Unorthodox Recordings – Unhx/005 432.69MB FLAC
The cover of Drawing – Opus 2: Paul Klee immediately establishes a world of fragile connections. Three thin, birdlike figures stand or balance above a geometric base, their bodies reduced to narrow lines, angles and small dark shapes. The cloudy grey background gives the drawing depth without providing a recognizable landscape. Names and title run vertically along the left edge, making the sleeve itself resemble a page removed from a portfolio rather than a conventional jazz cover. Nothing appears solid, yet everything seems related through balance. One line supports another, a small mark changes the direction of a figure, and the empty areas carry as much visual weight as the drawn forms.
Alessio Riccio, David Shea and Ellery Eskelin approach Paul Klee through that same tension between precision and uncertainty. Drawing does not attempt to provide pleasant background music for looking at paintings, nor does it translate individual pictures into literal sonic illustrations. Instead, the musicians work with qualities central to Klee’s visual language: line, interruption, repetition, disproportion, mechanical movement, childlike figures, damaged architecture and the ability of a few marks to imply an entire imaginary environment. Sounds are placed like strokes on paper. Some remain isolated, while others connect into structures that seem capable of collapsing after the next gesture.
Riccio’s percussion is the album’s physical foundation, but the word “drums” barely describes his activity. Conventional kit playing appears beside manipulated tape, live loops, randomized percussion, water drums, metal claves, shakers, bell chimes, processed metal and a specially constructed gong sculpture. These materials allow rhythm to behave as color and shape rather than simply meter. A drum pattern may establish forward movement, then be repeated or electronically displaced until it resembles a machine trying to remember how it was built. Small metallic sounds glitter at the edge of the stereo field, while larger impacts create temporary walls.
David Shea enters this environment through samples, digital piano and keyboards. His sounds rarely function as a smooth electronic background. Samples can appear as torn pieces of another composition, fragments whose original circumstances have disappeared. Piano figures supply recognizable pitch and touch, but their regularity is often disturbed by Riccio’s loops or by electronic layers that change the apparent dimensions of the room. Shea’s presence makes the music feel edited while it is still occurring. Acoustic gestures and reproduced sounds occupy the same plane, leaving the listener uncertain whether a particular event has just been played, recalled or reconstructed.
Ellery Eskelin’s tenor saxophone supplies the most continuous human line. His tone retains the physical evidence of breath even when the electronics and percussion become fragmented. He can move through broad phrases, irregular slurs, low honks and rough multiphonics without becoming a conventional soloist placed in front of an electroacoustic rhythm section. The saxophone is another drawing tool. At times it resembles a heavy black stroke crossing a delicate field. Elsewhere it becomes a thin, curling line forced to navigate around blocks of percussion and sampled sound.
That relationship prevents Drawing from settling into either free jazz or electronic composition. Eskelin often phrases with the urgency and elasticity of an improviser responding to a rhythm section, but the ground beneath him refuses to remain dependable. A pulse may appear only to be looped, divided or interrupted. Shea’s piano can suggest harmonic direction, yet a sample may enter and change the meaning of the surrounding notes. Riccio can support the tenor with recognizable drumming, then dissolve that support into scattered impacts. Jazz interaction remains present, but its usual architecture has been opened and rearranged.
The titles provide another connection to Klee without forcing the music into direct representation. “Strange Garden,” “Death and Fire,” “The Gray One and the Coast,” “Clown,” “Destroyed Labyrinth” and “The Timid Brute” name places, figures and conditions that already sound partially abstract. They suggest pictures in which recognizable objects have been simplified until they operate like symbols. The music behaves similarly. A garden becomes a gathering of delicate metallic sounds and irregular growth. A clown becomes a figure whose humor cannot be separated from discomfort. A labyrinth is not represented by footsteps and walls, but by musical paths that double back, disappear and reconnect somewhere unexpected.
