When American veteran double bass player Michael Bisio heard Korean pianist Eunhye Jeong’s solo album Nolda (ESP-Disk, 2021), who was mentored by pianist-composer Vijay Iyer and drummer-composer Tyshawn Sorey, he asked the ESP Disk label to connect and work with her. Their debut, free improvised duo album, Morning Bells Whistle Bright, was recorded after a few successful duo performances in Kingston, New York, at Park West Studios in New York in March 2023, with guests – veteran tenor sax master Joe McPhee and drummer Jay Rosen (both of them recorded many albums with Bisio and played together in Trio X with double bass player Dominic Duval).
The first four pieces feature Jeong and Bisio in intense, restless and fast shifting conversational improvisations that manage to embrace together, in their own mysterious and expansive ways, elements of Korean traditional pansori vocalization with the approaches of Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor and Andrew Hill, and the idiosyncratic sonic palettes of these gifted improvisers. They weave these elements into dramatic, adventurous, yet cohesive short stories that are allergic to clichés. As writer and musician Paul R. Harding writes in his liner notes, each of Jeong’s notes is «a sign of water for the thirsty ear… the other side of the moon is not dark shadow in Jeong’s piano but rather an introducing of illumination».
McPhee and Rosen introduce a strong bluesy vein to the beautiful, free ballad «Drinking Galactic Water», the sparse «Morning Bells Whistle Bright», and the most touching ballad, «Disclosure». McPhee’s poetic tenor sax and Rosen’s light swinging, percussive touches steer the dynamics of Jeong and Bisio into a deeper, more restrained, and melodic dimension.
«Jaybird» is an enigmatic, free associative duet of Jeong and Rosen, and as Harding describes it «that is not a piano in Jeong’s hands but rather a structure of a circling reinventing itself through interplay… Fingers of her own dimensions… from branches somersaulting in neither slow nor over-pronounced motions… nor high diving tightrope chords… but the blood cells and nervous systems of a forest called The Music». Bisio’s duet with Rosen, «Superpreternatural» continues the enigmatic vein, but is more intense, free jazz mode.
This great album ends with the aptly titled, playful free jazz «Coda for Tomorrow», again with all four musicians, suggesting their unorthodox ideas «for the courage of predawn Stride, future Rag, and the present new sonnets of piano from ‘far beyond home’ where «every creation grows from a particular soil, its birthplace… shaped by the complexity of its reality», as Harding summarizes it.
Eyal Hareuveni
Eunhye Jeong (piano), Michael Bisio (double bass), Joe McPhee (tenor saxophone), Jay Rosen (drums)
