SUM (Ross Lambert/Eddie Prévost/Seymour Wright)
"What's going on here? As AMM drummer Eddie Prévost deals up backbeats and grooves - albeit grooves conversant in Elvin Jones, Sunny Murray and Louis Moholo - and guitarist Ross Lambert oscillates around alarmingly basic melodic intervals, is that really the sound of Seymour Wright's alto saxophone playing the devotional chant from John Coltrane's A Love Supreme? . . . But unlike postmodern hokum, this trio don't expect feeding off borrowed evergreens will hand them a sense of purpose - rather, these historical references float into view and are grabbed, then dropped like a canary down a mineshaft to see if they can breathe in the structural labyrinth surrounding them. . . . The energy harvested by those earlier stylistic discontinuities endures, but is now focused internally: nuances of texture and transforming hybrids of instrumental timbre leave specifics of idiom and style behind as a distant memory." - Philip Clark, The Wire
" . . . suggests what might happen if Lee Konitz's Motion (his 1961 masterpiece with Elvin Jones and Sonny Dallas) were beamed out into space, picked up 25 light years away, its messages interpreted, commented upon and reconstituted, and the results returned at the same velocity with striking audio presence. This is jazz clarified to the purest event and exchange, possessed of an inevitability that includes both the pleasure of the momentary dialogue and a consciousness of the complex status of its rhetoric and its historical position." - Stuart Broomer, Point of Departure
myspace.com/sumexperimentaljazz
myspace.com/rosslambertimprov
matchlessrecordings.com/quintessential
seymourwright.com