Best of 2025 in music

Many months have passed since I wrote my last review. Many albums have seen my desk and my CD reader, or have been transferred to my laptop. The fact is, I’ve started writing for an Italian magazine online, in my native language, but after some months the articles were not published, nor rejected. They were simply frozen on the virtual desk. Then there was the theatre laboratory, and the arts academia. And my daily job.

But since many musicians have sent to me their beautiful works, and since I have bought some other records that to me were worth listening to, now I want to give my reader a small “best of 2025”. So, I’ll start in no particular order. There won’t be a podium, and the albums will not be displayed from worst to best or vice versa. The reader is free to skim through the lines and read the reviews of the albums he had listened to or maybe he’ll want to discover the music he was not aware of.

As in the past, you will find albums coming from Italy as much as from the rest of the world, experimental records and noise rock, metal influenced by jazz and industrial music. Obviously my (non-)ranking is subjective, so don’t mind if I miss LPs or CDs you liked: it is impossible to be conscious of everything that sorts out of the music business, and every time I read magazines, on line or on paper, I see a beautiful anarchy coming out of them, more than a dreadful or mortal order. That’s life!

 

Wadada Leo Smith/Vijay Iyer “Defiant Life” (ECM)

Partially deluded as I was by last year collaboration between the A.A.C.M. trumpet player and Amina Claudine Myers (see my review here), I was really happy to hear him and Vijay Iyer in this ECM release. Space and time are suspended, but you won’t enter into another dimension as while listening to Chet Baker or Chopin’s preludes: better, you’ll enter in touch with yourself. If post-punk is the right music to deep dive into yourself from 1979 onwards, this 2025 album is beautiful and courageous in a similar way.

Leo Smith’s trumpet is interspersed with layers and layers of piano, Fender Rhodes and electronics, but the music is always essential and the compositions are created by subtraction. The dedications to Patrice Lumumba and Refaat Alareer (poet, activist and co-founder of the project ‘We Are Not Numbers’ in Gaza) say it all.

And so, even if sometimes the (abstract) ‘muezzin call’ we are accustomed to listen while hearing Wadada Leo Smith trumpet here is more elliptical than in his usual concerts or records, the meditative atmosphere can bring consciousness about the nature of activism – it doesn’t sort out of the will to affirm oneself, but from a deep connection with the inner self and with reality: this is at least what the music suggested to me.

 

Nine Inch Nails “Tron: Ares” (The Null Corporation / Walt Disney / Interscope)

It’s incredible how much Reznor’s music under the monicker Nine Inch Nails is able to speak out loud to me even when it is a partial compromise with the music business as this soundtrack for the movie starring Jared Leto is. But let’s go with order: last year Reznor himself told the press that he was imagining with difficulties a future for his major creature. But after a small amount of time he was helped by Walt Disney’s CEO who wanted the new soundtrack for the movie “Tron: Ares” to be released as a proper NIN album.

And even if Reznor is assuring in 2026 we’ll see other new NIN material, this album in the end, thanks to pieces like ‘As Alive as You Need Me to Be’, the duet with the Spanish singer Judeline ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’, the meditative ‘I Know You Can Feel It’,  and a bunch of instrumental tracks like the ecstatic ‘Echoes’ or the threatening ‘Infiltrator’ are raising high the flag of the band name. Obviously, we will be grateful to Reznor and Atticus Ross for the new  material we’ll hear this year, with great curiosity.

 

Swans “Birthing” (Young God)

The two CDs (or vinyls) set published by Gira and friends this year is possibly the most focused of these last years. More than the beautiful “The Beggar”, more than the previous “Leaving/Meaning”. From ‘I Am A Tower’, with the guitars echoing memories of Robert Fripp’s work with Eno and Bowie on ‘Heroes’, to the dramatic crescendo of ‘Red Yellow’, Swans are creating a music full of tensions that are not exploding, but that are accumulated until an abyss comes to your senses.

The perfection of tracks like ‘The Merge’, with his noisy introduction and his circular, even if a little limping, rhythms, make us forget about Gira pretending “The Beggar” to be the testament of The Swans (do you remember ‘Michael Is Done’?) and the following tour as the last of his career. It is not the first time this happens with him, but the beauty of the music makes me curious about the announced new phase of Gira’s creature as I was curious about his pupil Devendra Banhart when his first albums came to light.

 

Model/Actriz “Pirouette” (True Panther Sounds)

This is possibly the album of 2025 I have listened to the most. I have read many reviews in which the album was negatively judged because of his mixing post-punk guitars and 4/4 beats as they happen in disco or dance music, but to me this is definitely a ‘plus’. The single ‘Cinderella’ with his ‘queer’ video is what we had missed for many years – Cole Haden, M/A lead singer, as the hero we needed along with Anohni and Terre Thaemlitz as the only people able to bring some diversity to some genres created mostly by and for cisgender hetero males.

