Fort Worth, 8.22.2025

This week was more of an ass kick than I anticipated, but I was still able to toddle up the street to The Grackle Art Gallery for its seasonal re-opening party with a couple of trios: Dallas classical-improv virtuosi Trio du Sang, and Polish duo Obrzym i Kurdupel, augmented by Houston sopranino sax specialist Danny Kamins (El Mantis, Sleeping Beast, Firelife Trio). This is probably going to be my Show of the Year, so lemme tellya 'bout it.

Hadn't seen Trio du Sang in a couple of years, although violinist Andra May dueted with guitarist Gregg Prickett at an improv show in Denton late last year. Since then, I've learned that percussionist Bobby Fajardo played Xenakis' "Rebonds A" -- I've been on a Xenakis tear since learning that Amorsima Trio will be playing an all-Xenakis program for their tenth (Xth, get it?) anniversary performance at TCC Northeast later this year -- for his masters program at the University of Miami. (It's on YouTube.)

Trio du Sang's performance seamlessly blends composed material with improvisation, drawing on influences that range from Romantic repertoire to gypsy jazz to Afro-Caribbean rhythms. The opening piece was a showcase for shifting dynamics, driven relentlessly by Fajardo's hand percussion. The amplified strings needed some power to match Fajardo's vigor, but the overall sound was well balanced and not excessive for the room. 

Prickett, whose jazz ensemble Monks of Saturnalia gave a profoundly satisfying performance in Denton last week, was equally adept on nylon stringed axe here, laying the harmonic foundation and tossing improvisational curveballs at his bandmates, who listened and responded with near-telepathic exuberance. May's violin was the icing on the cake, singing expressively and providing counterpoint to Prickett's melodies, at one point even employing a plectrum to the violin. Never saw that before. Glad to see this crew on the boards again, hoping to hear more from them soon.

The touring act that followed Trio du Sang represents a confluence of improvising traditions. Danny Kamins is a road dog, crisscrossing the US and Europe on solo tours since kicking cancer's ass a while back. He's a product of both jazz academia (Cal Arts) and the fertile Houston experimental music scene. The duo Obrzym i Kurdupel -- Kamins' frequent duet partner Marcin Bozek on bass guitar and tenor saxophonist Tomek Gadecki -- are part of the vibrant Eastern European free music scene. Bozek is the founder/conductor of the Gdynia Improvisers Orchestra, while Gadecki also performs in the baritone saxophone duo Sambar (with Paulina Owczarek) and the psychedelic rock outfit Lonker See. Their band name translates from Polish as "the giant and shorty," a comical reference to the physical contrast between the towering Gadecki and the wiry, compact Bozek.

Their set began with a cascade of notes from the dueling horns of Kamins and Gadecki. Kamins is a master of circular breathing, and he's been working on his overtones, while Gadecki has an impressive command of the tenor's full range -- even working up in sopranino territory. It's like '60s energy music, but with more intention and precision, a manifestation of what Kamins calls "commitment to craft." Underneath it all, Bozek plays an agile and inventive style of bass, using a treble-rich sound that accents every finger movement and harmonic. At one point, he inserts a horn mouthpiece (he also plays French horn) in the face of his bass to make the group a wind trio.

Some of the set's most impactful moments came towards the end of the set, when Kamins' circular breathing -- truly a phenomenon to see and hear -- took off into Roscoe Mitchell territory, while Bozek laid his bass across his lap and played it percussively, evoking both metal and funk. Then Gadecki and Bozek duetted, sounding for all the world like Archie Shepp driving a runaway freight train. I have a stack of CDs here, including three by Olbryzm i Kurdupel, that I look forward to delving into (and maybe even writing about) in the days to come. In the meantime, if you're in Denton tonight, go catch Kamins, Bozek, and Gadecki at Rubber Gloves, part of Porous Sonorous's showcase celebrating the tenth anniversary of Ernesto Montiel and Miguel Espinel's improv duo Monte Espina.

Denton, 8.15.2026

Hit a wall this week so decided it's time for me to become an observational listener and scribe again for a minute. As fortune would have it, 'twas the evening when my favorite band, Monks of Saturnalia, was playing a pre-release show for their upcoming debut disc, Sacred Home, on new Oak Cliff-based indie Gentle Static Records, at a brand new venue, The Pony, a bar/restaurant-cum-eclectic music venue just off the square in Denton (314 E. Hickory, Suite 121, to be exact). So my buddy Mike and I saddled up and headed out to see what was what.

