john tchicai - john tchicai with strings

gorgeous late-career effort by the incomparable john tchicai, accompanied by spring heel jack and mark sanders. the body of the work is a series of sparse nocturnes of "silent free jazz" and elegiac pieces in which tchicai manages to perfectly accompany orchestral pads with alternately asemic squiggles and gusting, soulful solos. the recording is capped with the ambivalent, unforgettable cosmic frisson of steve dalachinsky's poem "these pink roses", read by tchicai atop said pads. 

"the long gones know it
deep within their long gone elegant
tombs
                                                  an unfathomable unity between forest & trees"

tchicai would survive this work's initial cd release by seven years, but i can't help but think of it as a kind of life's summation. incredible album.



label: treader - trdLP004
condition: vg+/vg+