Angelo Bruschini has died today, Oct. 24, 2023

People has not been very aware of who Angelo Bruschini was possibly until he passed away today after a long battle with lung cancer. Former member of Blue Aeroplanes and other bands, producer of albums like Strangelove’s self-titled Lp in 1997, he should be known to you my reader for the guitar parts on the Mezzanine album, one of Massive Attack’s masterpieces and one of the most intriguing albums from the end of the 1990s.

I still remember the first time I heard the guitar parts of Angel, Mezzanine’s opening track, with that precise and rich sound. All the album has this intriguing parts that are perfectly on time, as if they were played by machines or computers. More than a reference to Neu! or Can and the krautrock world, Massive Attack accurate timing on this record is due to the will to create a music that can be felt as alienating and threatening as in the worst dystopian novel.

Cinematic as that album is, it required all musicians to border on perfection, something rare in rock music not because of a lack of technical skills from the people involved in it but because in this style of music it is required to be emotional and expressive, and perfection can be an enemy. Mind only during the passing of time how much low fidelity counted even more or so, so that not only the musicians should have been more sensitive, but also the recording process involved in it.

I’m relistening to Mezzanine right now, and pieces like Risingson, full of pedal effects that seem to slow down or even to brake the music creating a thrilling effect, the dialogue with the ethnic instruments and electronic parts on Inertia Creeps by a minimal guitar, the arpeggios on Man Next Door, the few notes spent during some parts of Group Four, are all testifying of a unique approach to music that made the members of the band declare today that is “impossible to quantify [Bruschini] contribution to the Massive Attack canon”.

Far from being a minor loss, that of Bruschini is instead the loss of a vision shared between musicians and the loss of a creative process. I still remember how much was praised but also criticized the approach to music by a band like black midi, of whom I talked earlier this year in a group post, for an album like Hellfire. This album, far from being relatable with Mezzanine as an overall project, has a similar approach to music in that the players seek for perfection of details up to the point of refusing to leave the listener, for almost an entire record, able to feel his own thoughts, overwhelmed as he is by the music itself.

Not by chance another dystopian tale through sound, and in this more direct than Mezzanine who is open to intepretation, both bands created a perfect device in order to take the listener and guide him through a mirror up to another dimension that tells many things about the present time when the album was conceived: Mezzanine has left people into a middle-ground, with all the implied sensations, while Hellfire leave the current audience almost dismembered. Time has passed, and society has changed for the worst since 1998 up to 2022.

Finally a part of history, Angelo Bruschini now can rest in peace and it’s up to us to come back to the times in which, through records or live performances – I remember one in Milano in 2010 at Circolo Magnolia where the visuals remembering also the brutal murder of Stefano Cucchi in my country by policemen were compensating a too much patinated sound – since he and the music he created were such an important part of our lives.  

 

Carla Bley has died yesterday, Oct. 17, 2023

Born Lovella May Borg in Oakland, California, on May 11, 1936, pianist and composer Carla Bley has sadly passed away yesterday due to a brain cancer, as told by her husband, bassist Steve Swallow. For a long time associated with free jazz, Bley during her career spanned through a vide variety of registries, including solos, duos – the longtime collaboration with Swallow – up to exploring all the potentials of big bands.

The most famous projects she collaborated with are obviously Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, a line up that changed during the decades producing at least one masterpiece – their firsts album for Impulse! released in 1970 – and the project under her name Escalator over the Hill (JCOA, 1971), a triple album for a big band including Jeanne Lee, Gato Barbieri, Karl Berger, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Leroy Jenkins, Enrico Rava, Roswell Rudd and many others.

The work was inspired by poems of Paul Haines and it was depicted as a “masterpiece” and by some as “the most important record of all times”. Far from sensationalism, EOTH is simply one of the most successful attempts to mix free jazz, rock, indian music – ragas in particular – and the cabaret music of Kurt Weill. Intense, physical and intellectual at the same time, the album is an unicum in a career that quite often explored delicate and meaningful places such as in the case of pieces like End of Vienna from the album Fancy Chamber Music (ECM, 1998) with its violin, viola, cello and flute delicate and intense dialogues.

