Stevens/Rabinowitz, Play

[Nate Dorward]

A very beautiful disc. That's a two-edged comment of course: there's points where I think it gets a little precious--in particular the sweet pastoralisms of "Whispering Wind", a piano solo. It's an hour-long disc of piano/bassoon duets by Michael Jefry Stevens & Michael Rabinowitz; they seem mostly to have improvised the pieces in the studio though they all have a relative formality & coherence that suggests they didn't just blow. It's all somewhere between late-Romantic chromaticism, Chick Corea sweetness & showers of pentatonics, & lean melancholy free improvising. Favourites: the dark "Aftermath" which seems to me implicitly a Mal Waldron tribute; the brisk bassoon solo "Reflections" (not the Monk tune), which is the only track with an obvious sense of humour; & the quite varied "Meadow" (which has a brief outburst from Rabinowitz which is quite startling) & "The Journey". The downbeat night-is-falling closer "Rivulets" is good too. Actually, there's nothing here I don't like, taken a few tracks at a time; but as an hour-long program it's a bit sameish. Worth checking out nonetheless.