The Auditorium San Fedele is near the Duomo of
Milan, and it’s also near a good great library. Not that far there are some
small restaurants for ‘i Milanesi bene’ (the Milanese bourgeois) so it is good
to be able to breath some fresh air thanks to the music. But before to start, a
little bit of context – yes, more.
Every year the above mentioned Auditorium
organizes a review of various artists coming from electronic music and
contemporary music called Inner_Spaces. This year, thanks to the Covid, the
guys were not able to create a real review, organizing different concerts
before a given date, so the only thing we as externals knew was that on
September 20 and 21 there would be a performance of the precious piece of music
L’Ile Re-Sonante by Eliane Radigue.
The masterpiece of drone/ambient music by
Radigue was introduced by a couple of shorter pieces of music by the younger
composer David Monacchi, born in 1970 and disciple of Salvatore Sciarrino.
Monacchi is developing since 15 years a project called “Fragments of
Extinction”, where he exposes the sounds taken directly from nature (e.g. the
sounds of the Amazon rainforest) in an attempt to preserve its purest sound
forms.
First Monacchi piece was Stati d’Acqua for
fields recordings (taken along the Tevere, the river of Rome, but also from a
scanning of a six month foetus and the resonance of the fluid of a human body),
while the second, part of the above mentioned Fragments of Extinction series,
featured the sound of the rainforest in Brasil. If Monacchi research on site is
remarkable, I can’t completely enjoy the result, even if it is not bad.
The way ‘real’ sounds intertwine themselves
with electronic sounds, as an example, makes me think about the clarinet and
the tape recorded dialogue in Stockhausen’s Stimmung, but the result here is
that of a mere flux of the ones into the others and viceversa. Something we
have listened to for about ten years at least. The way also Stati D’Acqua
terminates, with a slow lowering of all the sounds, without any apparent
reason, makes me think of a compositional cul de sac the composer didn’t took
seriously.
But I have to admit it, it is difficult to mix
the will to create a meaningful sonic environment, with the desire to report
the climate crisis we’re all living: there’s a comunicative urgency in Monacchi
that overwhelms him as a composer maybe. Or maybe it just me wanting from a
soundscape the same complexities of contemporary music.
Things don’t go that much better with L’Ile
Re-Sonante by Eliane Radigue. I think we have to deal, for once, with the given
definition of the music: “drone-ambient music”. Yesterday night I heard very
clearly all the drones, but it was not ambient music. I heard description of
this work of music everywhere as a music created to impregnate discreetly the
environment in which it is played. At the opposite, yesterday the volume was
very high, at a point the structrure was resonating clearly and
distinguishably.
I heard almost a long, prolonged piece by Sunn
O))) maybe, instead of a composition by Eliane Radigue. I’m joking a little,
but that was the feeling anyway. The good thing was that the drones were
clearly audible, initially as a human heartbeat slowly beating, then the air
was full of different textures the one mutating into the other until I was able
to distinguish, with time, three different sonorous landscapes: the first drone
movement, then a bunch of female operatic voices, then again another drone.
Two things came to my mind: the work of Mark
Rothko, or at least a music transposition of it, and the Vipassana Meditation –
I mean, the music was creating the right environment for it, so I closed my
eyes and started a Vipassana myself. More prosaically, L’Ile Re-Sonante is the
highest compositional point of Radigue as far as her work with the ARP 2500
synthesizer, and the best possible union of the different roots Radigue was
referring to: European composers of noise music (Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari)
and the american noise minimalists like Rhys Chatham, or Pauline Oliveros drone
music.
Nevertheless the ‘acousmatic direction’ I have
depicted, the work of Radigue is one of the most brilliant and important
composers in contemporary music. I still hadn’t the opportunity to listen to
her most recent stuff – I know she’s encountering several musicians to discuss
the sound dynamics of their instruments composing music ad personam – but I’m
sure it will be interesting in the future to immerse in her sound world. I so
hope her research will be rewarded by brilliant results.
The best way, for someone unfamiliar
with contemporary music, to start listening to this genre is undoubtely, in my
opinion, the Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen. Its vivid
melancholy mixed with open meditative trascendency is something everyone can
deeply appreciate. The story behind the composition of the eight movements is
impressive too.
