GEORGE WALLACE
CD REVIEWS

FROM HOZOMEEN HEIGHTS
Hozomeen Jam, a limited edition EP, Hozomeen Press, Calque Cinema, 01

Okay it's a promotional piece and not for sale, but the seven cut Hozomeen Jam CD recently released through the press by the same name offers some startlingly attractive original works by, sustained and molded to new levels through musical accompaniement, by some of the leading "next generation" figures in bohemian poetry writing.

The session, which took place at a studio in New York City on Mercer Street in the summer of 2001, features esceptional cuts of work by the likes of Ron Whitehead, Steve Dalachinsky, Lee Ranaldo, Casey Cyr, Richard Lee Martin and Albert Kausch - each of them accompanied by beat music ambassador David Amram, who has a cut of his own to lead things off.

All of the artists have association with Hozomeen Press, in Connecticut, publishers of an impressive array of chapbooks by these authors and others.

The jam is an unusually fine one, with Amram working from instrument to instrument to provide interpretative interplay with the writers for their poetry. Richard Lee Martin's Sonorous You, after Keiji Haino, is supplemented by Amram on Doumbek. Dalachinsky's contemplative Sciure de Gamme receives inquisitive piano meanderings; as does Kausch's lengthy Synaesthete. Amram, who does a fingerclicking improv piece to back himself up in the opening cut, pulls out the French Horn - the instrument that he used in the seminal Pull My Daisy film of the late fifties with Kerouac and the rest of the gang - in support of Sonic Youth's Renaldo, who reaches to ecstgatic heights in his piece What Lake if Void of Love.

As for Whitehead's classic piece Tapping My Own Phone, too often taken at face value as straight social criticism, it has possibly never sounded so playful, self-ironic and wry as in this recording, with Amram transmogrifying the background into some fakir-like kind of middle eastern bazaar with ocarina, doumbek, and shanai.

And in the last cut, Cyr's splendid song Shiva - which fails is somewhat underproduced on an earlier recording - it here is brought to memorable levels, as Amram plays around and through her voice, guitar and drumwork with a double flute. The effect, a shuffling rhythmic accompaniement, dream-like vocalization, and flute intonations resonant with early Jefferson Airplane, is to turn a previously minimalist production effort into a work that sounds straight out of 60s Haight Ashbery, worthy of comparing to the best musical musings John Phillips ever managed.

An early example of Hozomeen Press' foray into the world of poetry CD production, Hozomeen Jam offers promise of great things to come.