"There is an aura of discovery and inevitability about this music, a sense that the players are uncovering fresh sounds at every turn…Nothing Is Not Breath is a trip, a soundtrack…running inside your head…Kaiser does have the knack of making his material refreshingly creative and vigorous. The live recording, with superb spatial characteristics, helps to make this a rewarding and intriguing listen."
--Cadence Jazz Magazine, New York, July 1998"I almost began this review with a confession that I was lying about the Trignition CD [9Winds] being the most inaccessible CD, but as I listened further, I stopped myself. This disc is a huge, 70-minute, eleven-part suite that begins subtly and improvisationally and then explodes in many multi-layered compositions and quirky fanfares. I feel the apex of the disc culminates in Section VIII, which I will call the "theme". It's the only part of the disc that my mind sings. The rest is an avant-garde smorgasboard that swings in places, much like Ornette's original double quartet did on the historic Free Jazz. Nothing Is Not Breath goes beyond that template, happily, and saturates itself with wonderful 20th Century classical sensibilities. In attempting to interpret the title of this work, I beleive that even though only four of the eight instruments are winds, the percussion and double basses actually seem to breathe. The rising and falling of dynamics, and the lack of rhythm or pulse in some selections, resembles a large organism slowly inhaling . . . and exhaling. The tumbling marimba is the rattle of its breath, the squealing reeds its vocal chords, the percussion its raspy cough. This is a Kaiser masterwork (not to mention that Golia is on it, of course)."
-Fred Barrett, Beyond Coltrane |