Podcast Episode 2 - Symbols of Transformation

Sabrina Siegel: Stop and Employ Nature from “Piano Breath (action music)” (2012) [7.27]

Anthony Braxton: JMK-80 CFN-7 from “Saxophone Improvisations Series F” (1972) [17.57]

Master Mujicians of Joujouka: Pull up your Belt and Dance from “Joujouka Black Eyes” (1995) [2.38]

Human Arts Ensemble: Hazrat, the Sufi from “Under the Sun”, (1975) [21.24]

Tom Soloveitzik/Korhan Erel/Kevin Davis: Arba Esre from “Three States of Freedom” (2012) [5.34]

Viktor Sethy: 3rd Movement from “Improvised Piano Concerto” [15.24]

Sabrina Siegel seeks to create situations where nature/chance compromise her control, to bring forth grace through the precarious. "More than executing notes or rhythms or melody, a song or a piece of music to me is a field for being--for direct living, feeling, breathing, and expressing in the moment; for sinking deeply, or flying highly into self/Self; or just maintaining our balance--which may reveal a simple beauty or truth. And like life, one rides the waves of grace and the precarious--in this existence, the better we watch and listen, the easier and more potent our flight."

http://sabrinasiegel.com/

“Braxton developed a systematized approach to free solo improvisation that would give various levels of pre-performance structure and organization to the music. Formal, stylistic, melodic and rhythmic organizational tools are implemented to stimulate the player's improvisatory thinking. By structuring the free improvisation, the performer is given a set of variables from which to generate personal creativity. Secondly, Braxton combined opposing creative forces into one unified thrust of creative expression. The solo alto saxophone improvisations combine jazz and concert modernist traditions, visual and audible creative mediums, and other dichotomies in an attempt to advance toward one composite world creativity.” [David Putnam Rowell, “Structure and Musical Convergences in Anthony Braxton's Solo Saxophone Improvisations”, B.A., Furman University, 2006]

http://tricentricfoundation.org/

“A lone pipe line leads the group into action. The drummers pound out an incessant barrage of colliding patterns on their drums (with sheep hides for skins), rested on the knees and played with a spoon shaped piece of wood in one hand and a thin stick in the other. You can watch the musicians and try to work out who is playing what, but once you catch the eye of the man you’ve picked out they will instantly change the beat. The rhaita players carry on a follow-the-leader routine, constantly upping the ante, using circular breathing techniques to maintain the notes, until unified screeches ring out in ascension, building up and building up the intensity until the pitch is ringing out beyond the lavish tent that is their backdrop and high out into the hills. And oh yes, it is loud too.” [Ritchie Troughton full article here]

http://joujouka.org/

“The Human Arts Ensemble was a musical and theatrical cooperative founded in St. Louis, MO, in 1971 by free jazz musicians who had been associated AACM and BAG (Black Artist's Group). Around 1970, public funding began to dry up for arts organizations that were suspected of having ties to radical political groups, and drummer Charles Bobo Shaw had the idea of creating a new artistic co-operative that was open to any person without regard to race. The resulting Human Arts Ensemble was thus able to proceed within a radical political agenda and pursue its unique brand of guerilla theater, yet get the public support it needed to do so. […] Among musicians who spent some time jamming with the Human Arts Ensemble were Luther Thomas, Joseph Bowie, Marty Ehrlich, John Lindberg, and even a young John Zorn, along with more established artists such as Lester Bowie and Oliver Lake.” [Uncle Dave Lewis at Allmusic]

“In October 2009 I travelled from Israel to Istanbul. Curious to connect with like-minded improvisers, I contacted Korhan, a founding member of Turkey’s pioneering free improvisation group, Islak Köpek. Korhan arranged for us to meet with Kevin, the group’s American-born cellist in Galata, home to many shifting communities over nearly two thousand years of Istanbul’s cosmopolitan history. Our tour began in June 2010, just a few days after the May 31 raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla in which nine Turkish citizens were killed by the Israeli military. Our tour coincided with a heat wave, too. We saw cars stopped by the side of the road, unable to cope with the heat. In Jerusalem, a hundred thousand ultra-Orthodox Jews took to the streets to protest a Supreme Court decision that ruled against ethnic discrimination in one of their schools. A line was drawn from our first meeting in Istanbul to our last days in Jaffa. While we recorded, this line hovered in the air, connecting our individual histories with a multitude of histories of confrontation, resistance, and co-existence.”

[Tom Soloveitzik, Tel Aviv, February 2012]

http://korhanerel.com/

“Now we are living in one huge global society, and chaos and corruption rule. Talent doesn’t counts any more – that’s why we don’t have any subculture renewing cultural life – giving us geniuses like we had in the 60s or in the early 70s. in music, fine arts…or even in politics.  So – art is a way of life and needs a person who has to have all the opportunities (and time) to practice, play, work and show results to the public. Our life is not written down either – we have to know how to improvise – also in music, also in life. Otherwise we are not humans but robots = good slaves, perhaps… Art is something sacred – it can lift up our souls, our minds to a higher level of existence. And what else that is sacred is left for people these days?  I guess nothing.  This is the only, and the last chance for humanity to find the right way.  Maybe that is why some want to destroy it so bad.”

