You're kidding, right? (I hear the naysayers saying).Isn't it The Dave Holland Quintet?
Or Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio?
Or Dave Douglas's latest band?
Or the Brad Mehldau Trio?
Nope.
It's three women who call themselves Mephista.
This, their second recording, is nothing short of revelatory.
Listen.
This is the whole package. Covering the waterfront from freebop to electronica to avant-freakout, these ladies have thrown down the gauntlet.
Who will pick it up?
No one, I'm thinking: just too much power, res, emotion, and virtuoso playing.
Let's start with Susie Ibarra. Fast becoming THE monster percussion presence on the New Music and Nu Jazz scene, she's the Evelyn Glennie of improvised music. Her two solo efforts, esp. Songbird Suite, her second, are beyond praise.
Ikui Mori may be the most sophisticated and nuanced practitioner of electronics alive. Possessed of an uncanny ability to create the exact right electronic soundscape, she consistently imbues these proceedings with magical, mesmeric, life-giving and -breathing sensibilities. Too often electronics can come across as cold, static, or gratuitous.
Not here. They're an absolutely integral part of the aural palette.
Sylvie Courvoisier on piano (and it sounds like a bunch of prepared piano stylings), a name new to me, stamps these offerings with a unique sound signature that entirely fits in with the wild imaginings of the other two. Sometimes single-note configurations, sometimes cluster chords, sometimes bent sonorities, there's always something interesting--nay, intriguing--issuing from her keyboard.
This music is so glorious, outré, striking, outrageous, and ravishing, that not to encounter it is to find oneself shut out from musical possibilities of the first order.
Talk about serendipity.
Talk about magic.
Talk about advancing the aesthetic.
This splendid music--beyond category, beyond imagining, beyond comprehension--cries out for hearing.
If you somehow land on this site and read this review and don't drop everything and buy this astounding music, you will--I guarantee it--spend the rest of your sorry life and untold years of your afterlife regretting it--
Purgatory bound, that's where you'll be.
And I'm only half kidding.
