Andrew Bishop: Time and Imaginary Time

This recording is a free-form, freewheeling delight. It's new music from a piano-less group, but the spirit is so playful, the soundscapes are so simple and rich, and the playing is so accomplished and together, that this "dense" and "complicated" new music falls richly and beautifully on the ears.

As a composer, Andrew Bishop's palette encompasses a broad spectrum of music—from jazz and blues to rock, folk and international to the wold of "serious" contemporary music. This is his debut recording, leading a knockout trio which knows and feels his sensibilities and keeps the invention coming. The other musicians are fellow Michiganers—drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist Tim Flood—and the three make a universe of sounds out of Bishop's shorter sound pieces and more extended journeys. The album, amazingly enough, draws its original inspiration from principles of physics, but it's music that bursts with light and creativity.

"Cleaver's Loops" turns on the rhythmic repetitions of the drummer, and the other players joyously bash out complementary swirls of color that feel like minimalism but also theme and variations. It's got the rhythmic and harmonic intensity of a Coltrane foray, but it's more buoyant and changing.

On "For Whom the Bell Tolls" Bishop uses the tenor's overtones to create a sense of ambient stillness; the bass and drums quietly add pointillistic splashes of additional sound painting. The forty-second tenor groove "Fragment" leads to another jaunty trip, "Picking Up the Pieces," and this is much the way the whole album goes. Every tune sounds somehow planned and beautifully random, and the sequencing feels smart thoughtout, like it's just come up in a bold set of live music. There is an intense, frenetic passion in the groove of "People's Republic," and then the set surprises with the quiet stillness of "Go to Sleep," a lullaby where Bishop, on clarinet, uses a melody he sang to his son.

Time and Imaginary Time blends the power of rhythm with the intimacy of invention to present an extraordinary amount of quality music.