Machine Mass, Inti, Tony Bianco, Michel Delville, Featuring Dave Liebman

Music does not stand still. It cannot. Especially today, with the world as our basic unit for musical creativity and what is being done on planet earth generally known and freely inspiring others to respond in their own ways, and on and on. Just in the last few days we have covered Chinese, Indian, English, American, and Russian musicians, and now here on this page a coming together of heavies from America and Belgium. That's the way things go now. If the old "silk route" managed to encourage the mixing and melding of musical cultures centuries ago, the everything-everywhere road makes that creative interpenetration that much more vast and intense, rapid and encompassing.

So we have Machine Mass, here an excellent combination of sax master Dave Liebman with the vibrant guitar stylist Michel Delville and the complete drummer Tony Bianco. The album that comes out of such a fertile meeting is Inti (MoonJune 060).

This is avant jazz-rock without a stitch of cliche. That it is as fresh and vital in its own way as some of the old hoary classics has to do with the high creativity of all three artists and the zeitgeist that springs spontaneously and yet deliberately from the Pandora's Box that is unleashed in the process.

This is music that is both outside and firmly and hipply grooved. It rocks out as it goes out. It never stops. It is a series of very effective vehicles written by all three members, separately and together, depending, plus the old Zawinul Miles classic "In A Silent Way" done with a new angle to it.

Delville shows himself even deeper than we may have once supposed, with hidden compartments of hip music insight that are pulled open here to add to the totality. Lieb sounds as essential as ever and if you don't know what that means just put this on. Tony Bianco plays the right balance between grooving and inciting.

Well now I think I should stop because the hearing of this one will give you all the rest.

Don't miss this. Exceptional!