Steve Tibbetts
The Fall Of Us All

"Gamelan": keep this word well in mind, repeat it among yourselves as if it were a mantra, memorize it; because it is the key-word for understanding a unique album, among the absolute pinnacles of all the new experimental music of the '90s; a work infused with spiritualism, rich in ethnic sensitivity, as profound as few others. The pinnacle of the research of a musicologist by vocation and profession, of a musician unjustly and sensationally underestimated (as I see, even on Debaser): Master Steve Tibbetts, and never as in this case will the definition of Master (strictly with a capital letter) appear more fitting.

Gamelan, as was said: that is, the ideal percussion ensemble in the (centuries-old) Javanese musical tradition, whose first attestations date back to the 12th century. Originally, the percussion served as a simple backdrop to the recitation of court songs and poems, within highly ritualistic contexts, and were only later used to accompany dances and performances (primarily the "bedhaya", in which exclusively female groups performed—and still perform). For a gamelan to be complete, that is to meet the expressive needs of the "Pathet" (the most common "mode" in Javanese harmony), it must include: a "gender barung" and a "saron" (metallophones that have no direct equivalents in Western cultures and are extremely difficult to play, which is why the players often belong to families of musicians); a "gambang", the characteristic multi-octave "xylophone" also used in Bali; a "rebab", a stringed instrument originating from Arabia and then spread as a result of the expansion of Islam; a "suling", which is a flute made of bamboo; finally the characteristic "gong", which like the cymbals of modern drums has the task of signaling the transition from one rhythmic unit to the next. On this base, singing is added (mostly choral vocalizations).

There is a fundamental difference that distinguishes the practice of gamelan from other traditional music in the area (Indian and Japanese—Raga and Tsugaru Shamisen—first of all); Javanese music is always and exclusively conceived for a collective, for a group of multiple elements, never as a solo performance. To be clear: Indonesians wouldn’t know what to do with a Ravi Shankar; the protagonism, the centrality of a single element is something that does not belong to their culture. It is not by chance that, precisely due to this attitude, the Pathet is the one—among the Oriental modules—that has been the least influenced by the Jazz and Rock tradition: many are the guitarists who, starting from the Sixties, have included elements of Raga and Arab Maqam in their compositions, very few those who have ventured into the unknown paths of the Javanese tradition; from memory, I only remember two: one is Iwan Hasan, an unknown guitarist (and 21-string prodigy) of Discus, a local band of ethnically contaminated Prog-Rock; the other is precisely our Steve Tibbetts, a modern Robbie Basho (but a fanatic of Hendrix) who over the years has carried forward a discourse of astonishing completeness and variety. Arriving, after years of research and a long journey "on-site," at the much-anticipated encounter with that musical backdrop so ignored by the Western listener.

It is 1994 when the prestigious ECM releases this "The Fall Of Us All", the album of the "encounter"; a crucial passage of a career undertaken discreetly in the distant 1977 with a self-produced album (and played "at home," in fact, when he was still a university student in St.Paul—Minnesota). Already astonishing was the ease with which the young man alternated acoustic and electric, 6 and 12 strings, for a style already intolerant of "frontiers"; a few years later, "YR" and "Northern Song" would be the prelude to his first masterpiece: "Safe Journey," a monument of uncommon culture and technical skill, Hendrixian distortions and moods on a carpet of congas and African drums; years of silence, between the Eighties and the Nineties, and a new apotheosis in conjunction with a new "orientation" (in all senses) stylistic.

Thailand, Java, Bali, Malaysia, but also the monasteries of Nepal and Bhutan are the stages of a journey translated into music, between rigor and experimentation, gloomy acoustic lines and fierce explosions of electric vehemence; this album is permeated by the fascination of the unknown and the ancestral, from the stern atmosphere of meditation to the orgiastic liberation of frenzied dances. It brings to mind (but don’t take me too literally) Santana's "cross-over" from "Caravanserai," ethnic Fusion, even—going back—the seminal "East-West" by Paul Butterfield; with the difference that here it is not Raga dominating but the atonality of the Pathet, its complex and occasionally dissonant geometries: tongues of incandescent fire are the guitarist’s sudden eruptions, modifying in the studio the orthodox sounds of his instrument and forcing it to reach unthought-of and exciting heights. Against the backdrop of the gamelan percussion. And one cannot help but be captivated by so much beauty...

...by the beauty of a "Dzogchen Punks" that recalls the tribal Gabriel of "The Rhythm Of The Heat", of a "Full Moon Dogs" that inspires a night in a Buddhist temple, of the exotic acid-blues of "Hellbound Train" that smells of voodoo, of the almost "motorcycle" rumble (such is the violence) that animates and shakes "Roam & Spy". Among cries, obsessive and tormenting percussion, and a profound tension, ritual-like. Primitivism mixed with modernity, reflection to outburst: all within even a single track, between sudden transitions and reverberations that almost lead to the "stunning" of the listener. But at the end of it all, it is catharsis, it is a feeling of fullness and satisfaction that cannot be described.

Music overflowing with emotions, then, music that is itself an intense, prolonged emotion. It is a new Fripp, that you will hear, who from the court of the Crimson King has settled at the court of the sultan. Monumental.