In fact, Bley’s music was not only and not always dense and thick, since many times it was lyrical and meditative as in Fleur Carnivore, full of references to classical compostions, even if reworked through a jazz sensitivity, as in More Brahms from Sextet (ECM, 1987) or again adventurous and evocative as in the compositions selected by the Jimmy Giuffre Trio for the alum Jimmy Giuffre 3 (ECM, 1961).

As it happened earlier this year with the losses of Peter Brotzmann and Tristan Honsinger, the death of Carla Bley deprives us not only of a magnificent musician/composer, but also of a refined human sensitivity so useful in these days of conservatorship and cultural, but not only cultural, homologation. Even because these musicians will not be replaced by new or younger ones, more influenced by the days they’re living in than the older ones, freer and less inclined to compromise first and foremost in their minds. 

 

 

Ibrahim Maalouf @ Teatro Dal Verme, Milano, 10/13/2023

Being able to see a concert at 8.00 PM in Milan is almost an absolute novelty, even if I remember that when I lived in London that was the standard time to attend live events. In fact this is the right time since you have a regular job in the morning, maybe the early morning and you need to get up at dawn. This is not the case since it’s Friday and tomorrow I’ll sleep a little bit more than in the previous days.

Nonsenses or discussions about the weather apart, tonight Friday 13 instead of the usual bad luck we have Ibrahim Maalouf (trumpet, piano) playing with his friend François Delporte at electric guitar. When I see Maalouf live I ain’t got any expectations: everytime he plays something different and with different musicians. But yesterday night in effect Maalouf have surprised me even more, because the most part of the concert was based on interactions with the audience and his talks. But let’s start with some order.

The introduction to the live show is held by Maalouf playing the beginning of a love song by the legendary Oum Kalthoum. The piece would have been last the entire concert, so we heard only a small part of it, but it was a nice beginning. Then Maalouf took the microphone and started talking about the roots of the pieces he would eventually play, like one song for her daughter who is 14 now and who’s life he tried to depict with his trumpet.

But this is still far from the very core of the show, who was a song about hope Maalouf played at the piano asking the audience to sing the melody: possibly one of the most touching moments I attended through live music. In another moment, Maalouf asked us to sing à la Louis Armstrong, thing that we, embarrassed and amused, have been careful not to do. A nice sketch have followed. At the end of the show Maalouf asked for forgiveness to that part of the audience exspecting for a regular jazz show.

But, as he told us at the very beginning, Maalouf after 17 albums and even more years of career needed something different and so he invited Delporte, a mutual friend, to be part of this show that possibly was kind of a therapeutic session for him and also for the public. Atipic as it was, it hit us anyway with Maalouf touching and sympathetic sensitivity.

So, even if I had only the opportunity to remember how much a great musician he is, above all at trumpet, in the end I can’t say I’m not satisfied with what I heard and saw: in these harsh times, Maalouf is finding his own way out from normalisation, and who can tell he’s wrong for now? We’ll see what he we’ll cook us in the future. For the moment, Maalouf passed my exam, for what it’s worth. 

 

Arto Lindsay feat. Melvin Gibbs @ Armani Silos, Milano, 10/12/2023

Finally the fall has arrived, and live music comes with it. Jazz Mi is a revue of jazz and pertaining music, full of intriguing shows: concerts, panel discussions, movies with live soundtracks, and so on. The opening was let yesterday night to guitarist and producer Arto Lindsay – the aficionados of this blog are remembering an old review of his concert with Sainkho Namtchylak – who played a set of his compositions along with bassist Melvin Gibbs and the sound design of Stefan Bummer while waiting for the release of his new album next spring.

The venue was spectacular, held on four floors full of people with Lindsay playing in what for people above him would have been similar to a pit. Luckily enough I was at ground floor at few steps from the musicians, so I had the opportunity to hear everything as it should have been: honestly I don’ know if the place was aptly amplified everywhere and the volume of the music was nice only for the first rows, or the first floor anyway, or at least this is what came to me.

Now, let’s start from the end. I will not bore you with how much the music was good – and it was up to a certain point – and with the fact that Lindsay was trasforming his guitar and pedals into a sound design machine, thanks also to Bummer that only in one occasion was stopped by the guitarist since he was not producing the effects he wanted or no effect at all as he wanted; I will not bore you also telling you how much both the Brazil influenced songs were nice with all that slight guitar noise around and inside them, as it happened to the songs more in the new/no wave vein.

