Years ago, in a Shropshire market, I used to regularly overhear conversations that involved one of the participants finishing off the sentences of the other one. It is, as you can imagine, very annoying to have your thoughts finished off by someone else, at least in conversations. In music, at least freely improvised music, it's another thing entirely. If you are quick-witted enough, and the music is bendy enough, you can go along with your companion's suggestion; the music can take another direction, which can be abandoned again just as suddenly. That makes it sound rather neurotic, but it really isn't. It's what people have been doing, in ever-increasing numbers, for decades. They've particularly been doing it in London, and very often in the company of Mark Sanders. Now there is also Elliot Galvin. Good. This was the third time, by Mark's reckoning, that they had met and Alex Bonney almost magically captures it in a superb recording. So forget clichés about working on stuff for years before you make a record. This is as good as anything anyone has done. Drop a needle at random (if this was on vinyl), and you would come up with radically different impressions: Elvin Jones introducing David Tudor, Sly Stone jamming with Anton Webern, Old London Silence, minimalism, maximalism. There are moments of perfect synchronicity where they leap in perfect choreography to two new sounds that were clearly made for each other. Yes, it's a playful and entertaining frolic through musics of all temperatures, but given depth by a profound commitment to group playing. Piano/ drums duets do have a special colour, the piano being, after all, a sort of percussion instrument. In the early '70s, I had my conceptions utterly changed by the two LPs of Don Pullen and Milford Graves. Conceptions got turned around again a few years later by seeing many performances by Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg: obtuse, graceful, stubborn, flexible. Here's the latest chapter, each piece named after a cloud formation. Float away with it . - STEVE BERESFORD NOV 1, 2015
