Maneri/ Phillips/ Maneri - Angles of Repose (ECM)

Sequestered within an aged chapel space adjacent to his rural French home, Barre Phillips second meeting with the Maneris evinces a subtle evolution in ensemble sound. Father Joe and son Mat deconstruct the “soft-to-loud-to-soft” dynamic, so often the stereotypical trajectory for free jazz, and stretch it to deliciously perplexing extremes. The “angles” referenced in the album’s title retain relative degrees of “repose” over fluctuating temporal spans only to be shattered by bursts of cacophonous dissonance. Predicting these seismic explosions can be problematic as they are often timed to the elder Maneri’s internal improvisatory clock. Phillips is the self-professed “scalar” player, constantly recalibrating his attack in relation to the atomizing pitch streams of Joe’s horns and Mat’s viola (yet another departure from the earlier trio recording Tales of Rohnlief where he played electric 6-string violin). One of the things I adore about the disc is how completely the stark ECM engineering aesthetic jibes with the complex acoustical interactions of the instruments and the recording space. The overlapping sound conjured collectively by the three ricochets off the stone walls of the chapel (another allusion to the titular geometries) and creates an auditory experience that at once demands attentiveness and rebuffs pretension. Liner scribe Steve Lake cannily likens the trio to back porch bluesmen and damned if I don’t hear it, in the hearty hiccupping of Joe’s Rosicrucian reeds, the sliding vernacular of Mat’s close-shaven viola and the reverberating thump of Phillips’ bull fiddle.