Paul Plimley & Trichy Sankaran: Ivory Ganesh meets Doctor Drums (Songlines: SGL1523-2)

Paul Plimley (piano), Trichy Sankaran (mrdangam, kanjira)

The fact that this disc is a very easy listen shouldn't lead anyone to dismiss it as easy listening. The fact that Plimley likes to play tunes which have a tonal centre shouldn't imply he's a reactionary. He did, after all, study with Cecil Taylor at the end of the seventies, which seems to have been a huge influence on his playing, and he's worked with a roll-call of avant gardists from Derek Bailey to Jon Oswald to Andrew Cyrille.

So what's he doing making an album of jazzy improvisations with a Karnatic drummer? Well, as Andrew Timar points out in his excellent notes, this is no novelty project. Sankaran and Plimley have been playing together for half a dozen years by the time this session was recorded, and they had reached a certain aesthetic which they obviously wanted to document. This unites Plimley's Taylor-derived concept of the piano as a primarily rhythmic instrument with Sankaran's very Indian approach to percussion as a matter of tuning and melodic inflexion.

The results are, to quote Timar again, redolant of "Satie in colourful madras plaid lounge attire". There is certainly that decadent elegance in this music which is also in, say, Arthur Lyman's; that exotic, sophisticated beauty which is a million miles from the pop pap of "world music". And underlying the gin and martini, the epicure's love of India as a home of fine cuisine and civilised manners, the strong desire to listen to this CD under a slowly rotating fan in an art deco bar with peeling pink walls and decaying rubber plants, all the trappings of the end of the Raj -- underlying all that there's something of genuine musical worth going on here.

That's because the two players have built up a rapport which enables their music to really flow. The way they toss rhythmic ideas back and forth is electric, and as Plimley superimposes his melodic and harmonic ideas on this rhythmic core, Sankaran, quite independently, adds his timbral ones. It's as if the two are perfectly in step in one dimension of the music, and quite happy to do their own thing in others. The result: captivatingmusic you can't take your ears off.

Agreed, this isn't cutting-edge experimentalism, but it's more experimental than you expect. The two players interrogate their different relationships to rhythm through the medium of a close shared understanding, but there's little compromise. It's not as if Sankaran is playing jazz or Plimley is playing Karnatic music. They're doing their own thing but, it seems, with very closely worked-out relationships between the different parts, which makes for a fascinating and surprising listen. It's not the most difficult thing you'll hear all year, but extremely enjoyable and not a little thought-provoking, too.

Richard Cochrane