Camila Nebbia/Chris Corsano

Martin Küchen/Håkon Berre
På Snurr
Barefoot Records  BFREC 089 CD

Time honored in Jazz and improvised music, the saxophone-percussion duet has become a standard playing configuration. However simple as it might appear, nonetheless the variety of saxophones and percussion instruments available and the inexhaustible ability of players to forge archetypes often results in individual paradigms. For instance the match up on På Snurr of Swede Martin Küchen playing only sopranino saxophone and Norwegian Håkon Berre on drums, percussion and objects is an exercise in Free Music whose tendrils stretch into minimalism. Meanwhile Six or Seven Ways Towards Becoming Undone is almost completely unbridled Free Jazz executed by Argentinean tenor saxophonist Camila Nebbia and American drummer Chris Corsano.

Involved with numerous large and small groups during many decades Küchen has worked with everyone from Sophie Agnel to Joe McPhee. Younger, Berre’s associations include Susana Santos Silva and Sture Ericson. Peripatetic Corsano has worked with a lengthening list of sound explorers including  John Butcher, Akira Sakata and Paul Flaherty. Nebbia has worked with among others, Kit Downes and Yorgos Dimitriadis.

During four extended selections, Küchen turns the sopranino saxophone into the woodwind little engine that could, distilling tones from it that encompass twittering whistles, moaning cries, kazoo-like buzzes, dissected moose calls, fragmented doits and renal honks. Berre’s counterpoint involves idiophone scrapes and rattles, drum press rolls and rumbles, plus gentle pings or full out smashes on triangles, cymbals, bells and gongs.

Matching snarling reed caws and yelps and ratchets on abrasive surfaces, Küchen and Berre still manage to create broken octave sequences where fragmented motifs change texture and dynamics, but don’t retard sonic advancement. One instance is a track like “Piruett” where a hollow reed-like yelp is challenged by a bass drum smack before the harmonic changes highlight narrowed lip burbles and tongue stops evolving on top of conga drum-like pops. As mocking reed cries and moans from Küchen multiply, the drummer hits a junkeroo-like groove so that the previously splintered exposition connects.

Throughout the discs and especially on the elongated “Ellipse”, the trajectories and curves created with tropes such as thin splintered reed patterns meeting disassociated crackles and buzzes show how this antithesis equivalency is built into each evolving motif. With the duo’s underlying organization what may seem like random tonal ambiguity characterized by sequences involving animalistic cries paired with hand pummeled ruffs and rebounds eventually coalesces into logical, if rugged narratives.

The same could be said for the other CD’s seven tracks. Beginning on track one, “Shattered Things”, with Nebbia’s Reveille-like bugling before she projects the variations in timbral color and confusions, constant antiphony ensures that neither side overpowers the other.

Working through musical sounds comparable to automatic writing, Nebbia and Corsano still avoid the excesses of so-called Ecstatic Jazz by at points revealing vibrations that attain near ballad simplicity. It’s most obvious on “Nothing is Fixed” where well modulated drum shakes and reed vibrato attain this state of musical grace that adumbrates pinpointed mallet vibrations abutting singular reed slurs and bites. A ricochet to prestissimo percussion rattles, slaps and ruffs alongside fire-siren-like bellowing and snorts relates to what takes place during most of the other tracks.

Along the way Nebbia investigates nearly every reed projection possibility from cramming as many notes possible into a purported bar lines to and moans and howls or note swallowing, split tones and shaking flattement, where timbres are eviscerated down to almost inaudible essence. Consequently though, as on a track like “Dead of Night”, her output corkscrews back to high-pitched barks and spetrofluctuation. Corsano’s equally intense drum swats and continuous cymbal ringing perform a similar micro to macro evolution plus vice versa here and on other tracks. To demonstrate the duo’s close collaboration, a broken chord continuum knits together dynamics and the downturns. This dup may have founds ways  to become undone, but with skill and connection they’ve avoided them.

Stripped to their auditory essences, the two programs confirm that there’s much that can explored and emphasized during simple saxophone-percussion programs.

–Ken Waxman

Track Listing: På: 1. Apnea 2. Kvervel 3. Piruett 4. Ellipse

Personnel: På: Martin Küchen (sopranino saxophone) and Håkon Berre (drums, percussion and objects)
Track Listing: Six: 1. Shattered Things 2. Cast A Spell 3. Sunken House 4. Dead of Night 5. A Paper Cut In Smoke 6. Nothing Is Fixed 7. Unadorned/Never Better

Personnel: Six: Camila Nebbia (tenor saxophone) and Chris Corsano (drums)