SESSION AT 475 KENT was selected for inclusion in the ten best recordings of 2010 by Tim DuRoche, Jazz Journalists Association, as well as Jason Bivins and Grego Edwards, Cadence
Session at 475 Kent
Connie Crothers, piano
Michael Bisio, bass
Grego Edwards
Gapplegate Music Review
February 24, 2010
Connie Crothers and Michael Bisio in a Breathtaking Duet
Improvisational music depends so much on the time, place and inspiration of the players. Once in a while, we are all lucky that the tape is rolling when everything conjoins wonderfully.
Session at 475 Kent (Mutable) is just such a recording. The place is Connie Crothers' studio, with great acoustics and a congenial environment to make some music. The time is May of last year, so late spring is in the air, and, well, let's just say that this is one of the most moving performances of free improvisation I've
heard in a long time.
Connie Crothers makes pianistic things happen. She has devoted her life to a style that cannot be easily classified; even less can she be dismissed as "follower of so-and-so." It's Crothers who has gone her own way from the time of her first album in the '70s through to today. She has deep roots in the music, but whether she chooses to evoke them directly or not becomes a part of a performance on any given occasion. She has a very fertile, musically inventive gift and a pianistic touch that puts her in with the world-class few who can really make the piano sing. She does here.
Michael Bisio in many ways parallels Connie in that he is a marvelously inventive bassist that seemingly has burst forth over the years as a musical trunk rather than a branch. His technique is formidable, both pizzicato and arco, and he taps into a virtually inexhaustible wellspring of musical ideas when he plays.
These are two artists that have a perfectly simpatico viewpoint of what is possible in a freewheeling improvisational setting. The music they make on this recording is pure magic. Do not miss it.
Derek Taylor
Master of a Small House
Meditations on Music of a Mainly Improvised Variety
February 9, 2010
Considered something of a Tristanoite in her early years, pianist Connie Crothers has long since supplanted the mantle of her mentor for a style all her own. This challenging and worthwhile session, recorded at her loft space in the company of bassist Michael Bisio, summarizes just how far she’s come from those formative stages. Bisio might not seem like an apposite partner at first blush, but his full contact, “kitchen sink” approach to his instrument is exactly the sort of creative foil Crothers thrives on (cf. her ’82 duets with Max Roach).
The duo engages on four lengthy slabs of improvised music, the shortest two clocking in at over a dozen minutes apiece and the final consuming third of an hour and what has to be a kilo of horsehair burned up in Bisio’s bow. Each spools out like a stream-of-shared-consciousness conversation and even when the pair peels off in separate directions for stretches, an underlying anatomy of continuity perseveres. Artist Jeff Schlanger’s cover painting (a welcome return of his Music Witness work to a circulation forum it’s well-suited too) gives a handy visual analogue to the combination dynamism and prismatic color on display.
There’s always been density and loquacity to Crothers playing and both traits are in full bloom in these intimate, highly resonant surroundings. Her pedal-swollen patterns on “Improvisation #7”, the disc’s third piece, fill up her corner performance space as Bisio builds a complex ostinato via furiously perambulating fingers. A sawing drone he sets up on the second excursion, “Improvisation #5”, complements Crothers alternately pellucid and opaque clusters and stabbing accents. The brooding clouds break halfway through with Bisio turning to stampeding, reverberating pizzicato and Crothers crafting lyrical right hand motifs amidst rumbling left hand anchors, losing nothing in the way of temerity in the bargain. By the track’s ominous end it’s hard not to imagine Bisio’s digits bleeding profusely and Crothers at risk for repetitive stress injuries.
The two move together at speeds and moods varying from blur to crawl, but allow no dust to settle in the cracks of their communication, each quickly adjusting to the other, but refusing to become bogged down in diverting niceties or affectation. Every shift in their dialogue is audible and mappable, but it soon becomes preferable to simply allow the music’s immersive effect to take hold. With close-knit and demanding interplay of this caliber the mind naturally wonders about the unaccounted for improvisations that fall between the numbers ascribed to those issued. With luck they’re of comparable quality and will see release sometime soon.