So, even if sometimes I listen to
this work of art on my PC as many other music, I wanted to give it a deeper
listening, and when I knew that there was the opportunity to listen to the
Quartet live in a concert hall, I bought istantaneously the tickets for me and
for a friend who never listened to contemporary music but that was deeply
fascinated by the work and its performers.
More prosaically, the Quartet for
the End of Time was created by Olivier Messiaen when he was a soldier in the
French army fighting against the German Nazis during World War II. Hostage in a
concentration camp, he mediated with a party official to leave him free to
write some sheet, and since there were three other musicians in the camp, in
1941 Messiaen and his new friends were able to perform for the soldiers and the
prisoners.
Messiaen music is full of references
to carnatic music, the sacred music of the south of India, but transposed into
a system he called ‘modes of limited transposition’ along with other elements
taken from his first serial works. Also an ornithologist, he tried to convey
the sound of birds into his own music. He said he was able to perceive colors
while listening to sounds – a phenomenon known as synesthaesia – and so one of
the goals of his music was to allow people to listen to colors: the second
Quartet movement, as an example, is intended to give the listener the sensation
of yellow and light blue.
As previously written, the music of
the Quartet is divided in eight movements, some ensemble music and some solo
music – all the instruments except the piano. The four musicians at Teatro Dal
Verme yesterday afternoon were flawless, and this helped for sure me and the
huge group of other listeners to enjoy the music. Giovanna Polacco is a
talented violinist who studied at the Conservatory of Milan. After, she gain an
impressive number of awards and played under the direction of Abbado and
Karajan for a long time.
Clarinetist Sergio Delmastro started
studying piano at a young age, then he passed to composition at the Turin
Conservatory; after a huge number of recordings for Stradivarius, BMG and MGA
(Paris), he started teaching composition at the Conservatory of Lugano. Nikolay
Shugaev won his first prize as a cellist at the age 13, the first of a long
series, and curated a long theory of first executions of authors like Fine,
Falcon, Rosenblatt, van Geel and others.
And finally, pianist, harpsicordist
and orchestra director Antonio Ballista played in the last decades under the
direction of Abbado and Boulez among the others, and he can claim to have the
major authors of contemporary music writen pieces directly for him: from Berio
to Bussotti, from Sciarrino to Sollima. He toured also with Berio, Dallapiccola
and Stockhausen, and collaborated to concerts of Boulez, Cage and Ligeti.
A deeply fascinating journey into
the idea of time and transcendency, the Quartet is also full of references to
contemporary philosophy. But, surprisingly, the way the musicians interacts the
one with the other and intertwine the one with the other will be not unfamiliar
to the usual reader of this blog. I’m not obviously saying that Messiaen music
is similar to jazz, but that even if this is written music there’s almost an
interplay in the way the parts are conceived in relation to the full scheme.
While the clarinet solo is what the
words say, a solo of clarinet with all the other instrument muted, the solos of
cello and violin are provided with a minimum of interaction with the other
three players, giving life to some interesting small dialogues or conversations
that can be intriguing for a lover of free improvisation. It’s not a surprise
that many composers of free jazz or experimental music are taking this type of
contemporary music seriously while studying.
In the end, if you take in
consideration the last works of Roscoe Mitchell and you think about it as a zen
kind of music, with the sonorous masses as statements instead of being the
developments of a given theme, something similar can be said of Messiaen music,
whose praises to the eternity of Jesus and the consequently reflection on time
are very tied to Mitchell’s. Sometimes, the difference between genres are only
a matter of temperature. So, my final advice is: enjoy the music, wherever it
comes from.
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.
There is people who made the history of
improvised music and who is well exposed in the temple of criticism or in the
pantheon of the mind of music lovers, then there are musicians who gave their
entire life to find out new paths in articulating a personal language, and then
again there are creative guys who want only to risk and give new lymph to a
‘tradition’, that of the avant-garde, and that therefore are taken by many
people as redundant, while in fact they’re essential as the other cats.
