Mythos

But the most exciting part of Mythos is Pavone himself. You can take many approaches to listening to this record, but if you make the effort to listen to his lines, you'll hear an unswerving devotion to forward motion. Pavone can walk for years, but he has a flair for drama and angularity which he lets loose with regularity. Admittedly these pieces are in all sorts of weird time signatures, and they often shift styles midstream, but Pavone is clearly the locomotive driving this train: pure diesel power. His lines reveal the contours of the music, rendering each composition logical and coherent. As pianist Peter Madsen moves toward climax on ”Dialect,” for example, Pavone sees the peak ahead and shifts from a cyclical pulse to rapid-fire bursts of energy. Madsen and Pavone have a special relationship both in composition and in performance; Madsen is particularly exciting when he lets go of structure and bursts into the stratosphere, Tayloresque in his flight.

Mario Pavone remains impossible to categorize, with roots all over the map. This is toe-tapping, misty-swirling, percolating, mind-bending, heat-emitting music, all wrapped in one. Jazz. And it works.

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Track listing: Diode; Dialect; Odeon; Sky Piece; Mythos; Crutch for the Crab; Dancers Tales; Interlude; Isobars; Fablet; And Then We Wrote.

Personnel: Mario Pavone: bass; Steven Bernstein: trumpet; Tony Malaby: tenor saxophone; Peter Madsen: piano; Matt Wilson: drums; Michael Sarin: drums.