Free improvisation can be many things: challenging, abrasive and meandering among them. This spontaneous act of creation between Frances-Marie Uitti (cello) and Elliott Sharp (Dell’Arte Anouman acoustic guitar and soprano saxophone) is none of those things. Rather, it’s welcoming, cartographic and focused. Sharp has always had a tactile approach to the guitar, one that emphasizes skin and organs alike and which embraces natural resonance as a portal to understanding the mathematical certainty of decay. The same could be said of Uitti, who digs into her cello as if it were a plot of land and pulls up every root around which she can curl her fingers.

In “Avior,” the relationship between these two signatures is so complementary that one almost feels a new strand of archaeology at play. Not in the sense of tearing up sacred land for the bastion of science, but of letting the past speak for itself. Thus, when Sharp sheds the guitar for a soprano saxophone in “Ainitak” and “Algieba,” he invites an earthen language to rise to the surface. In tandem, Uitti renders her instrument a giant ear to capture those utterances before they fade.

Given that in the past Uitti has been mislabeled a mere provider of drones, this reviewer challenges any listener to discover anything but complex shades of meaning in her sound. In that respect, both musicians are translators of energies that could otherwise go unacknowledged. Sometimes, as in “Mizar,” Uitti brightens the foreground while at other times, as in “Mintaka” and “Arcturus,” Sharp wraps us in the garland of a minstrel’s weathered muse. And while it is tempting to label their music as cathartic, in these times of distance one can’t help but read it as a form of proximity.

As organic as it gets.

(This review originally appeared in the June 2020 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)