Mats Gustafsson / Ken Vandermark / Tomeka Reid / Chad Taylor: PIVOT

Do not judge a friend for buying a lottery ticket when the jackpot climbs to some astronomical sum. The odds of hitting the winning combination may be just as astronomical, but the dollar spent buys something more valuable than probability: a few hours of dreaming, imagining another life. Speaking of combinations, the newly formed quartet Pivot feels very much like a winning ticket.

Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark are no strangers to collaboration, having crossed paths in Peter Brötzmann's Tentet and Sonore, Gustafsson's AALY Trio and The Thing, and Vandermark's DKV Trio and their anarcho-punk excursions with The Ex. Similarly, cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Chad Taylor have long worked together in ensembles led by Rob Mazurek, Jaimie Branch and Joshua Abrams. With such a history of shared languages and overlapping circles, Pivot arrives less as a gamble than as a sure thing.

Recorded in Chicago in December 2024, the album presents eight composed pieces—two each by Gustafsson and Vandermark—interwoven with seven improvised duos. As John Corbett's liner notes explain, every piece was captured in a single take. That detail accounts in part for the immediacy of the music, its freshness and volatility, though the rest is surely chemistry—four musicians listening, responding, and daring one another forward.

Gustafsson's "The Sensation of Sliding" sets the tone: a deceptively gentle opening line soon erupts into a free-jazz storm, with saxophone and bass clarinet tearing against Reid's cello and Taylor's drumming. Just when it seems uncontainable, the chaos resolves into a groove—horns harnessed by rhythm without losing their fire. Vandermark's "Blowing Out from Chicago," a sly nod to Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore's Blowing In From Chicago (Blue Note, 1957), channels the muscular, big-shouldered sound that defined Vandermark's own work in the early 2000s.

Taylor is more than a timekeeper here; his drumming and textural percussion expand the mournful atmosphere of "Epistemological Glide," while Reid's plucked cello anchors "Drops of Sorrow. Accelerating," guiding the saxophonists into exchanges that shift from jagged fragmentation to unified drive. Reid's bowed introduction to "Drifting Against the Wind" summons the intensity of ritual, which soon combusts into something akin to John Coltrane's 1965 Ascension sessions. The program closes with Vandermark's "Popular Music Theory," a raucous street fight of a piece, all shronk and shredding, with horns, cello, and drums locked in a furious dance.

Threaded between the composed works are six brief duets, each pairing different musicians. These concise interludes act like palate cleansers—sharp contrasts of timbre and texture that spotlight the chemistry of smaller units before the full quartet returns. If the major compositions are the jackpot numbers, the duos are the dice rolls in between: small, satisfying wins that remind us of the game's joy.

Taken together, Pivot is less a gamble than a triumph of combination. Like the thrill of holding a lottery ticket, it opens space for possibility—for dreaming of another life. But unlike the lottery, the payoff here is guaranteed: music that excites, challenges and rewards with every spin.

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