Read what Andrea Centazzo said about Vasco
Trilla, the musician we want to explore in this post: “Being one of the first
solo percussion improvisers in the ‘70s, I paid special attention to Vasco
work. This fresh music is a blossoming of ideas and sounds. Vasco is a minimalist
in percussion, each sound is accurately chosen and explored to an extreme end.
A world of larger horizons and open skies where the percussion trigger the most
inner intense feeling in the listener”.
Born in Barcellona, Vasco Trilla started playing
drums at the age of 19. Initially into progressive rock and metal, he developed
an interest for improvised music, but this is really cutting short and I want
to give you more cues on Trilla’s work. After all, knowing about one artist
life and tastes can help in enjoying better his own art. So, the first thing I
want you to be aware is that Trilla studied art history and was passionate
about Polish and Russian cinema and music.
So he studied at university the movies of
Wojciech Jerzy Haas, Andrzej Waida, Andrzej Munch, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and
Krzysztof Kieslowski while he listened to the music of Lutoslawski and
Penderecki. On the other hand he was into the experimental metal scene of that
country, with bands like Decapitated and Kriegsmachine. It is quite common for
the younger generation of experimental musicians to be able to skim through
such different sources of inspiration, and it’s good because you can develop
your own voice made of fragments of different previous identities without
belonging to anyone of those.
Between the many collaborations of Trilla you
can find the names of Andrea Centazzo, Jamaladeen Tacuma, Cecil Taylor, Peter
Evans, Marshall Allen, Lotte Anker, Wilbert de Joode, Mette Rasmussen, Ilia
Belorukov, Axel Dorner, and this is only a small part. His last solo album is
titled “Unmoved Mover” and it is issued by the label Fundacja
Sluchaj. The seven minutes title track opens with small cymbals and noise
interruptions here and there, but the intent of the music is to create into the
listener a space where he can be aware of everything that happens as an event,
as you can listen through some of the old and recent AEOC records.
Gongs and drumsticks rubbed against the
cymbals give substance to the atmosphere with bold but delicate statements.
Then a huge amount of small bells appear, giving the music some solemnity and
the sacred tone it deserves. An openly percussive texture so to give the
listener the feeling of a path through sound is experimented in Hylomorphism.
Ousia is dominated by a more preeminent cymbals sound, and natural echo
effects, while Living Bodies is constructed on a dialogue between thicker and
denser sounds, before an explosion of little bells.
Nous – how many of you care about gnosticism or
Philip K. Dick novels? – is more dominated by dynamics of sound and silence,
leaving you with this presence of a vast unexplored space in your mind, where
different volumes and densities of textures are also present building a
fascinating climax, and if Hylozoism can seem only a subtle pause made of other
bells chiming, Celestial Spheres is like listening to thunders and the natural
elements in a primeval brew, interspersed with the sound of the bells.
We can get this way to the end of Causeless
Cause, almost seven minutes of summary of Trilla’s art as a scultpor of sound
through bells, a set of chimes activated in different moments, as if each one
of them is giving life to the following. And while this album is becoming one
of my favourite releases of the year, discovering my gentle side and knowing
something more about myself, I can only recommend you to give Vasco Trilla the
chance to become one of your favourite young players.
In 2011 or 2012, when I wanted to quit writing
(and I did for quite some years devoting myself to photography) I wanted to
leave with a couple of articles: an interview with young Stefania ‘?Alos’
Pedretti (available on the italian webzine Mescalina) and an article about a
young photographer (available on the italian webzine Culturame). But, what made
me quit writing? It’s simple: the quality of the music I was listening to at
the time.
Something was going terribly wrong. I listened
to a lot of young musicians in London the year before and if I loved the ‘great
old men’ of the avant-garde (Evan Parker, Louis Moholo-Moholo to name a couple)
on the other hand I felt little or no empathy with the young improvisers or
experimental musicians, with some notable exception. And I was feeling as Mr
Jones (as in Bob Dylan song Ballad of a Thin Man, when he sings “And you know
something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?”).
So my idea was: “I don’t know where the music
is going, I know only it is going badly, in sad places, so I want to explore
art as an artist in order to understand better, on my own skin, what’s going
on”. So I did photography and then theatre for many years, and finally I came
back to writing. It was not a dramatic come back. I was always putting a review
here and there, even in this blog. But finally, thanks to a colleague, I found
out the perfect album to talk about this lost decade.
