Friday, May 18, 2012

The Thing with Barry Guy, Metal!

A double LP called Metal! (No Business NBLP 47/48) has hit the streets and it's a kicker. It's a group called the Thing with guest bass master Barry Guy. In sum this is an all-star free-avant jazz lineup. Barry and Ingebrigt Haker Flaten handle the bass duties. They expertly, madly scrabble and scumble power arco and pizzicato lines in a kind of humming and thrumming hornet's nest of fire and chaos. Mats Gustafsson hits the ground at a run on baritone, tenor and slide saxophone. Paal Nilssen-Love, perhaps the reigning king of manically slashing, metallically clattering free drums, gets a froth to combust spontaneously throughout.

So you have four sides of wildly free music. Mats' baritone is grainy, blasphemous to jazz order, his tenor is no less compacting and his slide sax slithers. The two-bass team are astoundingly brash. Paal gets very impolite.

In short it's all a manic, panic attacked contemporary world needs to portray itself the way it is now. In other words this one really kicks up its heels and says a healthy f.u. to all that might have wanted to replace it. It's not getting replaced, people. This kind of music survives and thrives in the hands of these four demonic fellows. I mean that in the best way! Bass players beware. You are about to be smoked! Everybody else? Smoked. All are going to be smoked.

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