Gordon Grdina/Jim Black

Canadian Gordon Grdina and American Jim Black cannily invest this CD’s 13 tracks with multiple textures from two instruments each, Grdina playing both guitar and oud and Black using drums and electronics. Augmentation doesn’t follow expected courses though, with the additional instruments leading the two to create neither faux World Music exotica nor have an over-reliance on voltage.

Instead during the improvisations which range from slightly longer than one minute to about 6½, the duo defines unique grooves and expands on them to greater or lesser degrees. With tough guitar strumming and concentrated drum rebounds on a track like “Brushes with Death”, the stacked timbres could come from a Metal band, but one that favors story-telling over smashing tumult. As noticeably, the oud’s few Maghrebian-like textures expressed on “Conservative Conversation” and similar tracks may prompt Black to respond with ratcheting doumbek-like clatters, but the subsequent multi-fingered string frails and the percussion backbeat are more familiar in Jazz than Jaffa. Sophisticated players, whose narratives are dark and atmospheric as well as lively and cadenced, also use electricity sparingly. Oscillation and wave splashes on “Buggy Whip” for instance, pierce the nearly opaque fuzz-tone guitar and percussion clumps to create more expressive and balanced lines.

Physical evidence exists that Grdina and Black are definitely not Martians or kitties. But the singular program they improvise here fits the oddball title that distinguishes it from more commonplace discs.

-Ken Waxman

-for MusicWorks Winter Issue 2021/2022