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.