Ivo Perelman/Whit Dickey: Tenorhood

For this meditation session, we ask you not to think about the legends of the tenor saxophone. Just listen to the interplay between Ivo Perelman and drummer Whit Dickey. Press play, and ignore the track titles dedicated to Hank Mobley, Ben Webster, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and Sonny Rollins. Why? Because, the saxophonist did just that when he created Tenorhood, a totally improvised collection of pieces the pair recorded in 2014.

The Brazilian-born, New York resident has released music on a scale not seen since David Murray's campaigns of the 1990s, producing more than 20 albums in the last four years. Dickey has been a part of five of the sessions.

As with all his later work, this music is improvised. A switch is flipped and the magic happens. With Tenorhood, he created these titles after playback— Perelman hearing the gestures and fragments of his tenor saxophone heroes within his own creations.

The pleasure here is finding those gestures in this music. The easiest to recognize is "For Ayler," a sound Perelman has conjured from his earliest days. Listen again to Soccer Land (Ibeji, 1994) and Albert Ayler's spirit is ever present in the wail and yowl of the master. Then there's "For Coltrane," and certainly no modern player has escaped feeling the weight of John Coltrane's music in life. Perelman and Dickey exercise the music of Intersteller Space (Impulse!, 1967), Dickey is a dynamo here, but more importantly, he is as much an accompanist to Perelman as pianist Matthew Shipp. He can color his sound, support, or challenge the saxophonist. He is even given all of the title track to solo with mallets and cymbals. There is spirit here, and life. The beauty of Ben Webster and the swing of Hank Mobley, both laid out in only barely recognizable signals. The pair end with Sonny Rollins. Perelman works that upper altissimo register that both he and Rollins are famous four.

If you listen to Tenorhood with the openness of a meditator's mind, you are certain to hear all the spirits that inhabit the person that is Ivo Perelman.

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