It all was true and effective, but if I have to tell you the truth, about the end of the concert, before the encores, I was hoping for the concert itself to finish. And the reason is that the concert was good, but it was all too much gentle and compromissory in my opinion. The place, a foundation held by a famous Italian fashion designer, was not the right place for this music as far as me, and the music itself was influenced as it would have not happened otherwise. Obviously I’m talking about accents and the general drive of the music, which I appreciated as a whole but with a little bit of a disappointment for the intention that produced it.

Remember that Arto Lindsay started his musical journey with DNA and Lounge Lizards, two no wave bands – even if labels are the less important part of the story – one devoted to one chord noise guitars pieces, and the other to distort the music of Thelonious Monk other than in producing their own tracks on the albums and in concert. Lindsay as many others were true revolutionaries, in the sense that they assumed the risk of being rejected because they had a peculiar vision of their own. This vision nowadays has been weakened by the world around the musicians, so it’s not their fault but they pay consequences as each one of us.

That’s why in the end I hoped that Lindsay would stop playing quickly after more or less than one hour – as it happened. Obviously I’m not expecting that in 2023 people would love to play and listen to music only in squatted centres or in occupied spaces at the highest possible volumes as it happened in the last decades, when music and politics were mixing together. On one hand in fact I believe that a political act by a musician is to play as they want. On the other hand, how could they play freely themselves with that audience and in those spaces? Another thing to worry about is the lack of young guys. I am in my 50s now and all people around me were about my age.

So my general impression was that Capitalism won and it bought all of our souls, including that of the musicians we’re attending to through their records and live shows. I remember when Bono was singing in 1991 “Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief, all kill their inspiration and sing about the grief”. Now, more than 30 years before those lines, it’s as if there is no more grief but a little bit of diluted creativity so that people in the business can be seen as the ones who are saving the world of art. It’s not my perspective, anyway wait for more news from Jazz Mi festival in the next days. 

 

Lankum – False Lankum (Rough Trade, 2023)

There are few occasions where you start listening to one album casually and, even if you’ll need to deepen it with more attendances, you know you are dealing with some important music. This happened to me almost at the beginning of this year with Algiers’ Shook. But this happened to me to some extent with e more intensity with False Lankum. The Dublin’s collective has an intriguing story on its own, so it’s better to start with some background in order to have a wider context.

Brothers Ian (vocals, Hammer Dulcimer, hurdygurdy, Uillean pipes, concertina, piano, electronics, noise, loop) and Daragh Lynch (vocals, Hammer Dulcimer, piano, organ) gave life to the a band called Lynched self producing three albums variously described as alternative rock, indie rock, and/or influenced by the blues, even if their first output, Where Did It All Go Wrong (Cd Baby, 2013) was in fact a mix of influeces taken from krautrock, punk, drone music and psychedelia mostly.

Strong also for the presence of musicians such as Cormac Mc Diarmada (vocals, fiddle, viola, banjo, bowed banjo) and Radie Peat (vocals, harp, concertina, harmonium, mellotron) the band released three albums, more and more keen on rivisiting their cultural heritage and folk Irish music, even if full of ‘strange’ accents coming from their many influences. In 2017 they signed with Rough Trade finally, and released their first album as Lankum titled Between the Earth and Sky.

Other musicians involved in the current Lankum’s line up are John Murphy (subsonic, vocals, samples), John Dermody (percussions), Cormac Begley (bass concertina), Sadhbh Peat (concertina), Andy Fenstermaker (vocals), Iona Zajac (vocals) and Ruth Clinton (theremin). The amount of musicians involved obviously make you imagine the variety and the nuances of the music you’ll find in the album, one of the most impressive I’ve heard this year.

First band that comes to mind to many music lovers as far as ‘folk revival’, along maybe with Gloaming and Stick In The Wheel, and adored by legions of music critics, Lankum have released few time ago a new album this year, and it is possibly one of the most intense records you’ll listen to in 2023. But let’s start with deep diving the record, from the firs track to the last coda, in order to understand why this album is so special.

