Rob Brown Trio

High Wire is the trio of alto saxophonist Rob Brown with bassist William Parker and drummer Jackson Krall, recorded at Tom Tedesco's Studio in New Jersey on 22 July 1993 and released by Soul Note in 1996. Brown wrote all six pieces, which run from seven and a half to twelve minutes each, long enough for a piano-less trio to move from written themes into open playing and back.

Jon Rosenberg recorded the session, Flavio Bonandrini produced it and K. Leander Williams wrote the liner notes in March 1995. Reviewing the album in the Chicago Reader in August 1996, Peter Margasak called Brown "a magnificent hornman" and found the record "significantly more linear and structured" than Parker's own Compassion Seizes Bed-Stuy. He heard Turmoil as a fairly straight, delicate blues on which Parker keeps to the changes, and Hex Key as looser and more jagged, with Brown's multiphonics close to Parker's busy line. On the waltz Totter, by his account, Krall plays free texture under Brown's melody, which grows harsher as it goes. Revealing opens with Parker's bowed bass. Without a piano, Parker's playing carries more of the harmony, and Margasak noted that Krall leans further toward swing than the drummers Parker used on his own records. Just a Touch and the closing Trickster complete the set.

This is the Soul Note CD 121266-2, first released in 1996.