Ivo Perelman / Arun Ortiz / Lester St. Louis: Prophecy

Movies run through our heads all the time and Prophecy, the latest excursion into the unruly unknown by tenor saxophonist and tireless creator Ivo Perelman and his two latest partners-in-crime, pianist Aruán Ortiz and cellist Lester St. Louis is just the soundtrack for them.

Boisterous, disconcerting, consoling. Musically obtuse yet oddly accessible for the love scenes and elegies. Music restless for the reveal. Hypnotic themes for the terse encounters between lead characters or the silent parsing of the protagonist's self. Cantankerous, restive and just clamorous enough for those high-speed chases through the broken streets of Savant City. Siren call and brash alarm.

And that is just the first track. Entitled "One," oddly enough. All thirty-seven, wiry minutes of its beautiful, unique self.

No strangers to the unforeseen and immediate, Perelman, his brassy, eccentric vocalese quite possibly at the height of its improvisational powers, whispers, and mews move the conservation forward with equal measures of urgent plea, ancient knowledge, inside joke, and peerless broadside. Ortiz in turn responds in his own symbiotic language, plunging inward and out, his lateral movements a constant source of reverie and insight. Cellist St. Louis is a man of cool pacing. He plucks and scrawls, lays out on bass, fluctuates, instigates, and holds quite the avid conversation with Perelman about nine minutes into "One."

We do not hear conversations like this anymore. We just hear chaos and criminality. Decline and default. Purge and parchment. Sure, these three argue at times (and at times at length) but there is a basic understanding, a foregone conclusion, that to get to where we are going we all have to work together, and that means communicating with each. And that means Prophecy.

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