Flow Trio with Joe McPhee — Winter Garden

Prolific free jazz multi-instrumentalist veteran Joe McPhee is mostly known to me through his one-off collaboration with Pauline Oliveros' ambient outfit, the Deep Listening Band,  with a 2003 album titled Unquestionable Fire .  This album certainly had an intuitive, stream of consciousness way of meandering and undulating, but was far from the dense chaos of this new recording, Winter Garden.

The style found here is busy and aggressive, full of sharply plucked double bass and skronking sax.  None of the players restrain themselves from unleashing spiralling scalar cascades of notes, at times with great volume, but they typically don't warp the sounds of their instruments to the point of becoming atonal noise, and some sense of bluesy tonality is retained.  While the rhythm is often sketchy and loose, the harmonic unity is unbroken.

The Flow Trio is a relatively new ensemble, starting around 2008 with a self-title debut appearing in 2009, and a live album in 2011. Though it's made up veterans of the original free jazz era nearly as seasoned as McPhee himself, and the combined result of years of performance can certainly be heard.  Special mention goes to Joe Morris on bass, who is nearly as agile as the saxophonists.  Louis Belogenis and McPhee complement each other on the lead material fantastically.

At a couple of moments on the album, one of the musicians begins literally screaming into his instrument, summing the sense of restless ennui throughout the whole thing, of cathartic expiration.  In a similar way to more recent players like Mats Gustaffsson, the bleat of the sax gives me of the impression of a raspy, throaty growl, resonating in tune, yet with a touch of dust and grit.

The production quality on Winter Garden is pristine and immediate.  By free jazz standards, this is certainly on the more musical side, and fans of the looser moments in the music of greats like Mingus, Dolphy or Coltrane should find much to enjoy on this album, which is not so lacking in structure as to lack discernable emotional arcs.