Camila Nebbia & Patrick Shiroishi “The Human Being as a Fragile Article” (Trouble In Mind, 2021)

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. 

 

 

John Coltrane “A Love Supreme Live in Seattle” (Impulse!, 2021)

October 2, 1965, a Saturday night. The place is The Penthouse, a club held by Joe Brazil where people like Roland Kirk and Chick Corea played many times. Mr Brazil won’t be very happy of the performance of that night, but not because of the music: the deal is, ‘Trane lovers drink only one beer, then they listen to that demanding music with almost religious concentration. But they’re right. That night, John Coltrane enlarged his historical quartet in order to welcome a bunch of other musicians, so it was worh to listen to them carefully.

It wasn’t the first time for the multireedist, this kind of enlargement of his quartet. Few months before, during the sessions leading to the album The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, he hosted bassist Art Davis, along with Jimmy Garrison, for a mournful version of the classic song Nature Boy. Also, the same year, Coltrane recorded his pivotal album Ascension, released only the following year, where he led his classical quartet plus Art Davis again, trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson, altoists Marion Brown and John Tchicai, and tenorists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp.

This period, from 1965 until the end of ‘Trane life in 1967 for a liver cancer, is my favorite in the saxophonist career. Les schizophrenic than the previous years, where Impulse! managers were constantly asking him to produce a hit song like Atlantic’s My Favorite Things, forcing the musician to issue records like Ballads, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, while it was clear listening to his less commercial stuff like Africa/Brass, India and the live versions of My Favorite Things what Coltrane’s real direction was, the 1965/1967 period marks the end of the classic quartet and an attempt to follow more experimental paths. 

Unluckily the extraordinary machine of the classic quartet in the end disbanded. Pianist McCoy Tyner declared more than once how unable to listen to the music he was with the passing of time, due to the volume of the two tenors – Coltrane took Pharoah Sanders as a permanent member of his band, and for a short amount of time tried to set a couple of drummers, putting Rashied Ali and Elvin Jones side by side – the latter also said farewell not knowing exactly how to manage with the uncertainties of ‘Tranes experimentations.

But with Alice Liddle, further also Coltrane’s wife, on piano, and Jimmy Garrison as the only member of the previous group remained as pivotal contrabass, the music went on for that short amount of time leaving some masterpieces like Meditation, the above mentioned Ascension, Kulu Sé Mama and the drums/saxophone duets contained in the beautiful Interstellar Space. 

Anyway, that night, the second occasion we know in which Coltrane played the A Love Supreme suite in its entirety, was for sure a special night. Just to start, Carlos Ward on alto and Pharoah Sanders on tenor and percussions are present in this concert/record, as well as Donald Rafael Garret at a second bass. Ward has been mostly a sidemen for people like Coltrane, Karl Berger, Don Cherry, Abdullah Ibrahim and Cecil Taylor if we refer to jazz, but for the most part of his life the man played also funk.

Donald Rafael Garret has been one of those rare musicians whose career is difficult to put in a box and to label. A collaborator of Muhal Richard Abrahms and his Experimental Band, he played also with Sun Ra, Coltrane – he is present also on the double album Live In Seattle, on Om and on Kulu Sé Mama –  Johnny Griffin and Roland Kirk between the many others. 

This version of A Love Supreme is very far from the original, even if the themes of the four sections are all expressed in their entirety and clearly distinguishable. But the variety of musicians involved and the different intros before every part of the suite make this album one of those products of research you can also be disappointed with, if you’re not that much adventurous. Another characteristic of this record is that the use of small percussions by Sanders and the presence of Ward make this rendition of the suite more keen on the experiments of the AACM, building a bridge between the wave of NY free jazz and the Chicagoan avant garde movement.

Those who are familiar with the Juan-Les-Pins version of the suite – played on July 26, 1965 by his classic quartet – will be not particularly swept up by ‘Trane performances on this Seattle date, since he was careful in order to leave the correct amount of space to his many hosts. Ward solo on Pursuance is possibly the most interesting part of the record since it is completely unheard before and Ward himself is not an overrepresented musician – unluckily – but for sure he has something to say: his solo is flamboyantly obliquous but clear and meaningful in his statement. 

Pharoah Sanders solo on Pursuance is something every Coltrane fan wanted to hear in a clearer recorded environment since the release of the Olatunji Concert in 1999. There, the noise of the poor recording wasn’t helpful in making us concentrate on Sanders honks, squeals, parodistic marches, while here his solo, that for some parts is not that much different from that on My Favorite Things, is finally clearly audible.

