Search - Sirone :: Sirone Live (1981)

Dark and deliriously languorous, warm and thick and totally

Aquarius Records | San Francisco | 03/04/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Most well known to most as the leader of the Revolutionary Ensemble in the 70's, Sirone was also a sideman for such jazz legends as Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Charles Gayle, Ornette Coleman, Roswell Rudd, Clifford Thornton, Sonny Sharrock, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra and more. But he was way more than just a sideman, an amazing composer in his own right and a completely orignal and creative bass player. For this live set, recorded in 1991, Sirone teamed up with Dennis Charles on drums and Claude Lawrence on alto sax, and the results are sublime.



The performance starts off with a long piece for solo flute. A dense squall of tweets and trills and twitters and flitterings, like strange and haunting bird calls. After that it's all about the bass, as Sirone stretches out and slides smoothly all over the fretboard with two tracks of almost nothing but bass (one track gets a smattering of free jazz rhythmic splatter), it's dark and deliriously languorous, warm and thick and totally dreamy. When the rest of the trio does join in, it's dense and focused and intense, with Sirone and Charles locked in tight but somehow still wild and loose and free, while Lawrence skips gingerly atop a squirming tangle of shuffling rhythms and throbbing pulsing low end. So good."