Review by Eugene Chadbourne

There are listeners who would prefer listening to the sounds made by a tree for several hours to a solo bass recital and they should by all means stay out of the shade of Thom Golub's The Dove in the Belly.  One of a series of 2004 releases on the Arrival label, administered by Edmonton percussion maestro Ron de Jong, the CD has details in common with other titles in the catalog.  Packaging is an envelope within an envelope, the outer casing presenting a faux-mail look that is quite distinctive.  More than half of the pieces are titled after lines from Kenneth Rexroth poems, a device also used on the Very Strange Crisp CD combining tenor saxophonist Darren Williams with de Jong's main group, the Vertrek Ensemble.  Rexroth is thus a bond with the Golub recital but not one that has any obvious musical implications other than the spectre of relentless creativity.  Very Strange Crisp presented trio interplay, in which everything is a reaction to something else, no matter how tentative.  It is a world apart from a solo performance, which no matter how designed or engineered has the capability to come across like some kind of abstract oration.  From that perspective the solo bassist must be a master actor with a bag of disguises hidden behind his back.  The instrument may sound like it is actually wounded at some points; indeed, there are few pain-inducing possibilities in music like the arco, or bowed, bass.  The instrument also has a  capacity for great dignity, however, an aspect of its role as the underpinning of so many grooves.  Listeners who are only slightly prejudiced and have not gone out to sit under a tree yet would prefer the sympathetic thump of a plucked note, especially down in the lower register where convention expects a bassist to pitch his tent.  Golub plays with these perceptions early on, pulling the strings with resonating conviction following s quick yet measured stroll through a patch of feeble fragility.  By then adding some kind of acoustic distortion to the patterns, he in turn suggests the sounds of African instruments such as the thumb piano, creating a dichotomy between large and small sounds that come up later in works such as "In Memory of Ray Condo."  The performances were recorded over a two month period, the resulting close to 50 minutes of music obviously and wisely trimmed down to Golub's most concentrated performances.  "And Angels Where Only Bird Song Wakes" is a nice starting place, lengthy enough to avoid any sense of insufficiency, relaxed in its sense of rhythmic movement and devoted to the instruments most natural and vivid sound.  Golub is also wise to leave such impressions resonating as the CD comes to its conclusion on a performance with a clearly Canadian title, "Take the Train, Eh?"