Between composition and spontaneity

The list of people to whom various tracks are dedicated on this album, which so joyfully crosses all kinds of shores, already indicates how wide-ranging Day & Taxi's interests and connections are. They range from Jack Bruce, once bassist in the rock trio Cream, which redefined the terms "loud" and "hard", to Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and Zurich painter Corinne Güdemann, to New York experimental impresario Kip Hanrahan. Day & Taxi was formed around three decades ago by the two saxophonists Christoph Gallio and Urs Blöchlinger. Since then, intensive creative periods with various trio formations have alternated with longer periods of silence. After Devotion (2019) is Run, the Darkness Will Come! the second album in Gallio's line-up with Silvan Jeger (double bass, shrutibox, voice) and Gerry Hemingway (drums, percussion). While the 37-year-old multi-instrumentalist Jeger is also involved in ambient and pop music and is a member of the Reto Suhner Quartet in addition to the group Uassyn, the discography of Hemingway (born in 1955) includes almost 200 works with Anthony Braxton (whose quartet he was a member of for eleven years), Marilyn Crispell, Don Byron and John Cale, for example.

The program begins with the title track, whose loosely swinging bass riff is cleverly dissected in a first solo. Hard on its heels follows Gallio's first flight of fancy, inexorably driven forward by virtuoso drumming, which comes up with a fresh detail with practically every bar, without ever forgetting the crisp beat. The piece provides the pattern for the longer compositions in that the musicians always and everywhere draw from the full, but never get stuck in the cerebral with all their virtuosity. The pieces are based on Gallio's compositions, which, however, leave plenty of room for improvisation. The spectrum of moods is impressive. From the playful R. F. it goes beyond the almost rock highlight Ego Killer to the meditative, 57 seconds long Infinite Sadness and the brooding, brooding sound of a mysterious "drone" underneath Too Much Nothing. The album's rich diversity is all the more astonishing given that it was created in just two days in June 2021 in the Baden studio of Gallio's record label Percaso.

Interspersed between the pieces, almost like commas and dots, are succinct short poems by authors such as Thorsten Krämer and Steve Delachinsky. The writer of these lines can do less with that. However, this does not detract from the enjoyment of the fireworks of the exchange between three gifted artists.