Phillip Greenlief/Scott Amendola Duo

One of the most engaging team-ups in exploratory jazz celebrates 30 years of simpatico collaboration and creativity with the release of Stay With It, their first outing on the Clean Feed imprint. It finds Phillip Greenlief and Scott Amendola developing the febrile dialogues mapped out on their deliciously bristling 1995 debut, Collect My Thoughts, an absorbing set that saw the pair garner considerable international plaudits, inspiring them to further cultivate their connection through regular touring expeditions. Three decades on, Greenlief and Amendola remain fully dedicated to their punchy, snaking exchanges, with hyper-dynamic tracks such as ‘Morpheteria’ and ‘Eloquent Turbulence’ building on the bountiful foundations of previous works, drums and horns locked in gloriously kinetic convulsions. But Stay With It also signals an evolution, borne of shared insight and artistic understanding, the duo inaugurating “a theatre of the unexpected”, as they mine acutely textural passages augmented by Amendola’s implementation of live electronics. The granular, parping abstractions of ‘Microfiche’ recall peak Supersilent in meditative cyborg mode, while ‘Farfalle en Mare’’s subtle amalgams of distorted sax exhaust and mutant cymbal-sourced static underline the duo’s commitment to exploring intriguing alien interzones nestled between free jazz and electro-acoustic espionage. While their distinguished careers have seen them share stage and studio with eminent artists ranging from Alice Coltrane, Susan Alcorn and Nels Cline to Mike Patton, Manuel Mota and John Zorn, it is often within this special tandem formation, so adroitly captured on Stay With It, where Greenlief and Amendola conjure their most personal and profound creations.

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