Misha Mengelberg “Berlin Solo 1987“ (self released, 2021)

In Italian and other languages, differently from French and English, the terms to indicate a musician ‘playing’ are different from that of an activity implying a game. Same with acting. This, in a way, is a distortion. Misha Mengelberg is a musician that, as Cecil Talyor would have put it, “can play”. But Mengelberg is a serious musician or one of those who love to come back to childhood as each one of us should?

During a concert in Italy, at the beginning of the new millennium, Mengelberg was, at a certain moment, singing like a child, almost out of tune – or indifferent to tune. You can find an interview about that performance at the following link – even if unluckily for you the interview it’s in Italian, but it’s only because I don’t want to be perceived as disrespectful.

Fact is that, Misha Mengelberg believed in music as John Cage believed in it. Music has a childish quality in itself, that is the sound of freedom. If Lou Reed said once that listening to music is like to be in your mother’s womb, with the drums mimicking your mother’s heartbeat, for centuries in the western world the rules of music were almost at the point of destroying the mother and the children, suffocating them with rules. 

Do you remember Chopin’s Nocturnes? I own a beautiful double CD with Maurizio Pollini playing that incredible music. But for Chopin’s contemporaries, that music was really only shit. Because it was music for piano, and the piano was the instrument where women were performing music at home. So, how some culturally evolved men were supposed to loose their time with things more suited for women?

Things are different nowadays, but even if concerts for piano solo are held in my city in prestigious theatres, there is a sacred quality with (classical) music that makes people like John Cage and Misha Mengelberg wanting to play with it, to disrupt that facade, that mask, and go deeper to the heart of both the musician and the listener. 

More prosaically, as I wrote four years ago one week after Misha Mengelberg died aged 81, our pianist was born in Ukranie in 1935, son of the Dutch conductor Karel Mengelberg. His family moved to the Netherlands in the late 1930s and the young Mengelberg started taking piano lessons at the age of five. Subsequently he studied architecture briefly before entering the Royal Conservatory at the Hague.

Influenced by Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and the above mentioned John Cage, Mengelberg in 1964 participated to a session of music with, among the others, drummer Han Bennink – who will become one of his lifetime collaborators – and multireedist Eric Dolphy, for the record of the latter titled “Last Date”. It’s like the perfect joining link between the US and Europe, as far as improvised music. 

As many of his peers and colleagues, Mengelberg recorded a huge variety of live performances. The one we refer in this review is a solo performance at piano coming from a cassette labeled as “17-18-4-88 berlijn solo”, but in fact it has been established that the record comes from a solo performance in 1987. The music is different from the assertions of the US free jazz and avant garde music from the 1960s and 1970s, you can smell something coming from Fluxus or european avant art and theatre. At the beginning.

The record is divided in four parts, two parts per set for a couple of sets, to be accurate, from 15 to 23 minutes each. At the beginning we can hear the piano has been prepared as Cage would do, but the music, spanning from the lower to the medium registries, becomes after a brief introduction a little excited just to come back to what it seems to be an attempt to create assertions who are interrupted, hammered, deconstructed. 

Finally the hummed monologue becomes like pearls whose fall resonates on the floor, then the perpared part of the piano comes in the foreground, with the strings hummed and dragged, then again we hear a small melody reminiscing some baroque music, just before an attempt to deconstruct the melody itself, just like Marc Ribot does sometimes with his guitar – it would be interesting to track how the two banks of the ocean have influenced each other and how.

At about minute 8 Mengelberg tries to mix some assertive chords with more subtle excursions on the keyboard, then for quite a while silence fill the room just before a come back to this mix of melody and humming, giving us that feeling possibly Roland Barthes was referring to in his La Chambre Claire when talking about the “punctus”. We go on with many permutations until the end of the first part of the section, not without some nice occasions to hear Mengelberg pressing, pushing and crushing, so to speak, his keys. 

Second part of the first section opens with a series of violent strumming on the lower registry of the piano, like we’re accustomed to listen to in Diamanda Galàs playing in her beautiful but haunting Defixiones, but instead of adding a raucous and grasping voice, at a certain point we hear another deconstructed melody – in fact it seems like a mix between a blues and a classical tune, which is no surprise since as a muisicologist pointed out in a recent number of the magazine Musica Jazz, Thelonious Monk himself was keen on taking inspiration from classical music for the blues pieces he wrote.

Obviously Mengelberg music isn’t devoid of more intimate, reflexive moments, but if the influence of Monk in these moments is clear and goes well beyond the quotation, which is present anyway, straight to the feeling of that music, one wonders, at a certain point, if it’s true that there are differences between the Western and the Eastern banks of the Atlantic, since the elements put to cook together seem to be almost the same. 

We’re at almost half of the second part and a deconstructed ragtime appears, magnificently interspersed with a strumming on the medium and upper registries. As far as it seems, the music of Mengelberg from the beginning of this album hits us because of the ability of his creator to put together different styles and different emotional temperatures giving us the feeling that something almost new is coming from that clash.

After a brief applause, the last ten minutes of this section are dedicated again to the music of Monk, but it’s a Monk that we still know revisited by Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron, and so it’s a Monk who lives of different interpretations, as his music would have gone well far beyond his creator’s death. Strumming on prepared chords occupy a consistent part of this section of the record, just before coming back to a deconstructed melody. 

If the first set was equally divided into ‘decostructing Baroque’ and ‘deconstructing Monk’, the second set sees Mengelberg engaging in an attempt to put his hands on the living matter of classical music interspersed with more modern experimentations, using a similar ‘method’ to the one described above – that’s why we don’t describe it almost second-by-second as we did before.

My advice today is to listen carefully to these sets, available through Bandcamp, because if it is true that on a first level the European Avant Garde music from the 1970s on is more keen on playing with the sound matter and how it has been hystorically defined, while the US Avant Garde is more keen on creating new shapes and forms – think about Braxton and Mitchell, at a deeper level you will find in fact similar concept in both – aren’t Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy from the US? 

And if there are different temperatures and general architectural concepts to differentiate the two currents, on a deeper level the bricks are the same, even if layered differently. I won’t loose time in affirming that, being mostly African-American the music coming from the US, it is more keen on illustrating how to survive in an hostile environment finding out the inner strenght to survive, while the European musicians find themselves more at ease with playing with culture and ideal constructions putting them out of context in order to see what they can become.

Because, in fact, in both cases the nucleus is an attempt to say something different from the mass thinking, the thinking of Power, in order to establish a new, spiritual order, that of freedom. And if Don Cherry encouraged Peter Brotzmann to go ahead with his music, we cannot let records like this unlistened, because their story is, mostly, our own story. A history of freedom, an attempt to a better life for each one, the search for new forms of music and life.

Camila Nebbia & Patrick Shiroishi “The Human Being as a Fragile Article” (Trouble In Mind, 2021)

Even if improvised music is a niche since it’s very beginning in the 1970s, nonetheless it gained attention in every part of the world – this is also the main reason this blog is written in English: to give the best visibility to this music to all the people interested in it – so different scenes rose up all over the world. In the past I wrote for All About Jazz about an avant garde scene in Istanbul, and few months ago I reviewed on this blog a CD collection of experimental music coming from Mexico.

