Forward Energy is the baby of one Jim Ryan, who's self-described as "one of the last living poet/musicians of the Beat generation". When your most memorable achievement is decades-ago status as what amounts to a scenester hanger-on, it's safe to say that you're no Allen Ginsberg.

Where Are They? is a political free jazz record, and it makes Ryan's stance clear from the outset with song titles like "Humvee" and the title track, an eight-minute-ish spoken word rant about "power-wielding fiends" (the list of whom includes Bush and Nixon as well as Hitler, Stalin and Saddam). Now, I'm as liberal as the next unpaid music critic, but I can't help but point out that neither H.W.'s nor Dubya's death tolls have climbed into the millions (yet). Lumping these admittedly scary guys with the last century's most universally reviled dictators doesn't exactly increase Ryan's credibility as a political commentator. But then again, he's preaching to the choir.

"Lovely Desert", with elegant bowed contrabass and haunting flute, is a relieving follow-up to this aria of dissent. It's an oasis in Where Are They?'s heard-one-you've-heard-'em-all series of disjointed piano runs and aggravating saxophone and trumpet squawks. Like a lot of free music, Where Are They? has its moments... and the rest of it feels like standing (for just over an hour) outside five separate practice spaces, each containing a musician jamming away in blissful ignorance of what their neighbors are doing. By definition, improvisational music goes off on tangents... but the best improvisations gain some cohesion, somewhere. Where Are They? offers very little.