Bill Orcutt & Chris Corsano Duo
Bay Area guitarist Bill Orcutt and New York drummer Chris Corsano are one of the great improvising duos of our time. Orcutt has forged a powerful amalgam of blues phrasing, stabbing noise, and spindly hypnosis, extracting a titanic flow of sound that holds on to some abstract vestige of the past as it rockets into the void. Corsano is a ferocious improviser who’s built a thick constellation of associations including Akira Sakata, Mette Rasmussen, Paul Flaherty, Bill Nace, and Rodrigo Amado. But his partnership with Orcutt is something special, a collaboration that has morphed organically over more than a decade, evolving into something genuinely telepathic.
Chris Corsano is the rim-batterer of choice for some of the heaviest contemporary purveyors of both “jazz” (Evan Parker, Paul Flaherty, Joe McPhee, Mette Rasmussen) and “rock” (Björk, Sir Richard Bishop, Jim O’Rourke). He’s also a formidable solo performer in his own right, as heard on solo recordings like The Young Cricketer, Another Dull Dawn, and Cut. “Corsano, despite being arguably the most riotously energetic and creative drummer in contemporary free jazz, does far more than merely bash his kit into submission. Playing loud does not mean abandoning subtlety, and Corsano’s sudden shifts of texture and dynamics are a wonder to behold” – The Wire
Former guitarist and founder of the duo Harry Pussy (later a trio) Bill Orcutt’s sound is a stuttered reimagining of blues guitar. One can hear familiar Southern folk scales between Orcutt’s jagged solo acoustic phrases, pulling and pushing melodies into unresolved fragments that eventually come unmoored in vast and satisfying note-torrents.
