Different Paths, Same Destination opens in a mellow, thoughtful mood of a randomly picked bass and the long, soaring tones of a saxophone that talks inwardly to itself. A sparse but detailed percussion kicks in, and as the music grows denser a direction is carved out, shapes moving in an emotional landscape, through an atmosphere of the slow healing of some kind of heartbreak.
The bass and the percussion tighten their hold considerably, talking in each others’ mouth, while the saxophone sings above this havoc in calm, yet paining, serpentines. He cannot forget. His sorrow rises over the commotion of daily life, into a sacred place of fading body memories of love.
At times this reminds me somewhat of John Coltrane and A Love Supreme, and maybe this improvisation turns out to be a kind of homage in that direction. It is utterly beautiful, somewhat painful, quite melancholy…

Legends has a meager beginning with long pauses between the bass and some seriously sparse percussion, but melodica and saxophone enter, painting individual figures that twist and turn like worms on the hook. Transparent threads, elastic, of melodica and saxophones, are tied around the listening, until a slow melody of sorts gets up and starts wandering around the room, looking under and behind everything like a kitten that someone just brought home, not to feel so lonely…
The timbres are spun together in a fondling kind of sonic experience, shiny, with soft, cold surfaces, a bit rounded, as where you reaching out, touching large, light spheres…
Perhaps, in there, I sense a desolate kind of consolation, kind of admitting to myself that yes, it is bad, but better to rest in that sorrow than fight it with nervous breakdowns or mad dashes to the psychiatric emergency rooms; better rest in these curving chords, these accelerating colors, these anti-silences of blissful thrusts through embouchures… and it all concludes with a hectic, burning conversation, mouth top mouth, in saliva spitting intensity, down the narrow streets of Bristol’s Easton at night, searching for The Duke of Cumberland pub, which doesn’t even exist…

Along the Red Lines tries it out percussion wise in a bewildering punctuation, leaving lots of room for un-sounds, which, however, pretty soon are compensated for by a massive attack of clustering drum dramas and screeching saxophone exclamations. It squeaks and pounds and clatters and picks, in a hasty, speedy progression, hightailing down the line, down the jerky path of improvisation, denser, louder and more dangerous by the bar, saxophone ape-screaming up the pitches.

N-6 is a strange title which probably has its – to me – unknown significance. It’s beginning is beautified in soaring, transparent bands of thin metal, shiny and a little bit raucous, mist-like and elusive, but quite palpable anyway, like feeling them through a blanket, hearing them through meat…
Deeper thoughts mumble and breath in the texture, but the melodica holds up a smiling face with much too white teeth, scary in jolly desperation, hysteria behind a sugary façade…
The jingling surf towards the end casts shadows of the immediate future back at you, blinding and ominous as the now is prolonged indefinitely… Good stuff!

Transit Visa is a short piece too, like N-6. The bass fingers walk up and down the bridge as saxophone stumbles in, looks around and paints golden figurines around the walls of this cave of humanity that we’re ducking in, right here in this universe that has directions taking off at every angle. Scattered pointillist percussion splash milk around the premises, and I dry my face with the sleeve of my Lakeland sweater as the cows bellow deep inside the texture of this rural music; wow, commotion!

Concepts in Travel Comfort is quite different, and much longer. It has a tabla inlet, into spooky cow dust hour sub continent feelings. The tabla and its flickering lights in the Indian dark heat are joined by saxophone and other unidentified instruments. The atmosphere is quite more rancid and darkly persuasive than the former improvisations. You can get caught here, pulled into a dark alley in Lahore or Jammu, winding up on the water, tucked into a houseboat in Srinigar as thousands of candles are reflected on the lake.
This luring advance picks up speed and density and marches on like a battalion of Gurkha soldiers, aiming at success. These boots were made for walking!
Conversations roll back and forth in the music, the saxophone and the bass chatting eagerly above the rolling, thumping tablas while metallic percussion spreads glowworm sounds through the dusk. Lives are winding down and lives are unfolding; everything going on, keeping on keeping on. The layer of life around the planet flickers and billows, for what ever reason, for karmic reasons, life after life – and tabla sings, tabla pounds in its dharma groove, as saxophone wails, cuts its arms, bleeds all over the desert; shit!
Desert ambulance surges over the dunes, wailing its melodica as the worlds in the grains of sand are succumbing in the star crusher machine behind the horizon of events.
The music thins into transparency, while the tablas strengthen the incense atmosphere of the Indian night, dark figures withdrawing into shadows, fires being put out, the last pillar of smoke rising… memories like a flock of cows resting…

Box the Compass (Song for John) is the last piece on the Destinations CD. It starts tinkling like a milk bucket as I remember it sounding as I was a rural kid of Scandinavia back in the 1950s… Time is hightailing, right…?
This piece, as it picks up, appears sensible, reasonable, at a fair kind of ease, the saxophone gliding leisurely above the rumbling and rolling drum work, which is in an entirely different mood way down in the rock shelter; frantically surrounded by brown infrasounds. The saxophone wails like prolonged sea gulls stretching from horizon to horizon, feathered shrieks across the watery expanses, across the sun… and the day settles in comfortable dusk…

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