The extended opening, “Luna of the Barbarians,” gives the trio enough time to introduce this language without immediately explaining it. Percussion, tape and electronics establish a terrain filled with small movements, while the saxophone moves through it as both visitor and disruptive force. The length matters because the piece does not develop through a conventional sequence of themes. It accumulates marks. A repeated sound becomes a boundary; a saxophone phrase creates a possible route; an electronic intrusion erases part of the map. By the end, the musicians have constructed a large environment from gestures that initially seemed unrelated.
Elsewhere, the trio works in shorter, more concentrated forms. These pieces resemble individual drawings pinned inside a larger exhibition. Each establishes its own proportions and exits before the internal logic becomes comfortable. Abrupt endings are important. A sound does not always need to resolve simply because it has attracted attention. Like a line ending at the edge of a page, the cutoff can define the shape more clearly than an extended conclusion.
“Underwater Garden” adds Mirko Guerrini’s bass flute, deepening the connection between breath and environment. The flute’s lower register enters less forcefully than Eskelin’s tenor and seems partially absorbed by the surrounding textures. Its air and low vibration suggest movement beneath a surface rather than a melody placed above it. The piece does not imitate water literally. Instead, familiar instrumental shapes appear distorted by the medium around them, as though heard through changing pressure.
The garden appears repeatedly across the sequence, but it is never a peaceful pastoral space. Klee’s imagined landscapes often contain a mixture of play, construction and unease, and Riccio’s music preserves that ambiguity. Bells, shakers and light percussion can sound bright without becoming innocent. A looping groove may initially feel playful, then become restrictive through repetition. Shea’s samples can introduce recognizable human or instrumental traces that quickly turn strange when removed from their source. Beauty survives, but it is always vulnerable to rearrangement.
“Outbreak of Fear” makes that vulnerability explicit. Eskelin’s forceful breathing and repeated figures encounter percussion and keyboards that appear organized but never fully safe. Fear is not represented by theatrical shrieks or a simple increase in volume. It emerges when repetition begins to close around the performers. A pattern that initially provides orientation becomes a trap, and the tenor’s physical strength starts sounding like resistance against a system already in motion.
This is where Riccio’s idea of a percussion “Metalanguage Unit” becomes especially useful. The collection of drums, objects, electronics, tapes and looping devices allows him to speak about rhythm through multiple materials at once. A beat can be performed, sampled, randomized and returned in altered form. Metal can act as punctuation, atmosphere or melodic color. The percussionist becomes drummer, sound designer and editor without separating those roles. Rhythm is not merely what moves the composition forward; it is the process by which the composition remembers and changes itself.
The album was recorded in 2003, when the meeting between acoustic improvisation and digital processing still carried visible seams. Drawing does not hide those seams. Samples do not melt into a polished electronic surface, and the saxophone does not pretend to belong naturally inside every constructed layer. The friction is part of the design. Riccio, Shea and Eskelin preserve the different physical origins of their sounds, then discover relationships through placement rather than forced unity.
The closing “The Timid Brute” contains the contradiction that runs through the entire album. A brute suggests weight, force and direct action; timidity suggests retreat, hesitation and exposure. The music repeatedly balances those qualities. Eskelin can produce an enormous tenor sound, yet place it cautiously among fragile electronic events. Riccio’s drums can strike with authority, then withdraw into tiny metallic details. Shea’s samples can fill the space or appear as distant remnants. Strength and uncertainty are not opposites here. Each makes the other audible.
Drawing – Opus 2: Paul Klee succeeds because it does not reduce Klee to whimsical abstraction or decorative modernism. It recognizes the discipline beneath the apparent play: the careful balance of line, form, space and movement required to make a strange figure stand upright. Riccio, Shea and Eskelin construct music through the same problem. Percussion, samples, piano, saxophone, tape and electronics remain precariously connected, each capable of changing the scale of everything around it. Like the figures on the cover, the album survives through balance rather than stability.
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