But also ‘Diva’, with his static tension, the second single from the album, has some intriguing quality – as the rest of the album – as if the music were able to bring the listener on the edge of the chasm leaving him here to dance. “I won’t leave as I came” sings Haden, and this is exactly the destiny of the listener of this album: the music and its meaning will remain glued to your conscience, and it will be a beautiful experience.

 

KnCurrent “self titled” (Deep Dish)

Jason Kao Hwang (electric violin), Cooper-Moore (diddley-bo), On Ka’a Davis (guitar) and Patrick Brennan (alto saxophone) have created one of the most adventurous LPs you will listen from what is emerging from 2025. Some years ago I crowned Hwang album “Uncharted Faith” as one of the most intriguing and avant albums of that period, and even if basically everything Hwang is involved bears traces of pure genius in music, this album is so full of textures and nuances that I couldn’t help but insert in this ‘best of 2025’.

Each track has its own peculiarities and particular sound/vision in it, and the instruments involved and the techniques they speak are so different from one  piece of music to the other, but taken as a whole the album is showing how much the old masters of improvised music are far from been merely legends of the past and can leave tracks into the present. Another album I wrote a review early this year, musically different but genuinely beautiful, is the album “Parallel Aesthetics” by Ivo Perelman and Tyshan Sorey: my advice is to enjoy it in its full length if you still miss it.

 

Robertson/Dell/Ramond/Klugel “Blue Transient” (Nemu)

Trumpeter Herb Robertson, vibraphonist Christopher Dell, bassist Christian Ramond and drummer Klaus Kugel have released in 2025 this double album full of remembrances from the Art Ensemble of Chicago (the ‘small instruments’ at the beginning) and from the Blue Note era of the great Sam Rivers and others who tried to give free jazz to the masses.

An intimate and intriguing journey through the depths of sounds and the visions of these musicians. Sometimes when I listen to them I ask myself why they’re not put on the flag by every blog/website/magazine related to experimental music. This is not nostalgia or carbon copy; this is devotion to an idea of music full of personal nuances and will to create.

 

Duck Baker “There’s No Time Like The Past” (Fulica)

Released in December of 2024, this album has entered my radar only last year so I really wanted to put lights on it since Duck Baker, a musician fond in fingerpicking, jazz, country and other U.S. contaminated music like the blues, goes well beyond my usual taste in experimental sounds. Melodic and enjoyable from the first listen, “There’s No Time Like The Past” will be for many of you like a Pandora’s box: Baker discography is full of treasures (he released at least other three albums under its own name in 2025).

Far from the deconstructions of musicians like Marc Ribot and Derek Bailey, Baker is one of the many, too many good underappreciated artisans that silently but with great love and devotion are leaving us an opus of beauty and truth. This album is a testimony of how a someone able to create a music rooted into tradition can be taken as example for other musicians or simple listeners as far as breadth of intention and clarity of vision.

 

Tropical Fuck Storm “Fairyland Codex” (Fire)

The nice and usual habit of seeking influences to describe this or that post-punk band are useless with this line-up coming from Australia. Obviously, there is the hoarse voice of Gareth Liddiard to remind me a little of David Thomas, but is a too obvious reference and Liddiard is a valid and original singer per se.

If you find difficult to think of this genre as self-renovating again after last year “Romance” by Fontaines D.C., this album will definitely change your mind. Drums, drum machines, synths, pedal steel guitars are creating for the listener a wider landscape, full of the irony and the abrasiveness that is typical of this style of music. But the creative spark is here to stay, and I think many of you will get back to this album also in 2026 …

 

Messa “The Spin” (Metal Blade)

Heavy Metal was the first genre of music to grab my attention as a teenager. Sonic violence, in-yer-face attitude and tell-it-like-it-is vibes were accompanying my angst in a way my parents were not completely approving, and this was enough to me. But many years passed since my last look at this genre in the first part of the 2000s, with bands like Neurosis and few others.

Messa are an Italian band (from the suburbs of Treviso if I remember well) who loves to mix doom metal with jazz guitar licks and harmonies. But the result is different from a pure melting pot of different styles: in a way only at an attentive listening you’ll find the single elements melting together. Because the effect is that of a perfect blend. A small miracle from my country, Messa are a band worth seeing in live concerts and spanning through its career in order to enjoy its evolution.

 

Marc Ribot “Map Of A Blue City” (New West)

A little bit disappointed as I was by Ribot’s recent outputs as a leader (Ceramic Dog were satisfying to me only partially), I enjoyed this album the was released after decades from its conception, thanks to many record companies who didn’t know how to label the music contained in it.

Ribot and his pals give life to a music that can be put aside of the beautiful folk of people like Nick Drake, but with a tinge of contemporary electric experimentations and some Latin nuances (see ‘Daddy’s Trip To Brazil’). There’s also space to put into music a poem by Allen Ginsberg (‘Sometime Jailhouse Blues’). One of the major works of Ribot to me, along with Spiritual Unity (with Ribot recreating with his guitar the music of Albert Ayler) and the famous (for the wrong reasons) ‘fake-cuban’ albums.