But those of you who are more keen on tasting different dishes with their own ears maybe are familiar with musicians like Kaoru Abe and Yosuke Yamashita from Japan, as well as Ibrahim Maalouf from Lebanon or Vijay Iyer from India. So, what I’m gonna do with this article, is to present you a couple of younger improvisors who gave life this year to a beautiful cassette now out of print but available to your listenings through the Bandcamp website.

The first improvisor featured in this cassette, titled “The Human Being as a Fragile Article”, is multi-instrumentalist and activist Camila Nebbia. Nebbia comes from Buenos Aires, Argentina, but recently she has moved in Stockholm, Sweden. Devoted to free improvisation, electronic music and mixed media (mostly super 8 film, archives and digital video). Nebbia is co-creator and curator of a collective interdisciplinary group and of a concert series. 

In her website I can see a huge amount of artistic collaborations I’m completely new to, so I think I’ll map them in the future. Her artistic companion in this cassette issued very recently is Patrick Shiroishi, a Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Los Angeles who, this year, has released other different and interesting material: from Hidemi, a solo album where he give life to a tribute to his father, also musician, Hidemi Shiroishi, through a multi-layered instrumental construction, to the more approachable album Natsukashii where he leads a quartet.

It’s not easy to find out resources on similar musicians along the World Wide Web and this is the reason I think it’s important to document their music in spaces like this one. Let’s start with the music, so. The first piece is called Un Nino Llamado Cuervo, opened by distorted saxophones intertwined the one to the other creating an intimate, meditative but urgent atmosphere. The second piece, El Ser Human Como Un Articulo Fragil, the title track, sees the spoken part introducing every sonorous fragment more linked to the music, which is a little bit more lyrical making me think about some of the early Braxton compositions. 

Al Costado De Los Recuerdos, with its seven minutes, its small percussions, bells, pre-recorded birds, crossed by a ghostly, delicate melody and some interspersed scratches. Olvido is introduced by small metal percussions and voice, bringing the horns in the background at the very beginning before a more peer to peer dialogue, while Mi Pies Son Tan Fuertes Como Mì Corazon is constructed on small blows and again a spoken part in the background. Mentiras y Silencio is based on continuous, subtle but assertive little lines on the horns with fragments of field recordings giving life to something I can visualize as a fire burning around the horns themselves.

El Espacio Entre El Lenguaje features percussions, horns and an almost far away chant, whereas the following short Terra Seca and Apagar El Televisor are based respectively on faster saxophone lines – again, derivative from Braxton language as far as I can hear – and squealing, honking horns remembering some experimental stuff from the 1990s of John Zorn. Finally, it’s the turn of the longest composition/improvisation on the cassette, the more than 11 minutes long Mientras El Cisne Blanco Se Eleva Al Cielo, No Deja Rastros Acà Abajo, full of raucous notes, shorter, deconstructed statements, meditative atmospheres, fragments of voice, of pre-recorded sounds like the resonating sounds of a Sitar, other effects, giving me the impression I was right in finding an inner atmosphere to the music I was listening from the beginning. 

In a way, listening to this music, I found myself at the far left of a spectrum of experimentation based in a world full of TV series pretending to give us instruments to our thoughts, and struggling and revolts who don’t resonate that much in our Western media, asking myself if I’m dreaming when I think of this music as derivative from a well defined ‘fire’ but more keen on looking at a well determined inner space. Obviously, we can say that starting from your inner self is the best way to rise up your own consciousness, but I miss that highly formal experimental statements from the 1970s as a way of telling the world ‘the hell with your common sense and wisdom, I’ll fight for a wider - and not a better – world’.

I’m not saying this music has a too much confrontational quality. It is confrontational and experimental as far as this world we’re living allows it to be. And this is the big deal. But one deal we can afford only listening better to records like this one and trying to confront this music with the one from the past, in order to understand better the different worlds they were created in. Paradoxical as it is, I think there were better information, in quality, in the pre-internet era. Now everything is accessible, but not only the good informations. But this is maybe another problem, and will talk about it another time. 

 

 

John Coltrane “A Love Supreme Live in Seattle” (Impulse!, 2021)

October 2, 1965, a Saturday night. The place is The Penthouse, a club held by Joe Brazil where people like Roland Kirk and Chick Corea played many times. Mr Brazil won’t be very happy of the performance of that night, but not because of the music: the deal is, ‘Trane lovers drink only one beer, then they listen to that demanding music with almost religious concentration. But they’re right. That night, John Coltrane enlarged his historical quartet in order to welcome a bunch of other musicians, so it was worh to listen to them carefully.

It wasn’t the first time for the multireedist, this kind of enlargement of his quartet. Few months before, during the sessions leading to the album The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, he hosted bassist Art Davis, along with Jimmy Garrison, for a mournful version of the classic song Nature Boy. Also, the same year, Coltrane recorded his pivotal album Ascension, released only the following year, where he led his classical quartet plus Art Davis again, trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson, altoists Marion Brown and John Tchicai, and tenorists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp.

This period, from 1965 until the end of ‘Trane life in 1967 for a liver cancer, is my favorite in the saxophonist career. Les schizophrenic than the previous years, where Impulse! managers were constantly asking him to produce a hit song like Atlantic’s My Favorite Things, forcing the musician to issue records like Ballads, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, while it was clear listening to his less commercial stuff like Africa/Brass, India and the live versions of My Favorite Things what Coltrane’s real direction was, the 1965/1967 period marks the end of the classic quartet and an attempt to follow more experimental paths. 

Unluckily the extraordinary machine of the classic quartet in the end disbanded. Pianist McCoy Tyner declared more than once how unable to listen to the music he was with the passing of time, due to the volume of the two tenors – Coltrane took Pharoah Sanders as a permanent member of his band, and for a short amount of time tried to set a couple of drummers, putting Rashied Ali and Elvin Jones side by side – the latter also said farewell not knowing exactly how to manage with the uncertainties of ‘Tranes experimentations.

But with Alice Liddle, further also Coltrane’s wife, on piano, and Jimmy Garrison as the only member of the previous group remained as pivotal contrabass, the music went on for that short amount of time leaving some masterpieces like Meditation, the above mentioned Ascension, Kulu Sé Mama and the drums/saxophone duets contained in the beautiful Interstellar Space. 

Anyway, that night, the second occasion we know in which Coltrane played the A Love Supreme suite in its entirety, was for sure a special night. Just to start, Carlos Ward on alto and Pharoah Sanders on tenor and percussions are present in this concert/record, as well as Donald Rafael Garret at a second bass. Ward has been mostly a sidemen for people like Coltrane, Karl Berger, Don Cherry, Abdullah Ibrahim and Cecil Taylor if we refer to jazz, but for the most part of his life the man played also funk.

