Best known in jazz and bluegrass circles, the guitarist Duck Baker is also an adept improviser, and collaborates here with players that test his limits. Two trios with the saxophonist John Zorn and the percussionist Cyro Baptista seem uncertain. Two blues with Roswell Rudd, the trombonist, alternately embrace and interrogate the familiar form. And three duets from 2002 with the guitarist Derek Bailey exploit the much-missed innovator's catalytic properties. Initially, Bailey burrows obstinately beneath Baker's more tonal intonations, until a common language is agreed upon, validating the philosophical inferences of free improvisation as an ethos, an artistic choice and a way of life.
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