Will Glaser: Climbing in Circles

Editor's Choice

Rating: ★★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Will Glaser (d)
Matthew Herd
Liam Noble

Label:

Ubuntu

March/2021

Media Format:

CD

Catalogue Number:

UBU0075

RecordDate:

Rec. 25 May 2020

This completes an unusual trilogy of releases, following Glaser's duo albums with saxophonist Matthew Herd, then pianist Liam Noble on Climbing in Circles Part 1 and 2, whose near identical tracklists tried to tease out how players' personalities impact material. The MO is loosened here, letting the combined trio relax into musical friendship, playing covers and originals. ‘Mood Indigo’ is dismantled for inspection, in a thankfully less extreme version of Douglas Gordon's Hitchcock art installation deconstruction 24 Hour Psycho, as Noble slows and delays the melody, only to find it indestructible. The band's own ‘Pre Lewd’ is more skittishly carnivalesque, like Nino Rota suffering a nervous breakdown, with a quick sax side-order of ‘My Favourite Things’. Don Cherry's ‘Mopti’, from his Ornette-honouring Old and New Dreams project, is the 11-minute centrepiece, Heard near free as he pecks and nags, and an Afro-blues blooms. The confident swing of ‘I'm an Old Cowhand’ and elegiac barroom ballad take on Tom Waits' ‘Lonely’ show the wide repertoire, the players linked to themselves more than any tradition.

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