As the title suggests, this live album was recorded in London’s current hot spot for weirdo music and finds the trio taking their work further into the inner recesses of free improvisation. As expected, given their track record as a group and as solo performers in their own rights, Café Oto/London swerves between danger and calm; safety and turmoil. Every adjective ever thrown at free jazz is applicable but, more often than not, inadequate.
Each member of the group takes a turn leading the proceedings with Ken Vandermark firing the opening barrage on "Fragments for an Endgame." Immediately, I am drawn into the space between the saxophones and I feel like I am being kicked between the three of them like a ball. Their three distinct voices come through, each one taking a different attack on us listeners. However, from time to time the lines become blurred between the players. They seem to move in and out of phase with each other, forming a tight coil of sound before spinning apart again.
Mats Gustaffson takes up the baton with "(I Was Arranging Her) Arms." The title sounds like a line from J.G. Ballard’s Crash and it is easy to imagine this playing through the car radio as Dr. Vaughan positions himself and his female travelling companions into the poses of the car crash victims he studied. Violent and erotic, Sonore play with a fleshy quality that occasionally tenses into hard, unyielding muscle. They lumber, they threaten, and they swagger through the notes–I move out of the way rather than start something that I can’t finish. Even the distorted strands of "Happy Birthday" sound like a threat rather than a celebration.
On "Le Chien Perdu," Peter Brötzmann takes control of Sonore and opens up the music with a buzzsaw (or is it a saxophone, it is hard to tell sometimes). Once the organs and bare bones have been revealed, Brötzmann takes the group down a notch into a contemplative and introspective mode with only an intermittent flurry of frenetic activity to remind the listener that the skronk is still there, lurking. "Le Chien Perdu" erupts towards the end before giving way to "Oto" where all three members of Sonore go forward together into the stratosphere. One of the players sounds like he’s plucking a muted stringed instrument rather than a woodwind as the other two tear up the floor boards of Café Oto. The trio intensify their performance to a climax before finishing with a tender, warm melody completely at odds with the preceding thirty-odd minutes. Yet it resolves the performance perfectly, as menacing as Sonore got, they were nice guys all along.
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