Blaise Siwula, Dom Minasi, The Sunshine Don't Mind My Singing

The beautiful call of a bird singing sounds in the background of a worthy on-location set by reedist Blaise Siwula and guitarist Dom Minasi. "The Sunshine Don't Mind My Singing" (Nacht Records download album) is the fully free improv duet of the two making significant sounds together.

Both are in a lucid mode and interact with energy, good ideas and a kind of tumbling forward that embodies their own inimitable channeling of the full history of jazz and freedom.

Blaise on clarinet, soprano sax, tenor, and alto continually invents interesting declamatory lines as Dom responds in kind in ways that color the electricity of his guitar and give out with linear and harmonic totalities that open the tonality to advanced extensions of pitch center fulcrum points. The two together contrast well as a simultaneous double-streaming of multi-solos, as much avant as it is a kind of extension of old jazz multiple-presence soloing, an out sort of post-New-Orleans ramble of two simultaneous voices together yet separate. At times Dom comps out chords or gives out with a walking sort of response; at other times there is a busy duplex outburst that never flags but ever conjures new combinations.

It swings greatly. Not in the conventional toe-tapping sense, but in the way the lines lay down together, the deft phrasings in linear space. It all swings in that subtle way that free music can do when it is right. It is such that if a drummer and bass player suddenly dropped into the mix, if they had the talent they would KNOW where this was moving toward and they would know what to do against it. It has an implied jazz vocabulary; it's all over the music throughout. And it is inspired, beautifully done at that.

So to say all that is to say that it isn't just free, it's free jazz if you will pardon that usage. That's what it is. Dom defines the difference in an article he wrote in All About Jazz, which you can find if you type his name on there in the search box. No, better yet here is the article link http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=48678 By his useful definition, this is free jazz. But it is very good free jazz, most importantly. And for that it is good music.

The listening is more important than what I write about it. So listen! Go to http://nachtrecords.com/album/the-sunshine-dont-mind-my-singing to find out more and to get a download! Highly recommended.