Has there ever been a guitar hero with a more misleading moniker than David Torn? With his violent, evocative surname, you expect Torn to really shred, to take that fretboard and rip it to pieces. And he does that, but not the way you might expect. His is a more considered virtuosity, a style that stresses mood and amorphous cloud technique over light-speed pyrotechnics. Torn doesn't rip. He weaves, he pulls, he draws.
"Why would a first-rate guitarist want to sound like a third-rate saxophonist?" someone once asked, rhetorically, of guitar-synth whiz Alan Holdsworth. While no less adept at transforming his axe into something else, Torn has taken a more tasteful tack. He comes from the Robert Fripp and Michael Brook school of style and discipline, which is why his playing has been enlisted so often as backdrops for film scores and for experimental-minded pop stars like David Sylvian and Bowie.
Prezens marks Torn's return to ECM, for whom he recorded his breakthrough Cloud About Mercury, for the first time in over two decades. He's joined on the disc by the capable team of Tim Berne on alto sax, Tom Rainey on drums, and Craig Taborn on keys, who as a trio comprise Berne's Hard Cell but here fill out Torn's ranks as a full-fledged (albeit bass-free) jazz quartet. Not that "jazz" really does the music justice. If only it were that simple.
