retrospecting (just a little bit): françois carrier @ london _resonance

words _ gian paolo galasi

François Carrier is a prolific   altoist/sopranist/flutist now living in London at the Quebec Artist Residency from the CALQ. 

30 years of activity playing with Paul Bley, Gary Peacock, Bobo Stenson, Tomasz Stanko, Uri Caine and Mat Maneri and his own music passed, and on December 6th, 2011 Carrier will be hosted at The Vortex Jazz Club with double bassist John Edwards and drummer Michel Lambert, to celebrate Leo Records' new "In Motion", featuring the Montréal-born multi-reedist and his more recent trio with Lambert and pianist Alexey Lapin.

Final chapter of this year tryptich, to which you can add Ayler Records release of "Entrance 3" with Bobo Stenson on piano, again Lambert on drums and Pierre Coté on double bass, Carrier most enduring collaboration under his own name. It can be embarrassing being in charge to testify about such prolfierating creative renditions, but after pushing "Inner Spire" (Leo Records, 2011), recorded during a tour in Moscow last december, on the player, the feeling of the music let you forget how much insanely such a small business as improvised and avant garde music is filled with so many records every months. 

True as it can be how easy a musician involved in public funding can become so prolific, and obviously starting with no point in blaming Carrier for that - real problem is, how much it is difficult usually for a musician sponsoring such projects - the urge to document this relatively new trio is more than comprehensible. 

What's more, the compositions on this record are so different in mood and substance - 'Inner Square' is a sweet and intense struggle for squeaking horns, lyrical piano chords and drumming barrage, 'Square away' is built on piano heavy clusters, tightroped horns and swirling brushes, 'Tribe' a more meditative weaving, with 'Round Trip' perfectly coupling and preparing while climaxing in order to introduce the last, openly meditative 'Sacred Flow', with almost impressionistic piano statements and more dissonant breaks - that one wonders if, even if being Carrier music more defining that suggesting, it can be correct to put him between two of his most famous partners, Uri Caine, post-modern but straight, and Mat Maneri, less melodically defined but equally committed with stretching sound into space.

The companion CD "All Out" (FMR Records, 2011) recorded during the same tour but in St. Petersburg two days later, is completely different: More relaxed, gentle, in some way less adventurous, but, let's put it as it is. 

I would say a little bit 'manieristic', but in writing so - knowing there's no more subjective statement than that - I'm compelled to specify that this is the risk for every musician who try to deal with a pre-defined musical shape - even such as 'improvised music slash free jazz'. 

I'm just listening again to the record and so the last composition 'Of Breath', my favorite, get me to the point to judge Carrier trio so much good in dealing with the strain of dissonance and its melodic - not harmonic - resolution through the interplay, to seem full of honest, humanistic faith in the aesthetics (of improvised music). The only thing is, you need 75 minutes to get the whole point. 

While waiting to hear the new record so to complete the puzzle, I'd like to add something about François Carrier collaboration with Swiss singer and performer Véronique Dubois on "Being With" (Leo Records, 2010). Conceived as an effort to mix sax and human voice conveying them into one, the good part of it is the widening of Carrier palette so to include flute, voice and objects as percussions/added colors; the interplay so is augmented with an onomathopeic quality that push me, after listening to a record not perfectly on focus, but at least coherent, to ask to Mr Carrier and his closest collaborators, to dare more. 

François Carrier performing @ The Vortex Jazz Club on December 6th 2011 - h. 8.30 pm - Free

reviewing @ london_resonance [part 2]

words _ gian paolo galasi

I discovered Mauro Sambo recently, thanks to the profile I wrote for the Istanbul-based label re:konstruKt. Versatile and many-sided, carrying since many years a personal artistic expression at the convergence of sculpture, performance, videoart and music, even if not still widely recognized as he deserves, Sambo is also a multi-instrumentalist: alto sax, tenor sax, flute, bass clarinet, double bass, electronics, iPad, iPhone, percussions. His last effort "Presto (dicono) giungerà la neve" [in English "Soon, they say, the snow will come"] takes his title from a Jorge Louis Borges novel. 

In the past, Michel Foucault dedicated his "The Order of Things" to the writer, underlining a concept of 'other space' (heterotopia) that lies in between the things and the words, a space neither here nor there. Improv fans familiar with Sun Ra probably will be able to connect with the concept, but the music here is really somewhere in between improvisation and soundart, electronic and acoustic, analogic and digital, music and space, while his previous "... di Origine Oscura" was a little bit shifted towards sculpture. 


05 - 06 09 2011

The Spontaneous River Ensemble was assembled in 2007 by Jason Kao Hwang and Patricia Nicholson Parker for a tribute to Leroy Jenkins, that died that year. Their first performance took place at the Vision Festival XII. Billy Bang was the conductor of the first version of Hwang's Symphony of Soul (Mulatta Records/Flying Panda Music, 2011) that reached his definitive version in 2008 where it was performed at the NY's Living Theatre. 

The ensemble is composed by Hwang's regular partners (Taylor Ho Bynum on cornet, Andrew Drury on drums and Ken Filiano on bass) in the Edge quartet, 14 violins, 5 violas, 7 guitars (featuring Dom Minasi), 5 cellos and 6 string basses (amongst them Michael Bisio, since about one year regular partner of pianist Matthew Shipp).

Partly inspired in his conduction by his past collaborations with Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris and Henry Threadgill, the music contained in this record is related by Jason Hwang himself to the jiwa, the individual embodied soul of every human being. The orchestral arrangements are conceived as a dialogue of souls and an exploration of the kinetic energies of the music itself through the layering of his particles.

Ilia Belorukov's Intonema released at the same time with Wozzek also Bewitched Concert, a 40 minutes improvisation reminiscent of contemporary music by a 'spontaneous' and international quintet composed by singer Thomas Buckner, flutist and composer Edyta Fil, pianist, composer and sound engineer Alexey Lapin, cellist Juho Laitinen and Belorukov himself on alto saxophone and objects.

While Dmitry Ukhov in the liner notes mentions Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening music, and also Witold Lutoslawski's Hesitant second symphony, we can take note of a work perfectly balanced between contemporary music and improvisation, in which the backgrounds of every musician are perfectly recognizable. It's not that common today listening to young performers (Thomas Buckner is the only one to have more than 40 years of career on his shoulders), coming from different backgrounds even if with a slight balance on contemporary music, still using as means of expressions devices related to recognizable , while stirred, idioms and looking for a coherent structure. So the record - as the other two in this article - can be also taken as an important clue in order to avoid for free improvisation the risk of involution as, apart from single musicians, happened to sound art at least in the last ten years.