The Pony's a nicely appointed room with a maximum capacity of 114, good sightlines, and impeccable sound. I've been following the Monks for years and this was the first time I actually got to hear them the way they're supposed to sound, with leader Gregg Prickett's guitar ringing full and rich out front, up there with the (on this occasion) two-horn front line -- Dale Fielder on alto and soprano, Steve Brown on tenor -- and the rhythm section of bassist Drew Phelps and drummer Alan Green clearly audible (although sometimes visually obscured). Thanks to publicist extraordinaire Lisa Oldham's advance work, it was a full house, and The Pony's master of ceremonies Dorian Marsh started the evening with a request that the audience be quiet and listen.

Opening number was Prickett's Albert Ayler dedication "He Walked Into the River," which I first heard when it was performed by the very last incarnation of titanic drummer-composer Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society at Oak Cliff's Kessler Theater back in 2012. Previous versions with the Monks had included a spoken intro/outro with audience participation, but on this night, the music spoke for itself, the elegiac theme invoking the free jazz pioneer's combination of melodic simplicity and expressive emotionalism.

Second song "Hika" is a dedication to the first of four wolf hybrids Prickett has lived with over the years. It's a tumbling jazz waltz in the mold of late '50s Mingus, with Fielder and Brown locking horns like John Handy and Booker Ervin on Mingus Ah Um or Blues and Roots and Alan Green -- a master percussionist who combines subtlety and finesse with relentless swing -- providing the powerful propulsion. The first set closed with "Gone Dance," a new composition by bassist Drew Phelps, a Prickett collaborator since "before we were born," dedicated to Phelps' late wife Esther. The onstage communication between Phelps, Prickett, and drummer Green is nigh-on telepathic, and the bassist's compositions radiate warmth and soulfulness.

Second set started strong with another Phelps composition, "The Day the Crops Died," which gallops along like a Western movie soundtrack and provides ample opportunity for solo statements from all the players. Phelps is equally adept and expressive on arco and pizzicato, while Prickett combines classical chops with tastefully applied electronic effects and throws in an episode of nasty slide that evokes the shades of both Duane Allman and Sonny Sharrock. Fielder, a prolific leader in his own right, skirts the stratosphere on soprano and alto horns, while Brown is the epitome of the tough Texas tenor. 

The secret weapon, sitting in back, is Alan Green, a hard swinger in the tradition who's absorbed influences from the avant garde and can also groove hard like an R&B showband drummer. His brisk shuffle on Prickett's "My Underdog Soul" drives the tune relentlessly and serves as a launching pad for lots of horn pyrotechnics. That tune was followed by a moody change of pace, "Missing Requiem" -- a dedication to California wildfire victims co-composed by Prickett and baritone saxophonist Aidan Sears, who plays on the Monks record but is currently ensconced in the L.A. music scene. 

The Monks ended the evening with an improv exercise that's a digital-only bonus track on the album, which featured the band extemporizing freely while Prickett ran the changes to a standard ballad. As Mike and I were getting ready to return to the Fort, I told Lisa Oldham something on the order of, "You know how to get bodies in seats." Her response: "I just like to see Gregg smile." My favorite guitar player was smiling plenty last night. May it always be so.

Dallas, 7.24.2026

Hadn't done one of these in a minute. Decided to take an evening off from doing political stuff to take in a show in Dallas, where two of my very favorite improvisers were performing in collaboration with some folks I knew not from Adam (or so I thought), under the aegis of Ernesto Montiel's Porous Sonorous -- a trademark of quality around mi casa -- and New Media Contemporary, the artist-run multimedia gallery of Fort Worth cat James Talambas, whom I last saw when he was running sound for No Kings 3 and I was running around in an orange vest. 

Opening the show was an exciting newcomer, a young Dentonite who goes by the handle xmyri. Seated at a table behind a laptop and a wire nest of electronic gear, xmyri cued samples of musical fragments, sometimes interrupted by silence, using faders while projecting images that looked like melting glacial ice on New Media Contemporary's large screen -- a feature (along with the streaming video installations around the room) that make the venue particularly well suited to this type of presentation. 

