I typically listen to a lot of John Coltrane, but I’ve been increasingly drawn to his Interstellar Space of late, the duo with the drummer Rashied Ali. It is an oddity in his canon by virtue of its minimal instrumentation, but the result of that is that it affords the listener an opportunity to really hear the interaction and the dynamic between its two protagonists. In a duo, there really is nowhere to hide, no rest, you can’t drop out while an another formation spontaneously assembles from within a larger group, and as a result, there is a particular intensity, you can really hear them listening. With a duo comprising a drummer and another, there is the potential to exploit both rhythm and melody, obviously, but some skilled practitioners can blur the expected roles, the drummer using extended techniques and kits which expand the range of pitches available to them, and the other engaging them on their own turf with staccato patterns and pulses. There is also the potential for extreme dynamics, from huge bass drum kicks to the faintest of brushwork, from full-throttled rampages to more circumspect approaches. It makes the drummer-plus-one format, in the right hands, potentially one of the most exciting and varied, whether the partner be sax, piano, guitar or electronics, and the results anywhere on a spectrum between jazz and noise. Read the rest of this post over at The Liminal.

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