Search - Jim McAuley :: Ultimate Frog

Letting Freedom ring

Pharoah S. Wail | Inner Space | 08/04/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

""Be formless, shapeless like water." Bruce Lee's famous quote is a perfect description for what happens when Jim McAuley picks up an acoustic guitar. I've seen the quote where he is called "an American analogue to Derek Bailey" but I do not believe it, though I'll grant that he is a post-Bailey player. Whereas Derek oftentimes subverted flow, oftentimes played against other musicians, and nearly always seemed to favor disjointed or fractured musical chunks, Jim to me seems to be capable of an even greater degree of freedom, from fractured sonic cubism to beautiful, flowing flights that pulse and ring with shape and contour.



Ultimate Frog is a 2-disc set of duos. Label: Drip Audio.



Jim McAuley and Leroy Jenkins (violin).

Jim McAuley and Alex Cline (percussion).

Jim McAuley and Nels Cline (guitars).

Jim McAuley and Ken Filiano (upright bass).



On these 2 discs you'll hear compositions, improvisations on/out of compositions, and free-improvisations of boundless clarity and vision. You'll hear ideas that may collectively come to the fore or may turn into ephemeral pulsations skirting the edges of the mind. One of the great joys of this set is that these duos are able to improvise form and motion. This music could not be farther from "a jam session" where a handful of people just riff on longer versions of familiar songs, shuffles or chord progressions and call it "improvising".



There is no lead here. There's always lead here. There is no support here. There's always support here. Everyone keeps time. No one keeps time.



I'm hard-pressed to think of more than just a couple acoustic guitarists who I think could grab the ears of other guitarists from Tony Rice to Derek Bailey to Bob Brozman. Jim is at the top of that list and he sounds like no one else, but I don't mean that in the sense of genre-hopping, forced eclecticism. There's no time on this album where you feel like you're listening to a genre or an adherence to codified musical templates. This is 2 discs worth of music that could have only been created by these duos during these recording sessions. This is seriously high human expression and communication through sound.



I didn't check before my Vignes review but I did recently. The original (and incredible) Acoustic Guitar Trio (Jim, Rod Poole, Nels Cline) album is still in print and available via Incus, Jazz Loft, Downtown Music Gallery, etc... just as Jim's other album, Gongfarmer 18 is still in print/available via Nine Winds Records and probably the above outlets, too."