Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly odd, but in the end compelling, July 8, 2005
This is quite unsettling music, full of dark textures, fractured themes, weird instrumental voicings, and general musical bizarreness. Which is altogether appropriate for its occasion: soundtracks (about 70 years after the fact) to two quite unsettling films, "Un Chien Andalou" and "A Propos de Nice." Both are famous in their own way, the first being a collaboration by surrealist Spaniards Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali and the second a short "documentary" by the celebrated French anarchist and filmmaker Jean Vigo, who died at age 29. But it's not all doom and gloom. There's a totally whacked out calypso (featuring a sly quote from "Rhapsody in Blue"), "Lanette," billed as "Intermission Music," to lighten things up. And scattered throughout flashes of light break in to illumine the murk. One of the highlights for me is the several-bar quote from "Bicycle Built for Two" Coleman casually throws out in the middle of--appropriately--"Bicycle," a jittery, skittish piece with ominous undertones.
The brains behind this madness are bassist Mark Dresser, who wrote the score to "Un Chien Andalou," and pianist/organist Anthony Coleman, who wrote the score to "A Propos de Nice." Each has extensive experience in the more experimental side of current jazz, and each is known (Coleman especially) as a musical iconoclast. They've brought Chris Speed, a mainstay on the downtown scene, on board playing clarinet and tenor sax. Together they weave a remarkable tapestry of chamberish jazz as if played by brilliant quick studies from Mars.
Certainly not for everybody, but there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here, and, despite the rather outré vibe, a good deal of attractive music. And it grows on you. This is one of those CDs that I put aside for years only to have it surface from the depths of my thousands of discs. As I listened to it again rather more closely this time around, my ears in the meantime having become more accustomed to adventurous jazz, it all began to make a weird kind of sense even as it displayed an odd, off-kilter beauty. Anyway, I'm glad I reconnected with it.
Unique, and certainly worth hearing.
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by Mark Dresser 
