Two Pianos, a Harpsichord and a Few Magical Instruments More

One of my favourite activities since when I was young is to go through book and record shops, looking for some hidden gems. You can find records at half price sometimes, or used items, that have nothing to envy to the last releases. Since the one we’re living is a particular time, more devoted to reissues than to new material – with some notable exceptions – I’d love to spend some time talking about some interesting stuff I ran into a couple of weeks ago.

In this small record shop I found out, in effect, for half their price these three CDS of free jazz and contemporary music. Two are double albums. As I discovered at home, listening to them, they were worth the price and the time I spent listening to them. The first album is a piano trio by an old acquaintance of this blog: pianist Matthew Shipp, in a collaboration with long time collaborator bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Norman Taylor Baker. The CD is titled Piano Song and it was released by Shipp’s label Thirsty Ear in 2017. It is the most recent release of the three I’ll write about in this post.

A little disappointed by one of the last outputs by Shipp in a quartet comprising Paul Dunmall, Gereald Cleaver and Joe Morris (here is the review) because of its predictability, I find this other trio album, instead, exquisite, intense, fresh and innovative. Matthew Shipp is, above all, a spiritual musician. The world became aware of him thanks to his work with the great saxophonist David S. Ware, devoted to free jazz and to Ganesh, and thanks to his big open chords and great melodic approach to piano, along with bassist William Parker and many drummers – the one I loved the most was Susie Ibarra – he renowned the great tradition of energy playing, in line with the historical quartet of John Coltrane for the Impulse! label.

The 12 original compositions in this album are great examples of how varied a refinished composer can be musically. There are pieces whispered like a caress full of compassion and others that feature an assertive execution. The two partners are interacting with Shipp not only in order to provide the right accompaniment, but in some compositions, reminiscent of the use of electronics and space in other Shipp’s outputs via his label, they gain the foreground with sonic gestures that leave the imagination free to be hit. The above mentioned use of space as a compositional tool makes me think of Shipp as a contemporary composer, accustomed to modern music – as he told me in an old interview in which he cited Varèse and Baroque music along with Jazz as a first influence to him.

That’s why the second, double album in this multiple review article is so important. It is an album by another great pianist – one of the greatest in jazz history to tell you the truth: ‘Muhal’ Richard Abrams, founder of the Association for the Advancement of the Creative Musicians I mentioned in a series of articles about the Art Ensemble of Chicago few years ago. Abrams is a versatile musician: his many records spans through Contemporary Music and Jazz, and if Sightsong, a beautiful album duo with bassist Malachi Favors from the AEoC was a melodic and melancholic output, this other release, titled Sound Dance and issued by PI Recordings in 2011 is dominated by an impressionistic, pointillistic and vibrating style.

The first disc of the set is a duo with saxophonist Fred Anderson, the second features instead George E. Lewis at both trombone and electronics. If during the concert with Anderson it is more clear who is leading and who is accompanying, the second set is the most intriguing for how both the trombone and the electronics are mixing with the piano notes. The drive becomes less evident, almost hidden, and this sensation of uncertainty comes to the listener without a decisive solution, even if the music is capturing the attention with his beauty and peculiarities. After all what we’re listening to is a dialogue, and, as it happens when you speak to another person, sometimes your words are driven more by the person you’re interacting to than by your ideas and concepts. Call it interaction, or relationship: but it’s the same with music and it’s interesting to hear such a thing happening during a performance.

The most intriguing part of the third album is the second disk, because it features compositions for harpsichord, a far away relative of the piano, and an instrument used mostly in Baroque music but not that much appreciated by Contemporary composers. Xenakis here, as it happens with him, leads the instrument at his limits, and uses the harpsichord mostly as a percussive instrument. It becomes interesting to listen to the composition Komboi, 18 minutes of harpsichord and percussions, because the feeling of an exchange, with the percussive harpsichord and the melodic percussions is something familiar to the listeners of avant garde jazz: you’ll remember for sure that duets between Cecil Taylor and Max Roach.

The first disk, instead, features three compositions for large ensemble – one, Jalons, directed by Pierre Boulez driving his Ensemble Intercontemporain, plus Keren, for trombone, and Nomos Alpha for cello. These are all compositions by the late Xenakis, who let apart his stochastic approach to music – you can read my monography about the composer in this blog – but who was always curious about pushing the boundaries of the instruments: so in the compositions for ensemble, as an example, you’ll not find the usual glissandi but notes mostly on the higher pitches.

I’ve written three reviews of old music – the two Xenakis CDs were released by Warner Classics in 2007 – because I wanted to recap a little the meaning and the practice of a music that nowadays is losing part of its how-to. As I wrote in the last multiple review, when I look around myself I mostly feel the struggling and the difficulties of a niche to be issued and to be heard by a larger audience, and the difficulties from the younger musicians to build a vision from an inner to an outer world. But since the world of rock and other contaminations has mostly completely gone, improvised music and the avant garde is still the most important tool to critique our society and imagine something better.

From September, other releases are waiting for us: from the new edition of Coltrane’s Blue Train with a disk of never heard before material, to a couple of new releases by the Japanese enfant terrible Keiji Haino, one with SUMAC. I hope to hear all of this stuff and more, but for the moment I wanna go back to the records I bought during these last years and share with you some hidden gems that maybe you have lost through the years. After all, music is a matter of love, and not a matter of being fashionable. 

