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  • Acts Of Love

    17519-2

    Artist: Bergman, Coxhill & Hession

    Label: Mutable Music

    Borah Bergman, piano; Lol Coxhill, soprano saxophone; Paul Hession, drums. Recorded at Besbrode Pianos, Leeds on 7/8 June 2003.

    "Two men. How you picture them may well influence how you understand their music. How you hear them will tell you a lot about who they are. Picture the pianist, as he suggests himself, digging out rocks with his father, busking for the passers-by. Old snapshots, faded and cracked, but they tell a great deal and so do those names; Bergman and Coxhill.

    With a unique, two-handed approach that dispenses with the traditional notion of piano playing as competing or interlocking lines, Borah Bergman deals with sound as mass, great chilly bergs or hot flows of magma that change shape as different layers flow against one another, hardening and melting a t different rates. By contrast, Lol Coxhill is a singer, a chanticleer on the dunghill of the city or on the rooftree of your house, a head full of old songs and the harmonic codes to transform them. The simplest difference may be that Coxhill comes from a jazz tradition, never more communicative than when playing changes and subverting a saccharine show-tune, while Bergman, for all his deep understanding of blues, boogie-woogie, swing (lessons from Teddy Wilson), bebop (a revelatory glimpse of Bud Powell), comes from somewhere else; classical, cantorial, exclamatory, De profundis clamavi...

    What unites them, though, even beyond the astonishing linqua franca of improvisation, is the idea of music a...