The Album is “We’re OK, but We’re Lost Anyway”
(great title, indeed) by the incredible Orchestre Tout Puissand Marcel Duchamp.
An italian magazine of music made me aware or these guys, and the first time I
listened to their music through youtube – a mix, as Stefano I. Bianchi wrote on
Blow Up, of ‘afrobeat, Ex, Stereolab, Folk, jazz’ – I felt this sense of
melancholy and sadness that was not coming from the notes played by the
musicians, but kind of ‘in between’ the music, but being the most part of it.
So I kind of felt that all the sadness for the
lost of music – there are only few record shops left in my town where I can
find CDs or vynils of free jazz, improv and contemporary music and I hate
Amazon so there’s no way I’m gonna use it to purchase records, plus the last
one was kind of a ‘lost’ decade: I mean, apart from few musicians, even apart
from the musicians you’ve found during this years on Complete Communion there
was not that much great music to listen to – was here, better said: instead of
listening to a new record, I was listening to all the sadness of the decade.
This is the best part of “We’re OK ...”. But
before analysing the album, few words for the band. The orchestra has born in
Geneva in 2006, thanks to the bassist Vincent Bertholet who basically wanted to
give life to a group of musicians who could play together around Europe.
Initially fueled by six players, the band during the years became a 12tet and
now it is a band of 14 elements. The band has a kind of political consciousness
that makes it very nice to my ears and heart.
“From Mexican Zapatists to Chiapas rioters, we
stand aside every person who wants to destroy capitalism through the
dismantling of great commercial empires in favor of local agricultural
enterprise” states Bertholet, and this is really the less we can do in this
world right now. But what about the music? After an introduction so heavy, the
music has to be at least incredibly good. And it is, even if its best part for
me is I won’t say ‘not intended’, but ‘unconscious’.
The album opens with Be Patient, where an
accordion lead the listener though his microtones and minimal melody to
Bertholet patterns embellished with violins twirling around the bass. Then
drums and horns enter. The atmosphere is full of rage, while we start listening
to the voice. If I have to make a comparison, the last Portishead come to my
mind. But the trombone and the guitar mumbling together comes from experimental
music, and so memory goes to records for instrumental ensemble and voice like
“Les Stances A Sophie” and “Raining on the Moon”.
Empty Skies shows us what drums and strings can
do if combined together exploring repetition through different pitches. Voice
sweetens the listener while guitar and strings develop a distorted unison that
is possibly what made Bianchi, the italian journalist above, think about the Ex
(accompanied by Tom Cora I guess). So Many Things (To Feel Guilty About) is
based on the dynamics of a guitar counterpointing a vocal chorus. Drums give
depth to the ensemble, vibraphone too as it takes its turn.
Blabber, as I was hoping to hear, is opened by
vibe and drums, plus cello and voice playing a game of underlines to which all
strings add tasty spices here and there, while We Can Can We is driven by
horns, cello and drums. The rhythm is undoubtely that of Fela Kuti’s music,
with a guitar dipped into minimalism as the vibraphone. Flux is a delicate
journey into a dream made of horns, voice and vibraphone, whereas guitar adds a
punk rhythmic ad a certain point. Drum’s colors set on fire the male rap, again
with the guitars developing a rock drama made of multiple grating.
Connected is a couple-of-minute-divertissement
for chorus and guitar, Beginning, the last five minute track on the album is
their first song I listened to in a live version you’ll find at the end of this
review, and it is made of a rhythm mimicking the circularity of afrobeat with a
minimalist guitar and multiple horns, percussions and strings to set the music
on fire. It has that warrior spirit, but also that not intended but real
melancholy I was telling you more above. But the silence is over.
The album terminates with the one and a half
minute of Silent, the closing of the courtain with a pinched cello, strings,
voice and the desire for an uprising. My dream now is to take the band to play
a live concert in one of the many squatted centers in my town. Maybe, having
some contacts, this will be possible in the future. It really would be the best
venue for the Orchestra’s fire music and at the same time, the encounter point
for an awakening of both music and people. Together.
