Paul Dunmall: Here Today Gone Tomorrow

 


Much improvised music may be ephemeral, but Here Today Gone Tomorrow, captures British saxophonist Paul Dunmall's long-standing quartet at a peak of collective lucidity. Featuring pianist Liam Noble, bassist John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders, the ensemble works through three slabs of unapologetic free jazz that display the rare assurance of a band that has put in its time together. Over the years they have honed such rapport that, in a feature which distinguishes the best free outfits, responsibility for navigation through uncharted terrain is shared equally.

Despite having assumed veteran status, Dunmall remains a protean force, but one who knows that there is strength in shaping lines that build tension without resorting to easy climaxes. Noble draws on a broad stylistic hinterland for commentary that ranges from oblique harmonic nudges to percussive. Each in their way unique, Edwards and Sanders form the most in demand bass-drum team in the country, whose talents have earned them recognition in Europe and beyond, with individual associations with flautist Nicole Mitchell, pianist Myra Melford, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and reed men Evan Parker, John Butcher and Joe McPhee to name just a few.

As a band they generate interplay that does not rely on rounds of individual solos for its weight. Edwards and Sanders ignite a constant malleable mix of rhythm and color that, even in the absence of meter, still conjures momentum. When Dunmall joins the title track, he does so with a chanting motif that would have made John Coltrane proud, stretching it into sinuous variations interrupted by gusts of abstraction and vocalized cries. Thereafter, the group's focus shifts easily, each episode unfolding into the next with an internal logic that surprises as much as it satisfies.

Noble and Edwards sculpt a limber prelude to "Speaking Silence" in which sparse piano vies with strained arco creaks, edging forward in a quicksilver duet. When Dunmall briefly echoes the pianist's phrasing, it serves as a unifying element, reinforcing cohesion, but also suggesting new possibilities. However, sudden pivots may come from any direction: On the closing "Lights," staggered drum detonations and rattling bass thwacks drive the ensemble into a staccato lurch that eventually eases into melodic closure by the leader.

What emerges is not a sequence of set pieces but a continuous act of creation in which individual mastery serves the needs of the moment. The result is an album where the evolving architecture dazzles in both its spontaneity and form.

 

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