[Viktor Sethy, interviewed by Michele Andrée]

http://viktorsethy.jamendo.net/

To listen to the podcast, go to Podomatic website and search for 'completecommunion'.

To send me material to be featured on the podcast, email me at galasi.g [at] virgilio.it or gianpaolo.galasi [at] gmail.com

Podcast Episode 1

Mauro Sambo – 21/3/2012
Pandit Pran Nath – Raga Yaman Kalyan (from “Raga Yaman Kalyan Raga Punjabi Berva”, 1971)
Free Gagaku Ensemble - FreeGagaku present and presently remembered – 1
Sam Rivers Trio – Flute Section (from “Streams”, 1973)

Mauro Sambo’s music (Venice, Italy, 1954) can be compared in many ways to Ives Klein paintings, even if he's not that much a surrealist. Multi-instrumentalist (electric and acoustic bass, alto sax, bass clarinet, percussions, samplers, wind controller, Akai S3000XL), video artist and photographer, the art of Mauro Sambo has an attitude towards movement, creating a field of immanence in which music, visuals, sculpture, painting, photography, are not clashing but synthesized by a tactile quality of the space present also in some early NY minimalists, often former disciples of the Pandit Pran Nath. This is also clearly reflected by his videos, photos and sculptures. Sambo is tracing a trip right in between stagnation and movement, his idea of  'time'.

[text taken from my blog london_resonance, and issued in 2011]

Pran Nath's singing emphasized precise intonation and the gradual exposition of tone and mood. Pran Nath's students included a number of American composers of Minimal music, including La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Michael Harrison. He left home at the age of 13 and took up residence with legendary singer Abdul Wahid Khan of the Kirana gharana school. Both guru and disciple were much attracted to mysticism: Abdul Wahid Khan, a Muslim, to Sufism, and Nath, a Hindu, to a Shaivite sect in Dehra Dun. He eventually married and reentered the world at the request (guru dakshana) of his guru, in order to ensure the preservation of the Kirana style. In 1937, he became a staff artist with All India Radio. Nath stuck to a very austere singing style – heavy emphasis on alap, and very slow tempi – which suited his voice well, but was not very popular to the modern Indian taste. Nath supported himself as a music teacher, and worked at the University of Delhi from 1960 to 1970, travelling to New York to visit the American composer La Monte Young and visual artist Marian Zazeela. In 1972, he established his Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music in New York City and stayed in the U.S. until his death on June 13, 1996.

[see full text here]

Wilhelm Matthies is a composer, videoartist and photographer living in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He builds and performs his original instruments, between which the kokeka, developed after years spent preparing guitars "in order to maximize the 'prepared' aspect of playing guitar". Listening to the eight tracks composing "RiverFoot-RealityRubs" (Field Noise Records, 2011), the first impression is that of a record staying at the crossroads of different streams of contemporary music. Matthies' Kokeka comes also from his studies on Japanese koto, Indian vina, Persian rebab and Chinese erhu; but there are also influences from John Cage's preparations and Iannis Xenakis' dry quality of microtones. Free Gagaku Ensemble is Wilhelm Matthies on rhythm stick and kokeka, Jaime Rodriguez Matos on guitar, Matthias Boss and Megan Karls on violin, Paul Mimlitch on alto clarinet.

[part of this text originally appeared on my blog london_resonance in 2011]

Sam "Rivers's music is rooted in bebop, but he is an adventurous player, adept at free jazz. The first of his Blue Note albums, Fuchsia Swing Song, is widely regarded as a masterpiece of an approach sometimes called “inside-outside”. The performer frequently obliterates the explicit harmonic framework (”going outside”) but retains a hidden link so as to be able to return to it in a seamless fashion. Rivers brought the conceptual tools of bebop harmony to a new level in this process, united at all times with the ability to “tell a story” which Lester Young had laid down as a benchmark for the jazz improviser." [Sam Rivers profile on AAJ] Sam Rivers with his Studio RivBea based in Bond Street was the beginner of the so-called 'loft era' [see my three part essay on that topic], started around 1972, with the counter-festival to George Wein's Newport in New York, and ended in 1983 approximately with the triumph of the Reaganomics. Striving to take control over shows and records and to manage independent careers, the 'loft era' was the zenith of the spirit of the Big Apple. “Streams” was issued in 1973. On this track, the multireedist is streaming his consciousness on flute, with all the sections – recorded live at the Montreux jazz festival – flowing coherently from one into the other. Cecil McBee on double bass, Norman Connors on drums

[text partly from my post on london_resonance blog]

To listen to the podcast, go to Podomatic website and search for 'completecommunion'.


To send me material to be featured on the podcast, email me at galasi.g [at] virgilio.it or gianpaolo.galasi [at] gmail.com

Complete Communion on Podcast soon ....

From the book 'La Terra del Rimorso' by Ernesto de Martino, 1961

A free podcast related to my blog Complete Communion will be available soon. All the musicians needing a space to see their works presented side by side with others and classic 'nuggets' - out of print - from the past twenty or more years of experimental music - my selection - are invited to send me an mp3 file of a composition/improvisation of their own choice to be featured on the podcast to the email address: galasi.g [at] virgilio.it, or gianpaolo.galasi [at] gmail.com. Contemporary composers, improvisers, avant-metallians, self-built instrumentalists, strange 'ethnic' nuances are welcome.