Urs Leimgruber, Jacques Demierre, Barre Phillips

Victo 40th Anniversary Super Sale. The choices Leimgruber, Demierre, and Phillips have made are everywhere unexpected and unexplained, but fit together as aural expression in the ambiguous area between imagination (a belief without experience to support it) and logic (a belief supported by experience). The materials they use may not be new, but they are reconsidered, recombined, reorganized in surprising ways. At its core, this is music of subtlety, understatement, nuance, concision. One of the trio's choices seems to have been to pay special attention to dynamics, closely regulating the intensity of the process and the resulting sound values, so that the physical activity of producing a sound on one's instrument may become the music itself, barely audible, but alive if attention is paid to it. More focused activity is held to the level of a whisper, a sigh, occasionally raised to that of an intimate conversation. Those few extreme sounds, like Leimgruber's saxophone wails in "Distance" or Demierre's piano turbulence in "Organically Yours", puncture the air, intentionally. Where pauses occur, they do not interrupt the music but become part of its fabric.

Art Lange, August 2001