mi3 - We Will Make A Home For You - Clean Feed CD039

Featuring Pandelis Karyorgis on electric piano, Nate McBride on bass and Curt Newton on drums. "If you asked me to make a long enough wish-list for musical projects, I'm sure I'd wind up asking for a trio with an elite post-jazz keyboardist smearing a Fender Rhodes electric piano over a snap-crackle-pop free jazz rhythm section. You can imagine how great it felt to have any such wish pre-empted by a disc that jumps right into the stratosphere with a leadoff take on Dolphy's "Gazzelloni" that fits the proposable scheme as tight as I could hope for. This disc just destroys me, and I've even been cranking it louder than I'm prone to just to bathe in the celestial ringing textures of the Fender Rhodes. The keyboardist is an unlikely candidate to join the ranks of Craig Taborn, Judith Berkson & Jamie Saft... in the vanguard of post-jazz electric piano experimentalism, Pandelis Karayorgis.

Here's a consummate baton-holder for the piano jazz tradition who has gone as deep as anyone else of his generation into the acoustic nuances of the instrument applied to the canon of Monk, Ellington, et al. Amazingly, he's managed to transfer his connection to Monk to this radically different timbral and phrasal situation, with four of the nine cuts here being revelatory passes through the well-thumbed Monk songbook.  A left-field gem from Hasaan Ibn Ali rounds out a program with space left for three Karayorgis originals, including a take on "Disambiguation" that makes for an incredible side-by-side with the version on his splendid Leo release with Mat Maneri, Michael Formanek, Tom Rainey, and Tony Malaby; I can't help but feeling the edgy sustains and amoebic note shapes Maneri characteristically brought to the piece are being handled by the incredible sound possibilities of the Rhodes keyboard in Karayorgis' hands. Doublebassist Nate McBridge and drumkitter Curt Newton form one of the best rhythm sections you could possibly ask for to play this music. This is one of the ultra-elite groove units of the recent era in jazz. They backed Ken Vandermark in the Tripleplay trio that Clean Feed broadcast to the world last year and Boxholder introduced in 2000. They were the engine that drove Joe Morris' landmark Symbolic Gestures release on Soul Note and one of the monumental Joe Morris Quartet opuses with Mat Maneri. And those are just the better-known exploits.

mi3 is possibly the new peak in the pairing's long history; the trio had a chance to become a throbbing unified organism with a long-running weekly house gig for an avant-jazz series in the Boston area.  Newton and McBride just explode all over the place here and swing like there's no tomorrow in between. Newton is one of the great connoisseurs of gourmet drumkit timbres; every cymbal hit, rim tap, and snare roll reflects both top-notch equipment and the kind of precise touch that separates sublime dynamic slopes from time-keeping prairies.  The timbral nuances he brought to the Steelwool Trio (with Vandermark and Kessler) are the crucial factor that made it a major highlight of 90s jazz. He's also the kind of weathered jazzer totally comfortable dealing with the fringes of his chosen specialty--look no further than his legendary erstwhile unit Debris and their travels from Berne-inspired cellular groove permutations to aggressive jazz-rock skronk. Beautifully recorded, the disc is really driven by the magical timbres of the three instruments, unblemished by the inevitable cliches of an acoustic piano.  Karayorgis doesn't limit himself to the straight Rhodes sound; he uses some choice guitar pedals to take things even further out into that zone of blissful fuzz-buzz-sponge-texture wafting of Soft Machine, Isotope, late 60s and early 70s Miles Davis, etc.  Canterbury fans take note: this is THE avant-jazz disc you've been waiting for.  Just on the basis of the woozy processed electric piano vibe and texturalized melodicism, I would also recommend this one to fans of Squarepusher's One Rotted Note.

Michael Anton Parker
Downtown Music Gallery
Source: http://dtmgallery.com
attached to CD in online catalog listing, http://72.43.108.54/Searching/WWW_DMG_Search.cgi?s3.mi3
9/23/05