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.
Even if improvised music is a niche since it’s
very beginning in the 1970s, nonetheless it gained attention in every part of
the world – this is also the main reason this blog is written in English: to
give the best visibility to this music to all the people interested in it – so
different scenes rose up all over the world. In the past I wrote for All About
Jazz about an avant
garde scene in Istanbul, and few months ago I reviewed on this blog a CD
collection of experimental music coming from Mexico.
But those of you who are more keen on
tasting different dishes with their own ears maybe are familiar with musicians
like Kaoru Abe and Yosuke Yamashita from Japan, as well as Ibrahim Maalouf from
Lebanon or Vijay Iyer from India. So, what I’m gonna do with this article, is
to present you a couple of younger improvisors who gave life this year to a
beautiful cassette now out of print but available to your listenings through
the Bandcamp website.
The first improvisor featured in this cassette,
titled “The Human Being as a Fragile Article”, is multi-instrumentalist and
activist Camila Nebbia. Nebbia comes from Buenos Aires, Argentina, but recently
she has moved in Stockholm, Sweden. Devoted to free improvisation, electronic
music and mixed media (mostly super 8 film, archives and digital video). Nebbia
is co-creator and curator of a collective interdisciplinary group and of a
concert series.
In her website I can see a huge amount of
artistic collaborations I’m completely new to, so I think I’ll map them in the
future. Her artistic companion in this cassette issued very recently is Patrick
Shiroishi, a Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Los
Angeles who, this year, has released other different and interesting material:
from Hidemi, a solo album where he give life to a tribute to his father, also
musician, Hidemi Shiroishi, through a multi-layered instrumental construction,
to the more approachable album Natsukashii where he leads a quartet.
It’s not easy to find out resources on similar
musicians along the World Wide Web and this is the reason I think it’s
important to document their music in spaces like this one. Let’s start with the
music, so. The first piece is called Un Nino Llamado Cuervo, opened by
distorted saxophones intertwined the one to the other creating an intimate,
meditative but urgent atmosphere. The second piece, El Ser Human Como Un
Articulo Fragil, the title track, sees the spoken part introducing every sonorous
fragment more linked to the music, which is a little bit more lyrical making me
think about some of the early Braxton compositions.
Al Costado De Los Recuerdos, with its seven
minutes, its small percussions, bells, pre-recorded birds, crossed by a ghostly,
delicate melody and some interspersed scratches. Olvido is introduced by small
metal percussions and voice, bringing the horns in the background at the very
beginning before a more peer to peer dialogue, while Mi Pies Son Tan Fuertes
Como Mì Corazon is constructed on small blows and again a spoken part in the
background. Mentiras y Silencio is based on continuous, subtle but assertive
little lines on the horns with fragments of field recordings giving life to
something I can visualize as a fire burning around the horns themselves.
El Espacio Entre El Lenguaje features
percussions, horns and an almost far away chant, whereas the following short
Terra Seca and Apagar El Televisor are based respectively on faster saxophone
lines – again, derivative from Braxton language as far as I can hear – and
squealing, honking horns remembering some experimental stuff from the 1990s of
John Zorn. Finally, it’s the turn of the longest composition/improvisation on
the cassette, the more than 11 minutes long Mientras El Cisne Blanco Se Eleva
Al Cielo, No Deja Rastros Acà Abajo, full of raucous notes, shorter,
deconstructed statements, meditative atmospheres, fragments of voice, of
pre-recorded sounds like the resonating sounds of a Sitar, other effects,
giving me the impression I was right in finding an inner atmosphere to the
music I was listening from the beginning.
In a way, listening to this music, I found
myself at the far left of a spectrum of experimentation based in a world full
of TV series pretending to give us instruments to our thoughts, and struggling
and revolts who don’t resonate that much in our Western media, asking myself if
I’m dreaming when I think of this music as derivative from a well defined
‘fire’ but more keen on looking at a well determined inner space. Obviously, we
can say that starting from your inner self is the best way to rise up your own
consciousness, but I miss that highly formal experimental statements from the
1970s as a way of telling the world ‘the hell with your common sense and wisdom,
I’ll fight for a wider - and not a better – world’.
I’m not saying this music has a too much
confrontational quality. It is confrontational and experimental as far as this
world we’re living allows it to be. And this is the big deal. But one deal we can
afford only listening better to records like this one and trying to confront
this music with the one from the past, in order to understand better the
different worlds they were created in. Paradoxical as it is, I think there were
better information, in quality, in the pre-internet era. Now everything is
accessible, but not only the good informations. But this is maybe another
problem, and will talk about it another time.
