Ivo Perelman
The Other Edge (Leo)
Reverie (Leo) and The Book of Sound (Leo)

BORN in Sao Paulo in 1961, the incendiary hornman Ivo Perelman began his musical life as a classical guitarist.

He learned cello, piano, trombone and clarinet before committing to the tenor saxophone at the age of 19.

He remembers what his first experience with the instrument meant to him: “It felt like an animal, all melody, air and expression — an eternity, a living thing. I became one with a living thing.”

He studied at, then quickly dropped out of, Berkley music college in Boston, before moving to Los Angeles in 1986 and charging his artistry and phenomenal powers of improvisation with a whole cosmos of influences — from Brazilian folk themes and children’s songs, African sounds and Takeba Indian musical traditions, Coltrane and the rasping saxophone timbres of Albert Ayler — although he later claimed that he had never heard his recordings before he was so frequently compared to him.

Perelman has made a host of records, many of them — like these three albums all cut in 2014 — on the Leo label.

On The Other Edge he leads a quartet of free musical souls including bassist Michael Bisio, drummer Whit Dickey and the pianist from Wilmington, Delaware, who was one of Perelman’s most early collaborators, playing on an early US album Bendito of Santa Cruz in 1996, Matthew Shipp.

Although the album is a sequel to an earlier record, The Edge, with the same personnel in 2013, Perelman insists that “to repeat myself” is anathema to him, asserting that his music will always be “truthful to the moment and the process,” with each of his recordings holding “a set of parameters that will never be repeated.”

The Other Edge begins with the wild, improvised high-pitched flourishes of Desert Flower.

Shipp’s complex piano ruminations follow beside Dickey’s shimmering cymbals before Perelman returns with a gyrating, unleashed series of ascendant volleys.

The two sections of the rampaging rhythmic piece, Panem et Circenses are separated by the lucidly fragile beauty of Crystal Clear.

There are times in Latin Vibes where Perelman’s horn sounds like an agonised birdsong, while Petals or Thorns? has a reflective beauty of contradictions which make the horn the living mind of its keeper, with Bisio’s bass its under-earth.

Big Band Swing is like unfettered Basie, its rhythm within the tradition and its sonic explorations also touching the stars.

Perelman’s partner on the duo album Reverie is the veteran German pianist and vibist Karl Berger, born in Heidelberg in 1935, who played and recorded with Don Cherry in the ’60s, moved to New York and founded the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock with jazz revolutionary Ornette Coleman in 1972.

The two men had never met before the session. Perelman was an admirer of Berger, who didn’t know the Brazilian’s music and assumed him to be an Argentinian — a level of surprise, unexpectedness and spontaneity loved by the ever-adventurous Perelman.

As they move into the instantaneous empathy of Transcendence and the stunningly cogitating Pensiveness, you understand again the astonishing momentariness of jazz improvisation and how a totally unrehearsed hour in the life of two musicians creates sounds never heard before and never heard again. To change the words of the poet Palgrave: “We see them born from light, and into light go,” for there is no darkness here.

Neither is there in what is Perelman’s as yet summative record, Book of Sound, with Shipp again and the nonpareil of free jazz bassists, William Parker, born in the Bronx in 1952.

With such brilliant companions Perelman’s mettle is even more intensely luminous and the Latin titles of the tracks give them an even more profound epic quality.

The opener Damnant Quod Non Intelligunt (They condemn what they do not understand) seems to be a riposte to some views of his artistry, with Shipp’s relentless hard-comping and Parker’s bass unifying the trio’s heartbeats, and the second track, Candor Dat Viribus Alas (Candour gives wings to strength) becomes the sonic watchwords of three immense musicians.

Just hear and listen to this music, as the inventive genius of two Americans, south and north, bursts out of every improvised note, and you may agree with the sense of the last title: Veritas Vos Liberabit (The truth will set you free).