Wire Magazine Review
JASON STEIN'S LOCKSMITH ISIDORE A Calculus of Loss
Clean Feed Records 2008

This intriguingly named project – Isidore was Stein’s grandfather – isn’t the jolly klezmer-flavoured project you might have been led to expect, but a mostly quiet and thoughtful examination of melodic, textural and timbral ideas. At one level, it’s a version of the sax/bass/drums trio, but translated to bass clarinet, the soft plunk of Kevin Davis’s cello, and Mike Pride’s restless but unhurried examination of struck surfaces. As Pride hits his cymbals on “Nurse Ellen”, over an accelerating and urgent dialogue between the other two, it sounds as if he might be reaching for the beats that would propel the whole thing into a rolling ostinato. The irregular pulse is held,  though, and the rest of the record proceeds in a similar way, teasing (as on “That’s Not A Closet” and “Caroline And Sam”) with a regular pulse but never quite delivering it. There’s a Dolphyish moment on “Miss Izzy” (is he thinking about “Miss Ann”?) when Stein starts into a jackdaw groove, but it unexpectedly comes back to earth, leaving Davis to play a virtuoso solo over a weird shuffle beat.

-Brian Morton, Wire Magazine, May 2008