Leroy Jenkins’ Driftwood - The Art of Improvisation (Mutable Music)

A perfectly prosaic title for a disc whose contents are anything but. Yes, there is the expected ecstatic element so often, too often, associated with free jazz, especially apparent in “To Live” and “To Run,” but the ensemble supports Jenkins at every turn, and his playing is as good as I’ve ever heard it, equaling the vigor and conviction in his work on the stellar Swift are the Winds of Life with Rashied Ali. Jenkins does not so much lead as allow and coexist, certain as he is of the brilliant choices he’s made in cohorts, pianist Denman Maroney, pipa virtuoso Min Xiao-Fen and percussionist/composer Rich O’Donnell.

Each player is allowed ample time to stretch out, Maroney’s unique brand of piano preparation informing and transforming “To Sing.” He adds life to whatever project he undertakes, and the decision to juxtapose his microtonal musings with the pipa’s inflections was a stroke of genius. All comes to a glorious head on “to Believe,” where Jenkins himself indulges in a brief but beautiful flight of solo fancy, the others gradually joining him in a manner much closer to the hyper-communicative gestural fragments I associate, loosely, with European improv. As the piece progresses from drama to drone, violin, piano and pipa circling each other in a motivic interweaving, it is O’donnell’s percussion that denotes change, marking strangely irregular time as the others hover in static chant-like reflection.

“To Believe,” and the disc as a whole, is a fitting testament to the late Jenkins, whose musical voice and creative spirit is sorely missed. Many thanks also to Mutable, for this document and for providing an outlet for composers and performers to push the boundaries of their art even further.