SIGNAL TO NOISE
#22, summer 2001
Ellery Eskelin
with Andrea Parkins / Jim Black
The Secret Museum (hatOLOGY)
The Secret Museum is the most recent installment of the excellent series of recordings that the trio of tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin, keyboardist Andrea Parkins and percussionist Jim Black has put out on the hatOLOGY label. To paraphrase a very old television commercial this disc, like it's predecessors, has "a light touch, just the right touch" of all of the following: composition, swing, melodisism, free improvisation, experimentalism, intellectualism, and soul. There is also pageantry (in their cover of Dr. Eugene Chadbourne's "Paris Swallowtail"), mystery (in Parkins' ghoulish organ "Prelude"), and herky-jerky Monk (in their galumphing deconstruction of the master's "We See"). The three players have now traveled the same wavelength (a triangular wave, I think) for so long that they have become part and parcel of the same advanced organism. Their music on The Secret Museum is high-spirited without ever being silly, and deeply serious without ever coming off as portentous. Jim Black belongs with such Musketeers of the free groove as Messieurs Drake, Rosen and Levin, but perhaps he resembles Gerry Hemingway most in his gnarly distribution of hard-edged accents in the midst of what might otherwise be a dreamy groove. His color choices are wonderful throughout and his intelligence is striking. Eskelin's fondness for and facility with screaming funk come out clearly on his "Sequence/Consequence (1)," but he can also improvise and write with a Hindemithian architecture. His "Mediation" has some of the towering majesty of early Mahavishnu, and the hollow, nearly wooden tone he utilizes for his insane opening improv on "Ephemera" are too scary for words - especially after Parkins' organ chords brings the morgue right into your living room. Like her mates, Parkins exhibits tremendous range here, from Babittesque doodles on pipe organ samples through Larry Young-style walking bass and swirls, right into the low-down neighborhoods where funkadelic piano is hammered for short dough. But don't let all this variety turn you off: there is unity here too, supplied not only by a common vision and Eskelin's fine arrangements, but by a musical artistry of a lofty order.
-Walter Horn
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