Minton Turner Schiaffini Armaroli "Quartet", Milano, L'Arsenale, 04.24.2022

After a long period of non activity, quite some years ago, I ran into some young musicians whose music I defined in this blog as ‘Post-AvantGarde’. I meant this cats were experimenting from a crypt, or a laboratory. When I heard such musicians as Umberto Tricca or Paolo Sorge, on one hand I was feeling the urge to create new music and experiment with new sounds from the vast palette of the contemporary and improvised music of the past decades, but on the other hand that in-yer-face feeling coming from the 1980s and 1990s NY movement near John Zorn et similia was completely lost. I suspect younger musicians are unconsciously ashamed of being experimental and don’t enjoy themselves like a Zeena Parkins or a DJ Spooky. And that means a lot: after all, enjoying yourself is a political act of resistance in this conservative world.

In fact I had in my ear music created with accuracy and taste, but too conscious of the past and less free to be itself. A totally different approach I felt for the music matter of not younger and navigated musicians like the vibraphonist Sergio Armaroli, who’s last creature, the quartet with trumpet player and vocalist Phil Minton, drummer Roger Turner, and trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini, I had the opportunity to listen live onstage last sunday, in the space of L’Arsenale, a school of theatre I’m attending to as a student and that is famous and well known since it’s a school founded by Jacques Lecocq, one of the last surrealists, friend and disciple of Antonin Artaud and master, between others, of Dario Fo and many others actors and performers from Italy.

The space is an old deconsacrated church, so there’s a great acoustic space for musicians to perform and actors to play. And, what about the music? The quartet played a dense, sensitive and diversified set, full of a complex and constant intertwining of different layers of sound matter. It’s not a complete unknown or original shape of music, even if the comparison that came to my mind was that with Lettrism (Isidore Isou movemente well represented through the movie “Traité de Bave et d’étérnité”), another younger musician talked to me about some months ago in a correspondence through email.

To that younger guy I was telling to diversify, intensify and make his music for drums and electronics less monochord. He answered to me a little disappointed telling me to listen to the lettrist poets, not knowing I was aware yet of that poetic current of artistic expression. Diversification, intensity and variety I deeply appreciated during the live set of Armaroli and his pals. The only little disappointment was for the voice, a little covered by the other instruments most of the time. I don’t know if it’s me, habitué of Diamanda Galàs performances, or if the space given to Minton was restricted for unknown reasons.

I obviously admired the courage of four navigated musicians whose non idiomatic interplay and musical structures were put in front of the audience in a place like Italy and in a year like 2022, a space and time clearly not good for those who love adventures and non-conformism. I obviously hope to hear possible new evolutions of such music in the future, and I hope for all of you they will issue live or studio material soon. After all, we desperately need artistic gestures that can open up for new feelings and visions in a square and narrow world as the one we’re living right now, before it’s too late. Try to reach these musicians and their live performances when they will be near you.