TALES OF KINGS  Release Review 

"The songs of Tales of Kings by Neon Egypt are first-take improvisations. Yet out of the potential for chaos indigenous to such spontaneity, Harrison Goldberg on soprano, tenor, and alto sax, and Steven Miller on his resonant, one-of-a-kind Shendai Ceremonial Drums travel a purposeful, though curvilinear journey. The languid flight of a singular bird, an ibis perhaps, coursing desert nights from Alexandria to Luxor, then on to Khartoum and Kampala. The music is the tone poem migration of sensibilities, as if the Nile could flow through Chicago.  

"The album's whole personifies a timeless river tumbling over ancient stones, or the early a.m. negotiations of a big city's streets, as if mood indigo resided in civilization's crucible. It possesses azure meditations, scarlet musings, golden speculations, each aspiring to discovery in a world of slate gray-green melancholy. It wears textures velvet to worn corduroy. It exudes an allure of rhythm that manifests the seduction of danger.  

"Goldberg and Miller handle their instruments in a way that accesses that subconscious place where only competent genius goes. Though there is a sense of lament on the wilderness they've chosen to traverse, never are they lost, struggling to find a way back to or out of any improvisation. There are in Harrison's work rare whiffs of Paul Desmond and Pharoah Sanders (Nejd) or Joao Gilberto (Triamorous), but never more than a speculated moment. He never massages any riff for that riff's sake. Miller's drumming elicits an African-ness, but never succumbs to overt ethnic references. The stage is theirs equally, as in Night of the Lotus, where Harrison's harmonic dissonance cruises inside and at half the pace of Miller's kinetic beat. It is being within non-being: a place where one senses, even at the end, that the music never stopped." 

-- Sandy Thompson, Director of Development, Plains Art Museum