In the late 1990s, New Yorkers became enamored with a brash group of freewheeling
improvisers from Atlanta going under the name Gold Sparkle Band. The chemistry of their fresh and
ambitious style clicked with the New York establishment, and the group members soon began
integrating with the entrenched Downtown musicians in taking the music forward at events like the
Vision Festival and venues where free speech was practiced.
Drummer Andrew Barker and reed player Charles Waters are charter members of the original
group. On this recording garnered from a presentation of their music at Tonic, pianist Matthew Shipp
joins them for an exciting set where the musicians' output intertwines with maze-like
complexity.
The music is spontaneous. It unfolds in numerous chapters from a revolving series of mixes and
matches by the trio. Waters churns out spirals of dancing light on clarinet, underpinned by
the dense and elaborate piano phrasing of Shipp. This inspires Barker to leap into the fray as he
constructs deeply hued drum solos of weighty proportions. Reenter Waters, who lightens the haze
with scintillating runs on alto saxophone. The program circles through these solo/duo/trio segments
while the cord of light/dark energy ties the divergent ends together.
All encounters find the artists challenged by the immediacy of the collective conversation. Shipp
manufactures clusters of momentum-building notes while displaying his preference for the lower
end of the sound spectrum. His surging flights form concrete blocks that elevate the music in layers
of emotion and tension. The impact is immediate, allowing Waters to drive his woodwinds into
frenzied zones of meaningful improvisation. When Shipp and Barker converse, the music becomes
profoundly massive with an occult sense of foreboding. Waters’ injection of sunrays causes the
dawn to break with signals of hope meliorating the storm.
Each solo, pairing, or collective development brings with it mood swings, but the performance
taken as a whole flows as a series of united processes--including the final cut, where Shannon
Fields surreptitiously merges material from the previous seven using electronics. The musicians
expound in their own unique language, but the communication
is immediate and the message conceptually understood and cognitively processed by each of them.
Barker, Shipp, and Waters generate demanding music with a welcome and satisfying degree of
originality.
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~ Frank Rubolino
