Barre Phillips Gyorgy Kurtag Jr "Face à Face" (ECM, 2022)

Mixing electronic sounds with analog gestures isn’t always an easy output. One think about the many releases by labels such as Matthew Shipp’s Thirsty Ear and Manfred Eicher’s ECM and not all the releases are completely satisfying. Sometimes the electronic sounds are too much grounded by the beats, sometimes the beats instead of becoming a propulsion weaken the improvised part. That’s why when an album such as the one we’re reviewing come out, I am sometimes a little bit skeptical as far as my approach.

But in this case the result is surprisingly good. The merit has to be divided by both the musicians involved, so we’re going to introduce them to you the reader. Born in San Francisco in 1943, and subsequently residing first in New York then in France, where, in Provence, he founded the CEPI (European Center for Improvisation), Barre Phillips is considered as the first bass player to go solo. In 1968, after a first part of a career in which he played with the likes of Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Giuffre, Archie Shepp, Lee Konitz and Marion Brown he recorded the first improvisation for solo bass.

Born in Budapest in 1954, Gyorgy Kurtag Jr, son of the famous composer, completed his composition studies at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, and subsequently he joined IRCAM, an association founded by Pierre Boulez in Paris where he worked as a composer and as a computer music director. Involved in collaborative composition since 1999, he also led during his life the trio of imprivisers Spions and the prog rock trio Sc.art.

In approaching this project Kurtag Jr thought about his wide palette as a tool to building up rooms for his mate where he could improvise, but the synergy, after Phillips worked for quite some years to a series of bass solo records – this is his first collaboration on an album since years – is at high levels. Obviously is not the first collaboration by the two musicians: they indeed started working together on 2014, and for a lucky mistake.

A director who was preparing a film on Phillips in 2013 wanted to include a performance of him accompanied by Kurtag Sr, but Phillips himself, who saw the son playing at a festival quite some time before, misundertood the director and prepared himself to play with Kurtag Jr, as finally happened. “The first image that comes to me to characterise the way I play with Barre is architectural”, stated Kurtag Jr as reported by the CD liner notes.

“I am dealing with a musician whose playing and phrasing changes constantly and in the most unpredictably ways possible”. That’s where the concept of ‘building a room’ for Phillips comes from. The album is introduced by two short one minute and a half pieces of almost complete electronic sounds. Beyond and The Under Zone are, this way, an introduction to this intimate world of sounds.

Tension rises, but the listening process requires a certain amount of closeness to experience all the nuances of the electronic inputs. In Two by Two and Across the Aisle, the bass becomes more preeminent and the electronic gestures stronger. There is no melody or harmony, only an atmosphere of suspension, almost of elevation. The arco traces some hints of bitterness or electricity, in a climax that gives life to a series of sensation the listener is required to listen to inside himself.

Finally with the fourth fragment it seem that small percussions are circling the bass, who becomes again preeminent with small decise gestures more and more paroxistic, but with a use of the pauses and silence that let Phillips’ fantasy free to percuss also the single strings and then come back to the arcoed notes while the electronic sounds overflow. Algobench is another brief interlocution that leads to Chosen Spindle, where the coordinates are emotionally and spatially that of the two other longer pieces, just to let space to a series of episodes of almost three minutes each.

The electronic sounds at this point become more descriptive, they hint at a melody, at a kind of minuet, while since Extended Circumstances the arcoed notes come back with a small, minimal electronic environment around them. Like wounds into the night, they’re free to leave the foreground to a haunted far away melody from the past before coming back at the closest part.

Bunch is one of the most abstract moment of the album, with the bass as a skeleton and the electronics as a stairway to the bottom of the conscience. Sharpen Your Eyes has a rhythmic and primitive quality, while Ruptured Air is reminiscent of the desert and the blues. Finally, Stand Alone and its coda Forest Shouts are the compositions most similar to a dialogue between analogic and electronic sounds, the most similar to an improvised dialogue, concluding with scattered bass pizzicato notes.

Organic and complete as far as relationship between improvisation and composition, this album is possibly one of the best outputs of this 2022. I had the opportunity to listen to it only few times since when it entered my house but it’s one of the most accomplished attempts listened this year to unite the worlds of improvised music and electronic composition. And it’s also evident and clear how much Kurtag Jr and Phillips had their own amusement in creating this work of art.