Paul Wertico's Mideast/Midwest Alliance

”One of the most experimental acoustic drummers around, the former Pat Metheny backer offers 18 tenuously linked tracks of bleating sax, knotty guitar, boffo synths, and sundry rhythmic statements… Multiple music voices are accompanied by freer-than-free rhythms that nonetheless feel deliberate and coolly measured. Sometimes beautiful, other times tense or just plain spooky, ‘Impressions of a City’ ought to go some way toward correcting the dubious reputation of avant-garde music.”
- -Drum! Magazine, January 2010.

”Between the jungly atmosphere of “What Should I Wear Today” and the quirky shredding within “Word Salad”, Wertico and friends include enough elements to please both picky jazz purists and rock fans alike, mixing hardcore distortion on the axe with synths, saxes, and the ambient soundscape. So pretty standard stuff, as far as insane avant-garde recording sessions with legendary fusion-jazz drummers go”
-A.V.Club, The Onion.

- The A.V. Club (The Onion)

”… a wildly unpredictable journey into one man’s apparently inexhaustible sonic imagination. Weird electronic effects, straight-ahead jazz, scorching blues, rock-tinged guitar wails, ambient sounds of the city – it’s all there on the CD… the CD unfolds with a grandeur and over-arching shape that would lead you to conclude vast amount of planning had gone into it… [That the album was completely improvised] helps explain the vitality and spontaneity of the recording but not its high degree of instrumental detail or its sense of cascading climaxes and resolutions. In effect, “Impressions of a City” captures the frenetic, too-many-things-happening-at-once sense of an urban metropolis, expressed in the language of jazz and its many off-shoots… a rare combination of jazz tradition and anything-goes experimentation. The miracle is that the two fuse so easily in a recording that spans 18 tracks but unfolds as if it’s one, rip-roaring epic.”
- -Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune, November 2009.

”Replete with crash, clatter and soundscapes of all stripes, Paul Wertico’s newly formed Mid-East/Mid-West Alliance takes a sonically engrossed look at the modern city via a day-in-the-life motif… the record meshes Eastern and Western tones in exploring the anxiety-enriched landscape we call modern life… Wertico ends the record the way Bob Dylan is prone to do after serving up heaps of distress, with a shrug of the shoulders and a joke: “Good Night and Good Luck.” This is musical narrative at its finest. A fanfare for the common (and mechanistically exploited) 21st century man and woman.” - -Matt Marshall, JazzInside NY, November 2009.

”Every Wertico album possesses, to some extent, free improvisation, making the completely spontaneous ‘Impressions of a City’ an inevitable progression… an hour-long suite that’s truly only experienced as a singular entity… Far from an easy listen, ‘Impressions of a City’ remains a compelling one. Closing in on nearly a decade since his departure from Pat Metheny Group, it’s time to stop thinking about Wertico in that context, and recognize him as a stylistically unbound, improvisationally intrepid player, composer and – as important as either on ‘Impressions of a City’ – conceptualist.” - -John Kelman, All About Jazz, December 2009.

”… a soundtrack waiting for a film… This is the soundtrack I suspect Hieronymus Bosch would have written had he been a modern composer watching the news… Despite the sometimes nightmarish and chaotic nature, the level of musicianship never ceases to attain a high level. Moulder and Rabin handle the guitars with exuberance, Markovitch soars on saxes, while Wertico himself plays at times like a dervish possessed by his own personal demons looking to break free… Peters provides some chewy bass, synths, violin and an assortment of unusual instruments and sounds, while Rabin’s loops and sounds also add layers of texture to the overall atmosphere. Haunting and memorable, ‘Impressions of a City’ is an engaging musical experiment and one that is highly unique.”
- -Brad Walseth, JazzChicago.net, November 2009.

”4 ½ Stars! ’Impressions of a City’ is an incredibly sharp release… there is a lot more hidden there than just what an initial listen may offer… Both players from Marbin make a very distinctive contribution… It’s like having a band within a band… The harmony of the players is what makes this very orchestral… ‘Impressions of a City’ is a combination of beauty and disturbance. Musically the album is reflective of life itself in a soundtrack sort of way. It’s a record with more than one heart.”
- -Mark Kadzielawa, 69 Faces of Rock, January 2010

”The music on this album is like nothing you’ve heard recently… these five musicians had never worked as one unit before stepping into the studio, where they improvised everything you hear on this disc… Wertico and company have constructed a panoramic palette of tonal colors and sonic designs, a broad wash of landscape imagery and topographical detail and deep-fathom waves (and even a little smoke-and-mirrors). His instincts remain intact: this quintet of collision, patched together on a whim, achieves the unity of purpose that Wertico imagined – even without preparation or rehearsal. As they’ve done on the trio’s previous recordings, Moulder and Peters manage to give themselves over to the music without subsuming their own unique personae; meanwhile, the new guys add a stream of fresh ideas, renewing the well from which this music springs. Holding it all in his remarkably strong hands is Wertico himself, one of the most energetic, inventive, and masterful drummers in any genre, on one of the most impressively spontaneous albums you’ll find on this planet – or any other.”
- Neil Tesser (from the liner notes)

4.5 Stars

"What makes the music work is not only that Wertico is not content to just "play it straight" as a drummer but that his skills as a conceptualist/leader may be even greater, helping to create a compelling, and not all together scattershot series of musical surprises." - John Ephland, Downbeat Magazine, March 2010