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Conference Call: Prism

By Mike Jurkovic
September 19, 2020
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During the roiling twenty years that

Conference Call

" data-original-title="" title="">Conference Call has willfully crisscrossed the broad Atlantic, the individual drummers haven't participated in all of the round trips. The pre-2020 drummer rotation was

Matt Wilson

drums
b.1964

" data-original-title="" title="">Matt Wilson, who left the band prior to its first tour in 2001 to prep for the delivery of triplets,

Han Bennink

drums
b.1942

" data-original-title="" title="">Han Bennink,

George Schuller

drums
b.1958

" data-original-title="" title="">George Schuller, and

Gerry Hemingway

drums
b.1955

" data-original-title="" title="">Gerry Hemingway. But the core players remain. As does the key aesthetic: creative art as spontaneous geometry. So how you fit the individual pieces together and how you knock them down is the sole equation of the day.

Never minding the covert allusion to America's secret surveillance program, Prism makes for a really good day. Its fall zone is a vast landscape of adventurous hurdles toppled by an innate insistence to remain free. Of thought, of boundary, of expectation. All the scholarly proof you'll need is one listen through of bassist

Joe Fonda

bass
b.1954

" data-original-title="" title="">Joe Fonda's elliptically fluid and joyously spirit-lifting "Listen to Dr. Cornell West," saxophonist

Gebhard Ullmann

saxophone
b.1957

" data-original-title="" title="">Gebhard Ullmann's true rush of form on "Variations on A Master Plan (Part Two)," and the sly, modernist honky-tonk of pianist Michael Jeffrey Stevens' shifty "Sal's Song." Taken together, the three define the whole enterprise and frame the middle of this seven song (song: it seems like such a trite descriptor here) program.

So it naturally incurs that Ullman's deceptively scorching "FJD" and Stevens' balletic banner track usher us into Prism, and that's no mean feat, being the whole is a succession of challenges sidestepped, pogoed, danced around, and charged full-on into. Antsy, articulate, and necessary, new drummer

Deter Ulrich

drums

" data-original-title="" title="">Deter Ulrich brings a current urgency to the founding trio, a veteran group that has never, collectively or individually, been at a loss to find the spark that ignites every barely controlled frenzy they come upon or bring into glorious existence. Each old hand brings his road-tested, respective brand: Stevens' waterfall-like fragility tempering and nudging Ullmann's cutting, breathy bites and jabs while Fonda's elastic animations play at the heart of the matter. Prism never lags, certainly not with the stimulating mash of Fonda's second highlight offering "The Bee" and the seismic, late-night quiet of Ullmann's "Zeit Lupe." The faint hearted need not apply.

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Track Listing

F.J.D.; Prism; Listen to Dr. Cornell West; Variation on a Master Plan; Sal��s Song; The Bee; Zeit Lupe.

Personnel

Gebhard Ullmann

saxophone

Michael Jefry Stevens

piano

Joe Fonda

bass

Deter Ulrich

drums

Album information

Title: Prism | Year Released: 2020 | Record Label: Not Two Records

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