One Dark Night I Left My Silent House ECM***

David Rothenberg, on bass clarinet and clarinet here, says that he and pianist/percussionist Marilyn Crispell “didn’t plan” out their duo album and that it “ended up spontaneous and improvised”. Yet its title comes from a novel by the avant garde and politically controversial Austrian writer Peter Handke, and some of the pieces are named for works by the prose poet Robert Gibbons. This presumably post-hoc bow by the duo sheds no real light on the music, except to reinforce its intensely private, personal and – perhaps unfairly – exclusive nature. But there is a constant pull between order and adventure, the lyrical and the intellectual, in this superb duo’s work. Put crudely, Crispell pushes the boundaries of sound more, while Rothenberg likes to fix on an idea and use it as a motif. It yields mixed results, sometimes inconclusive, but at its best, moments of rare beauty. See ecmrecords.com