Sonic Communion: a quintet made up of a few free spirits, those who work at the intersections of forms, liberating those intersections. On the French side, the trumpet player Jean-Luc Cappozzo and the double bass players Joëlle Léandre and Bernard Santacruz, incredible adventurers in improvisation. On the American side, Douglas R. Ewart joins the great lineage of iconoclastic multi-instrumentalists and is also an explosive visual artist, a product of the AACM, while Michael Zerang has often made his surfaces, skins, and metals resonate, whistle, and squeak on stages in Chicago and Europe. Transatlantic Amazon Gods: Sylvain Crossot had always collected crossings until the idea for this quarter magically blossomed: “To my knowledge, this orchestral color is unprecedented and amazing: two voices (working in very different expressions), a clarinetist who plays the entire family of clarinets, and a drummer with a background in aerospace engineering. Which allows for a rare exploration of timbres and rhythms,” and between the transcultural singing of Mankwe Ndosi, who has moved between Tanzania and the Midwest, soul and free jazz, in his insider’s exploration of several vocal traditions to develop his own naturally hybrid approach, and the chanted, articulated, or sung words, the flow of Mike Ladd, who has as many vocal resources as can be found in spoken word, slam poetry, and rap when they reach the heights of first-rate poetry. All that beneath the volcano of Dana Hall, the ubiquitous drummer who masterfully brings rhythms to life.

Alexandre Pierrepont