LOL COXHILL & ROGER TURNER – Success With Your Dog

Emanem

How many phrases, in several decades of liberal interaction, has been imagined, created on the spot, played without thinking or plainly discarded by a mind like Lol Coxhill’s? And another question arising as I listened for the fourth or fifth time to Success With Your Dog: how does the guy manage to execute those unpremeditated designs – released in apparently incessant fluxes – while systematically avoiding to fall in the traps of repetition, or just obeying to the untold rules of barely hinted parallelisms? In this duo with equally unique Roger Turner, recorded in different live settings, we find ourselves entangled, gratified and ultimately liberated from the usual obligation of a reviewer, namely the mandatory attribution of definite traits to what is merely a gathering of fragments. But the latter’s sheer brilliance is what renders the experience impressive. One is better served by comparing the animated sections of the interplay to sprinkling water, for there’s no constriction to be felt whatever angle is chosen to observe these disenfranchised improvisational streams from. Turner’s awkward logic of displacement of the components of the drum set leaves us dumbfounded, in the vain search of a vague point of reference. Still, the radical briskness of his work – juxtaposed with the partner’s miscreantly chirpy dismantling of the mere notion of “reed melody” – transforms the idea of a music for some kind of minority – think “introverted male specimen attempting to conquer a woman intellectually in absence of other virtues” – into the image of a functional world at large. No excess of thoughts, no paranoia, and who cares if someone judges what you do. Until nobody gets killed, that’s perfect.