Rose uses the properties of his 1932 Conn baritone saxophone for parallel tone experimentation.


Cannily he not only takes advantage of the mammoth horn’s expected blurry and subterranean brays, but also highlights the glottal multiphonics that result from playing widespread passages altissimo.

Among the sounds swelling up and diminishing from his horn are a volley of percussive tongue slaps strident enough to resemble gunfire…. a faint Arabic insinuation creeps into Rose’s playing on “Crater Lake”, especially in his choice of substitute notes.
 Tessitura slurs are more prominent elsewhere, as powerful thrusts against metal create multi-phonic cries at higher and lower pitches. Rose’s flutter tonguing also doubles and triples as he stutters and sequences note patterns which arise and disappear in split seconds.
Expressed in broken octaves, a tune such as the title track may include bagpipe-chanter-like swells… which remain chromatic despite juddering slurs and contracted tongue slaps.

Tracks like “Eel Feeler” in contrast bulge with crunching growls and stentorian reverberations that confirm the horn’s lower-depth power.
 Still, all and all, the aleatoric “Boxhagener” is most illustrative of Rose’s strategy which echoes both Free Jazz and Free Music. An almost-earth-shaking interlude, propelled with inflated circular-breathed timbres, it appears as if the horn’s outside finish is being stripped to toughen the already bottomless snorts.


(Jean-Michel van Schouwbourg)