**** Matthew Goodheart

SONOLUMINESCENCE

(Nine Winds)

Goodheart is a young Bay Area-based pianist/composer who bridges the worlds of avant-garde jazz and new music. Think of a pianist able to shift between Morton Feldman's sparse formalist pieces and free jazz in the vein of Cecil Taylor. This is Goodheart's first recording, and he arrives with a mature and individual musical vision. Joined by tenor-saxophonist Glenn Spearman, bassist Lisle Ellis, and drummer Donald Robinson, he keeps the spotlight on himself through high-velocity, dizzy, dissonant tone clusters ("Condensations") and relentlessly stabbing rhythms ("In the Water of Emanations"). What stops him from being one of an emergent army of Taylor clones is a sharp revision of traditional African and Afro-Cuban music in which a soloist improvises melodically against the rhythm section's ostinato pattern. This is the most accomplished debut for a new pianist working this jazz/new-music vein since Marilyn Crispell's first recording in the '70s.

-- Norman Weinstein