Alex Coke & Carl Michel Sextet: Emergence

The Alex Coke & Carl Michel Sextet expand their sound on this album, the follow-up to their debut, The Emissary, (Play On, 2022). Their unique instrumental blend of reeds, guitar, pedal steel, vibes, harp, and bass retains its ethereal charm while also pushing forward into fresh musical territory.

"Bagatelle II," by Ukrainian composer, Valentin Silvestrov, sounds like a medieval folk song. Its melody is laid out by Michel's guitar and Coke's flute while Carolyn Trowbridge's vibraphone and the other string players—harpist Elaine Barber, pedal steel guitarist Bob Hoffnar and bassist James Suter—provide a lush surrounding. On "Mangled Tango" Coke's tenor saxophone plays a torrid tango melody over pedal steel, harp, and vibes. The group's most radical experiment comes in "4 Mobile Structures Dedicated to Alexander Calder." This is a four- part collage of semi-abstract sound fragments where the various instruments weave in and out of each other in dense, hallucinatory textures.

Often Alex Coke is at the center of these pieces. His reed playing gives focus and clarity to the gauzy beauty that the other players concoct. His flute peeks into curtains of strings and vibes on "Wait/Not Wait" and "Locust Grove" and his tenor saxophone breezes through a thick cushion of sound on Paul Motian's "Garden Of Eden" like a wind blowing through glass chimes. He also blows soulfully on John Coltrane's "After The Rain" against a luxuriant harp and pedal steel swirl, while on "Presence" his trilling screams rise into Albert Ayler territory.

The sextet sounds more confident and relaxed on this album, as though they have really settled into each other's presence and coalesced into a powerful group. Their collective sound has evolved into a forest of far-ranging, dreamy music and they are becoming one of the more formidable units on the current music scene.