SLAMCD256 Organon – Klusterbuckstuckle

A set of four creative improvisations by a quintet of true masters of the art that include Elton Dean, Jim Dvorak and John Edwards. Recorded in London, September 2002.

Elton Dean: saxophones
Jim Dvorak: trumpet
Tim Crowther: guitar/guitar synth
John Edwards: double bass
Jim Lebaigue: drums

“Highlights are plentiful here and the band’s decision to work through lengthy pieces stacks up rather well. They afford themselves time to develop mini-themes amid sequences of budding, improvisational episodes and a few burning meltdowns…The music presented here crosses a few genres, spanning free improv, jazz-rock and hard swinging, avant-bop. But it’s the artists’ distinctive styles and breath of execution that provides a rather chic methodology that gains steam on repeated spins.” – Glenn Astarita, Jazz Review

“The four pieces were recorded on this imaginative free-jazz session as a real-time improvisation on one day…But if the music is uncompromisingly loose and open, it isn’t atonal, arrhythmic or wilfully indifferent to the audience appeal of signposts. An atmosphere of late-Miles electronic ambiguity is sometimes created by the sound of the horns against Tim Crowther’s thick-layered guitar chords; Elton Dean’s squirming sax figures are often astutely mirrored or punctuated by Dvorak’s bristling trumpet inventions; the great John Edwards on bass creates a feeling of purposeful drive, and drummer Jim Lebaigue could have dropped just as equably into a bebop session.” – John Fordham, The Guardian

“Groove and harmony are never absent, but nor is Dean’s Traneish pleading for freedom and Crowther’s canny psychedelia. The improvised studio mix plus sudden glints of forgotten 1970s utopias: electro modal folk funk improv, real ale, a real trip. A welcome sign of life from an undead genre. Fans of John Surman’s Morning Glory should investigate – Glastonbury ravers too.” – Ben Watson, Hi-Fi News

“Trumpeter Jim Dvorak doesn’t put in an appearance until nearly eight minutes into the opening track, creating the misleading impression that this might be an Elton Dean quartet album, teaming the saxophonist with guitarist Tim Crowther, bassist John Edwards (in strikingly good form) and drummer Jim Lebaigue. True to type, though Dvorak immediately adds a new dimension, wirier and more abstract than the rolling freebop Dean instinctively favours. Klusterbuckstuckle is vintage British improv…the more reflective “Arpaloogy” demonstrates what they are made of and what a find Crowther is.” – Brian Morton, The Wire

“Vestiges of Dean’s seminal Soft Machine flavour the ensemble sound, which neatly straddles acoustic improv and prog rock influences…he disc’s four lengthy excursions carry the atmosphere of congenial jams, with trajectories not signalled by written notation, but instead by the whims of one or more of the players. Their shared moniker Organon reflects this sort of cooperative, organic mindset…music that lodges pleasurably in the brain pan.” – Derek Taylor, Cadence Magazine

All composition/improvisations by Dean, Dvorak, Crowther, Edwards and Lebaigue.
Recorded on the Visionlogic mobile, 29 September 2002 in Room 1 of The
Premises Studio, London.
Engineered, mixed and mastered by Tim Crowther

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