John Surman
Private City

John Surman is a famous English multi-instrumentalist (soprano and baritone sax, bass clarinet, recorders, synthesizer), known as a jazz musician, and co-founder of the group Trio (1969) and collaborator of the late Gil Evans, John Taylor, and Kenny Wheeler. Over time, he has managed to conceive a genre of "pure" music, even if this adjective means everything and nothing. Certainly the "private city", the boundless inner world that he sketched almost thirty years ago with the finest expertise in this record, is not located between spatiotemporal coordinates. We grasp it from the very first track, "Portrait of a Romantic": first, a murmur of winds, almost a prehistoric, indeed extrahistorical fanfare, in muted tones, which articulates, structures, encourages listening, as if a story were about to begin; then an infinitely sweet attack and seven minutes of ecstatic passages, glides and ascents on the edge of the abyss, a technical and emotional roller coaster of incomparable intensity. As in all pieces born from a vision, the cohesion is perfect and remains so even if the sound wavers between overlapping solos, gets dirty, becomes a cry, a murmur, a bow that stretches and cadences, finally twisting to dissolve. What are we facing? An invocation ritual, a lullaby, a hypnotic liturgy? A study of the romantic temperament translated into the ineffability of pure music? What is certain is that the singer's gesture disperses the message in the very act of enunciating it, not mockingly, but painfully, and seems to suggest that any rational analysis of the inner world is doomed to failure. Surman destined this jewel to a ballet choreographed by Susan Crow and staged since 1987, the year in which this record was in gestation (it was recorded in December and bears the date of 1988).

There are numerous artistically very high passages, which often mature through the disarming - and apparent? - simplicity of the ancestors' song. Sometimes Surman, not like the wanderer above the sea of fog, but like a devoted child of nature, stands on the hill to contemplate, celebrate, and absorbedly question the landscape around: this happens in "On Hubbard's Hill", where the winds echo the remote pastoral airs of British folk. Other times, as in "Not Love perhaps", a gloomy fantasy that gradually takes shape, it designs dark and spectral scenarios.

The rest of the record moves in a dimension that we might, somewhat boldly, define as metaphysical. "The Wanderer", in some ways the mirror image of "Portrait of a Romantic", has the same subdued start, but its theme unwinds gracefully around a series of ecstatic arabesques, while more structured is "Roundelay", whose cadences are however more marked, in the filigree of a complex system of references. In this, it reconnects to the ancient English circular songs, those "rounds" apparently elaborated during the thirteenth century at Reading Abbey in Berkshire (where the oldest known round, "Sumer is icumen in", was written). To seal the masterpiece is "The Wizard's Song", which incorporates the sounds of "Portrait" in its pressing crescendo of bolero: the concept album thus closes in a loop. The tormenting search for balance, which touched the nadir right at the center of the record, between "Levitation" and "Undernote" - the two most enigmatic pieces, where the magma of musical matter became respectively a dense mass of suggestions and embroidery in the void - has here concluded, under the banner of the sublimation of what remains of the feelings of the "private city".

The album forms a triptych with "Road to Saint Ives" and "A Biography of the Rev. Absalom Dawe", from 1990 and 1995 respectively, less melodic and almost equally significant, interspersed with the splendid "The Bass Project". Subsequently, between 1999 and 2003, Surman dedicated himself to the baroque songs of John Dowland (1563-1626), a path also commendably trodden by Sting with "Songs from the Labyrinth" (2006) and various jazz collaborations, one of which, "Svartisen" from 2009, with our Maurizio Brunod (guitars) and Paolo Vinaccia (percussions).