In conversation later, the artist allowed that normally, their visuals are interactive, but they had opted to go with fixed patterns to avoid crashing their laptop. (I suggested that sometimes it's beneficial to have a constraint or two built into an improvisation.) While new to performance, xmyri is already demonstrating a strong command of their tools, and an ability to combine sonic surprise and visual atmospherics in compelling ways. Someone alert the Dallas Ambient Music Nights folks.

Next up was the first time duo of virtuoso cellist Kourtney Newton, whose performances of composed music (with Sounds Modern at the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth) and non-idiomatic improvisation (on the Denton experimental scene) are always thrilling, and multimedia artist Sean Miller, who also performs with his spouse, chanteuse extraordinaire Lily Taylor, under the rubric Locations. Newton admitted that she came to the gig with the expectation of performing solo music with visual accompaniment, and was relieved to have another musician to play off. 

Since the last time I saw her perform, she's added looper and Whammy pedals to her stage rig, along with her cello and musical saw. In electroacoustic situations like this, I always worry about the volume differential between electronic and acoustic instruments, and while Miller's shifting soundscape of acoustical textures (with visual accompaniment that looked like flowing mercury) occupied a big chunk of midrange space, Newton was able to make herself heard. She has a vast array of techniques at her disposal -- false harmonics, glisses, percussive and grinding effects with bow and beater on strings, tapping on the body of the cello, and more -- that she augmented with the pedals to create repeating backgrounds and push through the electronic wall, even managing to interject a brief melodic theme. Most striking of all were the sounds she produced with the musical saw, creating crazy glisses and otherworldly vibrato that cut through even more dramatically than the amplified cello.

Beam Splitter, the Berlin based duo of vocalist Audrey Chen and trombonist Henrik Munkeby Norstebo, were joined by Oak Cliff's own Stefan Gonzalez (just back from a quick mini-tour of Europe with The Young Mothers and preparing to relocate to Chicago in November) on vibraphone for a powerful set that raised the intensity stakes for the evening dramatically. Chen and Norstebo perform a highly empathetic form of improvisation, in which the sounds of their breath, channeled through the filters of his instrument and her formidable vocal technique, are treated electronically (controlled by Norstebo, who manipulates knobs while he plays), resulting in something like organic jazz metal. Her percussive plosives, idiosyncratic scatting, and vocal fry extended beyond imagination were almost superhuman. Dancing behind his vibes with manic intensity, Gonzalez listened intently and played off of Chen's vocalese both rhythmically and melodically until the set reached a satisfying conclusion. The audience of 20-odd folks listened attentively and roared their approbation when it was finished.

Now back to work, but I'll be heading to Denton on August 15 to hear Gregg Prickett's Monks of Saturnalia -- whose debut album is complete and is my most anxiously awaited release of the moment -- will perform at The Pony, a new Denton spot run by muso Dorian Marsh and his fiancee, ceramicist Bella Tylen. On August 22, I'll toddle down the street to the Grackle Art Gallery to hear sopranino saxophone master Danny Kamins in a trio with bassist Marcin Bozek and tenor saxophonist Tomek Gadecki, with Prickett's acoustic Trio du Sang opening. On August 23 there's another cool show which I'm not sure I'm allowed to mention yet, and I hate having to go back and correct these things. Last but not least, Kourtney Newton says that the collaborative new music outfit Amorsima Trio, of which she's a member, might be performing in Tarrant County this October; film, as they say, at 11. All I ever need is something to look forward to. Especially good electoral outcomes on November 3. 

Steven Bernstein's "ResoNation Trio/"Ultra Resonance"

Photo by Andrew Blackstein.

It's hard to believe now how controversial Teo Macero's editing on Miles Davis' late '60s-early '70s albums like In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and On the Corner was when those records were new. Part of it was the innovation of the funk-and-rock inflected sound Miles was exploring at the time, but Teo's post-production work almost made him a co-composer (although Miles always claimed credit for his Directions In Music). The same kind of resistance met Bill Laswell's remixes of electric Miles on Panthalassa when they appeared in 1998. Times have changed to where an artist like Makaya McCraven -- a drummer and producer whose work involves remixing live improvisations -- has been selected to receive a grant from the Doris Duke Foundation.

