Kevin Kastning & Carl Clements - A Far Reflection

Last year, I championed one of the most mind-blowing guitarist and one of his albums entitled Otherworld last year on Music from the Other Side of the Room. This year, he’s released album number 21 and his fourth time collaborating with woodwind artist Carl Clements. Carl Clements plays Tenor/Soprano Saxophone, Alto Flute, and Bansuri Flute. 

He received a BM in 1987 for Jazz Composition and Arranging at the Berklee College of Music, a year of study that he completed 26 years ago in the DMA Program in World Music at the New England Conservatory, an PhD in Ethnomuiscogology in 2010 from the CUNY Graduate center on his dissertation of Pannal Ghosh and the Bansuri in the Twentieth Century.

Alongside Kevin Kastning, Clements himself has performed and recorded with people such as Sundan Shor, Jean-Yves Jung, Ed Byrne’s Latin Jazz Evolution and Alex Syndman. He’s also released four albums with Crosscurrent and performed in festivals including Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Thailand, New York, and Boston to name a few. Now I’m very new to Carl Clements’ music, but for me when I listened to A Far Reflection, it’s a surreal twist between the music of Free Jazz, Avant-Garde, Droning, World, Chamber, and Classical Music.

It has a dark cavernous atmosphere that makes you feel that you are wondering the sounds of a haunted abandoned house. You can almost hear a pin drop the moment something had gone wrong inside the house. The music really hits you hard and both Clements and Kastning are setting the tone and scenery of what is going through with 11 compositions that they wrote and clocking in at 70 minutes and 59 seconds.

With Carl’s sound on the Woodwind and the Flutes, I can hear the aspects of Lol Coxhill, Gheorghe Zamfir, Didier Malherbe (Gong), and Mel Collins of King Crimson (Lizard-era). It sends chills down my spine the moment I put the CD on and played it all the way from start to finish. The two of them gave me a chill throughout the entire album. It was almost as if something had crawled on the back of my neck with a tingling chill down to the bone.

Clements nails it down, but he and Kevin are a team so it’s a rivalry, but more of a collaboration and honor that they have between the two of them. The development on here is the sequences that is powerful, emotional, sinister, and raw. All in all, this is another achievement for both Kevin Kastning and Carl Clements. I hope one day, they might do a film score together.

If you love Free Jazz, Neo-Classical Music, Chamber Music, and World Music, then delve into the deep, dark  and hidden caves of A Far Reflection.