Ball of Wax 63 Songs: Datura Blues – Silence for the Apple

With “Silence for the Apple,” the sprawling, long-lived collective known as Datura Blues brings us a brief, percussive meditation, created during a 20th-anniversary (!) improvisational retreat in the pre-Covid days of late 2019. It is noteworthy that six musicians contributed to this work, and yet it never feels crowded or overly busy. The percussionists work together as one to create a steady heartbeat for Sarah Jean Hart’s flute to impart its melodic wisdom. Once this rhythmic bed has been established, the flute slowly makes itself know, gradually adding more notes, climbing up and scaling down, reassuringly returning to the root note established at the beginning. Having said what it needs to say, the flute finishes its thought and the percussion ensemble gradually drops out, winnowing, all too soon, to nothing. This is the kind of piece that would work equally well as a ten to thirty minute immersive soundscape, but given that this volume of Ball of Wax contains about exactly as much music as I can fit on a CD, in this instance I appreciate the brevity.