A searching, intimate trio featuring Michael Moore's clarinets, Gerry Hemingway on drums, steel pan and marimba and his long time collaborator Marilyn Crispell on piano. With his trio, Moore focuses entirely on the clarinet and does so with clarity of tone as his utmost concern. Like the Giuffre sessions, this is elegantly slow and methodical, except for brief passages where Moore extracts a crashing bombast from the tunes' underlying calm (as on "Bruce"). With calm elegance in mind, Moore has chosen wonderful compadres, since Fred Hersch is able to tangle with the darkest depths of improvised music in patient, deliberate order that smacks of Paul Bley's subtle sense of improvisation's possibilities. |