 

Suede “Antidepressants” (BMG)

Famous during the mid-Nineties for their almost-glam rock revival in an era in which everyone was looking for an alternative from the Oasis-Blur battle, Brett Anderson’s Suede are coming back with a concept album that is deep and full of nuances to appreciate through different listenings.

Symmetrical to last year’s The Cure comeback, and different from the poorly written (in my opinion) Lebanon Hanover’s “Asylum Lullabies”, this record, released by a major label, has new obscure nuances the old Suede were completely missing. And if the album’s cover is inspired by a famous Francis Bacon (the painter) photograph, the music is more essential and plainer than in the past.

 

So, these are the album I enjoyed this year – along with older stuff – and these are my advices after almost a year of silence with this blog. I don’t know honestly how much I will write this year 2026. But obviously I’ll keep on listening new music, and so get ready for new releases like the new album by Wadada Leo Smith and Ivo Perelman. I still need to listen to this unprecedented collaboration, but I hope it will be a good sign for all the new alternative and experimental music that will be released this year.

Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers – Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lakes, Parks and Gardens (Red Hooks, 2024)

Despite the recent good albums I had the opportunity to listen to featuring trumpet player and composer Wadada Leo Smith, like Andrew Cyrille’s Lebroba (ECM, 2018), I have read contrasting opinions about his last efforts. As far as it seems he was not so brilliant in a series of concerts the musician held in the U.S.: according to the reviewer, he was too fond on personal clichés, and he was even juxtaposed to James Brandon Lewis, the young guy to take a look at since he was showing, at the contrary, an interesting evolution. 

Anyway, the cynic in me concluded that the reviewer was possibly tired of listening to Smith’s music and was enthusiastic about a younger musician. After all, many people got bored after a period if they don’t find the right stimulus. Anyway, finally Wadada Leo Smith, one of the most important composers to sort out of the A.A.C.M., the Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, has released and album in duo with pianist, organist and newly minted NEA Jazz Master – NJM Fellowship is an honour given in the United States to particularly innovative musicians since 1982 – Amina Claudine Myers. 

The album is inspired by New York Central Park’s environment, as the title of the album suggests, but there are also compositions dedicated to Albert Ayler and John Lennon. The First composition, Conservatory Garden, opens with Myers’ melancholic meditation. Every note resonates aptly thanks to the great work by former ECM producer Sung Chung, thanks to whom even Smith’s trumpet gain echoes and specific colors as it happens to the piano. 

Conservatory Garden is possibly one of the best compositions in jazz I have heard since many years, and it’s worth the price of the album per se. You will listen to a composition of contemporary jazz but with that quality that is sometimes difficult to obtain, since it’s a matter of accents. While listening to it, I can really understand what Smith was telling me ten years ago about connecting the head and the heart. 

The trumpeter is more keen on incorporating Miles Davis influence into his own language – in the past Smith claimed to have dreamed of Davis also, to stress the strong connection with him and his language of pauses, silences, and with his almost muezzin-like calls – but it’s the quality of the music itself and the interplay, where each musician is able to dive deep into the emotional motivation of the other, to make the difference. 

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir sees Myers at a Hammond Organ, and since music is a matter of accents, we have a strong emotional shift from the first to this second composition, with melancholy leaving space to an almost subtle spooky feeling. Central Park at Sunset is even a more spacey and meditative, while the harmonic idea is verticalized becoming almost dolphian, even if Smith’s call maintains his spiritual qualities. 

When Was is another step into an emotional journey, this time led by the piano only, that laps the territories of New Age – at least, of that part of contemporary music that laps New Age – without falling into it – thanks to some dissonances here and there, mostly in the second part of the composition - but this time I feel I can understand people who dislike this path into classicism. Luckily enough, the second part of the composition – almost a disharmonious fugue – is able to redeem the intentions of Myers. 

The Harlem Meer is the most static of the compositions here involved: thanks to a trumpet that is soloing almost unaccompanied, we have the feeling of not being able to sort out of a strange dream. Albert Ayler, a Meditation in Light lives on the contrast between Smith and Myers music and the original evoked, so much thicker and denser. No one expects in the middle of an album like this a changing of the guards, anyway I will limit myself to observe that even Lacy and Waldron in some Black Saint/Soul Note albums were paying homage to Monk underestimating his angularity. 

I don’t think Myers and Smith are asking for more attention from a wider audience, I suspect instead that the opportunities given to them by the recording process and output influenced their creativity bringing them to obscure part of the music they could give life to, making it all more monochromatic. 

Finally, Imagine, a Mosaic for John Lennon is an even more rarefied, subtle composition. You can feel at a certain point how much Lennon’s efforts to contribute to a more just society are losing their breath, or maybe it’s just me, but up to a certain point I have the feeling the musicians are losing the point, closing at the right time before their music becomes too obvious. 

Concluding, I would say that this album features some notable compositions, some of the most interesting in Smith’s and Myers’ careers, mixed with less well realised food for musical reflection. And while I’m meditating whether to look for a physical copy of the album, I’m happy I had the opportunity to introduce this album to my readers. After all, this is possibly not the right time for the perfect album or the complete masterpiece, but if you’re able to find a record with just some gems as in this case, I really believe you’re lucky enough.