Donald Rafael Garret has been one of those rare musicians whose career is difficult to put in a box and to label. A collaborator of Muhal Richard Abrahms and his Experimental Band, he played also with Sun Ra, Coltrane – he is present also on the double album Live In Seattle, on Om and on Kulu Sé Mama –  Johnny Griffin and Roland Kirk between the many others. 

This version of A Love Supreme is very far from the original, even if the themes of the four sections are all expressed in their entirety and clearly distinguishable. But the variety of musicians involved and the different intros before every part of the suite make this album one of those products of research you can also be disappointed with, if you’re not that much adventurous. Another characteristic of this record is that the use of small percussions by Sanders and the presence of Ward make this rendition of the suite more keen on the experiments of the AACM, building a bridge between the wave of NY free jazz and the Chicagoan avant garde movement.

Those who are familiar with the Juan-Les-Pins version of the suite – played on July 26, 1965 by his classic quartet – will be not particularly swept up by ‘Trane performances on this Seattle date, since he was careful in order to leave the correct amount of space to his many hosts. Ward solo on Pursuance is possibly the most interesting part of the record since it is completely unheard before and Ward himself is not an overrepresented musician – unluckily – but for sure he has something to say: his solo is flamboyantly obliquous but clear and meaningful in his statement. 

Pharoah Sanders solo on Pursuance is something every Coltrane fan wanted to hear in a clearer recorded environment since the release of the Olatunji Concert in 1999. There, the noise of the poor recording wasn’t helpful in making us concentrate on Sanders honks, squeals, parodistic marches, while here his solo, that for some parts is not that much different from that on My Favorite Things, is finally clearly audible.

And it is an important statement. Apparently, Pharoah is not matching with the rest of the band and seems not consequent to what John previously have played, but if you listen closely it makes completely sense. Hazardous as it is melodically, harmonically and chromatically, Sanders’ solo is one you don’t forget quickly and that in a way change emotionally at every listening, depending on the feeling it moves in you, that can be different every time. 

In his liner notes for the album, Ashley Kahn writes that maybe there can be other live versions of A Love Supreme to discover. We hope so, and we hope they will be different the one from the other, in order to touch with our ears how different even a perfect music can be while involving other human hearts or the same in different occasions. Quick note for the listener: this live version is recorded with the drums and the piano on the foreground and the saxophones and the bass on the background. Disappointing as this can be for some of you, some people say that listening to it in mono, if your stereo gives you this opportunity, is a good correction.  

 

 

Alvin Curran and Walter Prati "Community Garden", Milano, La Fabbica del Vapore, 10.15.2021

I’ve been in the Monumental Cemetery zone in Milan many times in the past. I love to take pictures of the statues in the cemetery with my camera. I have experimented with natural, harsh light, so I suppose sooner or later I’ll came back with a simple direct flash in order to obtain a different effect. But yesterday night I’ve gone to the Fabbrica Del Vapore which is near the Cemetery, in order to see one of the cornerstones of improvised music, Alvin Curran.

Alvin Curran was in the 1960s one of the founders of the group Musica Elettronica Viva, that hosted musicians and composers as Frederick Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, Steve Lacy, Allan Bryant, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor and John Fetteplace during his various decades of activity. MEV was one of the very first groups of musicians to experiment with the sound of synthesizers, giving life to what, in the following years, would have been called “electro acoustic improvisation”.

Friends of John Cage with whom MEV played a composition titled Solo For Voice 2, where Plantamura voice was trasfigurated by a Moog synthesizer, the group featured many collaborations with master improvisors – there’s a beautiful record from 1976 titled Time Zones featuring Teitelbaum and Anthony Braxton. But the main point with EAI is that it helped widen the concept of composition. 

Preparing a piano is, per se, a compositional gesture, as an example. And this is what I have seen first yesterday night as I entered the room where the concert of Alvin Curran with his longtime collaborator Walter Prati would have been played. Curran had at his own disposition a prepared piano (with cardboards, a small plastic bottle half full of water, a ligther, etc.) and a keyboard previously programmed with many sounds (human voices in English and Japanese languages, the sound of many different musical instruments as trumpet and saxophone, natural sounds like water falling, but also many manipulated sounds).

On the other hand, Walter Prati had a couple of laptops and a small electric viola enriched with a couple of pedals and an arco. Even if the concert was presented as a celebration of a recent CD published by the duo and titled Community Garden, disposable both physically and on many streaming platforms, the music the people filling the room with me listened to yesterday was completely new. The musicians themselves, in fact, didn’t knew what they were creating. So, the listener was attending to the music on the same side of the musician.

The more analogic sounds of the prepared piano were interspersed with samples, electronic sounds, manipulated sounds, the electric viola (both pinched and arcoed), giving life to a multilayered effect from whom emerged some curious moments like the sensation of attending to a music blob and more melancholic reminiscences of Ellington blues. But it is really difficult to describe every moment of the music, and maybe it’s also pointless. 

We can say to our readers that all dynamics of sound and silence, of flux and interruptions, and the sonic ranges have been experimented with success. Creating a music is not only a matter of playing, but also of listening and halting, sometimes, as Prati stated at the initial little speech before the concert. As far as me, I can obviously saying this was the most intense and interesting concert I attended this year, between the ones I wrote a review for this blog.

Community Garden has been for sure an intriguing live performance. The prepared piano, historically meaning the attempt to deconstruct bourgeois music as part of the values of one small but imposing part of society, the idea that composing doesn’t mean only to write down a bunch of notes on a piece of paper but creating an environment for creativity, the mix of sound and noise as part of a sound environment, the blurring of the line between the conscious will of the musician and his unconscious or physical response to the partners, is all we heard and saw yesterday night. 

It is important to testify these little moment of creativity and deconstruction (and reconstruction) of our ideals of what music is, because we all are living in a very conservative period, where music is mostly entertainment or a mere wallpaper for different environments, while in fact the sound world is a recall to our first environment and, this way, an important tool to create a new, collective meaning to life. And so I’m grateful to Curran and Prati for sharing with us their thoughts and feelings under the shape of beautiful music. Don’t miss them, if they’re around to play. 

 

Ben Goldberg “Eight Phrases for Jefferson Rubin” (BAG Production Records, 2021)

When last week I was listening to a clarinet in a concert of contemporary music, I was hit by how much dissonant this instrument was in that context, so I fully understood Eric Dolphy, one of my favourite multi-reedists, when he tried to be as scratchy as he could on bass clarinet. Above all, even if he studied the style of music I was listening to in that moment, his roots were dwelved into blues. So when I first listened to Ben Goldberg, I was in a way deeply fascinated by his touch.

But let’s start with a little bit of order. In the last issue of an italian magazine devoted to jazz there is an intriguing review of Goldberg’s last album, Everything Happens To Be, featuring a well known rhythm section to my readers: Michael Formanek on bass, Thomas Fujiwara on drums, plus the architectural guitar of Mary Halvorson. I didn’t wanted to review it since few time ago I wrote about Goldberg’s companions in full, but I promised to myself to spend some time listening to his music.

