While his (Mark Sanders') wonderful trio with bassist John Edwards and pianist Veryan Weston is not represented, per se, two of the albums do allow audition of his work in that illustrious company, though the ever-adventurous Weston is at a keystation on Crossings. The nine pieces offer up a bewildering but sometimes whimsical array of influence, none more so than on “Extinction”. Dig that opening bass groove Weston is laying down, redolent of nothing so much as Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”, with Sanders only too willing to join in the fun. The funky groove just begins to sizzle when cellist Hannah Marshall intones the words of William Butler Yeats: “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths…” Her cello-doubled melody inhabits a space
outside but conjoined to everything else, a modal area of “light and half-light” placing Sanders and Weston’s sure-fire brick-and-mortar foundation in stark relief. It is a stunningly effective study in time and contrast, mirrored in an even subtler fashion on the aptly titled “Kalimba Setting”. Who’s got the melody anyway, Weston’s “kalimba” or Marshall’s wonderful pizzicato? Maybe, it’s actually given to Sanders’ hi-hat, which we hear transforming, almost without awareness, from exquisite echo and foil to rhythmic pillar.
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