•
Rating: This review ideally continues a discussion on the forms of improvisation, already initiated with my contribution to "Ganryu Island" by the brilliant duo Zorn-Michihiro, and is especially intended as a response (naturally non-polemical) to the objections of two users who did not agree with the positions I took in that context. Honestly, I wouldn't have believed that a theme already widely discussed by certain specialized bibliography, such as improvisation and its characteristics, could provoke so many objections and recriminations, moreover carried with such vehemence and animosity; but the presence of opposing opinions is also useful for me to clarify doubts that someone, having read the lively debate on "Ganryu Island", might legitimately raise.
Therefore, I intend to "increase the dose," if possible, with a conceptually very similar work to the one I presented previously: in fact, it is possible to argue that, without the work I am about to present, that curious and bizarre sax-shamisen duet (though unique in its genre, as duly emphasized) would never have found a place. It is one of the most avant-garde and unsettling works the musical 20th century has proposed, one of those milestones that impress, fluster, and even "disturb," if possible, made to bewilder rather than to please, should we intend pleasure as the simple auditory satisfaction in purely "hedonistic" terms: indeed, it is a work not listened to but "lived", a representation of phenomenology capable of transcending the mere sound event to place itself in the exalted realm of "unrepeatability." It is the manifesto of an innovative conception of how the instrument is understood and, at the same time, the very relationship between performer and instrument, considering how the expressive potentials of the instrumental "medium" are explored, expanded, brought to the extreme here. It is the revolution, the total subversion of the traditional understanding of musical "time": from the narrative linearity comprehensive of an evolution, of a process, of a beginning and an end, to the circular, open, virtually infinite time of improvisation, understood as "logical" performance of sound segments that are illogical, random, and unrepeatable in the same form, in different contexts. It is the triumph of moodiness, of "sense" over prearranged and predefined settings, of a language of impressions, whispers, ungrammatical phrases left half-said, incomplete and whispered "hints" tasked with replacing a "complete," a "defined" that isn't there. It is the tangible and irrefutable proof of how improvisation, the "true" improvisation (and not what some love to call so through semantic extension of the term), doesn't need scripts: a context suffices, two virtuosos of the instrument suffices, "sensations" sufficient to translate into "sound matter": an image, a spurt even if only partial (actually, better if partial), perhaps even the cacophonous potentials of an instrument willing to play: a double bass.
"Music From Two Basses" by the duo Holland-Phillips is a programmatic declaration right from the title: that is, music produced by a dialogue (at times, as at times one can and should rather speak of a "quarrel") between double basses. The other essential element for understanding the work is the year of publication: 1971, reads the cover notes, but I, like some critics, disagree: this is an album from 1969. Why, you might ask? Have I lost my mind? No, it's my way of saying that this brilliant experiment is actually the product of a revolution that affected music "as a whole" in that fateful year: after that revolution, nothing was ever the same: the distinctions between genres, the performance practices, the recording and post-synchronization techniques. For me (born in 1987), that was never the year of the moon landing; it was the year of "Abbey Road," of Woodstock, and most notably, the year of "In A Silent Way." And there was Dave Holland, who had crossed the ocean some time before (and before fellow countryman John McLaughlin), in that half-hour and a little more of continuous flow, direct recording, of music that already had one foot "beyond"; the other foot in the new dimension was placed a few months later, in the summer, with the recordings of "Bitches Brew" and the "cut and paste" of Teo Macero to better define what a crowded acoustic-electric ensemble had already expressed. Few notice it, but in those months - and the following ones - Coltrane’s experiments of the Sixties, electric Davis, the monotonicity imperceptibly becoming atonality, become the Bible of a new generation that recognizes itself in it. The 1969 of Miles (and, with Miles, of all the musicians who, like Dave Holland, can say they "were there" in those days) does not end on December 31, 1969, but comes to fruition in 1972, with "A Tribute To Jack Johnson" (but maybe even in 1975, with the "twin" albums "Agharta" and "Pangaea") and the realization of that futuristic ideal of Jazz-Funk which even Hendrix, in his last months, was considering, if only fate hadn't decided otherwise...
Collaborating with the great Dave on this project is Barre Phillips, a Californian from San Francisco who had played (better to say: had recorded pieces of history) with Eric Dolphy and Lee Konitz, among others; the empathy established between the two is exceptional: even when, with alienating results, more moods coexist in the same piece, there is a singular feeling of being in the presence of a performer with two brains, so much so that the percussiveness of one knows how to blend with the melodic relaxation of the other. What is heard in the first part of the album is as far from the "preordained" as one can imagine: if the emblematic titles "Improvised Piece I" and "Improvised Piece II" were not enough, the dissonances and the disarticulated phrasings proposed leave no doubt. There is, as was said, no processuality, the passages that one listens to are purely "mood-related" in the sense that they are justified only by the "material" approach (more or less incisive) to the instrument; the center of the performance is in the instrument, in the strings pulled, plucked, caressed with the bow; in the sobs, in the silences, in the ferocious and wild moments of aggressiveness; in the lamenting lines that intersect without any reference, amalgamating or contrasting based on the "feeling," the impulse of the moment.
The rest of the album is mostly improvisation, as in the imitation of rain in "Raindrops" and in the uncontrolled, delirious hysteria of "Beans" and "Just A Whisper," but also bears witness to a more considered approach, more cerebral, based on extemporaneously reworked basic ideas by the two: listen to the astral melody of "May Be I Can Sing It For You" and, above all, the simply binary structure of "Song For Clare": it is no coincidence that, in the titles of both pieces, the use of two terms belonging to the same sphere of meaning, "sing" and "song," stands out; as you can see, suggestions are not lacking...
The five stars are a given, I would say almost pleonastic: but the historical value of this monumental record is immeasurable, transcending any numeric evaluation. An experience to try: indispensable.
Loading comments slowly
