| SASSAFRAS HELLO (Idyll Hands, IHR 003) is a storming set of duets from pianist ROBERT W. GETZ and saxophonist ELLIOTT LEVIN (Prelude/ Sassafras Hello/ Blooming/ Twenty Year Circus/ Wherever You May Hang Your Halo. 57:18) (Getz, p; Levin, ss on 1-2, flt on 3, ts on 4-5, spoken word on 5. Philadelphia, 21 July 2002). In his unusually thoughtful and helpful liner notes Getz comments about the opening �Prelude�: �My intro tries to mimic two different pianists playing at the same time (one a little more straightforward than the other)�. As that description suggests, there�s much about his playing here that will strike a chord with fans of attacking, independent-handed pianists like Borah Bergman and Joel Futterman. Elliott Levin is a dab hand at negotiating such turbulent musical waters, with a c.v. that includes stints with Cecil Taylor (including the recent Sound Vision Orchestra); rather than just a hard blower, he�s an impressively fertile thinker, and for all the toughness of his tenor playing and the acrid scrawl of his soprano, he�s basically a melodist who�s always in touch with the swaggering swing and the beseeching eloquence of a more orthodox jazz saxophone tradition. Getz is occasionally a little too bound up in predictable lurching rhythms and chordal thunder in the middle and lower registers�the clich�s of the genre�but both players are top-notch listeners, and despite the dissonance of their musical idiom there�s a genuine sense of conversational ease and warmth here. This is a quality hour�s worth of playing with no safety nets but surprisingly few dead spots, even on the longer improvisations. The album�s centrepiece is �Twenty Year Circus�, a tribute to Henry Threadgill�s Very Very Circus. Over the length of the improvisation there�s a number of false resolutions, wherein one or both of the players obviously considered winding things up; but on each occasion they discover there�s much more to say: rather than flagging, the performance actually gets more interesting and involved the further it goes on. Sassafras Hello is thinking man�s energy music, and comes strongly recommended. - Nate Dorward, Cadence Magazine, Nov. 2002 |