Jerry Gordon / Sink: Songs For These Ends

This is the second of two recent releases from the Osaka-based musician and poet Jerry Gordon, both of which are quietly compelling and beautifully realised in up-close recordings that bear the dampening acoustic imprint of a small room of wood and tatami....but maybe I'm projecting.

'Sink' begins with its most satisfying piece, 'Slouching Away From The Womb', which emerges slowly from a shallow well of brushed drum circles and tubular mouthpiece spittle, and builds into a dry and insistent pulse of Togashi-like tapped toms and brushed snare beneath overdubbed & understated, and largely descending & centering, tenor sax phrases - these are attentively co-joined and developed melodic fragments that feel more thematic than look-at-this soloing. Gordon's hushed and contemplative tone is attractive throughout, more poetic and damaged than didactic or defiant skronk. 'Trips, Taps & Torn Maps' journeys further in its dynamics and phrasing, but the components of drums and tenor sax remain - or saxes, as two are included here in dialogue). 'Wolf At The Door' is darker in tone and more fitful in progression, with some fantastic flights of deviant rhythm. In the closing track, 'Taken Down A Notch', the drum patterning is gently oblique and played with great feeling, matched at every measure by tenor soliloquies that move organically from a lamplit pre-bop mood, via mid-century modalities, to the kind of extended technique and controlled overblowing that only a deep listener and deeply sensitive artist could deliver this purposefully and present this plainly. A real find.