Mick Rossi, Songs from the Broken Land (Orange Mountain Music)

A good question: just what kind of music IS this, for pity's sake? Is it jazz? Is it some kind of ultra-hip downtown classical music that knows its Cage and Nancarrow and Cowell (not to mention its Reich and Glass, for whose latter music Rossi is the regular pianist)? Listen to RossI's prepared piano on "My Old Kentucky Home" to give you some idea what a pixilated spirit you're dealing with here. On the other hand, listen to the formidably propulsive and percussive piano technique evinced all through this disc to understand how wild it really is. "The mandate here," Rossi writes, "was to follow a whim to create something good, bad, silly or otherwise ã as long as it retained a level of rawness through no or minimal preparation." As cool an improvised postmodern piano disc as you're likely to hear, from Glass' own label. Four Stars (J.S.)