Selected Reviews of From Between - SOS editions
for all reviews go to www.soseditions.com


Serious listeners of adventurous music hardly need an introduction to reed players Michel Doneda and Jack Wright. They both have spent the last two decades as inveterate sound explorers, committed to creating personal vocabularies from masterful command of the full extended range of their instruments. While each has produced astonishing solo efforts, they are also equally committed to the constant search for new and challenging settings for spontaneous collaborations.

So this match-up is a natural fit, made all the more commanding by the addition of percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani. Here is improvisation full of stunning control and riveting detail. With all of the prodigious extended technique at hand, there is never a trace of flash. Every subtle shading of breath, overtone, reed resonance, drum-head reverberation, or bowed metal shimmer is attentively placed within improvisations that gather with a sense of stateliness and unforced intensity.

Not a single sound is arbitrary. Eschewing conversational interplay, the three instead collectively gather and balance timbral density and measured gestures into a beguiling form. The scrubs and scrapes, skirling squeals, and grated rasps move in shifting layers. And while the arcs and plateaus of the improvisation reveal themselves gradually, the flow of the piece never flags for a moment in focus or intensity.

– Michael Rosenstein, One Final Note, Oct. 2004

www.onefinalnote.com

Nakatani is an astute listener who complements the atonal reed vibrations with unique and contrasting rumblings. While Doneda and Wright are speaking in a spatial language, he counters in a dialect of his own with ringing bell tones and metal jangling. Peaks of energy are hit regularly by the trio, after which the band reverts to levels of calm and serenity and then rises again to stratospheric heights. The music is not overwhelmingly difficult to absorb, but to understand the trio's mission, full immersion into the black hole they traverse is required.

– Frank Rubolino, Cadence Magazine January 2005

This music is far from austere: a kind of gradually unfolding micro drama, comprising a series of tiny vulnerabilities, frayings, insinuations, and stretches of miniaturized song. Like so many of the best improv recordings, this one seems to change shape and emphasis with every listen: delicate, languorously paced, yet tough as steel.

– Nate Dorward, Bagatellen, May 2005

www.bagatellen.com

In a session that offers up electronic-like sounds with acoustic instruments, this CD's major piece features the saxophonists exploring every tint of the reed color wheel as the percussionist provides a restrained canvas for their aural brush strokes. It can and should be appreciated for unvarnished veracity. Beginning with bubbling raspberries and glottal stops from the saxes, sawing tones from a drumstick on cymbals gradually presage a shrill squeezed tone from sopranino, languidly expelled air, an occasional honk and elongated chirrups. As Nakatani feeds irregular hollow thwacks and gamelan-like cymbal hits to the others, the reedman turn to squealing higher pitched oscillations that then break up into click-clanking bumps, wavering slurs and tongue stops. Before Wright finishes with extended fog horn timbres, his tones sound as if they're coming from a comb and tissue paper kazoo.

– Ken Waxman, Jazz Word and Jazz Weekly

www.jazzweekly.com

Saxophonists Doneda and Wright have been active on either side of the Atlantic for going on 25 years, and each has recently contributed landmark documents to the solo sax repertoire, but the eventual collaboration that happened on Doneda's recent US tour turns out to be even better. Both are sufficiently inquisitive (and stubborn) not to rest on their laurels.

– Dan Warburton, The Wire, Sept. 2004

It's not dense or noisy; it's not an onslaught of screaming and wailing saxophones, but it's as simultaneously safe and frightening as a wild beast in an extended moment of repose, with incidental growls, cackles, and thrashing bodily jerks serving as a reminders of its other ways of being. This music is to balls-out apocalyptic free jazz assaults like Scelsi is to Wagner--the visceral intensity is still there, but it's been trapped in a tiny bottle.

– Michael Anton Parker,
Downtown Music Gallery, June 2004

It's almost as if time didn't exist. None of these players are in any sort of a rush. Tatsuya Nakatani's percussive work is stunning in its delicacy. He massages the cymbals ever so gently and when he uses the brushes, it's always with the utmost care and respect for those playing along with him. One of the signs of a great record is the melting of the sound sources. Sometimes the players produce a whistling sound, and just then, I think to myself, who the hell is that coming out of? Is it one of the reed men, or is the percussionist fiddling around on the cymbals. A fine record from a trio that knows how to use their colourful palette of sounds.

– Tom Sekowski, Gaz-eta (Polish e-zine),
May 12, 2005

www.gaz-eta.vivo.pl

Selected reviews of No Stranger to Air – Sprout
www.sproutandflora.com

Nakatani is a one man percussion ensemble, extending his kit with assorted metallic bric-a-brac which he drags, scrapes, rubs, sings into and moves around, creating such a racket you could swear he has six arms. Wright and Doneda are just as impressive, sounding like anything from a hive of angry bees to a litter of panic-stricken kittens trying to escape from a hefty bag. The music is complex and dense, demanding but fascinating, and never chatty and nervous.

– Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic

www.paristransatlantic.com

The energy (eminently physical) mobilized spurts or flows out in airy jets, in earthly shakings. Seething bagpipes interlace at the porticos with percussion sounds, feverishly digging into all the depths of open fields with a solar gong. It is exciting (since the listener has his place there) to follow, moment to moment, the adventure shared by these three workers in sound, on the dynamic wave of their subtly woven interactions, full of rough spots--these musical rents in the texture of air.

– Guillaume Tarche, Improjazz

A convincing memory of a concert, No stranger to air delicately exhibits a music of collected density. Which renders impossible all explanation...

– Grisli, Infratunes (French e-zine)

www.infratunes.com

The music moves in waves of innovation and retrospection. Linkages with the past are somehow simultaneously more present and buried. Shrills and overtones abound, the two saxophonists reeking "new thing" havoc on my unsuspecting ears when I was prepared for 21st century intricacy. Then, without warning, some kind of dial-tone drone, an illusory hint of electricity and an ending, a hollow pop, the sudden stop after a long fall, the slow decay of a rhythm. For the last of these, just check out Nakatani's opening gestures-a clattering roll that slows to a trickle, slickly picking up a bit of momentum again before disintegrating. Transient peak whistles, thuds and tiny engines drone, buzz and chirp above Nakatani's expertly recorded bass drum and equally forceful chimes, until they suddenly disappear with a mild clatter.

The horns are of a piece, breath matching shake and flutter matching slow trill in ways that are both beautiful and almost too vocal for comfort. Bowed and struck percussion of all sorts complement perfectly every nuance Wright and Doneda can serve up, admittedly no mean feat and even more convincingly accomplished on this new disc.

The live recording is very nicely detailed, the entire frequency spectrum being wonderfully captured, and it's all here, from the lowest rumblings to the most piercing sopranino, almost bell-like at times.

– Marc Medwin, Bagatellen

www.bagatellen.com