Cumulous

On the two albums he's made with his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, Toward the Margins and the new Drawn Inward (both just released, strangely, on ECM), Parker, Guy, Lytton, and violinist Phil Wachsmann improvise cumulous swirls of sound that get processed by electronicists Lawrence Casserley, Walter Prati, and Marco Vecchi and then folded back into the din--yet the saxist's grainy, concentrated melodic tendrils and patiently etched arcs are immediately recognizable.

The opportunity offered in the film-like cirrus clouds, which so frequently lie as the background to the more positive forms of the cumulous, for securing the oppositional feeling, is one frequently adopted by sky painters.

Far off on the horizon the cumulous clouds lay with level under-ridges, their upper outlines softly heaped in pearly lights and shades of dun and gray.

Along its eastern margin rises the mighty Sierra, miles in height, reposing like a smooth, cumulous cloud in the sunny sky, and so gloriously colored, and so luminous, it seems to be not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.