Chad Fowler: Alien Skin

Just from the paperwork alone, it was duly expected that Alien Skin would be unruly, raw, and cathartic. That is just the nature of the beast. That is just the way the big man planned it. But even with all that said, no one (including the players) saw Alien Skin coming down the runway.

A bayou bebop rave-up of the highest order, the album's madcap namesake rips the veil, drops the mic, and makes subversive a badge of honor. A one-of-a-kind collective (many headed hydra?) of inquisitive pirates, Alien Skin barely contains the spontaneous frenzy of Chad Fowler's stritch and saxello, Zoh Amba's recalcitrant, yet joyfully feminine, tenor sax and flute, and Ivo Perelman's more than ever, renegade tenor. Add to the mix Matthew Shipp and his obstinate ways with the eighty-eights, bassist William Parker and drummer Steve Hirsh, and things like the slippery dancehall magic of "Broken Language" combust and flare.

The hushed kinetics of "In Pairs" epilogues Alien Skin's two larger statements, the twin battlecries "Occupation Day" and "Sentient Sentiment." As each track nudges the twenty-minute mark, "Occupation Day," at first feeding off the starkness of Parker's menacing bow and Shipp's dark percussion, emerges into a clarity with a logic only it and the profound portrait of united sound, "Sentient Sentiment," can claim. Though akin to any of the time stopping, free-jazz blowups of yore, it would be unwise and unjust to equate it to anything that has come before it or that will follow it. Alien Skin leaves it own mark.