Review: Bows and Helios Suite

Here are two bowmen. One is Kash Killion, an African-American cellist, bassist and virtuoso of the sarangi - a bowed northern Indian instrument - who has played not only with blues veterans like BB King but more usually with avant garde jazz geniuses from Sun Ra to Cecil Taylor, Julius Hemphill and Glen Spearman, as well as with many an Afro-Cuban salsa band.

The other is Stefano Pastor, born in Genoa, Italy, and trained as a classical violinist but who has now turned almost entirely to free expressions of jazz.

They combined in Pastor's home city in 2007 to record Bows, a sonic exploration of at least three continents.

The opener Obstinacy has a terse-stringed Pastor playing over Killion's grounding cello beat.

The Italian's searching, relentless quest for new patterns of notes precedes Killion's plucked undertow solo before Pastor returns, soaring and plunging simultaneously.

Shanti follows, and here the man born in Miles Davis's home town of Alton, Illinois, turns to his sarangi while Pastor's bow saws across his strings as the breath of his flugelhorn compound the resilient harmonies and dissonances.

The title track's stop-time passages, crescendos and growling cadences have the duo of bows at full pelt and achieving powerful union across musical epochs and geographies - a true jazz message.

The nearly 15 minutes of Ahimsa transport the listener's ears to an imagined India, full of sounds born in Europe and the Americas but without any Orientalist falsity, only sheer musical empathy and outreach.

Killion's sarangi has as much of the Mississippi as the Ganges.

It vibrates with intercontinentalism beside Pastor's comradely percussion, and his years of study with some of the great Indian masters like Ali Akbar Khan, Sultan Khan and Rhamish Mishra become fully evident.

The two Monk tunes on the album are despatched with rare invention and beauty. The rhythmic idiosyncrasies of Epistrophy are expressed with such zest, verve and authority that you forget that there are but two people performing and two bows creating such a complex sonic universe.

And the melody of Ruby My Dear has seldom sounded so tender as it does here, with Pastor's pure clarity and Killion's groundswell of plucked cello.

Monk's spirit is throbbing in full life. Past also has a potent presence on the Helios Suite.

It was recorded in Oxfordshire in 2006 with three prime British musicians - the baritone sax player and jazz pioneer of the Hungarian tarogato wind instrument George Haslam, bassist Steve Kershaw and the Leeds drummer Paul Hession.

A poem by Pastor celebrating sunlight as the "wonderful, tormenting beauty of creation" is the spark of the music from the "clotted blood colour of the looming evening, verging on vermillion" to the "transfiguring noontime."

It is a sonic essay of light, colour, pastels and shade, with the sublime, transformative power of the sun at its centre.

Hemera, the opening movement, begins with Hession's percussive sunrise of cymbals and Kershaw's vibrating strings before Haslam's murmuring baritone disturbs the fading darkness.

The height of Pastor's flying violin next to Haslam's delving horn create a contrary harmony, constant and inseparable.

Epiphany begins with Pastor's whirling noontime strings and Haslam's growling notes while Hession's pulsating drums compound their fire.

Hespera, the third movement, begins with an evening feast of percussion and Pastor's flute moving into a marching beat which Kershaw marks out with his springing bass.

When Pastor's violin enters, its song is joyous as if some late-day birdsong has found its home inside it.

Besides the suite, the Helios album includes two other tracks. The first is Haslam's Marianao, perhaps reflecting its composer's sojourns and music-making in Latin America, particularly in Cuba and Argentina.

Hession drums brilliantly throughout. Like a Yorkshire Blakey, Kershaw digs into the Thames Valley earth, Haslam's tarogato swings amiably and Pastor's bow seethes across his strings.

The final stomping track is Pastor's, a tune written about the Oxford town Abingdon by a violinist from Genoa.

Halfway through, baritone and violin enjoy an unaccompanied colloquy, questioning, answering and debating with untiring voices, a free jazz conversation in the heart of rural Britain in the middle of a music first made where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

This is jazz of the world!