ZOH AMBA / CHRIS CORSANO / BILL ORCUTT - The Flower School LP

One of the deep pleasures of improvised music is when a first-time meeting produces sparks. Amba and Corsano finished up a duo tour of the west coast with an explosive performance in SF, March ‘23. The next day the duo entered the studio with guitarist Bill Orcutt. It was the first time Orcutt and Amba had ever played together. Although Amba has often recorded a bunch of tune-oriented albums, she's a free improviser at heart, and this trio arguably provides the most effective, elastic context for her playing yet.

Anyone who pays attention already knows that Orcutt and Corsano are mercurial figures, perpetually adapting, adjusting, and challenging one another. Inviting a third person to the party could threaten a slowly cultivated balance, but in this case the addition only heightened various dichotomies: soft vs. loud, bruising vs. tender, furious vs. lyric.

Much has been made of Amba's debt to the free jazz of 1960s, particularly the way her vibrato-drenched tone dips into valley of sacred music, but here she carves out a space that's entirely hers.

On "The Morning Light Has Flooded My Eyes" and "What Emptiness Do You Gaze Upon!" she reveals a meticulously sharpened gift for motific improvisation, taking a single phrase and chiseling away it until she's discovered every possible permutation. Orcutt often takes a single chord or two, letting them float in mutate in the background or splintering them into patient, reserved arpeggios that ripple alongside Corsano's circular sculptures and the saxophonist's edgy blowing. The collection is bisected by "Sweet One," a delicate lattice formed by Orcutt's tremulous electric guitar arpeggios and Amba's spike acoustic pointillism that basks in its own leisurely beauty for a couple of restorative minutes, while the album closer "Moon Showed But No You" is a searingly beautiful ballad where the guitarist unspools clusters of notes somewhere between vintage Loren Mazzacane Connor and a distorted kalimba.