Jazz
NoBusiness Records · 1 May 2026
“The Surface Of No Strain” opens low and consonant, both tenors still idle, and spends thirty-five minutes swelling and deflating without losing the thread. It is the centrepiece of a three-track record and the clearest view of what each man is doing: when the temperature climbs too far, William Parker picks up the bow and steers the energy somewhere else instead of following it.
The tape is from 20 May 1996, cut live at Context Studios in New York, and drummer Lou Grassi forgot about it for twenty-seven years. The reels resurfaced in 2023 and NoBusiness put them out this May. Grassi had just left commercial work for the avant-garde with PoGressions (CJR, 1996) and, immediately after this session, went on to a run of records for CIMP and to the long partnership of the Nu Band with Joe Fonda, Roy Campbell and Mark Whitecage.
Daniel Carter plays alto and tenor saxophones, flute and trumpet; Sabir Mateen, alto and tenor saxophones, flute and clarinet. Both came out of the Lower East Side and groups like TEST, and what they do best is orchestrate on the fly: improvised fanfares, incandescent solos and lyrical passages that arrive unannounced. In the second half of the long piece Mateen holds a high keening while Carter answers in cool long tones, and between them they walk the track back to the solemn mood of the opening.
Parker runs the room. He does what he always does, mixing fire music, blues inflection and a physical push that carries everyone with it, and he has more space here than in almost any other group of those years because Grassi lets him go: the drums keep up a tonally varied rumble that obliges nobody.
The record runs sixty-seven minutes and the centrepiece takes thirty-five of them. The other two, “The Angle Of Repose” (18:35) and “The Correct Diagonal” (13:32), run the same course at smaller scale and add no new angle: they are from the same afternoon and it shows. Sixty-seven straight minutes of free improvisation ask a lot of anyone not already inside this language.
Mastered by Arūnas Zujus at MAMAstudios, produced by Danas Mikailionis, with a painting by Martynas Ivinskas on the sleeve.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Aina Torrents