Mahakala Music: Murmuration

"Birds from the east coast meet birds from the midwest," reads Mahakala Music's description for saxophonist Dave Sewelson's newest release. Sewelson himself is a bicoastal phenomenon: born in Oakland, then traipsing into the New York scene circa 1977. Like his frequent bandleader collaborator William Parker, he acts as a magnetic center to attract a variety of local and international performers alike. Murmuration's line-up consists of another fellow New Yorker-violinist Gabby Fluke-Mogul, and three Minneapolitans, bassist Anthony Cox, drummer Steve Hirsh and alto saxophonist George Cartwright. The record reflects this geographic diversity, but not in the ways a listener might expect. Sewelson's technique does not attempt a unity of many parts flying as one, but is rather an abrasive, excited barrage, like a flock of birds racing for a fresh kill.

There are plenty of approaches to free jazz that accentuate a sort of geometric disorder, not only arrhythmic, but actively disorienting to the listener's sense of space. Very few, at least in 2025, are as free in the individual sense as Sewelson's. The first track, "Thieving Magpies," opens with a solo by Cox, primarily consisting of sporadic plucking, high-pitched shrieks and squawks, presumably leaving the other players to gradually fill out the sound. Instead, most seem to stick to the margins, Fluke-Mogul perhaps deepens Cox's reflection with some expert bow work, but almost deceivingly, as sharp turns pull her into a unique trajectory. Hirsh, too, destabilizes his playing with fits and starts, while Sewelson's rapturous crooning destabilizes what is already an entropic formation.

The first six tracks sustain and complicate the record's strange tap dance, mostly in two-to five-minute bursts. Cartwright's and Sewelson's squawks and warbles dramatize and soften. More than the soaring freedom of the sky, listeners are thrust into a nocturnal cave, pitch black, where labored rustlings and low roars haunt their every move, and echolocation continues to fail them. It's difficult to justify such an unnameable ferocity to an audience, no less so when it comprises two-thirds of the album. But for those who do trudge on, who allow themselves their dissatisfaction, they will find their ears remarkably in tune with the sonic experiments, especially those of Cox and fluke-mogul, in a sense preparing for the final three pieces. The title track not only delivers the shredding teased throughout the piece, but allows us to pay close attention to those bleeding margins. Sewelson and Cartwright are ready to let loose and rattle the airy creaks of the string section. Hirsh swings and pounces along Cartwright's cooing, and for the first time, we begin to hear a coherent "image" coming together. The closer "Peripheral Wonder" has the effect of raising the curtain, finally pitching light into the cave's dark recesses, with Cox's plucking like the ridges of sharp stalagmites hovering above. Sewelson, both as leader and performer, always strives to refigure the freedom in free improvisation. In Murmuration's case, it is the freedom to hide, frustrate and disorient, and finally, to reveal. While the record is one of the more demanding experiences in modern free jazz, it is all the more fruitful for the patient listener. Murmuration delivers a rare pleasure in the modern age: a soundscape that is genuinely mysterious, without category, forever shifting like the wind.

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