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CD
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ROG 139CD
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"In the quartet on this album with Liam Noble on piano, John Edwards on double bass and Mark Sanders on drums, Paul has returned to his first love: free improvisation based on interaction between the four players. The quartet is a worthy successor to the Mujician quartet, and must be one of the finest working free improvising groups in the world. His approach is to listen very carefully to what is happening around him and to react to it. In general terms, there are two broad approaches to soloing in free music; one is where musicians develop their own lines in a method that can be defined as independent simultaneous action, and which John Corbett (2016) has described as 'skiing down the slopes separately', the other is interactive where the musicians listen carefully and react to the other players in a kind of musical conversation. Of course, there is a grey area between these two approaches. Paul Dunmall's playing falls very definitely into the interactive category. If you see him play live, you will see how he concentrates on the flow of the music, often stepping back and allowing the music to develop before choosing the right moment to enter or re-enter. At times his playing is foregrounded, while at others it is an equal partner in the mix of sound. His solos always develop original melodic lines, free of the clichés of both straight-ahead and free jazz. The other three musicians make equally important contributions to the music. Liam Noble plays in many different contexts from solo piano to more mainstream quartets; he has a highly original approach to free improvisation based on short melodic ideas and clusters of notes that weave in and out of Dunmall's lines. John Edwards and Mark Sanders are longstanding partners in free music and they create intense swirling rhythms that react with and set off the improvisations of Dunmall and Noble. They are, in fact, equal partners in the quartet, free to influence the development and flow of the music."
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