The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

American alto saxophonist/composer Tim Berne says his four-year-old Snakeoil quartet is evolving toward "transparent density" – a highly composed, contrapuntal contemporary jazz that doesn't sacrifice detail or spontaneity. Berne offered a big glimpse of this on last year's debut album for the conversational all-acoustic ensemble (with Berne plus clarinetist Oscar Noriega, Matt Mitchell on piano and Ches Smith on drums), but the splices between writing and this adroit group's collective improvisation are all the harder to spot here. Three episodes (around 20 minutes each) on the six-track list are spellbinding examples of Berne's composing ingenuity and the band's agility at running with his ever-mobile ideas. Three shorter pieces feature typically seesawing themes, but the captivating Psalm with its brooding sax part sounds as if it has come from a more melodiously meditative ECM session than would usually carry Berne's name. The long passages OC/DC, Socket and Cornered (Duck) represent Snakeoil's progress, mingling wide-interval melodies that sometimes sound like contemporary classical music and sometimes trampling funk, quiet solos or intimate duets, tonal contrasts (warm clarinet lyricism, glimmering vibraphones, free-jazz sax wailing), dynamic percussion and unrelenting eventfulness. It's edgy, pattern spinning contemporary music, but austere it certainly is not.

(https://www.theguardian.com)