Sankt Gerold Live by Evan Parker, Barre Philips, Paul Bley

Sankt Gerold Live

Available from Amazon
Usually ships within 1-2 business days

Sankt Gerold Live

Reader Reviews
The members of this sax-piano-bass trio are (primarily, if not exclusively) jazz musicians, but the music they make together has little of the rhythmic momentum normally associated with the word "jazz". If you played this for most listeners in a blindfold test, they'd probably identify it as some sort of mid-twentieth-century chamber music. Which, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing... From the group's previous CD, TIME WILL TELL, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect; what surprised me was how much I like this one. Evan Parker's style can be quite abrasive (and often, to my ear, to no good end; his solos on Kenny Wheeler's AROUND 6, for instance, seem to clash with the rest of the music, repeatedly breaking the mood the other musicians have set up). Here, Parker's pensive and lyrical side is on display much of the time, and I find the results infinitely more appealing than most of TIME WILL TELL, which contained only two or three pieces I'd want to hear repeatedly. The trio tracks are interspersed with solo pieces, adding a welcome touch of variety to the proceedings. If you prefer to avoid the album's more raucous and outside moments, you might want to program your CD player to skip Variations 1, 8 and 11, at least for the first few listens. I found it helpful to get acclimatized to the music before giving these tracks a try. [Consumer note: although the packaging says "live", there's no problem with the sound quality, and no sign of extraneous crowd noise-so presumably what they mean is "live in the studio", not "live in concert".]

Back To Top