Ben Goldberg is an incredible musician. He studied with Pauline Oliveros and in some way her sensitivity matched perfectly with that of his pupil, as we will see during this review. During the lockdown Goldberg lost all of the concerts he was supposed to play, and so he started developing a musical diary published through his Bandcamp account. But this year he released a couple of intriguing records: the one with the trio mentioned here above, featuring also Ellery Eskelin on tenor saxophone, and an older album of previously unreleased material that will be the heart of this review.

The album is titled Eight Phrases for Jefferson Rubin. Rubin was an intimate friend of Ben Goldberg, a sculptor that curiously enough for a certain amount of time lived and worked in my own country, Italy. Sadly he passed away after an accident with his pickup truck. The music featured in this album is recorded by Goldberg on various clarinets, plus veteran Larry Ochs on sopranino and tenor saxophone, John Scott on guitar, the basses of Lisle Erris and Trevor Dunn, and Michael Sarin on drums.

The first things that came to my mind, even if it can seem a superficial description, is that Larry Hochs plays his sopranino saxophone, as an example in a piece like the initial Problem, as Steve Lacy was playing his own soprano: lots of edges, staccatos, various techniques used in order to give his instruments not a raucous but that quality of a tense sound, as typical of a music coming from jazz and an instrument whose lack of roundness need the players to be solved.

Obviously Goldberg is not playing here the part of a Steve Potts, with that characteristic stream of consciousness, but he is respectful of the atmosphere created by his pals and by his own decisions as a composer: an intense, meditative but not intimistic mood that can be related to what happens after a tragic loss. In his book Sud e Magia (South and Magic) anthropologist Ernesto De Martino described how music was used in south of Italy to help people to avoid madness after the death of a beloved parent, but in a way Goldberg’s music is intended to avoid concepts and actions related to catharsis.

Plain of Jars is, again, introduced by a saxophone whose melodic and harmonic structures will be for sure well known to the fans of the Rova, even if here there’s something different from the typical impetuousness of a quartet of reeds and a more direct orientation to explore all the possibilities of the instruments. Silence is a compositional tool widely used in this piece of music, and the single players are able to fill it with a respectful creative tension.

The piece titled Visited sees a unison of reeds and arcoed bass, and a consequent tension transmitted also through the dialogue between the other bass and the drums. Guitar weaves a dramatic and expressively urgent canvas, while the crescendo of the other instruments dramatizes music in a magistral use of distortion evoking the ghost of a Ronald Shannon Jackson. The clarinet behaves consequently, but the tension and release program sees the music reaching some peaks just to leave the soloists an aptly space of expression.

Eight Phrases, the other ten minutes long composition on the album, start with a clarinet statement added with sparse drums here and there. After, soprano saxophone crawls while the clarinet takes the role of the drums and the bass give the composition his right pulsation. Then a clarinet solo and another duet with the soprano leave space to some syncopated brushes and a bass texture, that after a while sees also the intervention of a gentle guitar. Another reed dialogue closes the piece.

Brace and Bits sees the clarinet sneaking out through the drums figures, rapidly substituted by a guitar solo. Drums and guitar continue together until clarinet and sopranino draw some lines at the horizon, depicting a vivid landscape. After some drums figures, guitar harmonics and the clarinet close. With Elements, it is time to leave some space to bass and sopranino, intertwining so well that the drums give only a few gentle brushes hits to add some little spices to the music.

Lost Touch sees Ochs mastering his tenor saxophone through a melody whose structure is well known to the lovers of jazz tinted with contemporary music, and the assertiveness of the tutti creates a dramatic bridge to the tenor’s wild, finally releasing the tension, assertions. All the instruments are finally living the opportunity to express themselves in a wild context, lowering the volume but not abandoning their creativity to underline the clarinet solo.

It’s time to close, and Snow is perfect for this purpose with his guitar melody: it’s like a night coming after a full, troubled day. This record can be the perfect introduction to a figure, that of Goldberg, and I invite you to recover also his debut with Kenny Wollesen in the Klezmer Trio, his compositions for Steve Lacy and the album by avant garde guitar hero Nels Cline New Monastery. I think one of the most satisfactory things about jazz and contemporary music is that when you meet a new pal, you really want to see how he behaves in different context: here there’s a new occasion to that.

 

 

 

Eliane Radigue "L'Ile Re-Sonante", Milano, Auditorium San Fedele, 09.20.2021

The Auditorium San Fedele is near the Duomo of Milan, and it’s also near a good great library. Not that far there are some small restaurants for ‘i Milanesi bene’ (the Milanese bourgeois) so it is good to be able to breath some fresh air thanks to the music. But before to start, a little bit of context – yes, more.

Every year the above mentioned Auditorium organizes a review of various artists coming from electronic music and contemporary music called Inner_Spaces. This year, thanks to the Covid, the guys were not able to create a real review, organizing different concerts before a given date, so the only thing we as externals knew was that on September 20 and 21 there would be a performance of the precious piece of music L’Ile Re-Sonante by Eliane Radigue.

The masterpiece of drone/ambient music by Radigue was introduced by a couple of shorter pieces of music by the younger composer David Monacchi, born in 1970 and disciple of Salvatore Sciarrino. Monacchi is developing since 15 years a project called “Fragments of Extinction”, where he exposes the sounds taken directly from nature (e.g. the sounds of the Amazon rainforest) in an attempt to preserve its purest sound forms.

First Monacchi piece was Stati d’Acqua for fields recordings (taken along the Tevere, the river of Rome, but also from a scanning of a six month foetus and the resonance of the fluid of a human body), while the second, part of the above mentioned Fragments of Extinction series, featured the sound of the rainforest in Brasil. If Monacchi research on site is remarkable, I can’t completely enjoy the result, even if it is not bad.

The way ‘real’ sounds intertwine themselves with electronic sounds, as an example, makes me think about the clarinet and the tape recorded dialogue in Stockhausen’s Stimmung, but the result here is that of a mere flux of the ones into the others and viceversa. Something we have listened to for about ten years at least. The way also Stati D’Acqua terminates, with a slow lowering of all the sounds, without any apparent reason, makes me think of a compositional cul de sac the composer didn’t took seriously.

But I have to admit it, it is difficult to mix the will to create a meaningful sonic environment, with the desire to report the climate crisis we’re all living: there’s a comunicative urgency in Monacchi that overwhelms him as a composer maybe. Or maybe it just me wanting from a soundscape the same complexities of contemporary music.

Things don’t go that much better with L’Ile Re-Sonante by Eliane Radigue. I think we have to deal, for once, with the given definition of the music: “drone-ambient music”. Yesterday night I heard very clearly all the drones, but it was not ambient music. I heard description of this work of music everywhere as a music created to impregnate discreetly the environment in which it is played. At the opposite, yesterday the volume was very high, at a point the structrure was resonating clearly and distinguishably.

I heard almost a long, prolonged piece by Sunn O))) maybe, instead of a composition by Eliane Radigue. I’m joking a little, but that was the feeling anyway. The good thing was that the drones were clearly audible, initially as a human heartbeat slowly beating, then the air was full of different textures the one mutating into the other until I was able to distinguish, with time, three different sonorous landscapes: the first drone movement, then a bunch of female operatic voices, then again another drone.

