Percussionist John Hollenbeck's band Claudia Quintet is a contemporary improvising group with a strong identity, that lies somewhere between a Philip Glass chamber ensemble, Chicago post-rockers Tortoise and New York contemporary post-jazzers Jim Black's AlasNoAxis. For their sixth CD add voices. It's both a fascinating and convincing update of the 1950s experiments in beat poetry-jazz performance. Celebrating the centenary of the birth of the American poet and artist Kenneth Patchen, who was a lesser known influential figure on the beats. The voices set to Hollenbeck's superbly cued music, are the leading contemporary jazz vocalist Kurt Elling and an unsung one, Theo Bleckmann (a regular musical acquaintance of Hollenbeck's). Elling, a contemporary post-60s hipster, might be not such a surprising choice, but it's like you've never heard him before. The crooner's rich baritone spoken word on the opener ‘Showtime’ sounds like it could be a sardonic voiceover for a pulp film noir scene while his feel for the nuances of Patchen's language are as effective as in his typical vocal performances. Bleckmann in contrast mostly sings, and his is a more sensitive, romantic, though no less effective, take on Patchen's pre-50s proto-beat poetry, that was praised by author Henry Miller as well as jazz artists as different as Mingus (with whom Patchen briefly performed) and Peter Brötzmann. Hollenbeck's shifting, looping, atmospheric soundscapes can hardly be called a backdrop, as it so coherently links with the articulations of the prose. Chris Speed's tenor sax provides the more edgier improv moments as does the +1 on this recording, Matt Mitchell, the pianist on Tim Berne's recent ECM recording Snakeoil. It works so well, it's as if beat poetry and jazz had never been apart.