You'd expect more fanfare. But the enterprising Boxholder label, based out of Woodstock, Vermont, seems to specialize in modestly excellent releases such as this. The listener would typically be well-advised to approach a 75-plus minute free jazz recording that opens in media drum solo with some trepidation, but, then again, these are not typical virtuosos of the aforementioned style. From his days as a young firebrand clamoring to be heard in the Pentecostal fervor that was the classic Cecil Taylor Unit of the mid-1970s (with Jimmy Lyons, Ramsey Ameen, Sirone, and Ronald Shannon Jackson), Malik has developed into a conversational trumpeter with an attractively throaty tone. Drummer Robinson plays with true circumspection, even when he swings, which is not infrequently; his contributions to the late Glenn Spearman's music should be more widely celebrated. Joe McPhee, of course, is the traveling star of the global free jazz scene, a multi-instrumentalist (heard here on pocket trumpet and soprano sax) whose intensity and mastery of color -- refracting his own white light, as it were -- is never gaudy and never sheds any glare.
Nor is Sympathy a collective improvisation blow-out. Although all three men receive (relatively) equal billing here, this is definitely a Malik session. Not only are all the compositions credited to him, they, well, actually sound like compositions. Moreover, they sound like extensions of the distinctively restrained material Malik has been writing and performing since at least the early 1990's. It is music that shares some of the same beautiful lugubriousness that falls like autumnal sunlight through the veils and shrouds that hang across the work of fellow brass players Bill Dixon and (yes) Kenny Wheeler, but is less weighty and both more sinuous and more capable of inspiring exuberant solos. Although themes such as "Testament", "Space March" and "Motivic" are not exactly catchy, they are quite sturdy, and reinforced by Malik and McPhee's tendency to underscore each sound and give each sound enough room in which to unfurl to its full definition. This is true even of the fast runs that dominate "Resolving A Quote" or the circular-breathing phrases, hewed out with a careful eye fixed on asymmetry, that are the coda to "Call And Response". Occasionally these performances have a tendency to plod along, with Malik slipping into "routine" rather than "pulse". Yet, although both are used rather sparingly here, Robinson, especially with his cymbal and tom-tom work, and McPhee call blither spirits back to the proceedings. McPhee's solo on "Escape Route" is remarkably playful and sensitive. In fact, his solo is positively Steve Lacy-esque; it is bouncy, angular, and charming.
Those hoping that this disc will shake the pillars of their one's own private heaven, or those listeners looking for the diversity of brainiac approaches they customarily find on McPhee's own leader dates, or even those looking for a continuation of the original What We Live might conceivably be disappointed by Sympathy. Which is not to say that there isn't much here. As with a great many of Boxholder's productions, there is well-prepared, well-executed, well-recorded, but non-insistent music, presented with an attention to craftsmanship -- a quality not often respected in an art that enshrines the passions and their volatilities -- and offered to the listener with few frills… which really are not missed at all, honestly.
~ Joe Milazzo
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