Cortex - Avant-Garde Party Music ( AUDIO CD 11-10-2017 )

Avant-Garde Party Music is the quartet's fifth release and it follows last year's critical success Live In New York (Clean Feed. 2016). Keeping with its title, the music is a celebration, a soirée, and a jamboree. The obvious connect-the-dots here is to Ornette Coleman's early quartet with Don Cherry. The music also evokes the energy of Charlie Parker's collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie, back in the old post-war American Blue Zone days. It starts with the vitality of Nilssen's drumming. His muscular attack on "(if you were) Mac Davis" ignites Alberts' tenor to blow Peter Brötzmann-like notes into the vortex of the piece before the music jump-switches to locomotive rocker. The party Cortex throws has nothing though to do with mayhem. The compositions, all by Johansson, are exacting and precise. "Grinder" opens with a good-natured theme before popping the cork of energy music where both saxophone and trumpet excise jazz demons. Same modus operandi for (of course ) "Chaos." The insistence of the music yields to an orderly disorder, things disentangle only to be combed out in the end. To be a party band the quartet is mandated to bring the happiness.

CONDITION: NEW Marked UPC

TRACK LISTING

1 Grinder 5:49
2 Chaos 3:49
3 Waltz 5:58
4 (If You Were) Mac Davis 3:39
5 Disturbance 4:23
6 Observe/Reverse 5:02
7 Perception 5:13
8 Off Course 3:54