Clearing Customs

Described in the notes as “a suite by Fred Frith with a multinational septet at the SWR NEWJazz meeting 2007,” this album consists of a single hour-long track of improvised music in which Frith collaborates with other instrumentalists playing the guzheng, drums, trumpet, mridingam, tabla, and various electronics, with Frith on “guitar and home-made instruments. As Frith himself points out, this music can hardly be counted as “jazz,” but it partakes of jazz’s aesthetic of free improvisation informed by careful and respectful listening to others. Over the course of its 67 minutes, this music seems to take us on a tour throughout geographic and cultural space, sometimes singing lyrically and sometimes shouting.