“I get into music not just by playing but by accessing a vibration,” says drummer Whit Dickey, a stalwart of New York’s improvised music scene whose brand new work directing yet another formidable quartet, Root Perspectives, gets to the heart of what he means by that elliptical phrase. It’s the latest recording from Dickey’s label TAO Forms, which since its 2020 founding has released some of the freshest musical material in recent memory, including James Brandon Lewis’ poll-winning, Jesup Wagon, and Dickey’s own highly inspired & well-received works, Expanding Light and Astral Long Form: Staircase in Space.

With Root Perspectives – recorded in May, on the day after releasing Astral Long Form – Whit Dickey and associates continue to create & explore new terrain.

“I conceived this album off of a vibration that I felt some 15 years ago, while obsessively listening to the title composition of John Coltrane’s Crescent,” he recalls. “It began to have mathematical meaning to me.” The sound and energy of a tenor-based quartet was a logical choice, and so Root Perspectives presents the first documented encounter between Dickey and master saxophonist Tony Malaby, along with one of Dickey’s closest associates, pianist Matthew Shipp, and the youngest of the group, agile and inventive bassist Brandon Lopez.

Dickey began exploring this enigmatic Coltrane angle on Peace Planet (AUM Fidelity, 2019) by the TAO Quartet with Shipp, bassist William Parker and altoist Rob Brown. On Root Perspectives, Dickey explains, he strove to flesh it out in more detail:

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RECORD LABEL: TAO Forms

ALBUM: Root Perspectives

RELEASE DATE: October 21, 2022

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