Mary Halvorson, Reuben Radding & Nate Wooley "Crackleknob" (Hatology 662)

One listen to this CD and that element of trust and synchronicity immediately comes through. This is the kind of music that can only come from musicians who know each other well. It is like dropping in on an intimate conversation. Ideas get launched and then get immediately picked up, morphed, and woven back in. There is also a striking compactness to the pieces. Free improvisation rarely displays the level of succinct structural sensibility at play here. Wooley comments, “In general, we work at making the cleanest, most elegantly simple piece of music that we can. It's not something we've ever been implicit about, but I think that is just the general attitude about improvising that we all share.” Here are three musicians who know how listen, how to work together to develop a collective arc, and how to tie it all together to create abstract, spontaneous pieces that span the length of a pop song. – Michael Rosenstein