A large ensemble recorded in two large rooms. Folk music, grooves,
and ballads. Available Jelly in transition. Featuring Russian 
pianist/accordionist Alexei Levin, bassist Eric Calmes, and 
multi-instrumentalist Gregg Moore.

Monuments features Moore the multi-instrumentalist, 
world-traveler and musical human-prism where every note, every 
gesture seems at once a refraction of its supposed source (most of 
Available Jelly's repertoire is inspired by the sounds of disparate 
places) and an expression of a propulsive avant-large ensemble 
sounding board where most individual elements are lost in a storm of 
collective musical free-play (as opposed to free-improv).

Available Jelly explodes freaky monster-movie-sounding themes 
into a clatter of the members' shrieks and bounces back foray into 
traditional Malagasy music transcribed by Moore. And interspersed 
elsewhere are bluegrass motifs spun out into this wacky ensemble's 
range, Peruvian musics heard and recast by trumpeter Eric Boeren into 
a dizzying, energetic cobble of times signatures and out-shots from 
various Jellies. The music is top-notch, especially at the dizzying 
paces at which most of these tunes are taken. But the music is 
astutely hinged on melodic development, no matter how wildly the 
non-soloing horns pull at the soloist's trajectories and the overall 
rhythmic cast.

Andy Bartlett, Cadence, September 1995

"" - Jazz Nu