London improviser Yoni Silver has been heard playing as part of Ashley Paul’s group, and has made a few solo releases under his own name, but he’s here today with Heme (SHRIKE RECORDS SRL003) blowing his bass clarinet with the accompaniment of Steve Noble on drums and John Edwards on the double bass. The album title, and the artworks, seem to be telling us something about the biology of the bloodstream, suggesting not only that improvisation is a living pulsating force that runs throughout the body, but also that it’s essential to human life.
Silver’s approach to squeezing notes from his woodwinds is not quite so emphatic as that supposition, and indeed his tone here seems almost provisional, beset with profound doubts about human existence and its meaning, only allowing him to advance his statements in a tentative fashion. This generally works very well, and one can savour the atmosphere of metaphysical ambiguity that billows out of his bell like so much fog. No wonder Ashley Paul chose him to join her trio. I’m feeling this most strongly on the opening cut ‘A’ and ‘Tunica Intima’, the latter emerging as a moving and laboured philosophical question expressed over 7:45 minutes. The groans and creaks of John Edwards’ double bass sometimes ably support Yoni Silver’s questing mode, but it’s not really clear to me if he understands why or what, almost like a newly-converted follower who is baffled by the gnomic utterances of this speaking-in-tongues holy man. You can hear the two of them trying to form a bond on ‘C’, an 11-minute exploration of the issues, but not quite managing to get to a consensus.
Thankfully, more accord and commonality is achieved on ‘Tunica Externa’, which seems to have been the moment in the night’s performance – it was recorded at one night in April 2021 at London’s Cafe Oto – when everything went right. If free improvisation is about respecting space and listening to each other more than playing one’s own notes, then here’s a rare gem to exhibit to non-believers. It’s about here that Steve Noble manages to curb his penchant for over-active rattling and paradiddling, and gets stuck into the serious business of generating scrapey metallic draggeroos on the cymbals, an old trick but an effect which is completely in line here with the Yoni yin and yang. If I seem to be describing nothing more than subtle variations on lower-register abstract drones, then evidently you need to hear this record for yourself and see how this halting language is starting to take shape. From 10 March 2022.