On his latest release -- out on double vinyl or CD via Royal Potato Family on June 5 -- the trumpeter-composer Steven Bernstein and his longtime collaborator, producer Scotty Hard, start with a set of new Bernstein compositions played by a brand new ensemble, then deconstruct them into Something Entahrly Other. Bernstein's a longtime fixture on the Lower Manhattan music scene, and the mastermind behind both the genre-bending jazz quartet Sexmob (which just released a 2023 collaboration with NYC avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson on Nonesuch) and Millennial Territory Orchestra, known for its reinventions of a century of American popular music. 

With ResoNation Trio, Bernstein -- best known for his work on the rarely-heard slide trumpet -- takes up the valved trumpet in the company of bassist Scott Colley and drummer Nasheet Waits to improvise conversations around his compositions, which Hard, on Ultra Resonance, then reimagines at the cellular level. It's a bold, bracing listen.

Bernstein first heard Colley and Waits with pianist Andrew Hill. Colley's a busy bandleader and in-demand side musician whose big sound shows the influence of his CalArts instructor Charlie Haden. Waits has become a significant force with his own bands, in Jason Moran's Bandwagon, the collaborative trio Tarbaby, and Dave Holland's New Quartet. Bernstein is a melodic trumpeter in the mold of Don Cherry, Dennis Gonzalez, and Wadada Leo Smith. ResoNation Trio's performances unfold at an unhurried pace, with ample negative space, before building to fulsome grooves, Bernstein's lines swirling around Colley and Waits' sturdy propulsion. The first disc closes with the trio's take on the venerable blues chestnut "Sitting On Top of the World," which establishes continuity with Bernstein's earlier explorations of American songcraft.

The inspiration for Ultra Resonance came from Bernstein's exposure to Garvey's Ghost, the dub version of reggae great Burning Spear's album Marcus Garvey. Bernstein and Hard previously worked as co-composers on Sexmob's 2023 outing The Hard Way, but for the new project, Hard took ResoNation Trio's completed tracks as the basis for his work. While modern pop productions owe a lot to innovations that hip-hop originators borrowed from dub producers like Lee Perry and Scientist, the techniques of dub -- heavy remixing, emphasis on pulse, the addition of audio effects and snippets from other recordings -- haven't yet been widely applied to improvised performances. 

The spareness of ResoNation Trio's instrumentation gave Hard the opportunity to deconstruct the music to its constituent parts and reconfigure them in a form that still has the instruments' organic warmth and humanity. Unlike Macero and McCraven, Hard will lift a phrase from here, a drum fill from there, and recombine them into a completely new piece, slathered with atmospherics and added instrumentation -- including Bernstein's debut on Electronic Valve Instrument (EVI). The pieces he created take their titles from elements on the Periodic Table -- emblematic of the way Hard has transformed ResoNation Trio's music. His musical alchemy rewards attention.

Golems of the Red Planet's "Surf Masada"

You might think that no thread could possibly connect surf music, John Zorn, and Northern Ohio. But you’d be wrong. Start with the hijaz scale, common to Arab, flamenco, and Ashkenazi Jewish music – and surf rock. Add the knowledge that genre-bending composer Zorn played in a surf band as a teen. 

Since 1993, Zorn has composed 613 instrumental pieces – his three Masada songbooks -- inspired by Ashkenazi music. They’ve been performed as jazz (so authentically that original Masada Quartet bassist Greg Cohen got a gig with Ornette Coleman for his trouble), chamber music, hardcore, acapella, salsa, and Afrobeat. 

Now, Golems of the Red Planet – an Akron, Ohio, quartet that drank from the same well of inspiration as Devo and Pere Ubu, and recently played their first-ever live date at Jilly's Music Room in the Rubber City -- dare to perform the Masada songbook as surf rock, with a cello (and live, a violin) to lend Zorn’s melodies special poignancy. You’ll never hear great Jewish music the same way again. It's available digitally now, out on vinyl on Heyday Again Records June 12.

Golems are the brainchild of bassist Mark Allender (The Pointless Orchestra), who runs the Zorn-themed Masada World website. To help realize his vision, he recruited cellist Matt Reese (Trial of Lucy), moonlighting jazz drummer Bob Ethington (Unit 5), and Bob's Tin Huey bandmate Harvey Gold on guitar and keys. (In the '70s, Tin Huey were prog rockers in new wave clothing who made the mark early Pere Ubu strove to hit.) More recently, Harvey was part of an aggregation Nuggets garage rock compilation curator/longtime Patti Smith sideman Lenny Kaye assembled to play a Nuggets anniversary show at Cleveland's Beachland Ballroom.