Two things came to my mind: the work of Mark Rothko, or at least a music transposition of it, and the Vipassana Meditation – I mean, the music was creating the right environment for it, so I closed my eyes and started a Vipassana myself. More prosaically, L’Ile Re-Sonante is the highest compositional point of Radigue as far as her work with the ARP 2500 synthesizer, and the best possible union of the different roots Radigue was referring to: European composers of noise music (Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari) and the american noise minimalists like Rhys Chatham, or Pauline Oliveros drone music.

Nevertheless the ‘acousmatic direction’ I have depicted, the work of Radigue is one of the most brilliant and important composers in contemporary music. I still hadn’t the opportunity to listen to her most recent stuff – I know she’s encountering several musicians to discuss the sound dynamics of their instruments composing music ad personam – but I’m sure it will be interesting in the future to immerse in her sound world. I so hope her research will be rewarded by brilliant results.  

 

 

Olivier Messiaen “Quartet for the End of Time”, Milano, Teatro Dal Verme, 09.16.2021

The best way, for someone unfamiliar with contemporary music, to start listening to this genre is undoubtely, in my opinion, the Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen. Its vivid melancholy mixed with open meditative trascendency is something everyone can deeply appreciate. The story behind the composition of the eight movements is impressive too.

So, even if sometimes I listen to this work of art on my PC as many other music, I wanted to give it a deeper listening, and when I knew that there was the opportunity to listen to the Quartet live in a concert hall, I bought istantaneously the tickets for me and for a friend who never listened to contemporary music but that was deeply fascinated by the work and its performers.

More prosaically, the Quartet for the End of Time was created by Olivier Messiaen when he was a soldier in the French army fighting against the German Nazis during World War II. Hostage in a concentration camp, he mediated with a party official to leave him free to write some sheet, and since there were three other musicians in the camp, in 1941 Messiaen and his new friends were able to perform for the soldiers and the prisoners.

Messiaen music is full of references to carnatic music, the sacred music of the south of India, but transposed into a system he called ‘modes of limited transposition’ along with other elements taken from his first serial works. Also an ornithologist, he tried to convey the sound of birds into his own music. He said he was able to perceive colors while listening to sounds – a phenomenon known as synesthaesia – and so one of the goals of his music was to allow people to listen to colors: the second Quartet movement, as an example, is intended to give the listener the sensation of yellow and light blue.

As previously written, the music of the Quartet is divided in eight movements, some ensemble music and some solo music – all the instruments except the piano. The four musicians at Teatro Dal Verme yesterday afternoon were flawless, and this helped for sure me and the huge group of other listeners to enjoy the music. Giovanna Polacco is a talented violinist who studied at the Conservatory of Milan. After, she gain an impressive number of awards and played under the direction of Abbado and Karajan for a long time.

Clarinetist Sergio Delmastro started studying piano at a young age, then he passed to composition at the Turin Conservatory; after a huge number of recordings for Stradivarius, BMG and MGA (Paris), he started teaching composition at the Conservatory of Lugano. Nikolay Shugaev won his first prize as a cellist at the age 13, the first of a long series, and curated a long theory of first executions of authors like Fine, Falcon, Rosenblatt, van Geel and others.

And finally, pianist, harpsicordist and orchestra director Antonio Ballista played in the last decades under the direction of Abbado and Boulez among the others, and he can claim to have the major authors of contemporary music writen pieces directly for him: from Berio to Bussotti, from Sciarrino to Sollima. He toured also with Berio, Dallapiccola and Stockhausen, and collaborated to concerts of Boulez, Cage and Ligeti.

A deeply fascinating journey into the idea of time and transcendency, the Quartet is also full of references to contemporary philosophy. But, surprisingly, the way the musicians interacts the one with the other and intertwine the one with the other will be not unfamiliar to the usual reader of this blog. I’m not obviously saying that Messiaen music is similar to jazz, but that even if this is written music there’s almost an interplay in the way the parts are conceived in relation to the full scheme.

While the clarinet solo is what the words say, a solo of clarinet with all the other instrument muted, the solos of cello and violin are provided with a minimum of interaction with the other three players, giving life to some interesting small dialogues or conversations that can be intriguing for a lover of free improvisation. It’s not a surprise that many composers of free jazz or experimental music are taking this type of contemporary music seriously while studying. 

In the end, if you take in consideration the last works of Roscoe Mitchell and you think about it as a zen kind of music, with the sonorous masses as statements instead of being the developments of a given theme, something similar can be said of Messiaen music, whose praises to the eternity of Jesus and the consequently reflection on time are very tied to Mitchell’s. Sometimes, the difference between genres are only a matter of temperature. So, my final advice is: enjoy the music, wherever it comes from. 

 

Joelle Léandre / George Lewis / Pauline Oliveros “Play As You Go” (Trost, 2021)

In my to-be-rebuilt-from-zero collection of albums (it’s a long story, I won’t narrate it here) there are live records released years after their public executions. The beautiful double ECM “Bells For The South Side” by the various Roscoe Mitchell Trios (Mario Gamba wrote on the italian newspaper Il Manifesto that these compositions stand in Mitchell’s carnet at the same point of Beethoven’s Ninth) was recorded in 2015 but released two years after. And the dream album by pianist Cecil Taylor, one of my favorite composers&performers of all times, “At Angelica 2000 Bologna” was issued on 2020.

Something similar happened with Peter Brotzmann’s sessions for the saxophone solo CD “I Surrender Dear”, sessions that belong to the year 2018 and published only two years later. So I asked myself if there is one reason that, after a long period of time where alternative music – whatever this label means – was about to instantaneously monetize creativity, now after all these years artits are going slower with the publishing of their own music, sometimes bringing to light hidden gems that were at risk of becoming only a small portion of a vast archive.

Things have changed in the business. If ten years ago a good decision was to give birth to a limited edition of 1000 copies for one album – since it would have been difficult to sell more than that at the beginning of the European economical recession and in the middle of the cultural crisis of the new century – now artists and labels, if we’re talking of passed away musicians, are more aware of the link and the responsibilities they have with their public, and the few of us that didn’t leave completely in order to become adults with no strange sonorous objects in their houses want more than the next great album to add to our collections anyway.

In order to respect the up above tracked rules, here it comes an album that will leave you with the will to listen to it repeatedly, or so I hope at list becaue it’s what it deserves. The musicians involved in this live recordings are three of the most important masters of instant composition and improvisation of the last decades. We’re in effect talking about bassist and vocalist Joelle Léandre, trombonist and electronic manipulator George Lewis, one of the founding members of the AACM, and accordionist Pauline Oliveros. This is the first time they play together.

The 44 minutes long instantaneous compositions begin with Léandre raucous vocals interspersed with accordion and electronic effects. The interaction is obviously different from that of a ‘jazz’ trio since the way the musicians listen and react to each other is based on reprocity more than on idiomatic techniques. Bass is both pizzicato and arcoed, and even if it is difficult to tell who’s conducting the dances, I would say that Léandre gestures are kind of the skeleton for Lewis’ and Oliveros’ flash, at list in this first part.

