As with most free jazz records, the easiest way to describe European Echoes is to say that it’s a bunch of guys with decent jazz chops just goin’ off completely for as long as they feel like it. Of course, that’s reductive, but it’s also fairly accurate. The people who play this kind of music often describe their style of composition in terms of planning: conceiving of the effect that they mean to evince, talking out a rough strategy, and then having at it. The results are invariably exactly the kind of thing that you’d play to piss off your parents if the heavy metal wasn’t working: it’s not chaos, but it comes pretty close. |