Calculated Gestures is by a group of veteran musicians from the Pacific Northwest who experiment with a gamut of sounds, using complex hip-hoppish beats on "XoBoX," snaky Indian melodies on "Vindaloo" and minimalist phrase repetition on "Oregonian Monkey Chant." These pieces often have the piano, bass, and drums locking into angular and fragmented rhythms while saxophonist Barber picks his way through on the top like he's climbing over barbed wire.
It isn't all angles and spikes. Some tracks flow more. "Zigtuno" is a rocking Latin melody where Barber really gets to fly on tenor, "10 to 5" features a surprising slab of boogie woogie piano from Anschell taken at a slightly slowed tempo with Barber wailing in front of him, and "Prismic" is a stuttering funk melody that Barber navigates nicely on soprano. Barber and Anschell are the obvious standouts for finding so much music in all these knotty rhythms, but Doug Miller and Byron Vannoy also deserve some credit for creating all these tricky underpinnings in the first place. Together these musicians have created a dense but listenable piece of Jazz modernism.