FROM THE LINER NOTES:

Sun Ra once famously described himself as a “sound scientist.” That wasn’t so much a stylistic label as the description of an attitude and a methodology. The music of guitarist Eric Hofbauer, bassist Scott Barnum, and saxophonist Jeremy Udden doesn’t sound a bit like the music of Saturn’s greatest cultural ambassador, but they certainly share his limitless curiosity about the alchemical transformation of sound into art, his fascination with putting the musical elements together in new ways to see what novel compounds they can create.

Of course, good science and good art must withstand the test of time. The chemistry among the musicians on the two sessions included on this set, from 2000 and 2006, resulted in music that passed that test. Perhaps that’s why these discs were selected to launch Creative Nation’s Hub Collection series of historic and previously unissued performances.

Science is a process of investigation, a way to examine phenomena and test ideas. In the best empirical tradition, ideas emerge from observation, you watch, draw conclusions or formulate ideas, and then test your ideas to see if they are true. An analogous process of methodical investigation leavened with intuitive connection is at work on Cause and Effect. It’s the art and science of improvising music together.

If music is the subject of their sound science investigations, then performance is their fieldwork and the CD represents their theory about the music. For Hofbauer and Barnum, the structure of The Cause and the titles of the improvisations on it arose out of the music itself. They probed into the molecular structure of their improvisations and found its elemental building blocks. After listening to the music, they assigned each improvisation an element from the periodic table that seemed to them to embody the same qualities as the music. When they assembled the CD, they created a chain of tracks—a molecular structure, if you will—of two improvisations preceding one composition, a pattern that echoes the H2O structure of water. They in effect, set a chain reaction of associations in motion.

The Effect was recorded seven years before The Cause, in 2000.This is a straight re-issue of an out-of-print CD by the trio of Hofbauer, Barnum, and saxophonist Jeremy Udden, all of whom at the time were recently graduated from NEC. Udden went on to play with Boston-based big band Either/Orchestra before heading to New York in 2005, where he currently leads his Torchsongs and Plainville ensembles. This early experiment by the three sound scientists is student work in the highest possible sense. It is the work of accomplished players who are humble enough to know how much there is to learn about improvising. (In fact, they would probably agree that even today, they are still students of the music.) The musicians they drew inspiration from—Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, Lennie Tristano—are very much present in the music, along with the musical personalities and concerns of the members of the band. The jazz musician is always a work in progress and this recording captures a particularly important moment in the progress of all three.