Michael Bisio Quartet: MBefore

Bassist Michael Bisio may be best known for his long tenure in pianist Matthew Shipp’s trio and his extensive work with multi-reed-and-brass player Joe McPhee. On his latest album as a leader, Bisio seeks unconventional textures, tone, and color from Creative Music Studio co-founder Karl Berger’s vibes, Mat Maneri’s viola, and Whit Dickey’s drums. Some of these nine pieces—five composed by Bisio, two by Berger, a collectively improvised finale, and a breathtaking rendition of Jule Styne’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily”—build gently from the suggested framework with chamber-music-like grace and precision, the forms swirling and contorting freely and abstractly in space. On other tunes, Berger’s bell-like vibes and Maneri’s darkly textured viola move in separate elliptical orbits around Bisio and Dickey’s driving, pulsating center of gravity. And this center (forged in their long relationship in Shipp’s trio) certainly holds. Bisio boasts a big Mingus-like tone, and Dickey spreads rhythms and percussive sounds around cymbals, skins, and a brilliantly rendered soundstage as if he were painting. All four players evince a love of melody, sometimes with Ornette Coleman-esque playfulness, sometimes with a melancholy tinge, and their individual phrases entwine as if sharing a single imagination.

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