**1/2 Joe McPhee/Johnny McLellan duo

GRAND MARQUIS

(Boxholder)

This pairing of free-jazz saxophone veteran Joe McPhee and young Boston-area drummer Johnny McLellan results in some maddeningly elliptical improvisations. McPhee's tenor mixes a burly, vibrato-heavy tone with graceful phrasing, dynamic variety, and a perfect balance of power and sensitivity. McLellan has his own ideas about orchestrating the components of his trap set and rarely approaches anything straight on. His idiosyncratic phrasing, irregular accents, and skewed elaborations of ideas and tempos give him a original voice on the drum kit, and it all makes for an oddly balanced pairing. McPhee's ecstatic, convoluted lines, alternately moaning and roaring vocal inflections, and big tone often overwhelm McLellan, who seems content either to defer to his elder and act as backdrop or to follow independent or only tangentially related ideas of his own. The drummer's spare snare taps, hi-hat ticks, hollow tom-tom rumbles, and sudden cymbal splashes follow one after the other in succession, sometimes corresponding to McPhee's phrases, more often not. The tempos are uniformly slow, which allows McPhee to concentrate on shading his huge tone and crafted unified statements while McLellan pays careful attention to dynamics, tone color, and linear progression. But for much of the disc, the connection between the two is difficult to perceive. They sound like two strangers intent on their own tasks rather than two friends engaged in a close exchange of ideas and feelings.

-- Ed Hazell

(Joe McPhee and Johnny McLellan perform this Sunday, March 5, at Green Street Grill. Call 876-1655.)