Harvey Sorgen: Dreamstruck

Throughout Dreamstruck's reverberant, captivating terrain, drummer Harvey Sorgen, bassist Joe Fonda and pianist Marilyn Crispell embark on a willful, tenacious interplay that serves as a template for the deep, wide ranging political and personal discourse we all need to seriously engage ourselves in.

Crispell's whispery, born-of-the-moment, intro to "My Song" welcomes us instantly into the conversation, making us equal co-conspirators as Fonda and Sorgen slowly add their weaving, eccentric voices. The edgy "Portrait" and the diagonal chaos of "Our Own Tea Leaves" are rowdy free-stylings; each player exerting their time tested, formidable strengths to pull the dialogue their way. Fonda in particular is a blitzkrieg of animated rumbles and wailings, while Sorgen counterpunches against Crispell 's sprays of machine-gun like bursts.

Comfortable across the entire jazz spectrum, Dreamstruck's emotional center finds Crispell especially reining in all the previous attacks on the wistful and melodically insistent title track, a ballad written by frequent Sorgen collaborator, guitarist Bill Windbiel. It's a quiet rumination, as each player seemingly longs for and delivers a moment's rest from the outside swirl. But that swirl rears again like jagged, breaking news on the barely contained "Read This" and the terse, fraught frenzy of "Area 52."

Intuitively informed by their decades long, collective CV (Anthony Braxton, Paul Motian, Gary Peacock, and Ahmad Jamal among many others) the trio knows they can't leave on an argumentative or combative stance. So a deliciously danceable rendering of drummer Motian's "Kalypso" closes this fiercely determined work on a joyous and most hopeful note of honest camaraderie and fellowship.

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