Vector Families - For Those About to Jazz/Rock We Salute You

The Guardian 60

(Sunnyside)

Amid five very different current UK releases from New York’s open-minded Sunnyside label comes this engagingly off-the-wall collaboration between drummer Dave King – cornerstone of genre-hopping supertrio the Bad Plus – and three experimenters from King’s Minneapolis home turf: improv/psychedelia guitarist and local hero Dean Granros, bassist Anthony Cox, and free-jazz saxophonist Brandon Wozniak. UK listeners might hear echoes of Led Bib or trioVD in these ferocious sonic collisions, and the fusion of experience, free-jazz expertise and improv-to-pop broadmindedness that sparked them. The pieces are spontaneous originals, but touch on Duke Ellington’s Satin Doll and Ornette Coleman’s Dee Dee – the former as an improv meander toward the tonal centre into which Wozniak sows the famous theme, the latter as a 12-minute blast of jazz-swing, turning to guitar squeals arcing over demonic drumming. An exhilarating anything-goes jam, though some hardliners (particularly those weaned on European practitioners) might feel it’s not always as fearlessly freewheeling as it promises to be.