I started listening to improvised music in
1999. I was a fan of Tom Waits then – I saw him live in that same year in
Florence – and I remember that at a certain point I wanted to start listening
to jazz music. Back in the days, you were able to go to those enormous music
megastores in Milan – Messaggerie Musicali, Fnac – and also a lot of small
record shops where you could take your CD, go to a workstation provided with
headphones and, thanks to the barcode on the album, listen to it before the
purchase.
That’s how I was into Mingus – how can you
resist to the “Haitian Fight Song” bassline? – as an example. Then there were
newspapers like “Il Manifesto” that, thanks to the long articles on a Saturday
insert dedicated to culture, you would read extensive analysis of every music
style, from calypso to soundtracks, and run into an article about John Zorn and
his filecard compositions, just to give you a help in understanding how I was
meeting new music prior to the internet era.
But when I started listening to Coltrane, I was
only trusting his name and my curiosity, and so I bought my copy of “A Love
Supreme” happy to learn something new. But at the first listenings – that was
my first jazz album – something strange happened to me: my head was simply
going somewhere else. I was simply not used to improvisation, so my brain was
refusing it. But, you know, practice makes perfect.
So in a few time I was hooked by a lot of more
or less traditional jazz, like Davis, Holiday, Rollins, Ellington. I also
bought me some books, like “Jazz” by Arrigo Polillo, a classic reading in my
native language. And then I started to see my first concerts. The very first
one was a Masada quartet featuring Zorn, Dave Douglas, Joey Baron and Greg
Cohen. For free. I was really happy. Then, after quite some months, I left
Milano and the university for the suburbs and my parents.
But I kept on listening to music. And so it
came 2001, the year the Trane’s album “Olatunji Concert” was released. I
remember that at first I was happy about this record because, even if poorly
recorded and produced, it was really my idea of music put on a CD. Pure sound,
sometimes pure noise with fragments and echoes of melodies coming from God
knows were. And then it happened something I would call an ‘agnition’.
I was on a trip with friends, a psychoanalist –
not my therapist, at the time I was followed by a younger woman – and other
people. We had to join a panel discussion, or something similar. This pal, the
therapist, was interested in what I was listening to, so he asked me to put
some music into the car stereo. I had some records with me, not by chance, and
my choice was the “Olatunji” album. I thought it would be funny, to see the
reactions of my friends. But what I didn’t know at that time was MY reaction.
Something really unexspected.
While listening to the melody of Coltrane and
its development on “Ogunde”, and then the harsh screams of Pharoah Sanders, I
felt something inside of me, as if something were collapsing and crumbling.
Obviously there was nothing in me really happening, this is only a metaphor for
a feeling. But I remember clearly that sensation of something falling apart in
me, and I would use, back in those days, to describe this feeling I kept for
myself, the German word ‘spaltung’.
‘Spaltung’ (in English: ‘split’, or ‘slit’) is
a word used by Jacques Lacan, the self-promoted renovator of psychoanalisis, to
identify the ontological division of the self between a talking being and a
thinking being, meaning that you’ll never be able to describe with words your
true inner feelings, and this scar is the first trauma of every human being.
Since I’m not Slavoj Zizek, I won’t bore you with such concepts moreover, but
those were the things that came to my mind in those times.
I never had such emotions again, but I remember
that my basic idea was, if I’m able to feel something I’ll never be able to
trasmit, and if this is something I have to take care of, something I have to
be responsible for, in a way this is, as far as myself, the same as a good
improvisor does while he creates his own language and music: something he is
responsible for, even if few people understand him. If Arto Lindsay takes his
risks in scratching his guitar, why do I have not to be serious about my own
life?
Since 2004 until 2007 there was also a period
where I simply could not listen to free jazz and improvised music. Every time I
was trying to spin a record by Don Cherry, Peter Brotzmann, or Gato Barbieri, I
was having horrible feelings. I had never been aware of another human being
with such sensations as me, but in a way I feel now that at that time I wasn’t
free as a person, and so I was not able to listen to such a free music.
If you are readers to my blog, now you know
that everything is all right. I mean, I can listen to music so carefully that I
can write about it. So, it’s just fine. But when I knew that Pharoah Sanders
was working to a new album in London, and then when finally I was able to
listen to that record a month ago, the one I’m reviewing for you now, I thought
back to those events of my life. Obviously I was curious about how such a
record would sound, and I was pleasantly surprised in listening to it this spring.
