In a very unusual attitude, Kelsey positions his music against the stylistic straightjacket of mainstream jazz, illustrated by Paul Desmond. His liner notes offer a quite long explanation for this, summarised in "I couldn’t embrace the music I loved without repudiating what I found appalling", a kind of rebellious attitude vis-à-vis the context of his own youth in the sixties. You can read all this in the liner yourself, as they're part of the free download package.
The music itself his excellent without breaking boundaries. Kelsey's compositions are angular in the Coleman tradition, with highly rhythmic melodic themes, as lead-ins for free improvisations. In contrast to much of today's free jazz, the rhythmic backbone remains the anchorpoint during the improv. Even in the slower pieces, as in "Raw Sun", the music is intense and quite dense, with the various instruments being active most of the time, interweaving sounds and giving perspective to each other's improvisation. The only voice to get real solo moments - as in the only instrument playing - is Grillot's bass, which offers some breathing space to the horn players and to the listener on several tracks. The slow "The Past Is A Frightening Prospect" is the best piece of the album, together with the last track, a long rendition of Albert Ayler's "Ghosts". Like Ayler, this music is expressive, intense, iconoclastic, and paradoxically also reverent, and with quite some emotional power.
You can temporarily download for free on Chris Kelsey's blog (128 kbps).
© stef
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