Bob Gluck Trio
Sideways | FMR Records
Review by Peter Aaron
Released on the overseas FMR label, the Bob Gluck Trio’s Sideways hits from many directions to bring together three of the upstate jazz scene’s topmost forward-thinking players; the set pairs the Capital Region’s pianist and electronics whiz Gluck and famed bassist Michael Bisio with the Hudson Valley’s always-somewhere percussionist Dean Sharp.
A marvel of confident restraint, the music here is characterized by vast tracts of openness and a steadily rumbling undercurrent courtesy of Sharp and Bisio. The tension-thick title piece would be the perfect soundtrack to some dark thriller; fraught with the foreboding menace of Bisio’s slithering line and the leader’s Chinese water-torture plinking, it will easily bring your neck hair to rapt attention. Things get hot and spiky here and there, especially when Gluck blows a shofar on the lengthy reading of Joe Zawinul’s “Unknown Soldier” that opens the disc (it sounds like he does it again on the version of the Ornette Coleman classic “Lonely Woman” at the close, though the liner notes make no mention of it). But for the better part of its 60 minutes, however, Sideways is content to live in the moment as Gluck, Bisio, and Sharp converse with calculated simpatico, each playing his hand like a shrewd shark, content to wait it out and let the chips fall where they may. Making this is one game you’ll want to be in on. www.electricsongs.com
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