It can seem obvious since the nature of an instrument that is designed to be pivotal but not that obvious from the nature of the sound structure of the improvisation-composition. And if a colleague from his blog wrote aptly that the way every musician is open to the other is fundamental for the creation of the music, I would also suggest the listener to be careful with the group indentity of it, an identity that can seem overwhelming the single musician but pertaining to the ensemble.

Around minute 8 the electronic elements mastered by Lewis give space to various accordion statements, intertwining with them, dialoguing with them, leaving them the space to become an abstract, far away melody mixed with bass’s percussed and arcoed strings. We’re about minute 12 and the trombone takes its place in the usual manner: statements of existence instead of melodies or trasfigured melodies or scarred melodies. It’s time for the voice to dialogue with these statements, while the trombone become less dense and more careful to the dynamics of sound and silence.

It’s time again, at around minute 15, for the accordion to gather trombone’s heritage and give life to a way of being, more than a way of improvising: the electronic sounds, in fact, articulate a range of different paths to music, leaving the listener the right space to live inside the music instead of being overwhelmed by it. We’re around minute 17 now, and this complex texture is held by trombone and bass: they build a climax that leave the listener with the famous Braxton idea of waking up spiritually the people who are attending to the event.

At around minute 19 electronics add themselves to the music, before a quasi-silent space where sparse sounds can accompany the positioning of the listener’s mind in the middle of the music itself. Accordion and electronics are now underlining the short and dense, but warm and gentle, statements from the bowed bass who takes the lead of the trio again, conducing it to a construction made of different textures sometimes echoing an exaltating full and sometimes leading to some full/void dynamics.

We’re around minute 25 and Lewis elaborates in real time Léandre vocals, before a short amount of silence interspersed with electronic sounds. Strings and short electronic statements dominates this second part of the performance, with vocoderized vocals and short accordion bids. A new climax by all the instruments can be taken as an invitation to leave yoursef go to the following mix of acoustic and electronic trombone’s sounds.

A new crescendo makes the music more dramatic, but it’s the non idiomatic quality of it that makes the listener live an experience of openness, of feelings, more than that of different identities contaminating each other. In a way, it is as this idea, that circulated throughout intellectual environments during the last decades, is now leaving its place to that of sensations mixing together in order to create a new, composite feeling, whose spirit is here represented by a sound that can seem that of a dramatic keyboard followed by small sound gestures levitating in the mind of the listener.

Small bowed strings lead the listener to a new electronic heartbeat, while far away small voices counterpoint Oliveros’ small accordion morceaux, until the apparition of what can seem a little percussion. Bass and accordion dialogue is following the pause with a mix of melancholy and expectancy, while the electronics try to remind us that this is non-descriptive music, and that this idea of sound is not for everyone to be played: you have to dismiss a previously frequented idea of ethics and aesthetics in order to do so.

Then, it’s time to the trombone to conduct the listener into a journey to be played as you go, and if the cover of the album is not far from that of other avant garde records where the sea is compared to the texture of sounds, this is the best version of it from Christian Fennesz “Venice”. Recorded in Prague at the Festival “VS Interpretation” for Czech radio, “Play As You Go” is an important album not only becase we miss Pauline Oliveros since 5 years, but also because this music is far from becoming surclassed in a period where we often can listen to musicians that are perched on melody or on a non completely textured experimentation.

 

Vasco Trilla "Unmoved Mover" (Fundacja Sluchaj. 2021)

There is people who made the history of improvised music and who is well exposed in the temple of criticism or in the pantheon of the mind of music lovers, then there are musicians who gave their entire life to find out new paths in articulating a personal language, and then again there are creative guys who want only to risk and give new lymph to a ‘tradition’, that of the avant-garde, and that therefore are taken by many people as redundant, while in fact they’re essential as the other cats.

Read what Andrea Centazzo said about Vasco Trilla, the musician we want to explore in this post: “Being one of the first solo percussion improvisers in the ‘70s, I paid special attention to Vasco work. This fresh music is a blossoming of ideas and sounds. Vasco is a minimalist in percussion, each sound is accurately chosen and explored to an extreme end. A world of larger horizons and open skies where the percussion trigger the most inner intense feeling in the listener”.

Born in Barcellona, Vasco Trilla started playing drums at the age of 19. Initially into progressive rock and metal, he developed an interest for improvised music, but this is really cutting short and I want to give you more cues on Trilla’s work. After all, knowing about one artist life and tastes can help in enjoying better his own art. So, the first thing I want you to be aware is that Trilla studied art history and was passionate about Polish and Russian cinema and music.

So he studied at university the movies of Wojciech Jerzy Haas, Andrzej Waida, Andrzej Munch, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and Krzysztof Kieslowski while he listened to the music of Lutoslawski and Penderecki. On the other hand he was into the experimental metal scene of that country, with bands like Decapitated and Kriegsmachine. It is quite common for the younger generation of experimental musicians to be able to skim through such different sources of inspiration, and it’s good because you can develop your own voice made of fragments of different previous identities without belonging to anyone of those.

Between the many collaborations of Trilla you can find the names of Andrea Centazzo, Jamaladeen Tacuma, Cecil Taylor, Peter Evans, Marshall Allen, Lotte Anker, Wilbert de Joode, Mette Rasmussen, Ilia Belorukov, Axel Dorner, and this is only a small part. His last solo album is titled “Unmoved Mover” and it is issued by the label Fundacja Sluchaj. The seven minutes title track opens with small cymbals and noise interruptions here and there, but the intent of the music is to create into the listener a space where he can be aware of everything that happens as an event, as you can listen through some of the old and recent AEOC records.

Gongs and drumsticks rubbed against the cymbals give substance to the atmosphere with bold but delicate statements. Then a huge amount of small bells appear, giving the music some solemnity and the sacred tone it deserves. An openly percussive texture so to give the listener the feeling of a path through sound is experimented in Hylomorphism. Ousia is dominated by a more preeminent cymbals sound, and natural echo effects, while Living Bodies is constructed on a dialogue between thicker and denser sounds, before an explosion of little bells.

Nous – how many of you care about gnosticism or Philip K. Dick novels? – is more dominated by dynamics of sound and silence, leaving you with this presence of a vast unexplored space in your mind, where different volumes and densities of textures are also present building a fascinating climax, and if Hylozoism can seem only a subtle pause made of other bells chiming, Celestial Spheres is like listening to thunders and the natural elements in a primeval brew, interspersed with the sound of the bells.

We can get this way to the end of Causeless Cause, almost seven minutes of summary of Trilla’s art as a scultpor of sound through bells, a set of chimes activated in different moments, as if each one of them is giving life to the following. And while this album is becoming one of my favourite releases of the year, discovering my gentle side and knowing something more about myself, I can only recommend you to give Vasco Trilla the chance to become one of your favourite young players. 

