ET is hip again. I'm not really sure why but I'm assuming that it's just being rediscovered yet again by a new generation of creative musicians. But since Extended Technique is in fact old hat I find it hard to get interested in ET per se. Take the woodwind for instance — what's the point, after Bartolozzi, Zorn and the rest have done it all? While ET used to make me think, "Gosh, that's very strange way to play an xyz, how interesting and novel," now I don't. I got over it. It's not that I don't approve of ET. I do. I approve of any effectively deployed technique. But a musicians over-valuation of ET's intrinsic value can be tiresome. Perhaps we all go through that phase, musicians included, so let's charitably ascribe any ET excesses to a passing phase. Meanwhile, Subotnick and Stockhausen, among others, have shown that a tape machine or record player is as much a musical instrument as any other so it's reasonable to think of Jason's approach to tape loops as no less ET than Greg's trumpet playing. But now let's consider the additional aspect of the lamentable challenges faced by the improviser, in particular that editorial judgment cannot be used and the inevitable requirement for novelty, and I think it becomes clear that we really have to cut the brave extended technique improviser a lot of slack. We cannot realistically hope for the extraordinary brilliant results that improvisation can bless us with without expecting some of the rest to be served along side. So I'm very pleased that this CD has much more of the former than of the latter. It's mostly laid back, a bit spooky, film-esque in parts. The brilliance of Jason's sounds lies in his good taste; he concentrates only those that are genuinely good to listen to and works them all the way out without hopping restlessly from one bewildering ET trick to another. In that way it is like Robert Rutman — it's in the finesse, the commitment to beauty. I thought of that because some of the music here sounds a bit like Rutman's. Greg's contribution is sometimes ornamental and at other times it is right in the middle of the generative process. It's at those moments that this CD really impresses. My biggest criticism is that at times the sound of the room it was recorded in is unhelpful and rather distracting but that's an aspect of the paltry budgets these brave adventurers are given to work with. Incidentally, the cover art from Jason's three-year-old Audrey is very attractive.
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