PETER EVANS & MIKE PRIDE
A Window, Basically
Review
15
January, 2026
By: Khagan Aslanov
Photo: Artist,s concession
In&OutJazz Magazine Review. A Window, Basically (Relative Pitch Records, 2025). Peter Evans – Trumpet (1-6) & Piccolo Trumpet (7). Mike Pride – Drumset, Percussion & Autoharp
It’s easy to love A Window, Basically. After all, for people who prefer their music to disrupt and eviscerate structural boundaries, this album exemplifies several decisive aspects. The havoc-prone, omnivorous palettes of trumpeter Peter Evans and percussionist Mike Pride show that the hallowed corners of New York’s avant-jazz scene still run deep. And Relative Pitch Records proves that, over the years, it has built itself into a veritable bastion of experimentalism, repping some of the most amazing talent around.
Listeners have already had the privilege of witnessing the deep rapport coursing between the Pride and Evans (as well as bassist Tim Dahl) in 2015’s Pulverize the Sound. A Window, Basically shows that nothing in that symphonic bond has diminished in the decade that ensued – Pride and Evans slide, easy as anything, into a tight resonant groove, full of communal knots and angular visceral turns.
Kicking off with “Substance X,” Pride unleashes a complex tangle of tonal manipulation and staccato fits, creating sheets of bedrock that are equidistant from cohesion and fracture. Evans locks in smoothly, weaving in and out, his playing by turns plaintive and combustible, lyrical then fragmentary. At a modest tempo, they set a teasingly restrained start to the implosion of sound to come.
That tantric moment is carried over as “Substance T” begins slinking off its layers. The gradual build creates a hanging tension and sustained dialogue between the players, and the dense clusters Evans lets loose here are an indelible pleasure
“Substance Z,” the centerpiece of the album, is a wonder. Here, Pride and Evans seem to relish the silent stretches, giving each other plenty of room to step in to drive the tempo. The ensuing patience, punctuated by metallic autoharp coruscations, and intermittently snapped in half by chaotic inserts, is a radiant masterpiece, perhaps the best example this year, of how crucial spatial awareness is to a well-formed musical statement.
So it goes on A Window, Basically, a near-hermetic collection of avant-garde variations, jagged and mournful, a congregation of beauty in sound. Plenty can be said here – how Evans and Pride manage to induce an orchestral feeling as a mere duo. How remarkable the stark, clarified sound they achieve is, sharp-lined and crystalline. How the sinister ambience and piercing piccolo tones of closer “Substance P” leave you with a pleasant itch that lasts long after the record finishes playing. How, taken in one sitting, this record becomes a dizzying and endlessly morphing assemblage of tone and mood.
What’s simpler to state is that A Window, Basically gives you exactly what you need when you sit down to listen to music that strives for something higher than composition – two people, at the peak of their powers, doing exactly what they were born to do.