Golems' arrangements and approach provide a more highly individuated approach to "radical Jewish culture" than, say, ethnomusicologist Hankus Netsky's Klezmer Conservatory Band, or even clarinetist Don Byron's African American take on the masterwork of Cleveland-born klezmer Mickey Katz. Surf Masada opens with an almost prog-rock take on "Hadriel" that gallops its way into a full-on, feedback-laden psychedelic maelstrom. "Mehalel" juxtaposes Gold's percussive picking, his notes slathered in chorus and delay, with Reese alternating counterpoint and unison lines on cello. It's a potent mixture.

On "Hutriel," Ethington takes a tricky and surprising approach to subdividing the beat while Reese states the theme, then Gold applies a fuzzy tremolo, giving way to a raga-like section where the drums play tabla-like accompaniment. What sounds like radio transmission noise (but proves to be a text from surrealist theorist Andre Breton) intrudes on the hauntingly spectral opening to "Paschar/Tzofeh," before the drums kick off a propulsive beat behind the theme statement. "Ziphim" starts with a nervous-sounding cello line; myriad dynamic shifts accompany the theme and variations, culminating in a series of descending, Who-like chords over a thundering drone before the recapitulation.

"Damam" opens with an intro straight out of a James Bond soundtrack, and includes a brief but memorably clanking, melodic bass line worthy of Roy Wood of Move/ELO/Wizzard fame (who made such a hallmark in his heyday). Pick to click here is "Hazor," with its catchy, repeating three-note hook, but "Re'cha" is no slouch either with its mutant Bo Diddley beat. 

What can one say? In a moment when weird instrumental music seems to be in vogue -- I'm looking at you, Angine de Poitrine, Khruangbin, and LA LOM -- these Buckeye boys might just have what it takes to make it. If not to Carnegie Hall, at least to Brooklyn. 

Things we like: Yvonne Rogers, Myra Melford/Satoko Fujii, Cecil Taylor Unit

I simply adore jazz piano records. And I have three new ones to edify and amaze me this month.

Like Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Heather Cox Richardson, pianist-composer Yvonne Rogers hails from the state of Maine. Since landing in Brooklyn a few years back after studies at the Eastman School of Music and University of Rochester, she's garnered awards and commissions, led her own quartet, and performed regularly in ensembles led by Ingrid Laubrock, Adam O'Farrill, and Alden Hellmuth. 

Her new album, The Button Jar on Pyroclastic, was produced by the estimable Kris Davis before she stepped away from helming the label to concentrate on her own composing and performing. It's Rogers' first solo recording, named, she writes, for her mother's button jar, which taught her "to balance fair play with craft, and to find magic in the process."

Perhaps influenced by its creator's bio, The Button Jar's meditative and spiritual qualities put me in mind of Ives' Concord Sonata, while my wife said the lightness of Rogers' touch reminded her of Tin Hat Trio/Sleepytime Gorilla Museum founder Karla Kihlstedt's voice -- it's "conversational, rather than performative." As a composer, Rogers is a clear thinker, has good command of her materials, and shows lots of promise for the future.

Myra Melford and Satoko Fujii's history as a piano duo goes back to 2007 and the all-improv duet album Under the Water on Fujii's Libra label. Katarahi, on leading edge French indie RogueArt, features compositions by both performers (four by Melford, three by Fujii). Melford recently wowed Texas audiences with her all-star Fire and Water Quintet, while Fujii produces a steady stream of releases in a variety of contexts.

The pairing of the two artists is galvanic. Both are dynamic, assertive performers, wielding ample expressive technique, unafraid of space or dissonance. They play contrasting dynamics, intertwine swirling melodic lines, and churn up roiling waves of emotion. Overall, I haven't enjoyed a piano duo this much since I caught Kris Davis and Craig Taborn's Octopus for two memorable nights back in 2022. 

At times, Melford and Fujii's intensity put me in mind of Marilyn Crispell, back when she was in Anthony Braxton's quartet, the two of them sounding for all the world like the meeting of Cecil Taylor and Eric Dolphy that never took place, but should have because both musicians remain such perennial influences on their respective instruments. For me, it always comes back to CT -- my pick for the musician of my lifetime on days when Ornette isn't -- and lucky me, some new-to-me music from him just arrived the other day.

