Jazz
Calligram Records · 4 September 2026
The title tune is Ornette Coleman’s, and it was Dana Hall, the drummer, who brought it to the group. Old and New Dreams cut it for ECM in 1979, where it opened side two, with Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell, Dewey Redman and Don Cherry. Here the quartet states the melody with a lot of give and then starts taking itself apart: into trio, into duo, into solo and back again, and that folding and unfolding is the method of the whole record.
There is no bass in the band. Geof Bradfield covers tenor, soprano and bass clarinet; Ben Goldberg, clarinet and contra alto clarinet; Myra Melford, piano; Hall, drums and cymbals. When real bottom is needed, the contra alto clarinet supplies it: on “Lonely Flowers”, a tune by the South African bassist Johnny Dyani that Bradfield has arranged, Goldberg takes the bass duties outright. On “No Brand”, a tribute to Abdullah Ibrahim, Melford’s piano and Bradfield’s soprano wind around a syncopated groove.
It was recorded live at the Green Mill in Chicago on 26 November 2025 by Ken Christianson, who also mixed and mastered it at his Pro Musica Audio; Bradfield produced. Melford’s “A Line With a Mind of Its Own” is written through, and the title picks up the painter Cy Twombly’s remark about a line that doesn’t illustrate anything and is the sensation of its own realisation. “The Kitchen” starts with Hall alone.
All four contribute material, and that sharing costs the record something in sequencing. Goldberg’s two pieces, “Study of The Blues” and “Three Ingredients”, sit back to back and begin the same way, with a reed duo: clarinet and tenor on the first, contra alto clarinet and bass clarinet on the second. They end up in opposite places, one digging at the root of the blues and the other heading out into rough collective improvising, but run consecutively the second sounds like a variant of the first and half the surprise goes. Across eight tracks, that running order shows.
The group grew out of the trio Bradfield, Goldberg and Hall unveiled on “General Semantics” (Delmark, 2020) — two reeds and drums — with Melford’s arrival making it a quartet. It closes on “Aargh”, the shortest piece here.
Rating: 8.1/10
Text by Aina Torrents