Steve Reid began his pop music career as a Motown session drummer, backing Martha Reeves and James Brown in his spare time, but he made his name with ruthless avant-jazz albums in the mid-1970s, compiling the most corrosive elements of Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra. Witness the ferocious Stax-thumped steel of Nova or the midnight funk of Rhythmatism. They're eminently organic records, arranging unkempt percussive bursts into cohesive swarms of soul and noise. It's a bit bizarre then to see the 62-year-old legend collaborate with Four Tet's Kieran Hebden, a high-tech bricoleur of electronic whispers and scratches. The teaming represents one more attempt to fuse physicality and virtuality, nature and machine, chaos and process, and all those other tired dichotomies that electronic artists feel obligated to address.
The unconventional partnership began on Steve Reid's superb Spirit Walk, which generated a clutch of formidable live gigs and a two-album series, starting with The Exchange Session, Vol. 1. Sadly, a brief preview on a Gilles Peterson comp ("Knives and Forks") made the duo seem destined for disappointment, articulating every cliché in innocuous techno-jazz: dull blips, tepid fills, sterilized synthesizers. When it tried to capture a Steve Reich-like blend of jazz and gamelan, the piece seemed unable to gain any traction. The music seemed listless and uneven, as if the union were merely suggested by some perplexed record exec.
Impressively, Reid and Hebden occasionally manage to combat these tendencies on their full-length debut. Sure, there are stereotypical motifs in the mix-- chipper birdcalls, brushing effects, tinny turntable maneuvers-- but it also has some remarkably gorgeous passages, brimming with Reid's fuming vitality and Hebden's electronic ingenuity. On "Morning Prayer", drums bristle in front of crinkled mounds of funk and shrill pulsations. It's both calm and vaguely menacing. In recent years, Reid has further tempered his improvisations with forays into West African rhythms, and Hebden ably assists by including reverential allusions to daqqa and baayo discord. In the longer pieces, Hebden's competence is severely tested by Reid's subtleties. Patchy digital fades seem either sporadic or restrictive, and the middles tend to muddle or fall into rote repetition. Of course, there are still lengthy moments of inspiration: The synthesized fragments of "Electricity and Drum" drain through Reid's cymbals and link with drilled reverb, filtered radio frequencies, static, and swirling fax bleeps. These passages are often elegant but, unfortunately, they make more tedious moments all the more obvious.
In general-- and despite passages of extreme beauty-- something seems amiss on Exchange Session. There is neither symmetry nor dissymmetry in the performances, as if both musicians were trying to pass by one another and kept colliding instead. Unlike a true alliance, Hebden and Reid seem to be playing two separate performances simultaneously. Under the right circumstances, this could make for a tense, dramatic recording. Instead, it often feels merely neglectful. If the album is one of Reid's attempts to move jazz forward within an electronic context, it demonstrates neither dazzling innovation nor complete mastery. At the same time, there is enough here to prove that both musicians have been (and are) great innovators within their respective genres. The sum is somehow less than the parts, but the parts are still invaluable.
