Marilyn Crispell - Dreamstruck (2019)

Drummer/composer/educator Harvey Sorgen boasts an impressive worked with/recorded with resume. His highest profile booster might be a handful of recordings with the Jefferson Airplane offshoot Hot Tuna, followed by a number of releases with bassist Joe Fonda and the Fonda/Stevens Group. With Fonda involved, you know you'll hear some left-of-center sounds. Dreamstruck teams Fonda with Sorgen, and brings pianist Marilyn Crispell in for a piano trio affair featuring several scrambled three-way, in-the- moment improvisations and four "written" turns, two by Fonda, one by guitarist Bill Windbiel and one by the late drummer Paul Motian.

Sorgen crafts spontaneous, complex rhythmic layerings and expansive textures and colors here; Fonda is muscular and succinct. Crispell—with six ECM Records sets in her resume, amongst them working solo and with Motian and Gary Peacock—has a way of distinguishing herself in a piano trio outing, with wandering lines and crisp interjections, and surprises lurking behind every corner.

Dreamscape is a wonder of in-the-moment-ness. It is forthright and in-your-face ("Area"); ghostly and dreamscape-like ("My Song"); full of uncentered melodic beauty ("Landscape"); thorny, teetering along the edge ("Our Own Tea Leaves"); and gorgeously minimalist and majestic ("Dreamstruck"). And in the piano trio game, they sound like no other out there.

All three players are idiosyncratically original in their approaches. The same can be said of the collective sound. Austere for the most part, the music benefits from a ruminative patience of delivery and the fortuitous entanglement of three strong musical personalities.