William Hooker Trio 'Yearn For Certainty' [Engine Studios 2010]

With 'Yearn for Certainty', Engine Studios presents a short set from an interesting new trio led by NYC loft-jazz legend William Hooker. The material comes from an April 2007 performance at Roulette in New York City.

In the early 90s, Hooker personified the relationship between the old-guard experimental jazz players and the younger generation of indie rockers: in addition to his continued experimentation with more-or-less conventional jazz ensembles, he played avidly with experimental rock musicians of the day as the preeminent drummer in various Knitting Factory-backed 'noise-jazz' configurations. With this trio, William Hooker continues to toy with various techniques and elements of disparate genres in his improvisational approach. This time out he's enlisted multi-instrumentalists Dave Soldier and Sabir Mateen. Dave Soldier's own eclectic incorporation of various materials fits in well with the Hooker approach; he's been furiously prolific over the past twenty years, with projects ranging from recordings of elephant song, to elementary school children making hip-hop, to chamber music. Sabir Mateen has enjoyed a long career in experimental jazz, really shining as a young man in Horace Tapscott's groups, and eventually growing to become one of the premiere saxophonists in the NYC vanguard.

The well-balanced, technically able trio shows much promise, but from the get-go (track one, Ingratiated Beam) I'm more than a little put off by Hooker's affinity for beat poetry. It's a major distraction for me so, to keep the disk somewhere near my favor, I've largely omitted the spoken-word sections from consideration for review. On track two we encounter scant percussive accompaniment for the ill-fitting duo of Soldier's banjo and Mateen's sax. The first ten minutes seem to be an odd warm-up exercise, because the music finally hits its stride in the third piece of the evening, Commonplace Travel. Through less-than-perfect audio comes a searing tussle between Soldier on effect-ed violin and Mateen's agitated, quivering tenor, under which Hooker lays a punchy big beat. Hooker lays out segues between tracks, most successfully between the third and fourth. For track four, the album's epic centerpiece, Soldier and Mateen cease circling each other at the insistence of Hooker's slurring cadence. Drums provide grounding for the layering of odd-phased swells by violin and saxophone. As Soldier lays low, surefooted movement turns to quizzical gesture, and then the trio deftly round the final curve amidst heated conversation between the riled drummer and his bandmates. The fifth and final track is marked by the worst audio on the disk -- a painfully over-miced violin -- in addition to more spoken word. But it isn't without some fine playing from William Hooker, who is by now at full speed, and an equally agitated Mateen, who's operating in the higher registers of his tenor.

Definitely not the best from any of the players involved, but its no stinker either -- 'Yearn For Certainty' has its moments, and promises even more. I'd like to hear the three go at it again.