Extremely Quartet

John Law's Extremely Quartet is the height of Brit/Euro free jazz at its most insistent on its own identity -- whether or not this is warranted. The five selections that make up the two Extremely Quartets here are virtually interchangeable. Start your CD player at track five and play it back or shuffle it and it won't matter. No matter what the liner notes say -- and they spend most of their ink on biographical details -- this is a blowing session that is with two exceptions indistinct from any other mediocre session of the same kind. Those two distinctions are John Law's piano tone, which, as the true element of rhythm here, leaving the worthier improviser -- Barry Guy -- free to roam, is gorgeous, full, rich, and sonant; it sounds like an instrument of a bandleader and one that provides for the timbral variations associated with its place. The other is the drumming and percussion antics of the great Louis Moholo. Moholo, unlike most drummers of his generation, never felt he had to overpower his kit to make a band move. He skitters and scatters, shining and shimmering across drums and cymbals like a snake approaching its prey. His playing is far more like dancing that drumming, and this ensemble should have paid more attention to his dynamic shifts than they did. On the whole, while there are passages of individual brilliance, there is little in the way of group drama to hold one's attention past the first 15 minutes. Extremely Quartet is pretty much a dud. ~ Thom Jurek|