"There is a familiar species of experience. I believe it is nearly universal. Here’s the brief: we have not seen a person in a long time, someone with whom we were once close. For no good reason – no falling out, no unpleasantries at all – our paths have not crossed. Then, in an instant, we are together, thrown or brought or drawn. Circumstance has landed us proximate and here we are, face to face. Within seconds, we recognize the person. I mean really recognize them. Not just their external appearance – indeed, maybe time has rendered that a little less than obvious, our mutual graying and balding and stooping and wrinkling – but their persona, how they act and interact, how they present themselves, their gestures, the way they defer or interrupt, their gait, their eyes, their smile. If we have loved them, we immediately love them again. They can’t help it. Neither can we. 

It is also like this with music. The nuances give away the player, and if we have not heard them for a spell, maybe even a lengthy period, but we have spent lots of time listening to them, recognition takes no time at all. Even if they’re doing something quite new, playing in a fresh configuration, perhaps with other such long-ago friends with whom we have too rarely communed. Hearing my friends Sebi Tramontana, Steve Beresford, and Frank Gratkowski makes me think of this phenomenon of instant recognition. At a time when we were all more globally mobile, a couple decades and more ago, the four of us were fortunate to have spent enough time together that, for me, they remain now fully present as themselves, behaving as they did and as they continue to behave, even as they have grown and transformed. Initially, I knew each of them independently, Sebi by way of Mario Schiano, Frank through his long association with Georg Gräwe, Steve in the context of his singular contribution to freely improvised music. Here they are, a congregation of separate worlds, come together for something quite new, but also a bridge to these pasts. In a world of perpetual change, I find this continuity reassuring. 

Many of those same points of recognition, the personal inclinations that make up someone’s identity, are audible in how they improvise. The actions and interactions, for instance, that constitute the most substantial part of spontaneous music, are immediately distinguishable here, not as signature moves, but in the ways that Sebi, Steve, and Frank work together. Their “weave,” if you will. I hear a playful quality, a warmth, in the give and take, as well as risky moments that pay off, the “almost organized” passages, their “minor adjustments to reality” – fundamentals of adventurous improvisation that require trust built on mutual experience. There’s a willingness to be arch or dissonant, as well as harmonious and tuneful. It’s all audible in the gestures, the deference and interruption inherent in the way each one improvises. When I hear the collective result, I can see the players, my pals, clear as day. In my mind’s eye, I imagine their individual gaits as they walk down the street, the gleam in their eyes while sipping an espresso, working on a whiskey, or eating a bagel. Their very different smiles – wry, generous, cunning. (You’ll need to place each smile on its smiler.)

I am grateful for this extraordinary music. Because it’s not only a portrait of these wonderful people, alte Freunde. It’s also a shared experience, a unique document of the trio making something that is at once all of them and none of them. Something ultra-familiar but also unrecognizable." - John Corbett