The Rub and Spare Change is the ECM debut of bassist Michael Formanek and his first album as a leader since 1998. Six of his own compositions give a quartet of long-time associates long, unusually built forms, where written and improvised passages run into each other. The result sits between post-bop and free jazz, with strong solos and close group interplay.
Formanek had played in the Mingus Big Band and recorded with Lee Konitz and Fred Hersch. His closest partner since 1991 is alto saxophonist Tim Berne, first in Wide Open Spaces and then in Berne's Bloodcount. Pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Gerald Cleaver had worked with both men. A 2008 set at The Stone in New York convinced Formanek to record this line-up. The session took place in June 2009 at Charlestown Road Studio in Hampton, New Jersey, engineered by Paul Wickliffe. Manfred Eicher mixed it at Avatar Studios with James Farber and produced it with Formanek.
The opening Twenty Three Neo builds on a repeating 23-beat figure and is played with great delicacy. Formanek splits the band in two, a piano and drum vamp below while alto and bowed bass carry the melody, before a piano solo leads into a freer collective section. The title track ties a tune with a sharp groove to a freer second half, in which written melodic fragments float over a slow pulse. Tonal Suite, the 17-minute centrepiece, joins three pieces into one span, with Berne and Taborn moving in and out of the foreground as bass and drums stretch and compress the tempo. Too Big to Fail, named after the language of the financial crisis, opens with a duet for Berne and Taborn, while Jack's Last Call was prompted by a friend's final message.
Ed Hazell of Point of Departure called the album "not so much a leap forward as a refined masterwork". He praised how the quartet made "a seamless whole of improvisation and Formanek's composing". Michael Kabran in PopMatters described "a masterful work of postmodern jazz noir", and John Ephland in DownBeat noted how the record works on the listener incrementally. The same four musicians returned in 2012 with Small Places.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2167, first released in August 2010.
