ome things you respect, but don’t necessarily like—or to strike more on point: you don’t enjoy. Jack Wright & Bob Marsh’s Birds in the Hand is such a thing. Wright and Marsh have been playing with one another since the mid-eighties and one gets a kick when they see the two of them on the back cover: old white squares—which is great!—I mean, how often do we suffer through all these hip young, swarthy personas on album photos: dreads, tattoos, sneers—oh please—I’m sick of hip looking folk! You’re happy you’re getting your picture taken, so stop making that brooding face—after all, you’re a notch above a clown when you think about it—you’re an entertainer, making lifestyle music to go along with movie-trailers and MTV reality shows. Whether you’re rocking dumbass power-chords or mixing up some ”get busy now” beats, you’ll never be as out there as avant-garde jazz. And that’s what these two old white guys—Jack Wright and Bob Marsh—make. Wright gets nutzo on the sax and clarinet; Marsh goes wacko on the cello, violin and processed voice. They don’t need body markings or mean faces or youth or even quasi-blackness. Nope. They just smile for the picture like Don Knotts and Tim Conway and let the music do its job.


Now, in this case, the job isn’t to entertain...unless you’re into the music equivalent of a swarming anthill or nervous breakdown. I admit, I’ve never been a big fan of free jazz—never dug Ornette Coleman much—some of Cotrane’s work during his later, shrieking stage is beginning to grow on me...slowly. Still, I can appreciate tension, even if I rarely care to listen to it, I can appreciate it. No matter how established the instrumentation used, tension—if potent enough in the playing, the expression—will always ring fresh. That’s why the material on Birds in the Hand doesn’t sound like jazz revivalism but an actual, living, breathing and progressing form of music. No—music is the wrong choice of word here—art is more appropriate. Like that gnarly piece of shipwreck sculpture you raise an eyebrow at in the modern section of a museum, or the abstract artwork on the Birds in the Hand cover (of course a cliché for jazz cover-art, but we’ll let them slide since it suits the material so well). At times the audible art on this CD is engaging: Wright’s dizzy, lost and squawking clarinet soloing; Marsh’s percussive dips and bottom plucks of cello—it causes one to feel there are still uncharted strokes to be played on analogue instruments. Nonetheless, it does—like the aforementioned swarming anthill—circle itself often and ultimately leaves the listener’s head spinning with its redundancy of tone. Not to mention the processed voice.


So, in the end, Birds in the Hand is clever, uncompromising and experimental, but there’s no swing from—or to—the hip, heart or soul. Better luck next time.