Jan Steele & Janet Sherbourne - Distant Saxophones

This collection of Jan Steele and Janet Sherbourne collaborations put together by US label Community Library has been floating around in various esteemed places for a few months, though had somehow managed to escape our grasp until now. It's worth the wait. There's a number of Jan Steele tracks attentive listeners will recognise from the Voices and Instruments record he worked on with John Cage that notably formed a part of Eno's Obscure series, and the Janet Sherbourne track Ivory is a beautiful vocal-led jazz arrangement taken from the essential Nobody But You 7" originally issued by her Practical Music imprint. The origin of the remaining handful of tracks is unclear (and there's a download code here that includes even more material than a single LP can house), though it seems the purpose of the anthology is to express the depth of their near four decade-long creative dialogue. Jazz, minimalism and modern composition approaches overlap in unique ways, and in such a complimentary manner it's in no way obvious that the music was recorded over diffuse periods of time. Steele and Sherbourne share a cohesive vision that ghosts between the lines of various disciplines, in the end only expressing their own distinct voice. Is this a new pop lexicon being imagined into existence? If the wind had blown another way, you might not bet against it. In these unhurried, between-genre compositions i think you can hear the roots of current notables like Tara Clerkin Trio, Mary Lattimore, Vanessa Amara, Sarah Davachi++, and with it a kind of wide angled experimental pop utopianism.