Evan Parker

Think Mingus. Think Coltrane. Think Keith Jarrett Quartet--Dewey Redmon. Branford Marsalis. For comparison only. Add South African rhythms instruments sensibilities. Raucous? Yes. Engaged? Damn straight. Intense enough for those bored to tears by "smooth jazz"? You betchya. Great music by great musicians.

The Schlippenbach Trio has been playing together now for over three decades, and the members (Alexander von Schlippenbach on piano, Evan Parker on sax, and Paul Lovens on percussion) have honed their communicative abilities to a rare degree. Most of their recent recordings have been live, but this one is a studio session with shorter pieces.

It has been said that jazz is a voracious musical language, eating all kinds of other music to serve its hybrid nature as a mix of European and African elements in cosmopolitan America, the country where it was born, eventually to be spread to the world. But we have to understand this with some nuances.

Would it be that when everything finishes that everything starts? Rather than a postlude or a coda, the five minutes a cappella by Joe McPhee on the tenor saxophone placed here in thirteenth position, sound like a song of love and hope coloured utopia which condenses the invisibility of lives which are here and then are no longer here.