Boustrophedon (In Six Furrows) was recorded in Munich during September of 2004 — immediately following the night Roscoe Mitchell recorded Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 & 3. What the two recordings have in common is that they were both created using a transatlantic group of musicians, some of whom played on both dates. This disc was conceived as its counterpart. The group here is an interesting one: it consists of Evan Parker and his longtime mates and partners in crime Paul Lytton, Barry Guy, Philipp Wachsmann, and John Rangecroft. It also features Mitchell and his brilliant Note Factory quartet with Craig Taborn, Tani Tabbal, and Jaribu Shahid, with other friends such as Anders Svanoe, Neil Metcalfe, Corey Wilkes, Nils Bultmann, and Marcio Mattos — all told, a 14-piece orchestra. Parker, who composed this music and conducts, is featured here on soprano. Like Mitchell's offering, this is a music based on strategies, as the title would suggest. Boustrophedon is a Greek word meaning "turning like an ox while plowing" — hence, the word "furrows" in the title. In fact, Parker quotes a beautiful passage from Samuel Beckett's The Expelled that offers its own explanation by trying to count stairs adequately first by climbing up and then again when walking down. The music here moves in much the same way, with vertical ascent and descent according to innate scalar challenges and horizontally in both directions as well. Textural elements, tonal colors by the different combination