* Edition of 100 copies * Two kits, facing each other, one night. On 10 April 2025 Lily Finnegan put a quintet on stage at Elastic Arts in Chicago with a second drummer sitting opposite her, and Bill Harris ran tape on it. Forty minutes, released here as three continuous parts, nothing reshaped after the fact. The second drummer is Vincent Davis, and the choice tells you a good deal. Davis is an AACM member with a Chicago pedigree that runs back through Roscoe Mitchell and Jodie Christian, alongside long service with David Murray, Marilyn Crispell and Matthew Shipp. Finnegan is a generation and more behind him: born in the city, schooled in its high-school punk and DIY circuit, back home since 2022 after a master's at Berklee, now drumming in Ken Vandermark's Edition Redux and leading her own quartet Heat On. Putting the two of them at the centre of the same band is not a gesture of deference in either direction. They play as equals and the record is built on the friction and agreement between them.

Around the drums, an asymmetric group: Anisha Rush on alto, Will Greene on tenor and guitar, Emma Dayhuff on bass - herself a former student of Davis, which gives the lineage another turn. With two drummers there is no rhythm section in the ordinary sense, nobody keeping time while others speak over it, and the usual free jazz architecture of head and solos never assembles. What happens instead is closer to a weather system, several centres of activity at once, none of them subordinate.

The quality that carries all three parts is momentum. Improvisation this open tends either to congeal or to run on adrenaline, and this does neither; the forward motion holds even when the volume drops, even when nobody is playing a pulse. Finnegan's punk background is audible, though not in the way the phrase usually implies. Nobody is playing fast for the sake of it and the saxophones are not there to shriek. The inheritance is a matter of energy and of how a room is meant to feel, transposed onto players who plainly know the jazz tradition inside out and feel no need to demonstrate it.

Finnegan was named a New Music USA Next Jazz Legacy awardee this year, and has been co-curating the Option Series at Experimental Sound Studio since 2023. The sleeve carries stained glass by Finnegan and Ivette Colón, photographed and laid out by Harris, on a heavy-duty jacket, in an edition of 100 copies.