Review: Lina Allemano Four’s ‘The Diptychs’

Give the devil of algorithmic media its due for knowing things about you that you never suspected. Who knew, for instance, that Japanese woodworking videos were an obsession lying dormant in my mind, waiting to be activated? Even though I am hopeless with a tool in my hand—or perhaps because of it—I found these little three-act dramas irresistible. Blocks of wood are lovingly, patiently and imaginatively shaped, then glide together at the end, the fulfillment of an imaginative plan artfully executed. Lina Allemano has done something like that with The Diptychs (Lumo, 2025).

The trumpeter’s latest is essentially a concept record as a series of three pairs of compositions with each pair a play of opposites. The opening “Positive” is a bouncy line that devolves into something like the unstructured free play that a group of children might invent on the spot. Its opposite party, “Negative,” announces itself with a dramatic, overture-like flourish and alternates a descending, thirty-second-note minor-key line with long tones, that eventually collapses into grinding, fog-bound gloom.

“Resist” is a tone poem of Hegelian dialectics in microcosm, a pulsing, unison concert C sharp from Allemano’s trumpet and Brodie West’s alto saxophone against a vaguely martial second melody. The two eventually come together in uneasy concord. The theme is picked up in “Coalesce,” which, after a slow introduction over a triple-meter feel, gains in speed. It is a flywheel spinning up into busy, Raymond Scott-like chatter over Nick Fraser’s brushes.  It’s compromise, not complete agreement, an illustration of the process, not the result.

The final pair returns to a favorite subject of Allemano’s: food. The Allemano Four released Vegetables in 2021, six—that number again—compositions from the greengrocer’s shelves. This time, it’s eggs, first “Scrambled,” a slow piece that starts with bassist Andrew Downing’s arco sawing. It is followed by “Over Easy., a nearly ten minute piece that eats up almost a quarter of the album’s run time. In sound and structure, it recalls Tim Berne’s early bands with Herb Robertson. A six-note cycling figure is given a quick fry followed by a slow-cooked central passage. Once flipped, the band turns up the head and the egg sizzles and pops with Fraser’s all-kit clatter. Order up!

If all this sounds overly intellectualized and determined, it’s not. There’s a freewheeling playfulness present in every moment, and this chordless quartet, one of the most venerable in Allemano’s trans-Atlantic collection of ensembles, is the perfect vehicle for it.

Still, there’s a special pleasure in encountering a recording that states its premise then delivers on it with clarity, coherence and honesty. It’s the joy one finds in recalling an obscure word that completes a crossword puzzle. Or in selecting a wine and finding that it’s the perfect complement to a great meal (vegetables, perhaps?). When the recording does so with wit and lightly worn intelligence, the pleasure is doubled.

‘The Diptychs’ is out now on Lumo Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp.

Tracklist:    Positive; Negative; Resist; Coalesce; Scrambled; Over Easy.

Personnel:  Lina Allemano (trumpet), Brodie West (saxophone), Andrew Downing (bass), Nick Fraser (drums).

Photo credit: Claire Harvie