 

Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp "We're OK. But We're Lost Anyway" (Bongo Joe Records, 2021)

In 2011 or 2012, when I wanted to quit writing (and I did for quite some years devoting myself to photography) I wanted to leave with a couple of articles: an interview with young Stefania ‘?Alos’ Pedretti (available on the italian webzine Mescalina) and an article about a young photographer (available on the italian webzine Culturame). But, what made me quit writing? It’s simple: the quality of the music I was listening to at the time.

Something was going terribly wrong. I listened to a lot of young musicians in London the year before and if I loved the ‘great old men’ of the avant-garde (Evan Parker, Louis Moholo-Moholo to name a couple) on the other hand I felt little or no empathy with the young improvisers or experimental musicians, with some notable exception. And I was feeling as Mr Jones (as in Bob Dylan song Ballad of a Thin Man, when he sings “And you know something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?”).

So my idea was: “I don’t know where the music is going, I know only it is going badly, in sad places, so I want to explore art as an artist in order to understand better, on my own skin, what’s going on”. So I did photography and then theatre for many years, and finally I came back to writing. It was not a dramatic come back. I was always putting a review here and there, even in this blog. But finally, thanks to a colleague, I found out the perfect album to talk about this lost decade. 

The Album is “We’re OK, but We’re Lost Anyway” (great title, indeed) by the incredible Orchestre Tout Puissand Marcel Duchamp. An italian magazine of music made me aware or these guys, and the first time I listened to their music through youtube – a mix, as Stefano I. Bianchi wrote on Blow Up, of ‘afrobeat, Ex, Stereolab, Folk, jazz’ – I felt this sense of melancholy and sadness that was not coming from the notes played by the musicians, but kind of ‘in between’ the music, but being the most part of it.

So I kind of felt that all the sadness for the lost of music – there are only few record shops left in my town where I can find CDs or vynils of free jazz, improv and contemporary music and I hate Amazon so there’s no way I’m gonna use it to purchase records, plus the last one was kind of a ‘lost’ decade: I mean, apart from few musicians, even apart from the musicians you’ve found during this years on Complete Communion there was not that much great music to listen to – was here, better said: instead of listening to a new record, I was listening to all the sadness of the decade. 

This is the best part of “We’re OK ...”. But before analysing the album, few words for the band. The orchestra has born in Geneva in 2006, thanks to the bassist Vincent Bertholet who basically wanted to give life to a group of musicians who could play together around Europe. Initially fueled by six players, the band during the years became a 12tet and now it is a band of 14 elements. The band has a kind of political consciousness that makes it very nice to my ears and heart.

“From Mexican Zapatists to Chiapas rioters, we stand aside every person who wants to destroy capitalism through the dismantling of great commercial empires in favor of local agricultural enterprise” states Bertholet, and this is really the less we can do in this world right now. But what about the music? After an introduction so heavy, the music has to be at least incredibly good. And it is, even if its best part for me is I won’t say ‘not intended’, but ‘unconscious’. 

The album opens with Be Patient, where an accordion lead the listener though his microtones and minimal melody to Bertholet patterns embellished with violins twirling around the bass. Then drums and horns enter. The atmosphere is full of rage, while we start listening to the voice. If I have to make a comparison, the last Portishead come to my mind. But the trombone and the guitar mumbling together comes from experimental music, and so memory goes to records for instrumental ensemble and voice like “Les Stances A Sophie” and “Raining on the Moon”.

Empty Skies shows us what drums and strings can do if combined together exploring repetition through different pitches. Voice sweetens the listener while guitar and strings develop a distorted unison that is possibly what made Bianchi, the italian journalist above, think about the Ex (accompanied by Tom Cora I guess). So Many Things (To Feel Guilty About) is based on the dynamics of a guitar counterpointing a vocal chorus. Drums give depth to the ensemble, vibraphone too as it takes its turn. 

Blabber, as I was hoping to hear, is opened by vibe and drums, plus cello and voice playing a game of underlines to which all strings add tasty spices here and there, while We Can Can We is driven by horns, cello and drums. The rhythm is undoubtely that of Fela Kuti’s music, with a guitar dipped into minimalism as the vibraphone. Flux is a delicate journey into a dream made of horns, voice and vibraphone, whereas guitar adds a punk rhythmic ad a certain point. Drum’s colors set on fire the male rap, again with the guitars developing a rock drama made of multiple grating.

Connected is a couple-of-minute-divertissement for chorus and guitar, Beginning, the last five minute track on the album is their first song I listened to in a live version you’ll find at the end of this review, and it is made of a rhythm mimicking the circularity of afrobeat with a minimalist guitar and multiple horns, percussions and strings to set the music on fire. It has that warrior spirit, but also that not intended but real melancholy I was telling you more above. But the silence is over.

The album terminates with the one and a half minute of Silent, the closing of the courtain with a pinched cello, strings, voice and the desire for an uprising. My dream now is to take the band to play a live concert in one of the many squatted centers in my town. Maybe, having some contacts, this will be possible in the future. It really would be the best venue for the Orchestra’s fire music and at the same time, the encounter point for an awakening of both music and people. Together. 

 

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra “Promises” (Luaka Bop, 2021)

I started listening to improvised music in 1999. I was a fan of Tom Waits then – I saw him live in that same year in Florence – and I remember that at a certain point I wanted to start listening to jazz music. Back in the days, you were able to go to those enormous music megastores in Milan – Messaggerie Musicali, Fnac – and also a lot of small record shops where you could take your CD, go to a workstation provided with headphones and, thanks to the barcode on the album, listen to it before the purchase.

That’s how I was into Mingus – how can you resist to the “Haitian Fight Song” bassline? – as an example. Then there were newspapers like “Il Manifesto” that, thanks to the long articles on a Saturday insert dedicated to culture, you would read extensive analysis of every music style, from calypso to soundtracks, and run into an article about John Zorn and his filecard compositions, just to give you a help in understanding how I was meeting new music prior to the internet era.

But when I started listening to Coltrane, I was only trusting his name and my curiosity, and so I bought my copy of “A Love Supreme” happy to learn something new. But at the first listenings – that was my first jazz album – something strange happened to me: my head was simply going somewhere else. I was simply not used to improvisation, so my brain was refusing it. But, you know, practice makes perfect. 

So in a few time I was hooked by a lot of more or less traditional jazz, like Davis, Holiday, Rollins, Ellington. I also bought me some books, like “Jazz” by Arrigo Polillo, a classic reading in my native language. And then I started to see my first concerts. The very first one was a Masada quartet featuring Zorn, Dave Douglas, Joey Baron and Greg Cohen. For free. I was really happy. Then, after quite some months, I left Milano and the university for the suburbs and my parents.

But I kept on listening to music. And so it came 2001, the year the Trane’s album “Olatunji Concert” was released. I remember that at first I was happy about this record because, even if poorly recorded and produced, it was really my idea of music put on a CD. Pure sound, sometimes pure noise with fragments and echoes of melodies coming from God knows were. And then it happened something I would call an ‘agnition’. 

