Michael Moore With Tristan Honsinger And Cor Fuhler - Monitor (1999)

Review by Steve Loewy

Dutch clarinetist Michael Moore has participated in a wide array of ventures, his best known perhaps the groups known as Clusone 3 and Available Jelly. He has shown a propensity for unusual colors, original sounds, and offbeat rhythms. This one is no different in its originality, though it is entirely new and exciting in its results. Joined by cellist Tristan Honsinger and pianist/keyolinist/organist Cor Fuhler, the three impress with their low-key and virtuosic pummeling of convention. At times it sounds like chamber jazz, but these free-wheeling exercises in free improvisation surprise and impress with changing combinations, altered directions, mixed time signatures, and explosive riffs -- all that suggest new ways of building on old traditions. Fuhler stuns with his "keyolin" -- a homemade contraption, which is described in Kevin Whitehead's liners as "a two-string viola suspended over a three-octave keyboard" that is bowed with the right hand. It meshes nicely with the cello, and the recording succeeds exceptionally well as a whole.