I remember being mightily impressed when I heard the second-generation reissue of this album – back in 2001, when it was released as a double-CD package which included Part 2 – but now I'm more agnostic. Recorded live at The Club in Heiligenhaus, Germany, in 1993 (not 1983, as stated on the album sleeve), Myra Melford certainly knows how to work her suitably appreciative audience. But the basic mould from which this music is cut – gradually revealed catchy vamps are overlaid with muscular clusters and/or squiggly counterpoint – loses something in the telling once you've fathomed what's going on. The problem is one of harmonic integration. Unlike Matthew Shipp, who in David S Ware's Quartet was often called upon to juggle a similar polarity of materials, Melford's Ivesian clusters (filtered through Cecil Taylor and Don Pullen) too often create an obvious dialectic: dissonance tugging against those explicitly tonal vamps. Her solo in the second piece, ‘Now & Now 1’, climaxes with clusters that pile-drive the harmonic impetus forwards, which succeeds only in filling up the available space rather than allowing her tonal roots to grow into something transformational or unexpected. The 20-minute long ‘Frank Lloyd Wright Goes West To Rest’ is, appropriately enough, more intentioned in its architectural planning. Lindsey Horner's thoughtful bass solo leads to a much-needed opening out of the texture: bowed bass cuts into inside-of-the-piano scrapings as disembodied foghorn blasts from a harmonica beckon towards the unknown.