William Parker continues to go beyond the status quo on Raining on the Moon, his second offering in labelmate Matthew Shipp’s Blue Series. Known mostly to a coterie of specialists in a niche field of avant-garde bass players, Parker’s discography represents his enormous value to the new avant-garde movement of the 21st century. His works of progression get better with each offering, and this time around Parker departs from his previous solo albums and collaborations to team with vocalist Leena Conquest. As lead singer on six songs, Conquest reflects the avant-garde black folk art that Parker emanates from a bassist’s perspective. She applies her splendid vocal colorings to his spirituality and musical visions and freely melds with the ensemble’s riveting stretches. Along with Rob Brown on alto and flute, Lewis Barnes playing a very cool trumpet on “Old Tears,” and Hamid Drake on drums, Parker’s basslines exchange and transform the compositions into textured applications of free jazz, loaded with unfamiliar improvisations and shifting between crisp and blunt and through blues, bop, and free. Raining on the Moon further reveals Parker’s aurally taut and riveting art in beguiling chromatic abstractions whose radical simplicity articulated the fundamentals of avant-garde bass playing back in 1972, when he became the bass player of choice among such free jazz icons as Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry, Sunny Murray, and Milford Graves and later with the amazing pianist Cecil Taylor. With this recording, Parker continues to offer appealing new perspectives on the free style of jazz and exceeds the harmonic ingenuity of his Blue Series debut, Painter’s Spring. – Paula Edelstein