![\"\"](\"https:\/\/misterioso.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/Dresser_unveil.jpg\" "\\"Dresser_unveil\\"")
<\/a>Virtuosity in the jazz world is a given. Jazz players are what they are because they have \u00a0mastered virtuosic technique and don\u2019t want to live under the rigidly-exacting thumb of a concert task-master. They take their creative fancy elsewhere and go farther to that highest of art forms, improvisation.<\/p>\nIt would be an empty statement, however, to imply that virtuosity and improvisational ability is not variegated. A case in point is Mark Dresser, an artist who goes further, much further, than the farther mentioned above. Dresser\u2019s imagination seems limitless in the of fields of virtuosic technique, ensemble playing, and most importantly, in storytelling. For a case in point concerning Dresser\u2019s ensemble playing, witness his playing with Anthony Braxton (Anthony Braxton Quartet (Victoriaville<\/em>) 1992- Victo CD) or Gerry Hemingway (Perfect World<\/em>, Random Acoustics RA019).<\/p>\n Unveil<\/em> reveals Dresser the composer and improviser in the solo context. In listening to\u00a0Unveil<\/em> this commentator hears Dresser\u2019s use of time, space, color, and motion as a musical kinship to the likes of Italy\u2019s Calvino, Columbia\u2019s Marquez, and Cormac McCarthy of the United States. Such authors have boldly taken the realities of everyday life and history and created out of them stories whose shimmering molecules quaver readers into zones of existence previously unsuspected. The printed words of those authors jump off the page and the senses that detect reality become logarithmically amplified, revealing minute components of emotion, color, action in spectacular detail.<\/p>\n Take the title composition \u201cUnveil\u201d. It opens arco, the long, slow strokes allowed to decay to near-silence. The music immediately puts a listener into a dark mysterious zone in which time moves like walking through molasses. Trepidation fills the air because of the tension-release cycle. The section ends with foreboding slash: danger is present. Now begins a very low pitch, bass saxophone-like, and on top of those pitches Dresser drags drags a string across the instrument\u2019s bridge. The pace increases, a tyrannosaurus rex emerges and it is thudding the earth, gnawing all in its path. That\u2019s what this commentator saw when he closed his eyes. The cinematography of Dresser\u2019s music is indeed powerful.<\/p>\n \u201cUnveil\u2019s\u201d sonics range from the deepest of bass to that of the cello. The composition goes through roughly five distinctive chapters, the dark mood never really vanishing, only reaching a stark finality with the ending slash, a Dresser trademark.<\/p>\n