25
February, 2026
By: Khagan Aslanov
Review from In&OutJazz Magazine. Reflection Distorts over Water (Relative Pitch Records, 2025). Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone – Marilyn Crispell, piano – Lesley Mok, drums.
From the very first minute of “Driving through Flood Water,” the opener of A Reflection Distorts over Water, the listener is led to enter a trance-like state, where all that is felt is abject beauty and the slightest brush of unease. “Flood Water” presents a prolonged reconciliation of mastery and patience, filled with vivid overtones and elliptical shapes. And just about the only thing you can feel through this induced trance, aside from your own pulse, is that the three players converging on this piece are locked into a single instinctual arc, their reciprocity briefly suspending them in time.
And what players they are!! The trio assembled here all occupy the upper strata of free improvisation – Argentine saxophonist Camila Nebbia and Brooklyn-based percussionist Lesley Mok are both perpetually ascending forces in the avant-garde, known for elastic and highly textural playing styles that favour open scores and extended techniques, respectively. And Marilyn Crispell would hardly need an introduction to anyone even remotely attuned to the experimental realm – the legendary pianist has stood at the forefront of improvised music for over four decades, and her virtuosic and highly incendiary playing has run the gamut of the volatile and dense (during her time as the harmonic lynchpin of the Anthony Braxton Quartet), to the distinctly lyrical embrace of negative spaces she explored in the latter half of her storied career.
A Reflection Distorts over Water, the trio’s debut in this formation, plays out like a series of tone poems, with the mood and playing styles of each piece reflecting its title, or vice versa. True to its name, “There is No Land” feels untethered and lost, a wandering quality that is largely projected through Nebbia’s tenor sax. Heavy on the altissimo, her pinched playing invokes the anxious sensation of facing vast unoccupied space.
On “Suspended Time,” Crispell unleashes a fragmentary matrix of tone clusters that brings to mind the visceral ferocity of Cecil Taylor. Mok splices in some spiky snare-work, and Nebbia alternates between sharp punctuation and painterly drags. The piece is a dizzying display of tension, with the trio varying their rhythms and tempos completely independent of each other, weaving together a strained wire that always feels like it’s about to snap.
On the stifling “A Room is Being Erased,” Nebbia employs a dampening technique, and though you can feel how intensely the saxophone is being played, it reaches you in choked, panicked gusts. This allows Crispell to float her crystalline playing to the forefront. And the gorgeous closer “Streamside” becomes the personification of fluid dynamics, the movement of water reflected in both the playing style of the trio, and the tonal quality achieved.
Despite its relatively curt length, the album packs an intense amount of technical exquisiteness, avant-grit and projected tactility into its runtime. As would be expected with the amount of talent gathered here, A Reflection Distorts over Water is an incredible foray into how both salvaging and oppressive texture can be. And as Mok, Nebbia and Crispell reach for this multitude again and again, with able hands and lungs, everything falls perfectly into place.
