Paul Flaherty / Chris Corsano

You can get plenty of noise out of a suped-up guitar, a laptop or a jackhammer, but as Flaherty and Corsano show, you can’t beat the raw sax and drums format if you want to hear musicians crashing against every sonic, emotional and physical barrier they can find. Flaherty’s a Santa Claus-bearded saxophonist who’s been part of the free jazz underground since the 1970s; since 1998 he’s been working with the much younger Corsano, once memorably described as "a jackrabbit on crack” (he’s been known to lash at his kit with fist, feet and head in mid-performance). The eardrum-scraping, body-shaking uproar they make is all the more intense for the close-listening dialectics of their approach: they function at a level of split-second dialogue and attention to detail that makes most mainstream jazz sound like it’s on autopilot.