And it is an important statement. Apparently, Pharoah is not matching with the rest of the band and seems not consequent to what John previously have played, but if you listen closely it makes completely sense. Hazardous as it is melodically, harmonically and chromatically, Sanders’ solo is one you don’t forget quickly and that in a way change emotionally at every listening, depending on the feeling it moves in you, that can be different every time. 

In his liner notes for the album, Ashley Kahn writes that maybe there can be other live versions of A Love Supreme to discover. We hope so, and we hope they will be different the one from the other, in order to touch with our ears how different even a perfect music can be while involving other human hearts or the same in different occasions. Quick note for the listener: this live version is recorded with the drums and the piano on the foreground and the saxophones and the bass on the background. Disappointing as this can be for some of you, some people say that listening to it in mono, if your stereo gives you this opportunity, is a good correction.  

 

 

Alvin Curran and Walter Prati "Community Garden", Milano, La Fabbica del Vapore, 10.15.2021

I’ve been in the Monumental Cemetery zone in Milan many times in the past. I love to take pictures of the statues in the cemetery with my camera. I have experimented with natural, harsh light, so I suppose sooner or later I’ll came back with a simple direct flash in order to obtain a different effect. But yesterday night I’ve gone to the Fabbrica Del Vapore which is near the Cemetery, in order to see one of the cornerstones of improvised music, Alvin Curran.

Alvin Curran was in the 1960s one of the founders of the group Musica Elettronica Viva, that hosted musicians and composers as Frederick Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, Steve Lacy, Allan Bryant, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor and John Fetteplace during his various decades of activity. MEV was one of the very first groups of musicians to experiment with the sound of synthesizers, giving life to what, in the following years, would have been called “electro acoustic improvisation”.

Friends of John Cage with whom MEV played a composition titled Solo For Voice 2, where Plantamura voice was trasfigurated by a Moog synthesizer, the group featured many collaborations with master improvisors – there’s a beautiful record from 1976 titled Time Zones featuring Teitelbaum and Anthony Braxton. But the main point with EAI is that it helped widen the concept of composition. 

Preparing a piano is, per se, a compositional gesture, as an example. And this is what I have seen first yesterday night as I entered the room where the concert of Alvin Curran with his longtime collaborator Walter Prati would have been played. Curran had at his own disposition a prepared piano (with cardboards, a small plastic bottle half full of water, a ligther, etc.) and a keyboard previously programmed with many sounds (human voices in English and Japanese languages, the sound of many different musical instruments as trumpet and saxophone, natural sounds like water falling, but also many manipulated sounds).

On the other hand, Walter Prati had a couple of laptops and a small electric viola enriched with a couple of pedals and an arco. Even if the concert was presented as a celebration of a recent CD published by the duo and titled Community Garden, disposable both physically and on many streaming platforms, the music the people filling the room with me listened to yesterday was completely new. The musicians themselves, in fact, didn’t knew what they were creating. So, the listener was attending to the music on the same side of the musician.

The more analogic sounds of the prepared piano were interspersed with samples, electronic sounds, manipulated sounds, the electric viola (both pinched and arcoed), giving life to a multilayered effect from whom emerged some curious moments like the sensation of attending to a music blob and more melancholic reminiscences of Ellington blues. But it is really difficult to describe every moment of the music, and maybe it’s also pointless. 

We can say to our readers that all dynamics of sound and silence, of flux and interruptions, and the sonic ranges have been experimented with success. Creating a music is not only a matter of playing, but also of listening and halting, sometimes, as Prati stated at the initial little speech before the concert. As far as me, I can obviously saying this was the most intense and interesting concert I attended this year, between the ones I wrote a review for this blog.

Community Garden has been for sure an intriguing live performance. The prepared piano, historically meaning the attempt to deconstruct bourgeois music as part of the values of one small but imposing part of society, the idea that composing doesn’t mean only to write down a bunch of notes on a piece of paper but creating an environment for creativity, the mix of sound and noise as part of a sound environment, the blurring of the line between the conscious will of the musician and his unconscious or physical response to the partners, is all we heard and saw yesterday night. 

It is important to testify these little moment of creativity and deconstruction (and reconstruction) of our ideals of what music is, because we all are living in a very conservative period, where music is mostly entertainment or a mere wallpaper for different environments, while in fact the sound world is a recall to our first environment and, this way, an important tool to create a new, collective meaning to life. And so I’m grateful to Curran and Prati for sharing with us their thoughts and feelings under the shape of beautiful music. Don’t miss them, if they’re around to play.