Nine Ways to Read a Bridge

A wide-ranging project by Chicago reed player Ken Vandermark — the MacArthur Fellow whose long relationship with Not Two anchors the label's catalog — gathering an extraordinary international cast: Joe McPhee, pianist Agustí Fernández, guitarist Joe Morris, trumpeter Nate Wooley, drummer Paul Lytton, electronics artist Christof Kurzmann, and AMM's John Tilbury and Eddie Prévost. The title's central image is telling — bridges as symbols of connection and communication — and the music embodies Vandermark's career-long refusal to be pigeonholed, moving between composition and wholly free improvisation. Across his work he has crossed the borders of jazz, punk, noise, free funk, and new classical music with projects from duos to large ensembles, and this set distills that restless, border-crossing sensibility into one ambitious statement. As Vandermark has put it, “as soon as you define an art form, it’s done, it’s over.”