Izumi Kimura, Barry Guy, Gerry Hemingway: Six Hands Open As One

It should come as no surprise that three of contemporary music's great improvisers should obliterate the boundaries between composed and improvised music. This is the second collaboration between pianist Izumi Kimura, double bassist Barry Guy and drummer/percussionist Gerry Hemingway following Illuminated Silence (Fundacja Sluchaj, 2019), a visceral live document where improvisation played out within conceptual compositional frameworks. Six Hands As One charts a similar course, the trio responding to a range of stimuli including the natural elements, poetry and war.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the upheavals of this most bitter war impelled Hemingway's four-part suite "The Unexpected," whose seventeen minutes map vast emotional terrain. A brooding tension runs through (part i) 'Day Into Night' where bowed-bass drone, eerie percussive textures and single piano notes strike a dissonant ambiance. The knowledge of impending catastrophe and the rupture of a peaceful existence are potent stimulators that have clearly struck a deep disaccord within Heminway. His liner notes guide the listener, but even without them one would have no hesitation in nominating the suite's first part as the soundtrack to a dystopian horror movie.

There is clearer structure to (part ii) "Sanctuary," a response to the meaning of home, a meaning magnified a thousand-fold by war. The delicacy of Kimura's touch and her deft melodies, Guy's sure-footed bass lines and anchoring pulse, and Heminway's subtly weighted colorations seem to relay the ideas of comfort, familial bond and safety. In (part iii) "Corridors," splashy pianistic dissonance, fast-trilling bass and thumping industrial pulses suggest crushing forces that sweep all before them. At her most intense, Kimura's pounding keys sound more electronic than acoustic, symbolic perhaps of unnatural inversions. The comparative quiet of (part iv) "Spirit," where the three musicians' introspective stirrings—fractious and unpredictable—resolve in a spare bass ostinato might imply a simple beacon of hope, the patterns of life going on.

At fifteen minutes, Guy's "Gnomon" serves up a similarly episodic narrative where the trio's course takes sharp and striking turns on more than one occasion. Minimalist textures give way to rivulets of lyricism from piano and bass, as Guy falls in behind Kimura's slipstream. An abrupt change in pace and dynamics thrusts a circling piano motif to the fore, punctuated by stabbing percussive notes. There is barely time to settle before trilled bass ushers the trio in a more turbulent direction, which peaks in a three-way maelstrom, each musician feeding off one another's energy as much as they do the musical signals.

Kimura contributes two shorter, but equally enveloping compositions. "Cloud Echoes," inspired by a JD Salinger short story, places piano front and center, with Guy and Hemingway responding to the rhapsodic ebb and flow of the pianist's predominantly lyrical course. Kimura dedicates "Underdrift" to Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian poet killed in Gaza at the end of 2023. Blue-tinged chordal progressions, spacious and melancholy, are at the heart of this emotively hefty meditation, but it is the restless probing of Guy and Hemingway that accentuate the edgy undercurrent.

There is so much shadow play going on between Kimura, Guy and Heminway that each subsequent listen offers up a wealth of new details—a slurred bass note here, an alien-sounding percussive element there, a whisp of semi-camouflaged melody, a low-key but affecting dissonance and fascinating rhythmic webs. Deep listening should reward the investment by revealing the layers and intricacies in this exceptional trio's fearless interplay. Challenging yet ultimately edifying music that haunts the memory.