The record opens with the first single Go Dig My Grave, a choice against the current since it’s more than eight minutes long, but the visual impact of the video will be of help with people to familiarize with the band and its musical content. The song comes from a group of ballads originally created in 1611 circa, and many of the verses were originally composed as stanzas of various different ballads, such as A Forlorn’s Lover Complaint.

The theme is the death for love. But more than that, what is fascinating in this piece of music is the almost limping cadence, as of someone who can walk with difficulty – a tormented soul? It can be ... – that find it’s resolution in a coda that reminds the violin parts on the first GSYBE album F#A#∞ (Constellation, 1997). The coda is also the beginning of the following Clear Away in the Morning, a meager acoustic guitar melody interspersed by the noise sounds of a drone.

The vocal, doubled melody is representing a work song from a 1983 album by the folk singer Gordon Bok (from Camden, Mayne) with the vocal choruses fitting perfectly with the instrumental parts. After the first two songs, appears a Fugue (there are three, splitting the album in four parts) that is almost a noise crescendo abruptly stopping, and after that it begins Master, Crowley, a song Peat was made aware by the well known concertina player Noel Hill.

Featuring as special guests the concertina players Cormac Begley and Peat sister Sadhbh, the piece is a rhythmic variation on a theme and is a song that fills the air with tension – thanks also to some musical brushes that depict noise at the very core of the piece before the re-entering of the melody - in order to pass to the following track, Newcastle, of which Lankum were educated by Seàn Fitzgerald from The Deadlians, even if the song was first issued in 1651.

After another interlude, a second Fugue, it’s time for the acoustic guitars and voices to start the beautiful melody of Netta Perseus, with a coda where a musical heatbeat is superimposed to the violins. The New York Trader describes a criminal on board a ship being detected by supernatural means, with the violins and the concertina leaving you imagine what comes after, while Lord Abore and Mary Flynn is possibly a Scottish ballad that came to Ireland through the United States.

The most bare of the songs on the album is embellished by the vocal melodies both male and female, a Lankum trademark you’ll find all over in many of the songs, and by an instrumental, even if minimal, crescendo. After the last Fugue, it’s time to close the album with the intense On a Monday Morning, first released in 1966 with its melody for male vocals and acoustic guitar interspersed with the sparse sounds of a harmonium, and the final, 12 minutes long, The Turn, with its noisy but not randomly-executed and contained coda.

With its one hour and ten minutes of music, False Lankum is possibly my choice, if any, for a record of the year. Differently from lot of folk music I heard in the past, this is a reworking that takes into account many of the best musical experiences we had in the last twenty – to say the least! – years, and this way it applies to be one of the most intense, contemporary and original musical experiences you’ll find in 2023.

 

Musica da Vedere, Milano, Adi Design Museum, 10.07.2023

The last time I heard a perfect rendition of a contemporary music piece live is something that don’t come to my mind so easily. In fact I have to get back to a violin solo for a Cage work I heard more than ten years ago in a small venue near the Garibaldi Railway Station of Milano held by a couple of then friends of mine. I was really satisfied by the music and in a way disappointed by some members of the audience who told the young performer something as “you gave me pleasure [with the music]”.

The concept of having pleasure from music as it were sex is an idea many listeners of music here in my country shared with me in the past years, even implicitly. I don’t like it, but that’s it: after all, music can also be sensuality – I remember a beautiful bellydancer during an old performance by Ibrahim Maalouf, that I’ll go to see next week, that I really enjoyed, but as far as music I think the best praise you can give a musician is still the old fashioned “you moved me into another dimension”.

After all, music is something you need in order to furnish time – as we furnish space with paintings sometimes – but, far from being a mere embellishment, in the art of music you can find the seeds of every revolution since when you listen to a piece of art you’re outside the capitalistic mechanisms of “do ut des”, as old Romans would have said, and this happens even if you have payed a ticket. In my own country some politicians 20 years ago said “You cannot eat with culture” and this became a mantra then, and now is a reality.

But let’s go to today event, that was held at Adi Desing Museum as it happened last week with the John Cage performance. Actually, I was skeptical for today’s four hours of Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston since all the things you can find in my review of the past weekend concert. But after the start of the performance I had to change my mind quickly and easily. The performance was very similar to some old recordings I found out last sunday after I’ve been told of this gig.

