Slur

In his liner notes, Phil Minton does not say whether his quartet has remained active for the past ten years. However, a decade after recording Mouthfull of Ecstasy (an album of loose compositions and free improvisations based on excerpts from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, still one of Minton's finest hours), the same musicians reconvened for a studio session engineered by Steve Lowe. There are no (pre)texts this time around; otherwise, the music is as demanding, exciting, and European Free Improvisation-grounded as before. Sure, one might notice a bit more silence, a bit more space within the eight tracks -- saxophonist John Butcher has radicalized his playing even more in the intervening years -- but the album is unmistakably a follow-up to the 1996 CD. Minton has had fruitful, longstanding musical relationships with both percussionist Roger Turner (their groundbreaking duo in the '80s) and pianist Veryan Weston (their song-based duo since the early '90s). Butcher, a well-known partner of all three, easily finds his own space within these historically charged associations. The music they perform as a quartet is of the utmost quality, as it relies on a phenomenal level of creative telepathy. Of the eight pieces included on Slur, four clock in at under six minutes and none goes above ten (well, "Lower Down" is actually 10:03 long, but that doesn't really matter). The longer pieces are more developed and touch on several different moods, while the shorter ones focus on simple improvisational concepts embodied by their title ("Back," "Closer," etc.). If Mouthfull of Ecstasy remains an essential listen, Slur would be just a notch under it and nevertheless stand as one of the best and most welcomed free improv records of 2007. ~ Francois Couture|