Fields, Scott/Matthias Schubert - Minaret Minuets
SKU
Clean Feed CF 213
Scott Fields, electric guitar / Matthias Schubert, tenor saxophone.
"In the Minaret Minuets system there are two separate but equal branches: the electric guitar and the tenor saxophone. Composer slash instrumentalists — those roles smear — Scott Fields and Matthias Schubert find myriad methods to blend and contrast, to appear to be at one moment a larger ensemble and then to sound as just one. They perform virtuosic material virtuosically sans showoffness. Their reach doesn’t exceed their grasp and they grab for an awful lot. That their ambitions are fulfilled reflects a long association. Schubert appears on the Fields CDs Beckett (Clean Feed Records), Samuel (New World Records), and We Were The Phliks (Rogue Art) and for five years Fields has played in an orchestra that Schubert co-leads. You can hear their almost telepathic communication as they navigate a hodgepodge of innovative compositional structures: asynchronous looping fragments, some melodic, some graphic, some mixed, with sudden coherent passages (Dipstick Triptych, Santa on a Segway, Gidget Widget Wacker, and Willie’s Billy Beer), a funereal micro-tonal canon (Willie’s Billy Beer), an
exploration of the interactions between harmonic components of saxophone multiphonics and a single, subtly varying sustained eclectic guitar pitch (Multi Trill), jazzlike propulsion (Santa on a Segway), periodic alternation between walking bass and acutely angular melodies (Menu Innuendo, in which Fields sets every letter of the Charles Bukowski poem “A Challenge to the Dark”), and what perhaps could best be described as a fragmented noise ballad (Fire Island Egg Cream). These are most unconventional dances."