Unaccomplished identities through unheard sounds

Words + Photos (except the first): Gian Paolo Galasi

This short essay is a first reconnaissance on some interesting points I became aware of in developing my knowledges on improvised music. While I'm planning to develop more with time, I want to start from a couple of books I discussed with their author last year through a brief email exchange. 

I'm trying to put down more than a simple 'review' of this works, while at the same time I'm trying to further develop some skills and knowledges whose importance is growing the more I listen to music and I get in touch with musicians.

While discussing about the subject with Davide Sparti, he was also telling me that during this year, 2012, the Oxford University Press would issue wide portions of his writings in English. I hope so to thank him for his availability and his advices, and for some of his writings on Michel Foucault he gifted me with. 

If improvised and avant garde music are becoming objects of academic studies, this can probably mean that one of their cycle is closing, or still come to an end, leaving space to new developments in the future. I tried to discuss some of the thesis included in the last couple of books by Italian Associate Professor in Literature and Philosophy at the University of Pisa Davide Sparti, with some improvisers coming from different parts of Europe to play in Italy, or known through my trips in Europe, last year. 

Davide Sparti started publishing his studies on the relationships between identity, conscience, recognizement and their ethics - a study coming out of his previous works on Ludwig Wittengstein, Annah Arendt and Michel Foucault - and music as a product and a producer of changes in the experience of the musicians in those fields, in 2005. 

Suoni inauditi. L'improvvisazione nel jazz e nella vita quotidiana (in English: Unheard sounds. Improvising in jazz and everyday life) is a serious and well developed attempt on saying something interesting on jazz starting not from musicology but from sociology and philosophy of language, avoiding to use jazz as an excuse or external element. 

Sparti focus on 'improvisation as a generative act', not as 'matching with the realm of freedom' but involved in a tradition shared and in a practical knowledgde, and on improvisation as a cultural, more than only musical, practice, so to use it as a paradigm for every shared action in society. 

While passing through Plato, Aristotheles, Descartes, Leibnitz, until Freud and Marx, it is clear that in Western knowledge from a certain point the visual paradigm prevailed against the aural - how much I'd love to point at this, developing further, but nonetheless what Sparti want to show here is the possibility to use sociology in order to become more conscious about how much of society enters into music and how much sonic constructions are affected by it. 

While he's distinguishing his studies from formalist musicology, I can state that in my experience, being in both UK and Italy, even without taking Sparti's books as a direct reference, my impressions on improvised (but not only) music in both countries is that there are subtle, but unavoidable inflences, between the culture 'deciding', as Sparti says, if a 'family of sound events' is acceptable for a composer or a player, the self perception of musicians and their roles in their respective environments, even if this would lead to a wider discussion; putting Derek Bailey's Improvisation: its nature and practice in music under the same focus, it is clear why European improvisers were through the decades trying both to unmark themselves from the shapes improvised music developed through other countries - e.g. jazz, blues, ragas, baroque music - and sometimes also from their own previous results, as the accounts by the likes of Gavin Bryars and John Stevens can directly testify.

Christian Weber and Joke Lanz, Oslo, Jan. 2011

If improvising is a cultural practice, it is interesting to read Adorno about jazz, as on Sparti's second chapter, aptly titled "history of a reciprocal misuderstanding": for the Frankfurt philosopher, history of jazz is 'an history of regression'. Adorno was studying jazz only as part of a wider analysis on culture and business, pointing at the relationship between individual creativity and 'administered' society, and the attitude of most of the listeners as 'consumers', something every old, or modern jazzman or improviser would subscribe for sure - how about how much a record can really testify of the music and the creative processes behind it, once diffused on a stereo through a room, as an example?

Adorno was misinterpreting jazz as a practice - the example of his encounter with Leonard Feather at a Johnny Hodges concert at the NY Cotton Club is inspiring - but he was on the other hand really digging the risks of the Dialectics of the Enlightenment, that is, the business industry that 'produced' jazz 'as entertainment'. That's why Adorno didn't get, since his first 1933 writings, through his last 1962 Uber Jazz, the moments of transition and the breaking points in the jazz continuum, while his greater quality was pointing at the contradictions between creativity and industry. 

Maja S.K. Ratkje and Zeena Parkins, Oslo, Jan. 2011

In fact, while Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane were giving life to a music whose polyrhythms, polyphonies and multi-tonalities were breaking the accepted cathegories of 'beauty' in music, abolishing also the preconceived hierarchies between musicians - this is true also for the second Miles Davis quintet - as John Cage or Lennie Tristano were experimenting with indeterminacy and improvisation, Adorno efforts were related to denying the ideological conciliation between individual and society, not the ideal of this conciliation. 