I was on a trip with friends, a psychoanalist – not my therapist, at the time I was followed by a younger woman – and other people. We had to join a panel discussion, or something similar. This pal, the therapist, was interested in what I was listening to, so he asked me to put some music into the car stereo. I had some records with me, not by chance, and my choice was the “Olatunji” album. I thought it would be funny, to see the reactions of my friends. But what I didn’t know at that time was MY reaction. Something really unexspected.

While listening to the melody of Coltrane and its development on “Ogunde”, and then the harsh screams of Pharoah Sanders, I felt something inside of me, as if something were collapsing and crumbling. Obviously there was nothing in me really happening, this is only a metaphor for a feeling. But I remember clearly that sensation of something falling apart in me, and I would use, back in those days, to describe this feeling I kept for myself, the German word ‘spaltung’. 

‘Spaltung’ (in English: ‘split’, or ‘slit’) is a word used by Jacques Lacan, the self-promoted renovator of psychoanalisis, to identify the ontological division of the self between a talking being and a thinking being, meaning that you’ll never be able to describe with words your true inner feelings, and this scar is the first trauma of every human being. Since I’m not Slavoj Zizek, I won’t bore you with such concepts moreover, but those were the things that came to my mind in those times.

I never had such emotions again, but I remember that my basic idea was, if I’m able to feel something I’ll never be able to trasmit, and if this is something I have to take care of, something I have to be responsible for, in a way this is, as far as myself, the same as a good improvisor does while he creates his own language and music: something he is responsible for, even if few people understand him. If Arto Lindsay takes his risks in scratching his guitar, why do I have not to be serious about my own life? 

Since 2004 until 2007 there was also a period where I simply could not listen to free jazz and improvised music. Every time I was trying to spin a record by Don Cherry, Peter Brotzmann, or Gato Barbieri, I was having horrible feelings. I had never been aware of another human being with such sensations as me, but in a way I feel now that at that time I wasn’t free as a person, and so I was not able to listen to such a free music.

If you are readers to my blog, now you know that everything is all right. I mean, I can listen to music so carefully that I can write about it. So, it’s just fine. But when I knew that Pharoah Sanders was working to a new album in London, and then when finally I was able to listen to that record a month ago, the one I’m reviewing for you now, I thought back to those events of my life. Obviously I was curious about how such a record would sound, and I was pleasantly surprised in listening to it this spring. 

All things started in 2015. At that era, Pharoah Sanders listened by chance to “Elaenia”, a record made by Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points. Curiously enough, he was also in a car, but with a guy from a record label, and not a psychoanalist, who gave him the hereabove mentioned album. Sanders and Shepherd started meeting each other. Maybe they were going for a visit into the British Museum to see ancient Egypt’s statues. Or maybe they were talking about music together.

Then, the two started thinking about making music together. “Floating Point” is the result of this meeting. It can be described as a symphony in nine movements somewhere between third stream, ambient, minimalism; as if Gunther Schuller met Brian Eno and Steve Reich. Let’s try to analyse the movements of this work, so that we can deal with it closer and describe it more carefully using the most apted words. 

Fist and most important, this record sees harpsichord piano, other electronic instruments and the saxophone on the foreground. “Movement 1” sees Shepherd depicting the few notes that, repeatedly, will constitute the skeleton of the entire composition. After quite a while, it’s Sanders turn to improvise a melody that will give you the feeling of being back in the era where Coltrane was playing with the likes of singer Johnny Hartman: his gentle side’s ghost is now between us.

Strings come near just to underline the ecstatic atmosphere with a series of prolonged statements. They dominate “Movement 2” a little bit more, even if the scene is taken by Sanders and his melancholic melody. Some electronic sounds embellish the music, as it happens in some of Bjork albums throughout “Movement 3”. “Movement 4” begins with Sanders voice, whose purpose is to give life to a more human feeling than electronic sounds, just before another tenor solo. 

Some chimes, or sounds that imitates them, enrich the solo, then some piano and electronic melodies in place of the repetitive pattern we hear from the beginning come to give strenght to Sanders statements. Gentle electric sounds succeed each other on “Movement 5”, while the saxophone try to give life to a music that is reminiscent of all the history of free jazz but thin as a gentle breeze; and then, here we are again with the harpsicord pattern.

“Movement 6” is murmured through tenor, clavier and a cello solo. What’s peculiar in this music is that you don’t have a simple add of instruments, the one on the other. Every note is brushed with the right space to separate it from the others. Then the orchestra underlines the cello’s melody gaining the foreground. The impression anyway is not that of an alternating of full, rounded sounds and more sparse notes, a well known dynamic in jazz music, but that of different feelings cohexisting together in the heart of the listener. 

Crescendo of last part of the movement leaves space to a new repetition of the now well known hapsichord notes at the beginning of “Movement 7”, even if soon we hear a new melody on saxophone. Now silence is almost more important than music, or, better said, it is from silence that the music can take his life. The entire orchestra also is aware of this, and so it’s more cautious in participating to this creation.

More harpsichord little figures go around Sanders’ tenor, taking soon his place in conducing the music. An ecstatic melancholy is, anyway, the predominant feeling of this part of the symphony. We hear a more decise turn on minimalism. More and more rapid figures intertwines, until a new saxophone assertion, more decise than the previous ones. Even the coexisting of analogic and electronic sounds isn’t creating a contrast, also thanks to the equipment Mr Shepherd chose for the recording. 

Piano, Harpsichord, Celesta, Fender Rhodes, Hammond B3, Oberheim 4 voice & OB-Xa, Solina String Ensemble, Therevox ET-4.3, EMS Synthi, ARP 2600 and Buchla 200e are the instruments that are mixed together with the saxophone and the orchestra. “Movement 8” seems to come from a session of 1970s rock music, even if the notes we learned to appreciate are constantly present, at least until new electronic sounds appear jumping into a silence every now and then, leaving you with the feeling of constantly reemerging from a dream.

Finally, a subtle organ drone drive us until “Movement 9”, where, after some silence, we can appreciate the orchestra’s dramatic but atonal crescendo until the end. An album for people who want to undestand how much the shifting from one feeling to the other or the compresence of different feelings can be a form of spiritual awakening – because art is always a form of spiritual awakening – “Promises” is exactly as its title wants to suggest. 

For those of you who are not completely aware of the history of avant garde jazz, Farrel “Pharoah” Sanders – his nickname is the gift of another big soul, the mythological Sun Ra who hosted him in his Arkestra at the beginning of his career – is one of the very first musicians to experiment with free form and the decise insertion of noise elements taken from R&B into his sound and vision, as many other did at that time, from John Coltrane to Albert Ayler.

Recluted by Coltrane himself in his second small group after the one with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones disbanded, and even prior in seminal records like “Ascension” and “Meditations”, Sanders stayed with Trane until his death in 1967, following then his path with new, different ensembles, and experimenting with different types of music. This album is a way to reconcile past and present, since Sanders style evokes that of his soul brother and maybe, given Coltrane’s curiosity for every music style, it is not far from the truth to think that if he would have lived longer, maybe he would have experimente with such sounds.