Lee, don’t!

“Passing Tres” for instance weaves slow-moving textures of bass, percussion, saxophone and trumpet together, letting the drums float to foreground with their punches and cymbal shivers (that’s Diego Lucero on kit). It’s a luminous, somewhat indistinct sound with flares of fusion-y futurism, a musing, narcotic drift to it. A skirling saxophone, played by Gabriella Zelek, breaks through like a swimmer to the surface, the bass roiling deep underneath. “What About Being Alone” shifts the focus to Cooper Dickerson, his plaintive surges of pedal steel lifting out of the soundscape, while Zelek’s sax swirls and blows around him. “Reward of Consequence” provides space for Aesop Adams, the guitarist and Dooley’s partner in Osmium House, to let things rip.

The disc’s first three cuts are relatively concise. The last three stretch to wider horizons. “Westbound Alameda” does this in a lyrical, laid-back way, an elastic foundation of bass and struck percussion supporting flares of trumpet (Gavin Susalski), slithery runs of sax and, again, that gorgeous pedal steel. “Funeral of Fireflies” abstracts country pedal steel into abstract shapes, letting the thump and pound of percussion push it away from conventional twang. Adams, here, executes whistle-high harmonics that cut through the haze and Zuri Barnes sings warmly, evocatively in the background. It sounds like a slightly countrified version of Laraaji’s transcendental bliss. Dooley’s band is rooted in jazz, but not confined by it. The final track with its stand-up bass and swaggering horn line sounds the most like big band swing. It also allows the wildest bouts of brass improvisation, with Susalski arcing off into the stratosphere from a swaying, grounding foundation.  

It's not easy to get even a couple of people on one page, let alone seven. These tracks show a still relatively new configuration of people finding their way together, making a shared path and diverging from it.

“Conversations” opens with a snatch of a rickety piano negotiating some corny old song. It ends, and one of the women clears her throat, starting a dialogue of coos, questions, greetings, partings, monosyllabic interjections and hearty, life-affirming laughter. The participants’ shared affection is naked and giddy, the way new love can be, and their exchanges are simultaneously very private and quite universal; if you’ve ever felt this way, you’ll hear a bit of yourself in their them. But it’s also a work of carefully considered composition; Anderson had to sift through months of recordings and sequence them just so in order to make this stuff register as something other than a souvenir, even though that’s exactly what it was for 46 years. Preserved on cassette, it stayed between them until after Anderson’s death in 2019, when Lockwood listened to “Conversations” and decided to make a response.

“For Ruth” contains some of the same raw material. Lockwood has kept some of the voices, ditched the piano, added sustained notes by an operatic singer and woven them into field recordings taken from a bird sanctuary and various bodies of water that were dear to both of them. The fragments of speech are now rare fragments amid the honking of waterfowl and the trickle of streams. The piece is calm, like a memory of a good thing that’s gone but still gives comfort. Old love salutes young love.

The album also includes “Resolutions,” a purely electronic composition from 1984. It’s made of slowly descending pitches, which slowly wobble and settle into nothingness like a raw and hasty Eliane Radigue piece. It sounds profoundly dissimilar from the rest of the record, but makes sense on a conceptual level, since it reflects another ending, since it was the last piece of electronic music that Anderson ever finished.