The great French bassist Joëlle Léandre first assembled the Stone Quartet for a single performance in 2006. Heard here four years later, the free improvising quartet includes pianist Marilyn Crispell, violist Mat Maneri, and wind player Roy Campbell, who plays both flute and trumpet. The bulk of the performance, Vision One, is a thirty-two-minute exploration of textures that evolves slowly, no matter how rapid its individual lines. Its special character comes from the string section of Léandre and Maneri, who together can summon the energy of a chamber orchestra playing a late modernist score. Maneri’s extensive work with microtonality is particularly germane to the group’s character and it gives a distinct identity to the string exchanges, as ideas catch fire between the two. The other musicians don’t exactly take back seats, but Crispell’s performance is particularly subtle, a spare line etched here, a sudden flurry there, ultimately practicing a brilliant contrapuntal pointillism that knits together the other parts in the ensemble. Campbell’s muted trumpet comes to the fore in the shorter Vision Two. His sense of line derives more explicitly from free jazz and there’s sometimes an almost idiomatic blues feel to his work, part of a rich coming together of different musical languages on a broad canvas.
Stuart Broomer has written extensively on music, mostly improvised, for both general and specialist publications, and his liner essays have appeared on CDs by musicians from some 20 countries. The author of Time and Anthony Braxton (Mercury, 2009), he is currently writing a fantasia on the life of Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips. He has been intermittently active as an improvising musician since 1965; his composition Found Theme for the Age of Reason appeared in Musicworks 112. He lives in Toronto.