Search - New X Art Ensemble featuring the Amazing Tess Toster Tones :: New X: Trios & Duets

The New X Art Ensemble featuring the Amazing Tess Toster Tones is hard to describe. They're a free form big band known for odd instrumentation and experimentation with a debt to jazz, blues, and classical traditions. "Trios & Duets", was named for their penchant to subdivide as band members go on breaks. It's first track capitalizes on several of those possible incarnations in a carefully orchestrated 23 minute improvisation, "Sweet Suite". The twelve players flowed in and out of various small units and back to the big band. An eclectic blend of free jazz rapped around words and odd tones follows. "Always Remains the Same" explores the human condition with soulful folk blues. "Say That You Will" (But I know that you won't) tackles relationships with a super funk bass line, all chilled out vibraphone and Amazing Tess Toster Tone horns. "False Profits" (with colorful speeches gathering congregations of flouescent leeches) reflects the horrors of war. Funk again from "X-Ray Glasses" (dipped in Molasses; sweet young lasses with noxious gasses) in the Captain Beefheart tradition. "Vibratory Jam" explodes with a soprano/tenor saxophone duel. Then "Reduce/Reuse", cries out for the planet - and finally, "German Train", brings us home with a relentless, almost-punk anthem. It's an honest effort with no overdubbing or cheap tricks. Years of weekly free jazz in an isolated Art Works USA farm house set the tone for these one-take recording sessions with: Kevin Brady: bass; Kelly Coyle: guitar; Billy X. Curmano: lead vocals, dulcimer, mbira and vibraphone; James B. Quick Degnan: trumpet, bass trumpet and fluglehorn; Andrew Foss: bass; Pete Hansen: flute; D.L. Hunt: French horn, Fender Rhodes and bass; Jeanie Martini: vocals extraordinaire; Scott Olson: theramin; John C. Paulson: soprano saxophone; Steve Smith: dijjeridu and tenor saxophone and Frank Utecht: trap drums.