Phillip Greenlief & Scott Amendola - Stay with it

2023

One of the most engaging team-ups in exploratory jazz celebrates 30 years of simpatico collaboration and creativity with the release of Stay With It, their first outing on the Clean Feed imprint. It finds Phillip Greenlief and Scott Amendola developing the febrile dialogues mapped out on their deliciously bristling 1995 debut, Collect My Thoughts, an absorbing set that saw the pair garner considerable international plaudits, inspiring them to further cultivate their connection through regular touring expeditions. Three decades on, Greenlief and Amendola remain fully dedicated to their punchy, snaking exchanges, with hyper-dynamic tracks such as ‘Morpheteria’ and ‘Eloquent Turbulence’ building on the bountiful foundations of previous works, drums and horns locked in gloriously kinetic convulsions.

But Stay With It also signals an evolution, borne of shared insight and artistic understanding, the duo inaugurates “a theatre of the unexpected”, as they mine acutely textural passages augmented by Amendola’s implementation of live electronics. The granular, parping abstractions of ‘Microfiche’ recall peak Supersilent in meditative cyborg mode, while ‘Farfalle en Mare’’s subtle amalgams of distorted sax exhaust and mutant cymbal-sourced static underline the duo’s commitment to exploring intriguing alien interzones nestled between free jazz and electro-acoustic espionage.