Abdou, Gouband, Warelis - Hammer, Roll and Leaf (Relative Pitch, 2024)

By Stuart Broomer

French saxophonist Sakina Abdou is an emerging musician, thus far recording with Eve Risser’s Red Desert Orchestra and on a solo CD, Goodbye Ground (Relative Pitch). Polish pianist Marta Warelis can be heard in numerous cooperative projects and on a fine solo debut, a grain of Earth, that conveys a combination of technical and creative brilliance at the highest level. Toma Gouband is as brilliantly original as the other two, creating a mystery-filled percussion language both in solo and group formats (perhaps most notably with Evan Parker) using stones and branches as well as conventional materials. Each of the three has a certain genius for solo play, yet each is sensitive enough to creative interplay to form a trio. Sonic explorers all, they’re also meaningful communicators. Each of the nine tracks is highly distinctive, both in method and mood.

“Leaf the Hammer”, just over two minutes long, is an abstraction, a continuous passage of sounds passing among the three musicians with each musician, Warelis picking chords and clusters, Gouband building micro-phrases that contrast low-pitched drums and high-pitched metal, Abdou inserting only slightly longer melodic fragments. It’s a perfect miniature.

The suite-like “Roll the Leaf”, at around 10 minutes the longest track, proceeds from a random scatter of percussion and prepared piano with a freely melodic theme established by Abdou; The tempo eventually picks up, with Abdou’s line surrounded by more rapid and lightly dissonant piano and a fascinatingly compact drum figure mixing bass, snare and metal. It is the collective gift of the trio to simultaneously create and evolve form, establishing pattern with the very sonic gestures that they are simultaneously disassembling.

“Leaf the Roll” is a manic flight with the rapid saxophone so choked it can suggest that only the mouthpiece is engaged, initially suggesting a crazed squirrel, on a manic voyage pursued by first muffled then explosive piano and a tangle of rattled drum rolls, all so tightly engaged in the chase that it might have been notated.

The climactic “Hammer the Roll” begins with Abdou creating rapid microtonal rolls consisting of popping sounds before she’s joined first by Warelis’s complementary notes and then a rapid light percussion from Gouband (a rapid tapping that eventually extends to the full kit). When they’re all fully integrated into the weave, it’s a genuinely fresh trio language, its unusual form built on the interlocking rhythms and pitches of Warelis’s muffled string notes and Abdou’s rapid staccato.

Together, Abdou - Gourband - Warelis produce an hour of music that’s consistently entertaining, pressing interactivity to fresh heights, though risking a listener’s exhaustion from an overload of creativity. Meanwhile, it’s a fascinating assemblage of trio possibilities that are as compelling as they are distinctive.