All things started in 2015. At that era,
Pharoah Sanders listened by chance to “Elaenia”, a record made by Sam Shepherd
aka Floating Points. Curiously enough, he was also in a car, but with a guy
from a record label, and not a psychoanalist, who gave him the hereabove
mentioned album. Sanders and Shepherd started meeting each other. Maybe they
were going for a visit into the British Museum to see ancient Egypt’s statues.
Or maybe they were talking about music together.
Then, the two started thinking about making
music together. “Floating Point” is the result of this meeting. It can be
described as a symphony in nine movements somewhere between third stream,
ambient, minimalism; as if Gunther Schuller met Brian Eno and Steve Reich.
Let’s try to analyse the movements of this work, so that we can deal with it
closer and describe it more carefully using the most apted words.
Fist and most important, this record sees
harpsichord piano, other electronic instruments and the saxophone on the
foreground. “Movement 1” sees Shepherd depicting the few notes that,
repeatedly, will constitute the skeleton of the entire composition. After quite
a while, it’s Sanders turn to improvise a melody that will give you the feeling
of being back in the era where Coltrane was playing with the likes of singer
Johnny Hartman: his gentle side’s ghost is now between us.
Strings come near just to underline the
ecstatic atmosphere with a series of prolonged statements. They dominate
“Movement 2” a little bit more, even if the scene is taken by Sanders and his
melancholic melody. Some electronic sounds embellish the music, as it happens
in some of Bjork albums throughout “Movement 3”. “Movement 4” begins with
Sanders voice, whose purpose is to give life to a more human feeling than electronic
sounds, just before another tenor solo.
Some chimes, or sounds that imitates them,
enrich the solo, then some piano and electronic melodies in place of the
repetitive pattern we hear from the beginning come to give strenght to Sanders
statements. Gentle electric sounds succeed each other on “Movement 5”, while
the saxophone try to give life to a music that is reminiscent of all the
history of free jazz but thin as a gentle breeze; and then, here we are again
with the harpsicord pattern.
“Movement 6” is murmured through tenor, clavier
and a cello solo. What’s peculiar in this music is that you don’t have a simple
add of instruments, the one on the other. Every note is brushed with the right
space to separate it from the others. Then the orchestra underlines the cello’s
melody gaining the foreground. The impression anyway is not that of an
alternating of full, rounded sounds and more sparse notes, a well known dynamic
in jazz music, but that of different feelings cohexisting together in the heart
of the listener.
Crescendo of last part of the movement leaves
space to a new repetition of the now well known hapsichord notes at the
beginning of “Movement 7”, even if soon we hear a new melody on saxophone. Now
silence is almost more important than music, or, better said, it is from
silence that the music can take his life. The entire orchestra also is aware of
this, and so it’s more cautious in participating to this creation.
More harpsichord little figures go around
Sanders’ tenor, taking soon his place in conducing the music. An ecstatic
melancholy is, anyway, the predominant feeling of this part of the symphony. We
hear a more decise turn on minimalism. More and more rapid figures intertwines,
until a new saxophone assertion, more decise than the previous ones. Even the
coexisting of analogic and electronic sounds isn’t creating a contrast, also
thanks to the equipment Mr Shepherd chose for the recording.
Piano, Harpsichord, Celesta, Fender Rhodes, Hammond B3, Oberheim 4 voice
& OB-Xa, Solina String Ensemble, Therevox ET-4.3, EMS Synthi, ARP 2600 and
Buchla 200e are the instruments that are mixed together with the saxophone and
the orchestra. “Movement 8” seems to come from a session of 1970s rock music,
even if the notes we learned to appreciate are constantly present, at least
until new electronic sounds appear jumping into a silence every now and then,
leaving you with the feeling of constantly reemerging from a dream.
Finally, a subtle organ drone drive us until “Movement 9”, where, after
some silence, we can appreciate the orchestra’s dramatic but atonal crescendo
until the end. An album for people who want to undestand how much the shifting
from one feeling to the other or the compresence of different feelings can be a
form of spiritual awakening – because art is always a form of spiritual
awakening – “Promises” is exactly as its title wants to suggest.
