Carlos NINO / IDRIS ACKAMOOR / NATE MERCERAU - FREE DANCING

Los Angeles staple Carlos Niño teams up with The Pyramids’ Idris Ackamoor and guitarist/producer Nate Mercereau, cutting Ackamoor’s free-spirited tenor wails with tempered new age percussion and celestial synths.

A perpetual collaborator, Niño’s a reliable force – seeing his name on an album (yup, he’s even on André 3000’s ‘New Blue Sun’) is enough to make us at least want to take a look. ‘Free, Dancing…’ finds him working alongside legendary multi-instrumentalist Idris Ackamoor, who founded The Pyramids as part of Cecil Taylor’s Black Music Ensemble back in the early ’70s. That’d already be enough for us, but Nate Mercereau, a guitarist who’s produced for Kesha, Lizzo, The Weeknd and P!NK, among others, also gets a look-in. As always, Niño pushes the trio into the wild unknown, handling percussion and concocting a mood that’s somewhere between a long-lost private press free jazz oddity and a cherished West Coast new age tome – captivating, basically.

Ackamoor’s horn is front and center on ‘Heaven Cruise, Heaven Humming 1’, and Niño and Mercereau provide the atmosphere, using woodblock percussion and washy FM pads to help recontextualize familiar sounds, and establish the atmosphere. Humid flute tones help paint a damp, verdant landscape, and on the aptly-titled ‘Rainbow Entrancement’, Ackamoor’s breathy wails are just a faint trace between the trees and leaves, drowned out by water droplets and portamento synths. But despite its new age leanings, ‘Free, Dancing…’ isn’t particularly easy listening: ‘Fascination Frequency’ is uncompromisingly odd, with muted horn tones that slip into dark, doomy synths, replaced by echoing pan flute trills and detuned groans; and ‘Wylde (Life), Thyme Decoration’ grazes the kosmiche continuum, setting wheezing synth bleats against kit drum flurries, jangling bells and folks-y strings. Deep.