It says something about the boundaries that existed within Europe’s free music community that drummer Eddie Prévost and pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, seminal figures within England and Germany respectively since the mid-1960s, didn’t play together until March 2008. This CD, recorded at the end of a five city English tour suggests that it’s a shame that they waited so long – they have more in common than their respective involvement with AMM and Globe Unity Orchestra would suggest.
Annotator Christoph Wagner points out that each man was, in his pre-free days, enamoured of Art Blakey, and it is shared roots in jazz that draw them together, but not in a binding way. Each is free to work in ways that would not have fostered a long tenure in The Jazz Messengers; in the solo performances that comprise nearly two thirds of this CD, Schlippenbach quotes both Eric Dolphy and the 12-tone strategies of his recent Intakt recordings, while Prévost exercises his patient explorations of sound and silence. But although the pace and fluidity with which Prévost develops his ideas aren’t terribly boppish, the swinging sounds of brushes on skins and sticks on cymbals show deep regard for that idiom. And in “Skipping With Monk”, the lengthy duet that follows, the disassembly of jazz elements opens the gate to some very fertile fields. Monk’s “Skippy” turns up, of course, but fragmented and upended so that the original cascading melody repeatedly feels like it’s spiralling upwards.
Bill Meyer
