Emancipation Suite #1

Excellent trio performance by these three honchos, bound to please the dwindling yet faithful free-jazz audience. Actually, "free jazz" is a misnomer?since Silva plays something called "orchestra synthesizer," this could just as easily be termed electronic music with jazz overtones. Bassist Parker, while a renowned jazz cat, is amorphous at this point: he's made so many exotic forays into different areas that his bass-playing, no matter whom he plays with, amounts to a distinct category of its own. As for Silva's use of synthesizer on this record, let's just say the presence of electronics is nothing new in this area, considering that drummer William Hooker added hissing atmospherics to albums like Radiation eight years ago, and recent albums by David S. Ware and Matthew Shipp have been awash in electronic twizzle. In the case of all these artists, the embrace of electronics is less an attempt to "get hip" and more a natural yearning on the part of seasoned vets to explore other idioms in the name of improvisational music.

As more or less the table-setter on this album, Silva?whose history as a free-jazz bass player is as illustrious as Parker's?uses the synthesizer as an orchestral backdrop and percussive device. The performance amounts to a suite in seven parts, recorded during the Vision Fest in 1999, where all of the participants have found an appreciative audience for the past several years. Meanwhile, orchestral themes are nothing new to Parker?as a bandleader in his own right he fronts the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, which in recent years has been responsible for such suite-like works of grandeur as The Mayor of Punkville. This time Silva makes up for 9/10ths of what the Hueys would normally do?which leaves Parker even freer to lurch around his bowed ax with passionate abandon.

The first cut, "Part One: To Free from Bondage" (for the sake of the reader, I will eschew the "Part this-or-that" prefix from here on out), begins with much aplomb. It's a tumbling mass of orchestral thunder that at first resembles Henry Mancini, but once tenor sax player Kidd Jordan starts blowing it takes on a jazzier tone. Coming from the Coltrane school, Jordan's work is all about unfurling?he starts in the center and just keeps unwinding (he also reminds me of Evan Parker). Parker, meanwhile, is almost playing against the firmament, but against it like a strong wave against the bow of a wind-torn vessel adrift on a raging sea. It's a wake-up call, in other words, and it comes off like a lifeline. From what I can tell, Parker is pretty much the centrifugal force of every band he's in and this one's no exception. His crazed arco work throughout makes this one of the better examples of writhing free-form squiggle-doink I've heard in the past few months.

Speaking of Coltrane, Jordan quotes "A Love Supreme" openly in "Deliverance," but despite the title, the only thing squealin' like a pig in this opus is his saxophone. We're talking that Coltrane alone-on-the-mountaintop type of stuff. You should hear the audience whoop when he finishes his long and unwinding solo?he ain't as good as Frank Lowe at it, but he's better than Tim Berne. The college kids in the audience don't know the difference?they just know they liked what they heard. Did I say pigs? Maybe I should have said sheep.

"Freedom," as its title implies, is another free-form tumult: Silva gets really crazy on the Mancini stuff on this number, but there are also moments of stunning interplay between him and Parker and more way-out wailing from Jordan. I mentioned boats earlier so maybe these are whaling songs. In a word: schizophrenic.

On "Independence," Parker steps to the plate to play a typically intense solo and the crowd roars ardently. "Liberation," part five of the extended suite and the longest piece in the set, ends with one of the more lyrical interludes on the LP, leading to "Coda," another full-blown honkfest featuring resonating curlicues of sound with titanic orchestral undertones. When the embers fizzle, and the suite's over, the crowd waxes appreciative once more.