If art and music, far from reflecting one-sidely social reality, are nontheless not completely far from it - as in the case of Kafka, Beckett, or Schoenberg - they can, as 'expressive vehicle for a subjectivity disfigured by society itself', give a hint at a 'right path', in form of a 'negative utopia'. But jazz, as Sparti points out correctly, is far from the Western categories of the 'esthetics of the negative' - I strongly invite the reader to skim through Giampiero Cane Canto Nero. Il Free Jazz degli Anni Sessanta in order to deepen some useful tools in this sense - while at the opposite, as Sparti states, jazz instead 'reveals a certain critical, experimental, approach related to individual expression that Adorno was taking as the distinctive feature of the avant-garde music'. 

Wadada Leo Smith, Gunther 'Baby' Soemmer, Vitry-Sur-Seine, Feb. 2011

The third chapter of the book is focused on 'improvisation as proficency', in which composition and performance can 'converge through time' until 'composing in real time'; gaining fluency - a feature of every language - requires time, efforts, and soaking up knowledges. It would be really interesting - that's what I did with some 'contemporary' musicians, but mostly in fits and starts - to discuss the five requirements attributed by Sparti to improvising - indivisibility, originality, irreversibility, responsiveness - and the differences he recognizes between improvisation and conversation - for Sparti, in jazz you always have to say something 'new', while in conversations if you don't use common expressions, you are at risk of being not understood; not every musician I told about the subject seems to be necessarily 'pro' - but even not necessarily 'contrary'.

Charles Gayle, Novara, June 2011

Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith told me, as an example, that 'no one is experimenting today with new ways of expression', sounding as 'no one has this courage now', while at the opposite Peter Broetzmann told me 'I don't believe in new forms in arts'. But Broetzmann is both a musician and a painter, and I can recognize at least in some of his projects a direct confluence of both - as an example in Die Like a Dog, even if, when asked, he told me 'maybe'; another example of this convergence can be trumpeter and painter Bill Dixon - while at the opposite, bassist Christian Weber wrote me 'it would disturb me to work with the ambition to create something new everytime i play (since it is a fixed structure it's somehow limited and can become a formula too). But i feel the necessity of inventing anything a play in the moment it appears'. 

This last statement goes on the same direction of Davide Sparti statements, since his idea of 'jazz habitus' - a Latin word used also by anthropologist Marcel Mauss for a knowledge coming directly from the body - involves a convergence of body and mind through a training whose progress is oriented by discontinuous changes that it would be impossible to measure on every performance. Not that far from what Viram Jasani was referring to Derek Bailey about the way an Indian musician learns to play a raga from his master, or from what Johann David Heinichen wrote about baroque music in his Der General Bass in der Komposition (1711). 

Mary Halvorsom, London, Nov. 2011

What I would love to underline in discussing Sparti's Suoni Inauditi here is that his perspective on jazz as a tool for the develpment of the personality and identity of the musicians themselves is part of a bigger picture most of the musicians quite often show to be aware of, even using a different language, as Anthony Braxton in his Tri-Axium Writings, in which music is part of a wider knowledge about man, and his cultural tools as a way to relate to reality and to itself. 

As in chapter four, dedicated to interactivity, what really musicians 'give and take' the one to and from the other is an open possibility to express themselves out of the gained patterns of (technical) behaviour, in a way that can also be developed outside of the music field, at least potentially. 

In this sense it is fully comprehensible why a percussionist as Milford Graves - see William Parker interview with him on his book Conversations issued last year for Rogue Art - relates the art of percussions to some personal research through the field of 'alternative' medical sciences, as well as some statements by altoist Steve Lacy on staying 'on the border' as part of the creative process. 

In 2010 L'Identità incompiuta. Paradossi dell'Improvvisazione Musicale (tr.: 'The Unfinished Identity. Paradoxes of Improvisation in Music'), Davide Sparti goes even further in reading improvisation and its relationships between music and identity, using as references mostly Hannah Arendt theory of human action and Michel Foucault technologies of the self. 

For those readers not completely at ease with those categories, I'd like at firt to invite them to listen to double bassist and composer Stefano Scodanibbio Il Cielo sulla Terra, a piece of contemporary music whose libretto was composed by Giorgio Agamben, a disciple of both Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, as related to similar issues, an effort to give a comprehensive look on the development of avant garde music as an attempt to give men useful tools to regain their comprehension of life and themselves in their entirety against the oppression of an alienated, as in contemporary Western societies, life. 

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt discuss about action and its effects over recognizement, as a production of a potential 'new identity'. Under this focus, the attempts of many jazz players trying not to reproduce themselves and to avoid repetition as an esthetic trap is at one corner, while the other extreme is loosing their own identities - and as consequence, the opportunity to play and to be heard, this is the 'paradox' of the title. If this is particularly true for the 'avant garde' movements of the past - AACM, Sun Ra Arkestra, Eric Dolphy - this frame is used to explain also the attitude of a musician like Sonny Rollins even today.

On the other hand, Foucault's 'technologies of the self' are in Sparti's view an attempt to preserve the musician through his journey from the desertion of the common shores of a certain solidified style of music to his new developing style and his new possible social and economical recognizement, avoiding isolation and misconstruction. 

