The trio of music genres Ettrick uses to describe themselves on Myspace is experimental, jazz, and black metal. The band is a duo of two sax players, one tenor and one alto, who both also play drums, so most of the music is heavy drumming with free, skronky sax soloing overtop it. Only occasionally do the two guys play sax together, making the focus of the music how to make hard pounding drums and hard blurting sax sound right together. This release is a companion live recording to another 3" CD released on American Grizzly. The genre choice alone makes Ettrick an interesting band, but in Volume 1, the sound seemed to get lost in a dizzying haze of machine gun snare. It was black metal drumming, alright, which if you want to take your left field genre fusing literally, they were very successful at pounding away. In Volume 2, however, the drumming is jazz drumming - done with the force of a metal drummer. Thus, the sound is completely different and really successful.
This twenty minute recording is from the last stop of their fall 2006 tour in Pasadena. The first five minutes explore metal-powered jazz drumming. The sax is there but it is barely heard behind the force fo the drums, just there to fill the gaps between rolls with a bit of blaring tone. However, the intensity of the drumming is enough to carry the music this far into the recording. After this section, the two players both pick up their saxes. It's hard to inspire some devil horns with just two saxes wailing away, but the duo seem to at least have the spirit of metal, with one sax blaring short riffs as the other squiggles deeper tones. As the drums kick in again, it's more of an equal partnership between sax skronk and drums than the opening sounds, and the track picks up a lot of steam, sounding a lot more like traditional free jazz as the drummer leaves a bit more room for the sax. The recording ends with a drum duel as both guys pound away, really hard, really heavy.
I would say that everything on this recording makes sense in the free jazz realm. The intensity of the drums, much more than the style, pulls it somewhere else, closer to that black metal fusion they aspire to. I wouldn't say this is a clean merger of the two styles, but there's not many places you can hear death metal inspired jazz. And the sounds are certainly nice, as the band gets closer and closer to bringing this idea to fruition.
