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TONE TIME
(Wobbly Rail)
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Bassist Dresser carries most of the weight on this fitfully interesting duet with drummer Ibarra. The veteran bassist has a deep bag of arresting textures, startling tone colors, and off-balance rhythms, and that makes his playing continually surprising. And though his eerie sonorities dazzle your ears, his sophisticated sense of design turns his solos into jigsaw-puzzle structures. His playing on "Surrealm," "Slipinstyle," and "Simmer" combines the lyrical and the unfamiliar in equal measure. Ibarra’s response to Dresser’s refinement sounds rather pedestrian. It’s not that she plays badly, it’s just that on most of the tracks, what she plays is either too deferential or too expected. When she throws her considerable technique into multi-layered rhythms and textures that interlock with Dresser’s, as she does on "The Weaver," "Untold," and the four short tracks "Sphere A–D," there’s an electricity in the music that’s missing elsewhere.
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