Tiger Trio, Map of Liberation, Joelle Leandre, Myra Melford, Nicole Mitchell

Today we have a Tiger Trio made up of three women improvisers at the very top of their game for Contemporary Improvisation or "New Jazz" - Joelle Leandre on acoustic bass, Myra Melford on piano and Nicole Mitchell on flute. They gather for some eleven spontaneous improvisations on the recent album Map of Liberation (Rogue Art ROG-0093).

The result is vital music and a happy marriage of instruments, voices, technique and extended technique, and sheer brilliance of invention. They show the kind of simpatico openness of response to one another that mark the very best of such gatherings. And in many ways it all thrives by each artist staying in a mutually compatible zone of sound expression, for example high flute-tone flight slurries with bowed harmonic sustains on bass and high note sprinkles on the piano for "Reflection."

It is an album that to me grows in stature with every new listen--as the intentions and expressions become more familiar at each pass and therefore more clearly communicating to my inner ear.

I recommend this album very highly. Do not miss it if you follow the latest in the Improvisatory Arts!

New Improvised Music from Buenos Aires

We have seen countless times in music history how a local music situation can be a source of burgeoning new developments. And is there some of that to be heard in the recent anthology New Improvised Music from Buenos Aires (ESP 5033)? Yes, I think so.

We have to contemplate and appreciate right now 14 tracks that cover what is going on in Buenos Aires Improv today. The names will undoubtedly mostly be unfamiliar to you as they were to me but the music speaks without fail. So we hear Pablo Diaz's Quintet, the Luis Conde and Ramiro Molina Duo, a trio of Augusti Fernandez, Pablo Ledesma and Mono Hurtado, a duo of Enrique Norris and Paula Shocron, etc.

This music has the freshness of the new. If it reminds a little of the early ESP recordings from New York that makes it all the more fitting to come out on the pioneering "Free Jazz" label.

Rather than try and give a blow-by-blow description of what is a great deal of very good music, I will merely heartily recommend you get this one if you are interested in improvisational music today. Kudos!