And this is because the musicians, a nice trio composed by Sara Baldini (flutes), Veronique Delcambre (piano and celesta) and Jean-Louis Maton (percussions) plus Frank Gizycki at coreographies and dance, were very conscious of the music they were going to play. Inspired by Philip Guston paintings, in which figures and/or textures emerge slowly from the colors imprinted on the canvas, Feldman’s music slowly reveals itsel to the listener.

Small melodic cells made of few notes, an inner and suggested dialogue between the instruments: Feldman painted the music with nice and gentle gestures, influenced by the most intriguing visual artists of his time as it happened also for the Rothko Chapel composition. These late works, as the one we’re reviewing, have this quality of letting the thoughts flow from your head after a sequence of few notes, and it is in my opinion music for meditation.

Gizycki’s dance was at the beginning a little bit too much descriptive, but after quite some time the music kind of took him over as if it was suggesting to him to become more keen on marking time or playing with the equilibrium, as it happens with Butoh dance for instance. Unluckily the festival is over, but next week I’ll attend an exhibition by Arto Lindsay and another by Ibrahim Maalouf, so I won’t let my readers dry as far as reviews of live music. 

 

Gianni Del Savio – Nina. La storia musicale e politica di Nina Simone (Shake, 2023)

Eunice Waymon, born in 1933, seemed devoted to a career as a classical pianist since she was a child. She was not the first ever, as Gianni Del Savio underlines in “Nina. La storia musicale e politica di Nina Simone” (Shake Ed. Underground, 2023), but her future seemed to be bright. The young woman's career came to a halt due to the color of her skin and the fact that she was a woman, but the girl didn’t lose heart and so, after she moved to New York, she began a career as a soul singer and pianist.

Soul is a controversial music, made of sacred melodies and lyrics praising sex as well as the daily life of African Americans, and not everyone saw it favorably. To avoid running into problems with her family, the girl decided to change her name: she became Nina (a diminutive given to her by a Hispanic friend) Simone (from Simone Signoret, a French actress much loved overseas in the 1950s and 1960s). The rest is history: the success, that music made of jazz, quotes from Bach, Billie Holiday from which she took up both Strange Fruit and I Loves You, Porgy from the opera Porgy and Bess, the political commitment in the years of Malcolm X, more or less happy love stories.

Bigger than life – a black woman, a very well educated one, emotionally intense but also bipolar, Nina Simone was praised for her art as much as misunderstood, possibly, as a person. Amiri Baraka, as Del Savio recalls, spent words of comprehension even for her most troubled behaviors, while people like Bob Dylan and Nick Cave were really happy for the few time they spent together or the few words of appreciation by her.

Sick for a breast cancer in her last years, after she lost her family – the relationships with both father and mother were not easy at all, not to mention her connection with the daughter who tried a similar career – she was isolated almost completely for a period of time by the people she chose in order to take care of her, but in the end her exile in France was a choice not completely deepened in the book and maybe a more simpathetic writer would have give us more insights.

Gianni Del Savio to be honest have an interesting curriculum, beeing an historical collaborator for Musica e Dischi, Il Buscadero and Radio Popolare. In 2016 he published another book dedicated to Dr. Nina Simone, showing to the world an outsdanding appreciation for one of the most important Africa American perfomers, maybe the most intense after Billie Holiday. But this is only my opinion.

Interesting dissertation the one in this nice book anyway, also because many of her albums, above all the one recorded from the end of the 1970s, desappeared from the shelves of the record shops and as far as I can read there are hidden gems along with other stuff more trendy at least in the times they saw the light. The book is enriched and embellished by the lyrics of many Nina Simone successes, with a notable interest for the ones more politicized. But also the most intimate sometimes are reported, so that the Italian listeners more lazy can finally appreciate how a fine lyricst and selector - as far as the covers - Nina Simone was.

Strange as it can seem this brief article to an international audience, since the book have been at least for the moment issued only in Italy and in Italian, my hope is that someone would translate it in English and that Gianni Del Savio will be able to give life maybe to a new edition, with a more extended analysis of Nina Simone last years, and above all an examination of at least part of the artists who took seriously Simone's challenge to create revolutionary and spiritual art.