For those of you who are not completely aware of the history of avant
garde jazz, Farrel “Pharoah” Sanders – his nickname is the gift of another big
soul, the mythological Sun Ra who hosted him in his Arkestra at the beginning
of his career – is one of the very first musicians to experiment with free form
and the decise insertion of noise elements taken from R&B into his sound
and vision, as many other did at that time, from John Coltrane to Albert Ayler.
Recluted by Coltrane himself in his second small group after the one
with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones disbanded, and even prior in seminal records
like “Ascension” and “Meditations”, Sanders stayed with Trane until his death
in 1967, following then his path with new, different ensembles, and
experimenting with different types of music. This album is a way to reconcile
past and present, since Sanders style evokes that of his soul brother and maybe,
given Coltrane’s curiosity for every music style, it is not far from the truth
to think that if he would have lived longer, maybe he would have experimente
with such sounds.
I became aware of Mette Rasmussen and her music
about five years ago: after reading an article about her on an Italian
newspaper I always buy because I can find some interesting articles on
improvised music and cinema, where her work was presented as very interesting
and if not innovative at least highly appreciable, I started searching for her
work online through video and audio files.
I first listened to some of her solo
peformances from 2015 since I knew that soloing is one of the most difficult
setting for an improvisor, and I wanted to see basically if the praises about
Rasmussen I read were really acceptable. I have to tell you the truth: I was a
little bit disappointed. Rasmussen has a graspy, assertive tone, something
every passionate listener of improvised music can love, but her language seemed
a little poor to me.
I love solo performances by saxophone players.
One of my favorite records back in the days was “For Alto” (Denmark, 1971), a
double LP by saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton. His first appearance to
the world outside, this record seems to me even today one of the best
statements on that particular instrument. Not superior, because music is not a
competition, but worthy to stay near Ornette Coleman’s best works.
I hate to put it simple, but if you wanna to
express yourself on one instrument, you have something to say. Braxton in that
record was saying it all. Ornette through his multiple settings was saying
everything. Kaoru Abe was saying so much. Rasmussen, as far as I was able to
hear, was a great sparring partner – I also saw videos where she was playing
with musicians such as Thurston Moore or Chris Corsano – but when it came to
solo improvisation, she was not expressing herself completely.
That was really disappointing to me, not
because of some attack to my well refined senses, but because it happened in a
period in which I was reflecting on how improvised music is mostly a music for
men and made by men, for hystorical reasons I expressed here
in this long article. So, reading about Rasmussen I had this little hope that
things maybe were changing for the better. But Rasmussen was, and still is, a
young musician, and everything can get better maybe with just a little time.
Funny thing is, few time ago I was able to
finally buy a copy of Peter Brotmann’s recent solo tenor improvisations “I
Surrender Dear” (Trost, 2020) and things became complicated: this record, in
fact, is not the same Brotz we’re able to hear from “For Adolphe Sax” until his
Tentet. It’s not that Brotzmann has become sentimental, not at all. But the
music on the Trost solo album is only different from the usual.
And so I thought about Rasmussen and her solo
exhibition and I asked myself: have I missed or misinterpreted something? So
this weekend I listened again to Brotzmann on solo tenor, and then I went back
to Rasmussen listening her work extensively. And I find out she is improving,
not only: but she came out this year in February with a great trio record on
Relative Pitch, a New York-based label. So, what a better occasion to share my
feelings and thoughts about this music with my readers?
For those who don’t know her, Mette Rasmussen
is a young alto saxophone player coming from Denmark but currently – at least
this is what I read through multiple online presentations that are cut and
pasted the one from the other – living in Norway. She studied at a local
conservatory, but she brings always with her some books to study while she’s
having some rest from exhibitions. Here’s some of the people she has
collaborated with: Chris Corsano, Jamie Saft, Alan Silva, Mats Gustaffson, Paul
Lytton, Thurston Moore and Goodspeed You! Black Emperor.