Guro Skumsens Moe, London, Oct. 2011

Since this last book involves such concepts as tranformation, authenticity, experience, in a way that can reconnect on one hand Sparti's studies to a wider broad of the last century philosophy developments, the ones related to reflections on identity opened after the end of World War II and leading Michel Foucault to his studies on the history of knowledge and sexuality, and their relationships with culture and power, and on the other hand the studies of phenomenological perception through Husserl and Merleau-Ponty at the limits of the self perception in Western Culture since Cartesian's Cogito and the developments of Western science as separated from the arts and other human knowledge fields, I'd love to start a new discussion more over in time, after some reflexions and studies on the subjects. 

For the moment, I'd limit myself to consider that Sparti's references on Foucault are the ones that pushed me at a certain time to develop a knowledge of non-Western cultures, and their relationships with creativity. For those who would like to put an eye on Wadada Leo Smith's writings on music - but is the same with Anthony Braxton writings on the Tri-Centric Vibrational Dynamics - it will be clear that, far from being only tools to develop music, they are part of an attempt to re-connect, as Smith himself told me, 'the head and the heart' or, as Braxton would possibly put it, to restore a continuum in which human knowledges can be connected in a more, organic way through their own 'upper and lower partials'. A good starting point for the curious reader can be the last part of Graham Lock book on Braxton music, Forces in Motion. The Music And Thoughts of Anthony Braxton (see an extract here).

Related bibliography:

Davide Sparti, Suoni inauditi. L'improvvisazione nel jazz e nella vita quotidiana, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2005
Davide Sparti, L'identità incompiuta. Paradossi nell’improvvisazione musicale, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2010

Further Readings:

Leo Smith, Notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: Creative Music, self published, 1973

Graham Lock, Forces In Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton, DaCapo Press, 1989

Derek Bailey, Improvisation, Its Nature and Practice in Music, DaCapo Press, 1993

Davide Sparti, Musica in nero. Il campo discorsivo del jazz, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2007
Davide Sparti, Il corpo sonoro. Oralità e scrittura nel jazz, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2007

Understanding music as a matter of intelligence and love

Interview with Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith

Bologna, 7/5/2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Panic Jazz Café, Chiostri S. Corona, Vicenza, May 13, 2011

I followed directly Wadada Leo Smith in various live performances since Vitry-Sur-Seine in February. Since then, the trumpet player toured massively through North of Italy: in March he was in Milano with his Organic band (I put a review on Mescalina webzine in my native language), than he played in May (6 to 9) at Angelica Festival, solo, and in a duo with pianist John Tilbury, and finally both of them were in a quartet featuring Pauline Oliveros and Roscoe Mitchell (my photos). Astounding was his quartet performance, with all the musicians taking their parts as main soloist in turn, and the other ones following their stream in answer: very essential, and very fluid at the same time. Then again, one of his most beautiful performances: a duo with Gunther ‘Baby’ Sommer on May, 12 in Padova, in which Wadada played completely acoustic but with a mastery on his sound that would get him out of the boundaries of a trumpet player, even if no effects nor pedals were used, whereas Gunther made his drumset sound sometimes properly as a piano or a melodic instrument, working notably also on layering fore and background with his fellow. The day after, in Vicenza the couple played with Italian pianist Antonello Salis. Though the Italian musician is a master on his own (he played also with Cecil Taylor along with Tony Oxley), that was a harshly nervous performance, with serious interaction problems between the musicians; only in the end they finally played together all at the same time, giving shape to a melancholic, pointillistic and oblique blues … This is part of our conversation at the hotel he stayed in Bologna, followed by an open explanation of his Ankhrasmation musical system, that I deepened a little, as he suggested to me when we had the talk. Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith is a great teller, and his ideas could seem simple, but they are amongst those that need an entire life to be developed. It’s a pleasure to listen to him talking as it is hearing him play. I thanks both the musician and his Italian manager Alberto LoFoco for their kindness and support.

I’d like to start our conversation talking about your first compositions, like The Bells and Light of the Dalta, that were on Anthony Braxton’s records [The Bells appears on Delmark’s Three Compositions of New Jazz, whereas Light of the Dalta was issued on Byg’s B-Xo/N-0-1-47a or Composition 6g] … Light of the Dalta is an open reference to the blues, and I was thinking about the fact that the first free jazz players, like Ornette Coleman, developed melodically the references to the blues … you were more kind of giving to sound itself, silence and timbre a major relevance … you know, if I have to think about a blues composition that can remind me of your music, that piece would be Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground [a Blind Willie Johnson piece, that inspired also musicians as diverse as Ry Cooder, Marc Ribot, Loren Connors and moviemakers like Wim Wenders], where you can hear this guitar chord very prolonged and repeated; so I think that there is also a spiritual aspect, if you will, in developing music that way from the blues … so I wanted to ask you about your references in music, blues, and spirituality, in developing your style with the trumpet …

