Jazz
Mahakala Music · 24 September 2026
“Memory Is Subjective” is one whole night: on 12 October 2025, at the 210 Gallery and Art Center in Sandstone, Minnesota, saxophonist Nathan Hanson and drummer Steve Hirsh played three long improvisations — sixteen, eighteen and sixteen minutes — and Mahakala Music put them out exactly as they came on 24 September, numbered I, II and III. Hanson plays soprano on the first and switches to tenor for the other two. Caleb Paul Anderson recorded, mixed and mastered it, and the cover art is by Lara Hanson.
In fifty minutes of saxophone and drums there is not a single argument. The format drags a tradition of combat behind it — Coltrane with Rashied Ali, Paul Flaherty with Chris Corsano, Ingrid Laubrock with Tom Rainey — and it never shows up here: Hirsh doesn’t argue with any of the directions Hanson proposes, he goes along with them, finds the pulse each stretch asks for and lets the gesture stretch out. The switch from soprano to tenor between the first improvisation and the second is the only real turn the record makes, and even that doesn’t move it out of the same register. Hirsh can argue when he wants to: with Joel Futterman he answers with the same intensity he’s handed. Here he deliberately does the other job. The recording helps, because it places the listener closer to that night’s audience than to the two musicians.
Seen from the other side, that same decision costs the record something. A duo that systematically refuses friction is refusing the one thing this format can do and no other can, and the result is that the record’s intensity is always of the same kind: the intensity of concentration. Fifty minutes of sustained concentration is a lot, and there’s nothing inside the album to measure it against — no moment where the two players head somewhere different — so what ends up holding the attention is the trust between them, which is admirable, but it never quite becomes an argument.
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Aina Torrents