The Nows by Paul Lytton / Nate Wooley + Ikue Mori & Ken Vandermark

The duo of the veteran and pioneer Paul Lytton and the innovative newcomer Nate Wooley is one of the most powerful and intriguing of these last years. They managed to revalue this old instrumental format, seeing it not only as the most basic structure of interactive improvisation but also as a kind of metonymy of all the processes and lexical resources possible in this field. That’s why after one masterpiece like “Creak Above 33” and a deeper and deeper application of their “one-to-one seeming more” ideas, they invited other musicians to join them. On stage people of several generations of the improv scene like Fred Frith, C Spencer Yeh, Ben Hall, Evan Parker and John Russell, among others, and on record musicians of the relevance of Christian Weber (“Six Feet Under”) and David Grubbs (“The Seven Storey Mountain”). At John Zorn’s The Stone they played in 2011 with Ikue Mori and two weeks later they stepped at Chicago’s Hideout with Ken Vandermark, besides presenting the original duet. The recordings of those dates are now reunited in a double album that enables you to fully understand that the Lytton/Wooley partnership is the same when only the two are involved and when there’s a “special guest”. The trios with Vandermark and Mori aren’t duos plus one, and neither the duos aren’t a return to the essentials: everything is in perspective, accomplishing the old aspiration to create collective music in which the individuality of the participants isn’t damaged in any way. What a lesson!