Tony Bianco/Dave Liebman/Tony Marino - Line Ish

Emanem 4104

Dave Liebman has been turning up in a lot of unexpected places lately. There’s his duo Cosmos with Abbey Radar released on Cadence Jazz Records. Then there’s the short stack of discs for Hatology in collusion with pianist Marc Copland and solo. This Emanem-released date delivers the latest in his recent flirtations with top tier labels associated with the freer leanings of improvised music. Turns out drummer Tony Bianco was the catalyst, gigging with Liebman and Tony Marino, the saxophonist’s regular bassist, stateside at the suggestion of producer Martin Davidson.

The music is most definitely jazz-oriented, but Liebman’s loosely sketched lines allow for plenty of extemporaneous blowing. Bianco’s no stranger to working with Coltrane-influenced saxophonists having teamed with Paul Dunmall and Simon Picard on an earlier Emanem, Utoma Trio. He’s also at the heart of Hour Glass, another session with Dunmall and the switch-hitting basses of Marcio Mattos and Paul Rogers. The music here is in line with those previous projects though Liebman etches a more obvious spiritualized aura into the contours of his horns. There’s also room for his piano and even a bit of contemplative wooden flute to make appearances. The overarching metaphysical mood carries over into the colored pencil cover art depicting a gaunt Brahmin deep in meditative thought.

“Line Ish” dominates the disc’s running time and is broken into four parts. The sections are further separated by comparatively terse solo detours for each musician along with a “Group Interlude” that veers off from the focus of the main piece and into a fuzzy forest of chimes, bells and arco bass and the aforementioned flute. More striking and memorable is the shrill steam whistle soprano piece that marks the median point of the set.

Liebman sounds energized by the dynamic presence of Bianco and his playing at the onset echoes the blazing note-packed approach of his best 70s work. Bianco responds in kind pounding away at his kit and crafting huge shoals of rhythm in tandem with Marino furious pizzicato. The bassist’s clarity is compromised slightly by some shadow-inducing amplification, especially during the more agitated arco passages, but considering the thunderous nature of much of the interplay the augmentation proves a necessary evil. On his solo “Interlude” Marino actually makes the added ballast work to his advantage, coaxing corpulent slabs of sound from his strings that push at the edges of the studio space.

Later sections revert to more ruminative interaction as during Liebman’s oblique piano foray on “Part Two.” Here he moves from a piecemeal investigation of the interior strings into a filibuster of splashing right hand clusters. Bianco’s rolling beats accompany and eventually assume control in a snowballing solo that takes the track out. Martial press rolls and tumbling tom tattoos are a regular part of the drummer’s trick bag and these propulsive tactics balance out the various detours into more introspective inclinations. This is classic cut-from-the-mold free jazz, born from the common currency of saxophone, piano, bass and drums. From the opening strains to the somewhat depleted-sounding sign off these three fellows abandon any sense of artifice as to it being anything else.

~ Derek Taylor