muzycy:
Francis Wong: saxophone, flute, voice, small percussion
Tatsu Aoki: bass, small percussion, voice
Bradley Parker-Sparrow: piano, small percussion

excerpted from Neil Tesser’s liner notes

One of the oldest axioms about improvised performance continues to hold true: You Are What You Do.

In the act of spontaneous creation, a musician, actor, dance or monologist uniquely opens a window into his or her soul. So you might well expect visions of the East in this first meeting between Tatsu Aoki, the Japanese-born bassist who has often explored his own native musical roots, and the Sino-Amrican saxophonist Francis Wong.

In fact, the freely constructed duets heard on this album do NOT stem from the Asian music traditon (for that matter, there are those who will try to deny their place in the jazz tradition; after all, this music has little to do with straight-ahead tunes or even straight-time.) Nonetheless, these tracks tell a great deal about these two musicians, they also say much about the rapid emergence of the Asian American jazz community, and about the convincing power of shared artistic sensibilities.

In the late summer of 1994, Francis Wong and Tatsu Aoki walked into the studio with little in the way of tangible preparation -- to record these pieces. Although they had first met just a few days earlier, Wong and Aoki already knew a great deal about each other: Asian Improv Records had released Aoki’s solo album Kioto earlier in the year, and the discussions leading up to that project had convinced them both that they should work together.

Both musicians display prodigious technical skills, but that really isn’t the point here. This music has a great deal more to do with restraint -- with the harnessing of those skills in the service of the musical message. As with the proto-minimalist music of Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz, little details mean quite a bit. Aoki plays with open-handed freedom, but he ignores the buily empty speedlines that so often accompany such an approach. Similarly, much of Wong’s power l.......
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