Ben Allison
Peace Pipe

How nice it is to occasionally hear albums like this one where, for once, "High Quality at Low Price" isn't a cheap advertising gimmick, a low-grade slogan for clearance sale flyers, but a "great and solid slice of applied reality." PEACE PIPE, by the American bassist Ben Allison, merges the sounds of jazz with those of the African kora, to give us an eclectic product beyond labels and classifications, involving world music, ethnic jazz, certain ambient constructions, and concepts of electronic music (even though electronics aren't present here, not a trace of it!) and it manages to mark a new path on the "instrumental" level: both purely in terms of timbre and rhythm.

PEACE PIPE is the meeting point between different ethnicities, cultures, languages, and realities, distant but not dissimilar, a "mockery" of conventions that initiates a whirlwind mechanism of growth, moment by moment restoring intensity and beauty to music that becomes "borderless." As if suddenly all the walls and small gardens blew up to see "beyond" the fences a music "infinitely rich" and "frighteningly free."

PEACE PIPE uses the kora of Malian Mamadou Diabate (does that name ring a bell?), in a continuous exchange of ideas and stimuli, building around the pieces hypnotic structures and lyrical and evocative improvisations that are hard to classify into a genre. The only slight misstep, in my opinion, is the cover of Neil Young's "Goin' Back," a bit conventional and not very exciting, with phrasing that underlines the absence of vocals (sic!).

Overall, a truly surprising mix that, once again, makes us hopeful for the evolution of these genre contaminations. Where we will end up, nobody knows, we just know that when I come across works of this caliber, one can hypothesize better futures than those currently anticipated. If you then consider that an album like this is published by those at Il Manifesto for the ridiculous price of 8 euros, what more could you want?