Sassafras Hello

In his unusually thoughtful and helpful liner notes Getz comments about the opening “Prelude”: “My intro tries to mimic two different pianists playing at the same time (one a little more straightforward than the other)”. As that description suggests, there’s much about his playing here that will strike a chord with fans of attacking, independent-handed pianists like Borah Bergman and Joel Futterman. Elliott Levin is a dab hand at negotiating such turbulent musical waters, with a c.v. that includes stints with Cecil Taylor (including the recent Sound Vision Orchestra); rather than just a hard blower, he’s an impressively fertile thinker, and for all the toughness of his tenor playing and the acrid scrawl of his soprano, he’s basically a melodist who’s always in touch with the swaggering swing and the beseeching eloquence of a more orthodox jazz saxophone tradition. Getz is occasionally a little too bound up in predictable lurching rhythms and chordal thunder in the middle and lower registers—the clichés of the genre—but both players are top-notch listeners, and despite the dissonance of their musical idiom there’s a genuine sense of conversational ease and warmth here. This is a quality hour’s worth of playing with no safety nets but surprisingly few dead spots, even on the longer improvisations. The album’s centrepiece is “Twenty Year Circus”, a tribute to Henry Threadgill’s Very Very Circus. Over the length of the improvisation there’s a number of false resolutions, wherein one or both of the players obviously considered winding things up; but on each occasion they discover there’s much more to say: rather than flagging, the performance actually gets more interesting and involved the further it goes on. Sassafras Hello is thinking man’s energy music, and comes strongly recommended. - Nate Dorward, Cadence Magazine