Friday, September 14, 2012

Jeff Shurdut, Gene Janas, Marc Edwards, Bound and Gagged

Jeff Shurdut has been very profilic in the past decade or so, mingling and co-projecting with many of avant jazz's finest. This one, Bound and Gagged (Improvising Beings ib 11) with bassist Gene Janas and drummer Marc Edwards, is one of his most unusual and innovative.

What strikes you about the album on repeated listenings is how tightly sequenced it is. There is a great variety of musically out combinations, skronk guitar, contrabass, and thrashing drums, vocal outburst, sax and drums, drum soliloquies, bowed tones, and more, all coming at you in a rather exciting series of quickly moving segments. It has a bit of a punk attitude, something of the Flying Luttenbachers about it yet more devoted to the free zone.

Jeff is impressive on guitar and sax without sounding schooled, Gene has an all-over bass throb that fits perfectly and he gives us some nice moments of arco color too, and Marc's drumming is advanced and very impassioned.

It's a devilishly progressive free sort of program that's not out to impress you so much with how hot the players are as with what kind of sound-art they can pull together with spontaneity, depth and contrast. Whooo!

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