Tatvamasi: Parts Of The Entirety

Admirers of fellow Cuneiform Records artists, Gutbucket and Led Bib or other groups embracing the jazz-rock and progressive rock genres may find a lot to get revved up about with the Polish quartet, Tatvamasi. No doubt, it's an aggressive unit, armed with a vibrant demeanor as they tread across the jazz and rock terrains with polyrhythmic grooves, accentuated by the frontline's high-impact mode of delivery. The musicians' agility amid a throng of sub-motifs and variable pulses are often framed on complex unison choruses, rapidly executed paradigm shifts and a few episodic passages where tenor saxophonist Tomasz Piqtek skirts the free-jazz schema.

Electric guitarist Grzegorz Lesiak employs distortion techniques and uses a wah-wah pedal on many of these tracks and aligns with Piqtek for a take no prisoners approach. On "Rhubanabarb," the band dishes out a punishing attack via alternating flows and knotty time signatures. They build up steam via intersecting theme-building maneuvers, as Lesiak's slinky wah-wah lines generate a serrated edge. Here and throughout, the musicians impart an oscillating string of disparate melodies ingrained in sojourns that ultimately deliver the KO blow. But on this piece, they calm the waters for a brief time interval, perhaps alluding to imagery of smooth sailing after experiencing rough seas. Nonetheless, the quartet's hyper-mode game-plan is offset with a multitude of dynamically concocted inventions, offering plentiful contrasts and colorizations when considering the rapidly moving parts. (Recommended...)

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