Bruce Arnold's work, at its best, combines spontaneous flare and ingenuity with rigorous discipline and powerful intellect. His debut, Blue Eleven, was wildly inventive and rewarding in its approach to modern jazz composition. Arnold draws much of his inspiration from twelve-tone composers like Schoenberg as well as more die-hard serialists like Babbitt. The resulting head-on collision between freedom and restriction was what most impressed me about Blue Eleven, and A Few Dozen is the next logical step. It's more assured, more at ease and yet in many ways more stringent in its intellectualism. Whereas Eleven offered a disparate range of styles, from strange eleven-bar blues forms to straight-ahead art songs, on Dozen Arnold seems to have settled into his sound, which is modern jazz structured with serialist techniques. There are many powerhouse tracks on this disc, but my favorite is the haunting opus "Numbers". It is split into two parts, a prelude and a piece-proper. The prelude establishes a distinct, brooding mood. Its washy synth pads gain forward motion thanks to the momentum of a pulsing tabla rhythm. When the piece-proper begins, a subdued bassline mumbles dejectedly, underpinned by sporadic, spastic percussion hits. In short order a sparse, angular guitar phrase establishes itself as a sort of structural base from which Arnold engages in his flights of melodic fury. This piece works so well because Anold's bandmates, bassist Ratzo B. Harris and drummer Tony Moreno, know how to stay out of his way and let him fly. They support, accentuate and provide context for Arnold's driving, spontaneous forays. Tracks like this represent Bruce Arnold at his deeply communicative and rewarding best! I sincerely applaud him for his inventive and innovative approach to jazz composition.