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.