Short Take on Tim Daisy & Ken Vandermark

Found a copy last week of Light on the Wall, a double LP by Tim Daisy (percussion) and Ken Vandermark (reeds), recorded as a duo and both solo in Poland in May 2008, and issued on Laurence Family Records. The sound, both live and in the studio, is excellent. You can really hear Daisy's distinctively open sense of space in the live duo set; Vandermark offers a set of solo "Etudes for Jimmy Giuffre," but to me their duos not so much build on Giuffre's chamber-ish conceptions, as recall duos by another Jimmy, Jimmy Lyons, with Andrew Cyrille--not that there is anything derivative in this music, but rather that both are thoroughly cognizant of their position in an emergent sense of a building tradition of forward-thinking sonic experimentation, the extemporaneous edge where the performing present takes up its audible pasts: a historicity of the avant-garde, coming on. That, and it's a great record.