Search - Roscoe Mitchell :: More Cutouts

Cubist Music?

Il Dottore | Buffalo, NY | 12/31/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This trio--Mitchell, Ragin, Tabbal--does something remarkable: sparse and economical throughout, they manage at the same time to sound like they have about a dozen musicians on hand. Drums, trumpet, sax: a strange but magical combination. Tani Tabbal is a revelation on the drums; he really holds the whole thing together. Giving 'less is more' new meaning, he manages to sound free and expressive while also (on many of the tracks) keeping a steady swing. A couple of tracks are very abstract, such as 'Mix', a ten min. impressionistic piece made up of mostly squeeks wistles honks, and ending in a eruption of primal screems and drum-pounding. On the other hand, many of the tracks are quite melodic, such as the title track. The melodic numbers are clearly of the Ornette Coleman school and have a child-like playfulness to them, making use of loose counter-point and tonal centers (even scale-centers). The use of silence and space gives these complex musical ideas a fresh sense of simplicity and clarity. 'Fanfare for Talib,' worth the price of the cd alone, is at once abstract and swinging; it's like a beautiful cubist Picasso, it's all there, the beauty, the sense, the image, but taken apart and put back together in fragments, twisted, turned upside down, strikingly detached from the expected rules of representation."