Ivo Perelman with Sirius String Quartet: The Passion According to G.H.

At times, it seems difficult to fathom that Brazilian saxophone titan Ivo Perelman's collaboration with the Sirius String Quartet is totally improvised. And while improvisation is a principle component of the saxophonist's extensive and variegated discography, an unusually high synergistic force amid the artists' underlying tenacity offers a template for success. As the album comprises intense, avant-garde dialogues subsided by temperate or investigative flows, the string quartet often mimics Perelman's commanding, tremolo-tinged dialogues and brutish flurries.

"Part 4," opens with Perelman's burly attack, designed with wily phrasings and supple, soul-searching notes. He establishes a paradigm from the onset, yielding a framework that conveys pathos, lucid imagery and invokes notions of a puzzling series of circumstances. The strings section encircles, responds, and mirrors Perelman's refracting choruses in concert with a few softly woven subplots. It's a piece that poses streaming, contrapuntal passages and yearning notes, perhaps alluding to man's willful quest for the truth. Glowing imagery is a powerful component that prefaces the artists' spontaneous interactions and quick-witted evolutionary processes.