 

 

Joelle Léandre / George Lewis / Pauline Oliveros “Play As You Go” (Trost, 2021)

In my to-be-rebuilt-from-zero collection of albums (it’s a long story, I won’t narrate it here) there are live records released years after their public executions. The beautiful double ECM “Bells For The South Side” by the various Roscoe Mitchell Trios (Mario Gamba wrote on the italian newspaper Il Manifesto that these compositions stand in Mitchell’s carnet at the same point of Beethoven’s Ninth) was recorded in 2015 but released two years after. And the dream album by pianist Cecil Taylor, one of my favorite composers&performers of all times, “At Angelica 2000 Bologna” was issued on 2020.

Something similar happened with Peter Brotzmann’s sessions for the saxophone solo CD “I Surrender Dear”, sessions that belong to the year 2018 and published only two years later. So I asked myself if there is one reason that, after a long period of time where alternative music – whatever this label means – was about to instantaneously monetize creativity, now after all these years artits are going slower with the publishing of their own music, sometimes bringing to light hidden gems that were at risk of becoming only a small portion of a vast archive.

Things have changed in the business. If ten years ago a good decision was to give birth to a limited edition of 1000 copies for one album – since it would have been difficult to sell more than that at the beginning of the European economical recession and in the middle of the cultural crisis of the new century – now artists and labels, if we’re talking of passed away musicians, are more aware of the link and the responsibilities they have with their public, and the few of us that didn’t leave completely in order to become adults with no strange sonorous objects in their houses want more than the next great album to add to our collections anyway.

In order to respect the up above tracked rules, here it comes an album that will leave you with the will to listen to it repeatedly, or so I hope at list becaue it’s what it deserves. The musicians involved in this live recordings are three of the most important masters of instant composition and improvisation of the last decades. We’re in effect talking about bassist and vocalist Joelle Léandre, trombonist and electronic manipulator George Lewis, one of the founding members of the AACM, and accordionist Pauline Oliveros. This is the first time they play together.

The 44 minutes long instantaneous compositions begin with Léandre raucous vocals interspersed with accordion and electronic effects. The interaction is obviously different from that of a ‘jazz’ trio since the way the musicians listen and react to each other is based on reprocity more than on idiomatic techniques. Bass is both pizzicato and arcoed, and even if it is difficult to tell who’s conducting the dances, I would say that Léandre gestures are kind of the skeleton for Lewis’ and Oliveros’ flash, at list in this first part.

It can seem obvious since the nature of an instrument that is designed to be pivotal but not that obvious from the nature of the sound structure of the improvisation-composition. And if a colleague from his blog wrote aptly that the way every musician is open to the other is fundamental for the creation of the music, I would also suggest the listener to be careful with the group indentity of it, an identity that can seem overwhelming the single musician but pertaining to the ensemble.

Around minute 8 the electronic elements mastered by Lewis give space to various accordion statements, intertwining with them, dialoguing with them, leaving them the space to become an abstract, far away melody mixed with bass’s percussed and arcoed strings. We’re about minute 12 and the trombone takes its place in the usual manner: statements of existence instead of melodies or trasfigured melodies or scarred melodies. It’s time for the voice to dialogue with these statements, while the trombone become less dense and more careful to the dynamics of sound and silence.

It’s time again, at around minute 15, for the accordion to gather trombone’s heritage and give life to a way of being, more than a way of improvising: the electronic sounds, in fact, articulate a range of different paths to music, leaving the listener the right space to live inside the music instead of being overwhelmed by it. We’re around minute 17 now, and this complex texture is held by trombone and bass: they build a climax that leave the listener with the famous Braxton idea of waking up spiritually the people who are attending to the event.

At around minute 19 electronics add themselves to the music, before a quasi-silent space where sparse sounds can accompany the positioning of the listener’s mind in the middle of the music itself. Accordion and electronics are now underlining the short and dense, but warm and gentle, statements from the bowed bass who takes the lead of the trio again, conducing it to a construction made of different textures sometimes echoing an exaltating full and sometimes leading to some full/void dynamics.

We’re around minute 25 and Lewis elaborates in real time Léandre vocals, before a short amount of silence interspersed with electronic sounds. Strings and short electronic statements dominates this second part of the performance, with vocoderized vocals and short accordion bids. A new climax by all the instruments can be taken as an invitation to leave yoursef go to the following mix of acoustic and electronic trombone’s sounds.

A new crescendo makes the music more dramatic, but it’s the non idiomatic quality of it that makes the listener live an experience of openness, of feelings, more than that of different identities contaminating each other. In a way, it is as this idea, that circulated throughout intellectual environments during the last decades, is now leaving its place to that of sensations mixing together in order to create a new, composite feeling, whose spirit is here represented by a sound that can seem that of a dramatic keyboard followed by small sound gestures levitating in the mind of the listener.

Small bowed strings lead the listener to a new electronic heartbeat, while far away small voices counterpoint Oliveros’ small accordion morceaux, until the apparition of what can seem a little percussion. Bass and accordion dialogue is following the pause with a mix of melancholy and expectancy, while the electronics try to remind us that this is non-descriptive music, and that this idea of sound is not for everyone to be played: you have to dismiss a previously frequented idea of ethics and aesthetics in order to do so.

Then, it’s time to the trombone to conduct the listener into a journey to be played as you go, and if the cover of the album is not far from that of other avant garde records where the sea is compared to the texture of sounds, this is the best version of it from Christian Fennesz “Venice”. Recorded in Prague at the Festival “VS Interpretation” for Czech radio, “Play As You Go” is an important album not only becase we miss Pauline Oliveros since 5 years, but also because this music is far from becoming surclassed in a period where we often can listen to musicians that are perched on melody or on a non completely textured experimentation.