liner notes by kevin whitehead (december '96) andreas willers: "when we play live, each of us likes to be very expressive, and can go a little over the top at isolated moments. for this record we wanted to catch that same intensity on a different level: to bring the volume way down, and play very softly - we recorded in a very nice 1930s radio studio in berlin with concert hall acoustics, and it was interesting to adjust to that - and to work with that intensity in very short snapshots." not long ago evan parker came to amsterdam to play a 20-minutes soprano sax solo on a concert program. it was very good, even by the standards of those who know his knotty circularity well. afterwards he said, it's good to play a short set: you can get to all kind of things in 20 minutes you can't in 45. he was talking about technique: you can push things harder when you don't have to worry so much about pacing yourself. but his observation applies on a conceptual level too: some ideas are better suited to relatively simple exposition than extended development, which is okay. even james joyce wrote short stories as well as novels. so many pieces here clock in at under three minutes: for sure not extended, but not exactly haiku either. if long jams can tax one's patience, and miniaturism for its own sake has been done and done (all those six-second thrash tunes in naked city's book), this trio strikes a smart compromise. the track timings hark back to the pre- beatles era when people got their pop music from tiny transistor radios - music where, to digress, everything happened in the midrange, because that's all that came through the little speaker. the music was, as far as that goes, designed for the technology that carried it. so too in a different way with "trad corrosion". if ever a cd was made for shuffle-play or your own hands-on shuffling, this is it. in a sense the musicians have begun the process for you by cutting up phil hayne's "etude" into four parts scattered around the cd, out of order (a piece, by the way, where only the bass clarinet part was written, and drums and guitar set out to add another, spontaneous layer) - something they'd had in mind all along. to hear how this music parallels the old radio-hits esthetic, try willers' "princess". great to hear blues licks played on forgotten '60s relic as classic as other outlandish devices of the time, mellotron or varitone electric sax: the electric sitar. it's a good little piece, makes its point and gives everyone a chance to have a short say. it's brief enough not to wear itself out. that said, the pieces are organized as gambits not around gimmicks. consider ullmann's canny duo piece "gospel", a respectful and intelligent abstraction from source materials, down to the final cadence. it relies on a traditional gospel harmonic rhythm and highly embellished (bass clarinet) vocalisms. way back around 1960, about the time humans started walking upright, big city rock- and -roll radio stations had about 24 two- or three-minute songs on their playlist at any given time. but even as the songs stayed the same order they were played in would change, which was nice because (as anyone who uses shuffle-play on their cd machine already knows) the context in which you hear a piece alters the way you respond. the effect is intensified here because there's so little silence between tracks - even an attentive listener might miss where one composition ends and another begins. so think of this cd as the basic materials for you to listen to an ever changing suite - a mosaic where the tiles fit together hundreds of different ways. another far-flung precedent comes from chicago: the aacm collective of the late 1960s, spawning ground of such bands as the trio anthony braxton/leroy jenkins/leo smith. they too were concerned with detail, quiet, dispensing with a traditional rhythm section (no bass, no piano), and exploiting the colors possible to musicians who pointedly play more than one instrument in order to widen the soundscape. "diffusion 8" for prepared guitar makes a connection they made in a different way, to improvising after cage. gebhard ullmann downplays his tenor here, highlighting the contrast (to push a generalization) between his slippery soprano and popping percussive bass clarinet, increasingly attractive and individual. shying away from the bigger saxophone keeps them from coming into the powerful orbit of the influential tenor/guitar/drums lovano/frisell/motian trio, to which this group makes only passing reference. playing electric guitar these days is as much about resources as chops: you have to study the myriad sonorities available to you (via changing attacks, pickup settings and black box devices) as closely as, say, jimmy smith or shirley scott investigated the recombinant timbres to be coaxed from a b3. by that standard willers is a modern guitarist all the way, and as such faces the challenge common to the breed: how do you assert a style when your sound may keep changing? for andreas it's about momentum, a sense of timing, of propulsion. no accident he doesn't need a drummer for such support; he and ullmann have had a duo since '82, and played in a trio with paul bley before hooking up with brooklyn drummer haynes. the germans had both worked on other projects with phil, who always keeps an ear out for out-of-the-way musicians to work with. it would be easy for haynes and willers to hook up like a conventional rhythm section. (another useful comparison: this trio's mutual friend ellery eskelin's tenor/guitar/drums/backbeat combo with marc ribot and kenny wollesen. it barely sounds like the same/similar instrumentation). but haynes functions more or less independently of guitar, much of the time anyway, giving the texture greater spread. his sound is more open and relaxed than ever (as in: the more sure your time and swing feel, the less hard you have to work at it). and the more open and quiet the setting, the more a smart drummer like this one can work on bringing out subtleties that get swallowed up elsewhere: nuances of touch and tuning, and of attack and release; the small sounds and overtones and fortuitous resonances to be found in the equipment arrayed before him. so he can understate, firming up a hint of a tango on "d.nee.no", then letting it slip back into suggestion. haynes makes a shrewd conceptual decision, in contrast to his fellows' multi-instrumentalism. every trap drummer is a multi-instrumentalist of course, but phil de-emphasizes the wet ringing cymbal sounds which are every jazz drummer's daily drink. and a tip of the hi-hat for what may be the least annoying windchime solo on record. one thing about that old radio esthetic: those little pieces were fun to listen to, the pleasure principle at work. if that seems at odds with current trends for snoozy bebop or decible-heavy downtown traditions, then call this trio's wide-awake quietism trad corrosion.

- biography - discography - mail - news - download - compositions -
-bookings - press - guestbook - cd order - links - credits -