Usually compared to Albert Ayler and Gustaffson
for her graspy, raucous and confrontational statements, Rasmussen gives her
best – in my opinion, so I strongly recommend you to make your own listening to
her in different contexts – in duo, trio or with other musicians. This album
featuring Zeena Parkins on electrified harp and Ryan Sawyer (Marshall Allen,
Boredoms, Thurston Moore, and many others) on drums can be considered one of
the best way to start with.
The first thing I noticed while handling this
record are the titles of the compositions (“Nat Bygone,
just biggone”). Irony is great thing, and if you think about Fluxus, in a
way, I thought back at FIG, the Feminist Improvising Group, an ensemble you can
find some recordings along the Internet, but that no one guiltily wants to
reissue, as least as far as I’m informed.
The first thing I noticed while listening to
the record was, obviously, the music. Alto opens with rapid and abruptly
fractured statements. Drum figures and harp blowing answer back. Little by
little, every instrument structures his own language, answering each other. Sax
becomes dramatic and explodes, while drums and harp scratches contour it.
After, harp and saxophone put themselves together, until alto designs little
pieces of sound again, and so drums take the foreground while harp goes on the
highest pitches.
Here’s finally a sax melody on the lower and
medium registries, launching itself at the end in ultra high grasping notes,
with drums closing the piece with dust (“Begiunners, begges, beattle, belt,
believers”). The second piece (the record consists actually of an entire
concert aptly divided in six parts for the album) opens with the drums with the
saxophone indulging; full and void dynamics here makes me think about
compositions like “No. 2” by Henry Threadgill.
The mood is in effect more meditative, but the
space here is handled with a more contemporaneous sensitivity – maybe we’re
more deluded than we were in the Seventies – and so the saxophone is crackling
on medium and high pitches, while drums depict different colors here and there.
Harp becomes episodic, as Parkins doesn’t want to intrerrupt the dialogue from
his pals. Then the sax melody makes stronger and dramatic statements on higher
registries, and so the harp underlines them with scratches and semi-drones.
Drums, as in the best chicagoan tradition,
creates an atmosphere suspended between melody and rhythm. This second piece
(“Nat Bygone, just biggone”) ends with the sound of wood from the sticks,
little bells, and the diminuendo of the harp. At the beginning of the third
piece, Rasmussen explores as much of the pitches and registries she can; even
if she’s mostly on medium and high tones, even if what I feel is a lack of
lyricism as present, instead, in some of the musicians she is quite often
compared with – Albert Ayler for instance.
Zeena Parkins in this third improvised piece is
the first sound source, and the conductor, so to speak, with sounds that seem to
come from a theremin and that almost imitate a human voice. Saxophone fastens,
while drums become pulviscular again as in Sunny Murray tradition – which is
not bad for a musician coming from an alternative rock environment, snob as
this assertion can seem.
After “Flood of Trees”, the piece we have tried
to describe here above, on “The crystal chain letters” drums come back with
obsessive patterns, saxophone echoes as a short wave analogic instrument, then
it brings you a melody on the medium and low pitches, while the harp brings
back the last suggestions and drums again become like a little thick flood and
sax comes back to high, trembling registries.
“Merlin and the gleam” is full of
post-coltranian reminiscenses in the drums and sax interactions, the harp
produces scratching sounds, and then Rasmussen shifts on the altissimo pitches:
the other two musician give her complete freedom of speech, the climax becomes
really intense and dramatic. After some other melodic hints by the harp and a
new fragmentation of the drums, it’s the time for the closing “Melts into
surface”.
Here, Rasmussen becomes almost lyrical but
without becoming really melodic. She suggests more than creating an atmosphere.
Subjective as this description almost minute-per-minute can be, from it I can
imagine the reader able now to see what’s good to me in Rasmussen music and
what are her weak points, so to speak. Imagine them in a solo context and you
got to my point.
On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine
musicians, like the one featured on this record and the other Rasmussen’s
collaborators relying on them for no o few reasons. I can only tell I’ll
continue in listening to her music and following her evolution, since I’m
really interested in living in something more than a comprehensive environment:
it can be better to live in an environment where people can express themselves
and improve without the difficulties we all as part of the human history
carried with us until not that much time ago.
Related resources: Downtown
Music’s gallery for the Glass Triangle Trio.
