An essential set for anyone who follows the so-called ”free jazz”
movement, this is the NRG Ensemble`s second fine album–more accessible that the first (on the Nessa label) but just as bristling with surprises.
Benefiting from an exceptional recording (the album also is available on a compact disc, with two extra tracks), the Chicago-based NRG Ensemble
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(Russell, Steve Hunt, Chuck Burdelik, Brian Sandstrom and Curt Bley) tears into several pieces that pay oblique tribute to Ellington and the down-home blues, but the passion and sheer quirkiness of this music is exceeded only by its attention to detail.
There isn`t a extraneous note here, and the compositional density of the most freely conceived passages makes it clear that, for the NRG Ensemble, free jazz doesn`t mean ”anything goes.”
I`m particularly impressed by the vibraharp and drum work of Hunt (a spontaneous composer if ever there was one) and by Russell`s post-Ayler tenor saxophone solos, but this is such a unified group that the whole is more than the sum of its considerable parts.