Ivo perelman trio at manhattan inn - brooklyn, jul 28

• photography by Clara Pereira / text by Filipe Freitas

Ivo Perelman continues to exhibit his musical virtue with a variety of different projects throughout New York.
This time around, the venue was the Manhattan Inn, located in Brooklyn, where he performed with a trio of frequent collaborators: the bassist Joe Morris and the drummer Gerald Cleaver, also dominant figures in the free jazz scene.

In a few months, the highly expressionist saxophonist is going to release another five albums on Leo Records, entitled “The Art of the Improv Trio - Volumes 1 to 5”. One of them will feature this powerhouse trio with one difference: Morris will be playing guitar instead of bass, exactly as it happened in 2012 with the album “Living Jelly”.

With a furious and straightforward start, these spontaneous daredevils show what they are capable of. Their scintillating combination left us petrified on our chairs such was the potency of Perelman’s sax outbursts, whether on its convulsive, elliptical, or bulky modes, and the punch-drunk intensity of the rhythm section. Together, by maintaining a long and steady up-tempo, they kept threatening to bring the house down.
In a natural way, the mood shifted from visceral to moderate, passing through a trippy Amazonian dance at some point in the middle.

Perelman is a master in the art of coloring. He does it with clever rhythmic motifs (one of them was quite reminiscent of Coltrane’s “Sun Ship”), an irresistible sense of melody, and audacious patterns that may gain the prospect of chirps, high-pitch whistles, and wild eruptions.
Here, he found in Morris and Cleaver, two responsive adventurers of great force.