Monitor

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
One hallmark of Jimmy Giuffre's 1960s-era drummerless trio was the listener's inability to differentiate improvised and composed music the band played. American expat saxophonist and clarinetist Michael Moore has been mining at least some of Giuffre's approaches to tone--perhaps unwittingly--for years in his adopted hometown, Amsterdam. Here, he takes a page from the Giuffre trio's book, with a particularly Amsterdam-centric spin. In other words, cellist Tristan Honsinger and pianist Cor Fuhler love to play dittylike melodies (try the folky "Budnike," for one) and then dance around them playfully with shades of dissonance coming from each trio member and some truly unusual sound originating from Fuhler's invented "keyolin"--an inverted, two-string viola connected to a small keyboard. Moore favors long, patient tones and a sometimes tart sound to match Honsinger's here sawing, there rhapsodizing command of the cello. These are pieces that will reward close listening--especially from those who've found Giuffre's trio music captivating. --Andrew Bartlett

From Jazziz
Living in Amsterdam, American expatriates Michael Moore (reeds) and Tristan Honsinger (cello) team up with Dutch pianist Cor Fuhler to follow a superficially simple plan: tonally, two stringed instruments (be they hammered, bowed, or plucked) against and with reeds; compositionally, one performer plays a written melody, the other two accompany him improvisationally. Otherwise, things aren't that simple. These improvisors run the gamut of performing possibilities - from the reserved, in Moore's warm clarinet, to the theatric, in Honsinger's flip-outs on cello, to a grainy skronk from Moore. this is eccentric stuff, but always in a structured context, which makes listening to it such a pleasure.

Being under Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg's wing has led these three to understand the power of compositional suggestion. Indeed, a minimum of structure controls the music but also motivates it and gives these pieces a sense of surprising development: "Riddled" has Honsinger playing a fragmentary, plaintive melody, then the piece moves into chaos, only to end again sounding like chamber music that could have been composed by Eric Satie. On "Five Bits," Fuhler on Hammond organ presses out modest, charming, petite bits of sound that blend with the longer bowed pieces by Honsinger, himself sounding a bit like a baroque étude gone perverse. And then there's Fuhler's keyolin, a contraption he invented out of a viola. Its bizarrely Asian sound on Fuhler's "Desinteresse en Deviatie" integrates the structural improvisations like peanut butter with chocolate. A tasty surprise.

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