Daniel Levin Quartet: Blurry on Hatology 653

For anyone hearing the Daniel Levin Quartet for the first time, there's apt to be a dual response, a sense of something at once familiar and very different, a sounding which chamber music sonorities promise an unexpected emotional possibility, an invocation of something lost that is also an intimation of what is to come.

The cumulative effect of the quartet's music is vivid, as if its vocabulary of precise timbres is gleaned from the density of our past listening, as if high frequencies previously consumed by cymbals have been restored to us. It seems to operate on a principle of exchange in which all those things formerly adjudged hot and cool in the jazz tradition have temporarily traded identities.