Flood At The Ant Farm

Liner Notes

There are excellent solos here, not to mention levitating improvised duets on Johnston's (They) Call Me Daisy and his arrangement of Steve Lacy's Bone. This is music in which composition and improvisation overlap and the action is non stop.

The biting pitch of Johnston's soprano and his fanciful relationship to the beat tell you he's a Steve Lacy man, so perhaps it's fitting that Flood at the Ant Farm  begins and - almost - ends with Lacy numbers that, filtered through Johnston, reflect Lacy's own devotion to Thelonious Monk (with help from Hofstra, Johnston emphasizes their hopscotch beat).

Lacy also figures in the closing Hairline, a brief duet between Johnston and Ruddick excerpted from an unused take of Bone. "I was agonizing over which take to use", Johnston explains. "l ultimately went with the one that's on here, but I decided to use the duet from the other one as a kind of coda to the album because I liked it and felt it could stand alone."

As for the title: Bone led to"Bone Fragment", which (combined with the opening Hemline) led to "Hairline Fracture", which ultimately became just Hairline, because - as Johnston explains - "One of the things I find amazing about Lacy is that he still looks almost the same as he did on album jackets when he was twenty-five. The only difference you see is his airline slipping back a bit as the years go by".

Should give you some idea of Johnston' quick wit, on the off chance the music here hasn't given you ample idea already.

Francis Davis (excerpt from the sleeve notes)