Live Performance from June 2005

The musicians that have emerged from jazz schools over the past two decades share more than tradition. They are linked by an operational criterion: the synthesis of music at the very moment of execution. Their music has a grammar, a determinism founded on the razor of contingency, that springs effortlessly from the conditions of its execution. And although an adequate formal description of this grammar has never even been approached, it makes spontaneous sense to those who have been exposed to enough of it.

The more the soloist anticipates his or her sound, the more redundant the result is. We synthesize new musical statements at the moment we play them (instead of repeating what we have already imagined) by driving at something other than sound. In the absence of alibis of reference, this means thinking with the body. These tunes are designed to eliminate the possibility of replicating one's imagination in performance, leaving the body as the only recourse. An antisymmetrical metric system functions as a crucible for a soloist's intuition: the rhythm section swerves and swivels in tandem such that a soloist never knows where his or her phrase will resolve. The less the soloist tries to exercise control, the more coherent the result. The tunes resemble a polygraph machine hooked up to an array of spikes that are programmed to impale any participant who fails to relax completely.