Immediacy is the one quality that springs to mind immediately as the opening track opens! On a backdrop of infrasounding traffic (maybe only detectable on earphones or with your sub-woofer turned on) Bennett paints with delicacy and sometimes frenzy, and the gold of his saxophone is luminous and Buddha-natured.

This is all recorded at The Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco – and the lot is improvised, on the spot; immediate. Bennett and the recording people have really managed to capture some golden moments out of the space-time continuum, and got it down onto CD, from where it’s now recreated in my head. The whole freshness is still there. It’s alive!

This boy knows how to treat a saxophone, and he’s got a lot of imagination, a light touch when needed and a driving force when that is the direction it’s heading!

Track 2 kicks ass like the darnest contents of Wolfgang Fuchs’ “So – Und? So!”, which is high praise, since Fuchs well may be the standard frenzy to measure up to for any creative saxophone player of late. This is fun, inspiring, a flurry of the moment based on years and years of hard work and deep dives into the roots of it all, musically and spiritually, no doubt. Bennett reaches for something deep down (in the unconscious or in his stomach?) and brings it all up in broad daylight, where it twirls and twists like a worm on a hook… You name it, we like it! At times the sax shouts at you in high pitch shrills, making you duck away, but then all you hear is a faint whiz, a breath on hardly audible notes, bent out of shape in a snake’s hiss.

Vocal artist and performance woman Kattt Sammon joins forces with Bennett on track 3, with a diligence and knack of close collaborators. At times the voice and the saxophone talk at each other, but at other times they speak the same language, down to the smallest nuance of tone, following each other’s progressions exactly, then suddenly counter-pointing each other. It takes artistic guts to get into that, but they carry through wonderfully, and come out unscarred, with no need for any damage assessment!

The audience participation on track six is great fun!

It may not be directly and obviously apparent in this music, but Bennett has studied non-Western disciplines too, like music of West Africa, the Gamelan of Java and Bali, Northern and Southern Indian classical music, Japanese Gagaku and more. These studies, though, must have opened up many suggestions to Mr. Bennett, which do reveal themselves in this very imaginative package.
It is with pleasure I read that Aaron Bennett, born 1966, was introduced early to the avant-garde scene and jazz music by a person of my generation; his own mother, who lived in Long Beach when Aaron was born, and who was a painter of abstract art and a jazz fan. Here’s to all the mothers!

The occasional traffic of a San Francisco street does not disturb; just gives the recording an extra dimension, some extra urban gasoline poetry, and why not – this is the city of Kerouac’s “The Subterraneans” and the manifold poets of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “City Lights!”