*Composition in improvised music? Well, the information I found on this matter reveals that Bennett, who is a well-known San Francisco musician (saxophone) and composer (see for example the review of his Live At Luggage on ADBSound Records elsewhere on the Sonoloco site) has used “a musical notation for structured improvisation”.
This is not as strange at it may sound; it’s just bringing a little further, and stating, what is present in all good improvisation, if not decidedly unstructured and chaotic; i.e. the common understanding of how the general motion and expression of the music should be, to achieve a sound and a structure that one wants. Improvisation in a group is the height of playing together; much more so than in a classical environment. In improvised, or like here; semi-improvised music, you have to be much more sensitive and attentive, much more diligent and considerate; it is an auto-propelled force. Deciding beforehand the general compositional idea may thus bring together the both of improvised and fully notated music, which this CD with its four parts, demonstrates.

On Bennett’s homepage he explains:

Bennett has studied, in addition to Western art music, oriental idioms, such as Balinese and Javanese Gamelan, the music of West Africa, North and South India and traditional Japanese Gagaku music, which naturally has widened his view and opened his ears and mind towards alternative tunings and austere timbres, giving his music much more space in which to move.

The titles of the four cuts are truly minimal, but the order of them does suggest some kind of attached meaning. They’re called C, D, E and B. Perhaps it has to do with the order in which they were recorded, or it may have to do with keys.

A metallic rustle turns the key that sets the music of C in motion, opening for a generous but withheld flow of timbral richness, from the wheezing drinking straws to rumbling bass and squeaking cello, until everybody joins in, painting with thick colors on the canvas, albeit all the time shaping the flow into a bulging, wobbling simultaneousness of modeling clay or plasticine, the progression feeling soft and wet and thick between your ears.
The accordion gives that quirky Pauline Oliveros feel, that ironical glint of Eastern consciousness out West!
Suddenly the music stops to breath, stepping back a bit, bopping out into the spotlight in a new costume, hopping and popping in a humorous beat, Pinocchio-like across the score, drummer-boyish… and then, what do you know, bowing in a gracious French gentleman’s Quarter Latin courtship … and suddenly I realize that I have no idea what is to happen next. This orchestra moves in and out of style, seemingly effortlessly, drawing quick sketches of idioms worlds apart, only to give you a quick nod and a smile, moving into the next world, the next dimension – and all in a careful beauty of sound, never stepping out of line.
This crew has got to be very much intuitively together, given the sparseness of just general instructions in the Bennett score. They all have ears for each other, and I do declare, they appear like one quirky, vibrating, wobbling body of sound, in a Barba Papa shamanism, taking on any shape of sound, but always in coherence with each other, in a stop-start delicacy of magnum force, a ton on the razor’s edge, in perfect equilibrium!

D starts on a bass string, jazzy, rhythmic, the saxophone stepping forth, issuing rising, spiraling, meandering garlands of encoded messages for the soul from the soul, in a tribute to all that jazz, all those dark shapes in smoky Harlem clubs, vibrant, ecstatic, darn-hearted, bent on life and life only! The accordion strokes this soulful play horizontally in silver gleamings, and the violin is bowed in the manner of Dr L. Subramaniam and his Karnatic expressions of South India. The Electro-Magnetic Trans-Personal Orchestra makes me light some sandal wood incense in my Swedish November morning bleakness, as I go on listening, barefoot in front of the computer, and the Macintosh is my campfire…

It takes a good recording engineer to catch all these nuances, jotting them all down in binaries, and I bow graciously to Eli Cruz, and also to the mastering maestro; Myles Boisen at The Headless Buddha Lab. Their work is crucial to the outcome, which is nothing short of splendid on this recording.

But wait… I hear a voice, a woman’s voice, inside track 2 (D), but I can’t see any credits anywhere on the package. Who is this woman? I know that Kattt Sammon worked with Bennett on Live At Luggage, but is this her too, or is it Nancy Bennett, or am I just hearing things? The vocal part, if there is one, is so tightly woven into the pitches and timbres of the violin and cello and saxophone and accordion that it is hard to make out, but there is an all-too human property at play in there… not to be vocal.

E begins with a frantic rubbing of strings, mirroring some lucid moments of wizard Malcolm Goldstein on Vision Soundings (“Go to a lonely place and rub a stone in a circle on a rock for hours and days on end”). The stone is being rubbed here too, and the strings of the bass are set in sturdy, brutal movement, the bow bouncing ferociously… but then a certain midday garden stillness spreads throughout the orchestra in a cozy chamber ensemble gesture in misty fall expressions, tilting inwards, towards introspective spaces, accommodating the moist, misty fall orchard visions. The electric guitar sprinkles some shiny notes across these visionary meditations, falling like cool, refreshing drops of dew from the leaves of the apple trees inside the orchard orchestra vision…

The violin suddenly bursts into Stephane Grappelli moods, sweeping the street in wide, elegant sketches of Parisian atmospheres past the sidewalk cafés, while the bass mumbles and rumbles behind. There seems to be no end to the ingenuity of these musicians when they appear in their Electro-Magnetic Trans-Personal guise.

B is a short conclusion to the CD, hitting the bass in Jimmy Garrison style, the saxophone taking on the challenge in a John Coltrane loose Naima fashion, eventually breaking out in well-modeled ecstasies of mouth and fingertips, charging life with high voltage and a vibrant lust for it all, hitting the Universe with all that countering of lack-of-will of society, touring the force in a tour-de-force, raising arms in soothing, calming, reassuring gestures, and it finally winds down in a relaxed, laid-back arm-chair restfulness.