Teatro San Leonardo, Bologna, May 7, 2011

Ok, the song that you’ve mentioned I don’t really know it, but the blues is a very complex music, that has alternation between a 1/4 and a 5/4, and most people take that to be kind of a progression, but it’s not. A progression has to be at least three of four relationships to a chord, and blues has this alternation between those two relevances that is time to get a dam. Now, what makes that so important is that the blues itself has already built inside of it a notion about freedom, most sentence look tells like that: ‘no refuse, make some happen, or call some to change, all you need is to part to what to change’, I mean, until that part happens. So the blues masters figured out that the most natural relationship between events and objects and humans is true; that for example, if you have a child, he needs a woman; man and woman make appear that from the form; so there’s another phenomenon, of sunrise and sunset; both of them do the same things: sunrise it brings for light, sunset it brings for dawn; so out of both of them it quills like new conditions. So the blues is based off of that, a natural relationship between events, abrupt and hint. Now, my music doesn’t come out quickly as the blues, that little piece, Light of the Dalta, does have motion between the one in the bar, you see … [sings] … dabadabadabadabada–bang-da … [shifts singing of a major] dabadabadabadabada–bang-da … but, that’s an illusion, is not really blues … I made music like that because of the notion about the Delta, you see, the South, Mississippi has the most famous Delta in America. So Light of the Delta has to do with the way the sun rise in Mississippi where in the Delta, it comes about and it warm, when it rise. And at certain points you as a human being as you’re stand and watch sunrise you tell of being that. And at another point, it comes up midway left by, it comes up to your head; you even look so, and at some point, it passes by your head and move forward, and you know how it moves, you see, and, he goes on like that; it can shatters, an the sunset never it reduce the light; so, that’s what The Light of the Dalta means, it has to do with sunrise, and it’s not really a blues, it has relationship that’s … spiritually, is attempt to the blues, ok?

Ok, so, it has to do with the sun rising on the Dalta, and not with a progression of chords …

No, has nothing to do with chords … y’know, lot of people look at how music should be organised, they reduce to notions about chords and their function…

Yeah, this is a big problem, if we talk about so-called avant-garde jazz, even for people like Charles Mingus, they took many years to understand how his music was working, because musicologists were thinking more about the developing of music in notational terms, more than studying directly his compositions, as we European think about music from 18^th century on … I read a good essay on Mingus written in Italy kind of six years ago, by Stefano Zenni [Charles Mingus: Polifonie dell’Universo Afroamericano, Nuovi Equilibri/Stampa Alternativa, 2002], because he was trying to use a different approach, starting from what he wrote on the lines of his records … but maybe, if you want to understand really music, you have to be an artist, like a poet, or a painter …

No!

No?

No, no … I would say that to understand music, it’s a head and a heart, intelligence and love, that’s all it takes …

The most simply things…

Padova, Cinema Teatro Torresino, May 12, 2011

But the most simple is the most complex, and everytime we do comes through those two things: a head, that is intelligence, and a heart, which is really the one’s request to be loved … so really when Mingus remembers whatever they were doing they would come from the same point, basically a head and a heart, and to understand that is all it takes, now artists, and journalists, and poets, and painters, in any kind of profession, they did kind of a special relationship with, but what works not so fair is that relationship that one understands from the head and the heart… Like for example, if I put another photo wide on it it’s still wide but maybe a little bit lighter and a little bit dumb in his right, but it’s still … still wide, you know, so … when people look at music and they took it and put it a way it shows some other view of value, like for example some other who wants to show a relationship between American music and European music, and they take out people like Charles Mingus or anybody, like Roscoe Mitchell, or Anthony Braxton, or Anthony Davis, they take them as if they use the same light, and they use the same kind of head and heart to analyze them, but that has only information from the eighteen, nineteen century, or even twentieth century, now they gonna miss, you totally miss it, you completely miss it, and if you look a fantastic book that is nice to read, but when you get to the conclusion of what it has wrong you made a value mistake, that most of people … that jazz created music, blues … anything that’s in America, the same bop, it came out of the euro century, with some stuff amassed; and that’s a lost, that’s completely lost, because, look at it like this: this is Africa, this is Europe, right? And those people that came from Africa when they came to America they already had knowledge of art, culture, music and count … how do have they had that? As slaves: because those people loved, when they were slaves, they composed music when they were slaves, and they thought about the situation which made them culturally conscious of what they were doing; so when they came that they had this homost that was actually equal to the European homes; and then this blend that happened that was the first melting pot, that’s when you can talk about the euro-century and the afro-century thing, but the moment that a scratch happened, the more you wrote that picture on ragtime, it was all over … and that moment, it had changed completely from this European and this African merge it became stuff on that, it would be no Europe nor Africa to realise, it became creating what the music is, all jazz, all ragtime music, all American music, all this tons of main zones, but the best man for the American music, you know, it’s people like Stockhausen, or Pierre Boulez, it’s all you can mean, not baroque or classical music, or this stuff ...

