If you’re looking for some noir jazz fit to soundtrack a mid-20th-century crime flick, keep looking. Selections From The Gutter is better suited to a footage of the house going up in flames than to a smoke curling from a cigarette up past a cocked-just-so fedora. Brooklyn-based saxophonist Michael Foster has delivered musical intensity with the Ghost (his full-on free-jazz trio) and the New York Review Of Cocksucking (his quietly abrasive duo with Richard Kammerman) and facilitated its proliferation via the Queer Trash concert series.
But Selections From The Gutter’s fire is not only fiercely cleansing; it’s quite artfully lit. It captures Foster playing in Berlin with local drummer Michael Griener and Swiss bassist Christian Weber. That duo has affirmed its versatility by meeting the divergent needs of saxophonist Ellery Eskelin and pianists Aki Takase and Marina Džukljev. Griener and Weber match Foster’s fierceness, and their fast-paced and hyper-detailed improvisations magnify its impact. On “Moon In The Gutter,” sizzling cymbal forays and intricate stick work ignite peppery reed probes, and on “Of Tender Sin,” pointed bass harmonics both puncture and punctuate Foster’s twisting, distressed tones. Each of the album’s six pieces is a maelstrom of ever-apposite reaction. [Relative Pitch]
—Bill Meyer
