Alex Ward Item 4: Furthered

Is there anyone else who doubles on clarinet and electric guitar? Multi-instrumentalist Eliot Sharp perhaps, but it is an otherwise fairly exclusive arena, one which Alex Ward has occupied since 1989 when he was already performing with Derek Bailey's Company at age 15. While the guitar remains his axe of choice for the rockier end of his activities, he wields both instruments in his free improv encounters and also in forays into jazz and contemporary music adjacent composition.

That last category might be the best descriptor for Furthered by Item 4, one of a number of Items helmed by Ward whose headcount is indicated by the appended digit, with Volition (Copepod, 2018) by Item 10 the only other iteration to see distribution to date.

Completing Ward's crew are trumpeter Charlotte Keefe, bassist Otto Willberg and drummer Andrew Lisle on a studio recording of four charts, which allow ample room for individual and group invention. While Ward's written material establishes the mood, it does not constrain the subsequent exchanges which unsurprisingly range far and wide given the free improvising smarts of his partners.

Keefe deploys the complete adventurous vocabulary, making expressive capital from squeezed out murmurs, brassy reverberations, zigzagging splutter and breaths which elide into bluster and vice versa. Ward gives Willberg and Lisle a largely free role, which means that they provide astute ongoing commentary on whatever is happening as much as rhythmic support, thereby ensuring multiple levels of intrigue on each cut. Ward himself divides his time between fretboard and keypads, mixing percussive effects, textural swells and downright shredding on guitar, while leaping between registers and multiphonic oscillations on clarinet.

The annunciatory "Cypherned" demonstrates how well those parts fit together, the acrobatic interplay encompassing a pair of duets, first spiky guitar coming on like an electrified banjo in concourse with Lisle's spacious clatter, followed by a responsive trumpet and bowed bass pairing. The suite-like combination of "Our/Hours" and "Ours" (tracked separately but running together) delivers some of the highpoints, including a tour-de-force clarinet excursion and a wonderful passage blending the unearthly cries of squealing trumpet, wavering arco bass and squeaking percussion, before finishing it all off to a tee with raucously insistent tattoo, to bring the listener back down to earth.

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