Gregg Bendian's Interzone - Gregg Bendian's Interzone (CD)

All Music Guide

In the liner notes to this recording, bandleader Gregg Bendian cites the 1970s-era progressive rock band Gentle Giant as a primary influence on his life as a musician. All the musical concepts he applies so effortlessly on his many recordings and in concerts with all manner of players he attributes to hearing Gentle Giant's Free Hand album in the mid-'70s. This recording is a tribute of sorts to their influence, though Bendian himself has composed all the music here. Props aside, this is one hell of a band; they could play anything put in front of them. One listen to the metric modulation between Bendian and Mark Dresser's bass playing on "Countermeasures," and Nels Cline's counterpoint study as it balances between them is sign enough -- and that's only on the first track Alex Cline walks a thin line as he dances about his kit on this album given that the bandleader is a percussionist. His polyrhythmic displacement of the center of these compositions is quite astonishing. It is as if h...e were playing the tune outside of itself as the band moved about inside the harmonic world they were assembling, yet the time is perfect and the space created by such a naeuver is vast. Gary Burton's influence is in evidence here. The manner in which Bendian will state his theme without force or stresses and creates a hocket (the practice of dividing different voice parts resulting in a hiccup, or jagged effect) from the ensuing lines played by Cline's guitar and, on occasion, Dresser's bass ("Blood Sasoon Zi Tavit"). The atonality of this work, with Cline's heavy metal guitar, beginning in overdrive and displacing all rhythmic constraints by creating new ones, is a wonderful tactic. The shimmering quiet of "I-Zones" is the album's premier achievement, however. Here, drone, timbral extensions, and polymetrics are meditated upon as a method of lyrical invention. Everything is suspended: rhythm, nuance, tonal considerations, etc. Only the shifting timbres that create microtones upon microtones are focused upon in the off-angle meter. Tribute to '70s progressive rock or not, Interzone is a fine band who've issued a noteworthy recording. - Thom Jurek, All Music Guide Read more Less