Kirk Knuffke, Kenny Wollesen, LISLE ELLIS

The performance on this LP was recorded live at Roulette in New York last year. I have appreciated Knuffke's playing and music before, and I will do it again here. His tone is always full and warm, and he's a master at taking tough bends easily. The music is jazz in its purest sense : improvisational joy and emotional expressivity in a compact form. There is nothing but pulse in the pieces they play, even if the rhythms are not always explicit or when there are no patterns, the three musicians interact so well that they invent on the spot and keep this pulse going. Most of the pieces are uptempo, and real fun. The last track on side A, "Whatever's Next", shows a more bluesy side of the trio, slow and full of pain and agony, but then just in terms of feeling and mood, and without falling back on familiar structures.

The second side starts with great interplay between Ellis and Wollesen, over an open tune, but then comes the title track, a real goose bumps piece, slow again, with Ellis playing arco and Knuffke crying his heart out over soft fingerbeats on the toms, and Wollesen's drumming even evolves into a wonderfully restraint and mesmerizing drums solo, which leads us into the next piece, more mid-tempo, open-textured yet again so full of soul. (freejazz-stef.blogspot.com)