So the thing is, putting down too much boundaries between styles of music can’t be useful to understand music truly…

I think that … you see, writers write for the same audience, stylists write of the people that are stylists, they don’t write on normal people, you see? Artists that write about music they write for artists. Sometime the individualist economic stand it comes to a pure standpoint and so an artistic standpoint and so much a stylistic standpoint, but they’re not allowed to do it, it’s just those people count on brilliance, so to speak; but in all near places they have better to view wide music than anybody does, because brilliance doesn’t bring another reflection of what they could find among things; but they have in some way to have a way to peep inside of it; they look directly from their heart to your hart, from their head to your head, and they did it. I mean, I can’t burglarize you, because it’s not mean. Don’t mean to burglarize you, and they didn’t. And the most important dime about it is that when they do connect, it transform their life. What it does is to make that point to make it more aware, make it more conscious, and give them more feeling about a human being; that’s the profound change. And how it goes notice this is beautiful? That’s why the spiritual maze is like this, make it so that … spirit don’t have to know when you connect, like, when you came onstage and you’re making that music come out and make happen that feeling in contest connecting with people and the people in the audience they feel it and get connecting with it and sound out feelings and don’t get connecting with it, and sound do feels part of it, like just connecting some of them just with the head, some of them just with the heart, some just connect with even one of them, but the pushing to connect with both the head and the heart and this put intelligence to feel love … they made it, and they don’t even know it. That’s beautiful. I don’t know it; Roscoe doesn’t know it, you know, Miles Davis didn’t know it, nobody knew it, but … you can feel something happened. That’s beautiful. That’s what we call beauty.

An Ankhrasmation score example

Ankhrasmation

Spanning through his career, Wadada Leo Smith not only produced an important amount of recorded works; he also gave shape to a notation system called Ankhrasmation, which merges the idea of composition, improvisation and performance into a single construction. As the trumpet player would say, working on an Ankhrasmation score, every musician has to do a personal research, far from the ensemble playing. As an example, a red half triangle in the score could be taken as a velocity unit. So, every player will determine how fast or slow this unit would be, and nobody will determine it the same way: onstage there will be nine different realisations of that notion. Same with color: red could be a reference for blood, or for cherry, and this reference has to be developed in music; if nine musicians are playing that red, all musicians will have different references about that. And also, the cherry has a skin that’s red, a pin inside of it, and stems coming out of its center. Every player has to develop every part of the cherry. When finally the musicians play together, they have to rehearsal in order to find the right balance, the level of creativity coming out.

Wadada Leo Smith started developing his Ankhrasmation (from "Ankh", the Egyptian word meaning vital life force, "Ras", the Amharic or Northern Ethiopian word for Father, and "Ma", the conventional word for Mother: its sense, is that when Father and Mother procreate, they embody a vital and seminal life force) since his very first composition, “The Bells”, with his work on Rhythm-Units, a concept he started explaining after his residence in Europe since 1967, when he issued the booklet Rhythm: a study in rhythm units in creative music, and then formalized through his following activity as a musician and through his first self-published book notes (8 pieces)/sources of a new/workd/music/music: creative music in 1969. Improvisation #4, from Creative Music No. 1, first issue on Kabell in 1073, paved the way for Ankhrasmation. For full information about Wadada Leo Smith philosophy of music, scores and concepts, check his official website.

AngelicA - Festival Internazionale di Musica - May 5-28, 2011

Art shows us what is still invisible: it opens us up to new realms, it awakens us. 

“Contemporary” is anything we are drawn to by our inspiration, free from interference: it can be something ancient, or that is seen as ancient and old-fashioned, but that is absolutely new and necessary. 

“Contemporary” is anything that poses questions and makes us think, that corresponds to a time (which one?). 

“Contemporary” is also the reflection, the result of the culture of the time, of a state of
things. In this case its function may appear to be limited, inadequate, perhaps because it is too close to the world we are living in and almost closed upon itself, with no chances to grow and take off. A great amount of energy can be spent on a project, especially when its organizers want to bring something useful, stimulating and innovative to a stagnant scene.

In these times of crisis of the Institutions and of a great need for renovation, such choices can bring solutions, new life and a sense of hope that used to be let down in the past. 

Bologna welcomed us. 

Bologna is permeated by a contemporary reason, sedimented through time, and made up of the most diverse experiences: it is a hidden treasure that stirs silently.
 

An apparition, an event beyond our measures, causes a change with no return.
Giving shape to an idea requires an exchange beyond mutual limits.
In the midst of a thousand manifestations of protest, immersed in chaos, the opportunity to listen to an imaginative, creative voice that can reestablish a balance on several levels, open up once again the doors of imagination and give hope to our doings…this is a key.
Neptune among us, for a sensitive city.
 

Massimo Simonini

 

Complete program here: featuring Jim O' Rourke, Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, John Tilbury, Wadada Leo Smith, Stefano Scodanibbio, Cristina Zavalloni, Maja S.K. Ratkje, Paal Nilssen-Love, Lasse Marhaug, Heiner Goebbels, and many others.