Joe McPhee, Michael Bisio, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Juma Sultan: The Sweet Spot

Making music with one's neighbors was one way of getting by during the pandemic. Of course, it helps if your colleagues are all of the caliber of the foursome assembled on The Sweet Spot, all of whom reside in the Hudson Valley, a couple of hours north of NYC. But it is not just geographic proximity which promotes the special chemistry in evidence on the set. Saxophonist Joe McPhee and bassist Michael Bisio go back to the mid-'90s, and have partnered numerous times since.

A few years later McPhee encountered cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm when both were founder members of the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, a relationship further cemented when the cellist became a fixture in McPhee's Survival Unit III. When Lonberg-Holm swapped the Windy City for New York State, he too hooked up with Bisio, and the pair appear on several albums together including Requiem For A New York Slice (Iluso, 2019).

However it is percussionist Juma Sultan who is the kicker here. Belonging to the same generation as McPhee, Sultan was a veteran of the loft jazz era, particularly associated with the long-running Studio We, though that is not his most pressing claim to fame; in 1969 he was part of Jimi Hendrix' group pre-Band of Gypsys, and performed at the outfit's legendary Woodstock Festival concert. He and Bisio became acquainted when he moved into the same Artist Residence in Kingston, NY, resulting in his participation here. It is his hand drums which give the session its distinctive character, an attractive homespun aesthetic which grounds the improvised flights of his comrades.

All except Bisio provide tunes in a program completed by two group efforts and two covers of compositions by seminal bass players Charlie Haden and Henry Grimes, which situate the date firmly in the free jazz continuum. The pleasure of the unbridled interplay is palpable and surfaces on every track whether written or not. Exchanges between Bisio and Lonberg-Holm illuminate McPhee's opening "Malachai," as their dashing strings create an unruly undercurrent for the reedman's alternately searing and tender saxophone, while their careening bow work is a particular feature of the conversational "Free 3," which McPhee sits out.

At other times McPhee and Lonberg-Holm braid winningly, around a loosely sketched melody on Sultan's "AMS," and again on one of the highlights, the affecting dirge of Haden's "Human Being." Bisio channels the composer's gravitas on the same cut, his introduction and coda packed with sage profundities. A similar mood and another peak arrives on Grimes' elegiac "For Django," from which emerge solo breaks for McPhee's emotive tenor, Sultan's pattering cross rhythms and Lonberg-Holm's scratchy abrasions, as well as a final empathetic duet between the cellist and Bisio. It rounds off a varied set which regularly hits that titular sweet spot.

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