Review by Mark Medwin 

For Signal to Noise

Dave Fox
Dedication Suite
Umbrella Recordings
2005

Dave Fox & Eugene Chadbourne
the Foxbourne Chronicles
Assembled Sound
2006

   These two new releases on Ian Davis’ Umbrella imprint blur the boundaries dividing improvisation and composition.  The Foxbourne Chrponicles veers between transcendental beauty and hilarity (typical of anything involving Eugene Chadbourne.)  The major portion of this disc is devoted to Fox’s “Sonata for Piano and Banjo (Quasi-Improvised)”.  It’s a four movement structure on paper, and out of conventional order to boot, as Fox commits the unforgiveable sin of putting his Rondo before his funeral march – for shame!  The music goes some way toward redemption, as it’s a lot of fun throughout, alternating passages of obvious planning, like the opening exercises on single notes and dyads, with folky/jazzy sections of zany improve.  I love the page turns and the spoken word fragments, delivered simultaneously in Chadbourne’s empty-hipster drawl and Fox’s quasi-academic leconicism.  The disc’s varied repertoire sustains interest, highlighted by Chadbourne’s almost frightening dismantling of Bill Evans “Time Remembered.”  Fox and Chadbourne share a love for whimsical irreverence that serves their partnership well.

   Fox’s playing is restrained but intense in a way that Chadbourne’s is not, timbral exploration abounding as he spends as much time inside the piano as at the keyboard.  This is certainly the case with his solo offering, Dedication Suite.  From the very opening gestures, full of space and somehow comfortably solitary, Fox elicits an unbelievable series of multivalently fluctuating overtones, rendering the concert grand liquidly percussive, tam-tam fashion, invoking John Cage’s orientalism and Sorabji’s opulence in one breath.  Cage’s shadow certainly looms large over “Dedication #1” most notably his early prepared piano works, but Fox augments the sound with layers of taps, rattles, knocks and rhythmic scrapes, his textures even more “chromatic” than Cage’s; the switch to a louder jazz-inflected rhetoric midstream is more refreshing given what precedes and succeeds it.  Fox’s sense of harmony is no less inventive than his ear for timbre, and the two other pieces in the dedication series demonstrate a witty and innovative approach to motivic and scalar development.  “Tocotta” in particular is harmonically fresh, beginning decidedly in D major without a chord having ever been sounded, branching out in chromatically and technically facile ways that would make the masters of the genre proud.  Both discs are well recorded, and while Fox’s solo effort is a bit dry for my taste, any more echo would muddy details that shouldn’t be obscured.  Umbrella keeps dropping strong releases that fall, if uneasily, into the pan-idiomatic bag, and both sets are worth repeat listenings.