Anne Mette Iversen’s Double Life: So Many Roads

Chamber classical meets the Brooklyn jazz underground in a Scandinavian recording studio: such is the eclectic nature of contemporary improvised music. Danish bassist and composer Anne Mette Iversen's So Many Roads, a suite for jazz quintet and string quartet, might once have been called "third stream". But jazz is so omnivorous these days that the stream has long since overflowed its banks and flooded the plains around it. Iversen's intelligent writing for the strings, and their integration with the quintet, suggest a musician trying to break down the barriers between written and improvised music. It's still the latter, particularly from saxophonist John Ellis and pianist Danny Grisett, that impresses here. annemetteiversen.com