Search - Harry Edison :: Sweets at the Haig

The Real Deal

jive rhapsodist | NYC, NY United States | 01/10/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is as funky as such Chamber Jazz gets! It is not only wonderful music in itself but also fascinating as the prototype for so much later music. I'm thinking of groups as different from each other as Pee Wee Russell's quartet with Marshall Brown and John Zorn's News For Lulu. The playing has the quality of intense listening, with marvelous interplay and plenty of its own brand of groove. These tracks were recorded "live" and the performance energy is palpable. Giuffre's compositions abstract some of the most basic Jazz values (swing, the blues scale) and address them with an understanding of counterpoint and development that leaves nearly all more consciously "third - stream" music in the dust. And the collective playing looks ahead to some of the great moments of what Derek Bailey called "non-idiomatic improvising". Giuffre's next trios are more "modern" sounding, less obviously beholden to "the Jazz tradition". Great music, too - but not better than this. Highly recommended."