Archie Shepp
Blasé

LA RECENSIONE

The six-minute and thirty-second mark is pure transcendence...

The protagonist is a harmonica, actually two.

What does a harmonica have to do with jazz? I really don't know. But I'm almost at zero with jazz, not absolute zero as they say in Bologna, but almost. And anyway, who could have expected it?

And when you don't expect something, it really gets to you, right?

But it wasn't just the surprise effect!!! There's everything leading up to it, like that glass voice that breaks at minute six...

The harmonica just needs to come in, even if subdued, even if muted... and, in an instant, everything becomes blues, even though, to be honest, it was blues even before.

But how did we arrive at that voice that breaks?

Imagine some rhythmic whims + a minimal bass + two inevitable piano chords that are always (always) the same and they pierce your soul...

Now, imagine all this as a stage, a stage for sax and words.

A stage or rather a home, THE HOME. Something to which that sax and those words, completely abandoning themselves, entrust with absolute confidence.

You can feel that those words are great poetry without needing a translation. Destiny, I imagine, and a charge of underlying pride. The blues, indeed.

Even though, obviously, it isn't exactly blues, it's avant-garde Jazz. Proven by that Coltrane-esque sax, that continuous flight, sometimes atmospheric, sometimes all scribbles and gasps.

We travel through a strange kind of classicism, the eternal tale of the pain of living and something very ancestral and very powerful. Probably too much. How much tension can a pinhead hold?

So that's the sense of that harmonica, or rather those harmonics: dispersing, only to put all the accumulated tension back on the shoulders again.

For about forty seconds, of absolute dissolution, it's just them leaning on that minimal bass and that relentless piano always echoing the same theme...

Then, to completely break your heart, voice and sax again. With those harmonics that, together with them, keep reminding us that, although it's jazz, it is (it has been and always will be) blues.

The album isn't just this track, in fact. The next track, for instance, is a sensational jazz gospel, calm, invocation, subtle tension of a borderline masterpiece. So beautiful that it brings to mind Sandro Penna when he says “nel cuore è quasi un urlo di gioia e tutto e calmo”...

Yes...

“In the heart it is almost a scream of joy and everything is calm”...

Then yes, everything else too. But, since I've already said too much, I'll remain silent...