I owned the Prestige Great Concert of Cecil Taylor (the US issue of Shandar's multi-volume Nuits de la Fondation Maeght) back in the '70s, and in the pre-Record Store Day hoopla, was intrigued to see that Elemental Music, one of the labels for which reissue producer extraordinaire Zev Feldman works his magic, was releasing two other concerts from that famous tour. 

Now Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts is here, and it's stupendous. On CD, the relatively succinct, 50-minute evening set is sequenced first, with the slightly more diffuse, 90-minute afternoon set split at the 20 minute mark. In recent years, video of these concerts -- which were recorded for French radio and television -- has surfaced on YouTube, but because the sounds of the instruments are so distinctive, I actually find myself better able to focus on this audio-only document.

By this time, Taylor's appropriately named Unit with altoist Jimmy Lyons and drummer Andrew Cyrille had been together for three years, and their onstage telepathy shows it. They were in between their classic Blue Note albums and a sojourn in academia, Cecil's compositional concept was fully developed, and his accomplices knew their way around its contours well. Multi-reedist Sam Rivers, who'd joined them for the tour in between stints with Blue Note and Miles Davis and his own apotheosis on Impulse and at the helm of Studio Rivbea, sounds better integrated here than I remember, picking his spots to add tenor and flute interjections. Cecil's a force of nature, as he would remain to the end of his life, but this performance represents an early peak in his trajectory.

As Feldman's productions tend to be, Fragments is sumptuously packaged, with photographs from the concerts, an essay by Taylor biographer Phil Freeman, and reminiscences from Cyrille, Lyons' widow the bassoonist Karen Borca, Rivers' daughter Monique, drummer Jack DeJohnette (who was a member of Miles Davis' band that shared the bill with Taylor's Unit on the '69 tour), and pianist Matthew Shipp. But enough of this. Time to fire up the CD player and let those 88 tuned drums rip.

Things we like: Lisa Cameron, Sleeping Beast

Lisa Cameron is one of my favorite musicians on Earth, one whose work exemplifies electroacoustic improvisation at its finest. With a style steeped in psychedelic rock (she kicks traps with venerable Austin space rockers ST-37) as well as free jazz and Euro free improv, she's the leading practitioner of drum feedback extant.

Like her frequent collaborator, prepared guitar specialist Sandy Ewen, Cameron has a highly tactile approach to sound sculpture. At a recent appearance at Fort Worth's Grackle Art Gallery in duo with violinist Alex Cunningham, she demonstrated a propensity for sympathetic listening and responding that only the finest improvisers possess. Her tools include contact mics on drum heads, singing bowls, cymbals, a mixer, and an array of beaters and small objects. Observing at close range, one could only be amazed at the way she was able to electronically transmute the confluence of sound waves from Cunningham's bow and strings and vibrating objects on her drum heads into a veritable aural tsunami. The ease with which she and the violinist were able to follow each other's dynamic shifts entered the realm of the magical.

Cameron's part of a cohort of musicians -- others include her fellow Austinites, guitarist Jonathan F. Horne, saxophonist Joshua Thomson, and Norwegian expat bassist Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten; North Texas siblings, bassist Aaron and drummer-vibraphonist Stefan Gonzalez; and Houston-based trombonist Dave Dove, trumpeter Jawwaad Taylor, and saxophonists Jason Jackson and Danny Kamins -- who connect Texas to the wider world of improvised music. Last year's Live at Love Wheel Records with Thomson and Haker-Flaten was a good vinyl representation of this tribe. Now Kamins' label Musical Eschatology has released Sleeping Beast, a 2023 recording of Kamins and Cameron in a trio with bassist Thomas Helton, and it's quite stupendous.

One of the shortcomings of a lot of improvised music one hears these days is a tendency toward bombast -- a more art-tastic take on the old rockaroll saw "When all else fails, kick over the amps." Texan improvisers benefit from the ongoing influence of pioneering Tejana experimentalist and Deep Listening founder Pauline Oliveros, whose eponymous foundation gave birth to Dove's Nameless Sound organization, in which musicians like Kamins, Ewen, and Horne cut their improvising teeth. While Sleeping Beast includes ample opportunity for Kamins to flaunt his circular breathing fluency and seemingly endless melodic invention over Helton and Cameron's turbulent sprung rhythm, much of the real action here takes place in the quietest passages. All three musicians are virtuosi, but it's in the confluence of their imaginations that true wizardry occurs. Get you some of this.