More Windows & Small Mirrors | Milano Dialogues Part Two

Sergio Armaroli | Veli Kujala | Harri Sjöström | Giancarlo Schiaffini 

This is the eighth CD by Sergio Armaroli (vibraphone, Italy) released within a relatively short time. Each CD had been recorded with different partners and each CD is an unprecedented combination of vibraphone with different instruments — trombone, soprano saxophone, concert accordion. This time, yet again, Sergio’s musical partners are from different parts of the world: Finland, Sweden and Italy. Their vast musical dictionary and unusual combination of instruments help them to create something really original, some new language to reflect the richness of their musical relationship.

CD LR 933

REVIEWS

Cet album intrigant fait suite au Windows & Mirrors / Milano Dialogues (LRCD 931) enregistré lui aussi les 3 et 4 avril 2022 avec les mêmes, soit le vibraphoniste italien Sergio Armaroli, l’accordéoniste « au quart de ton » finlandais Veli Kujala, le tromboniste italien Giancarlo Schiaffini et le saxophoniste soprano (et sopranino) finlandais Harri Sjöström. Armaroli est l’initiateur de ce quartet atypique et aérien et j’ajouterai qu’arrivé récemment sur la scène internationale, cet excellent vibraphoniste a déjà publié une belle collaboration à trois avec Schiaffini et Sjöström (Duos & Trios), des duos magnifiques avec les percussionnistes Fritz Hauser et Roger Turner pour Leo Records , ainsi qu’avec Elliott Sharp. Veli Kujala est un artiste unique en son genre à mi-chemin entre l’harmonie et l’étirement éthéré de solutions mélodiques spiralées et microtonales entre les points fixes des gammes occidentales. Giancarlo Schiaffini s’est affirmé, il y a un demi-siècle en pionnier des musiques improvisées free (génération Enrico Rava, Marcelo Melis, et puis Centazzo, Iannacone, Mazzon etc…), généreux utilisateur de sourdines et avant-gardiste voisin de Paul Rutherford et Günther Christmann. Harri Sjöström a beaucoup travaillé avec Paul Lovens, Phil Wachsmann et Teppo Hauta- Aho et fut longtemps un membre à part entière des groupes New-Yorkais et Européen de Cecil Taylor. Ces Windows et Mirrors découlent aussi de ses Soundscapes à géométrie variable internationales (cfr Balderin Sali Variations Leo LRCD 870/871 et Soundscapes Festival #3 Fundacja Sluchaj FSR 07/2022) réunissant une quinzaine d’improvisateurs de haut vol parmi lesquels ces quatre musiciens ont appris à mieux se connaître. Cette musique improvisée en suspension dans l’espace et le temps est basée sur un dialogue minutieux comme le titre l’indique. More Windows #6 commence par un bel équilibre avec l’accordéon lancinant et ses spirales ondoyantes ou tortueuses auquel finit par répondre le vibraphone cristallin établissant un échange en demi-teinte. S’enchaîne l’intervention du trombone et ses sourdines expressives avec le vibraphone, le souffleur découpant l’air ambiant au cuivre moelleux, déchirant et acide, un brin narquois. Un peu plus loin c’est le sax soprano qui surgit, Harri modulant ses notes ciselées, morsures et hoquets rengorgés évoquant à la fois le meilleur de Lol Coxhill et de Steve Lacy dans un style personnel vraiment original. Dans le face à face sautillant des deux souffleurs, Veli actionne un ostinato irrégulier contribuant au momentum.15 minutes et c’est le plus long morceau. On apprécie l’instrumentation originale et toutes ces déclinaisons sonores au fil des 10 morceaux souvent assez courts (3 – 4 minutes). Les More Windows #6, #7, #8 et #9 de l’album contiennent ainsi des emboîtements spontanés et bien construits alternant dialogues en duos et trios, parfois tutti où l’art de la conversation logique ou lunatique se développe, s’améliore, se dilate dans une dimension intime, chambriste et lyrique avec quelques éclats qui font sens. Contemporain, free, improvisé libre , avant jazz, sont finalement des étiquettes qui rendent mal la qualité vivante et tout le charme indicible de cette musique. Les Small Mirrors #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 et #6 en duo, intercalés par paires entre chaque Windows tels les tableaux d’une exposition haute en couleurs, sont l’occasion de se jouer du mimétisme souvent inévitable pour apporter encore plus de nuances et d’expressivité à leur démarche. Vu le découpage des morceaux de l’album et de leurs conceptions épurées et interactives, l’auditeur se régale de toutes leurs figures de style, modules rotatifs, vignettes chatoyantes et haikus expressifs. Et il n’y pas de longueur dans toutes leurs interventions. Voilà une musique qu’on peut parcourir sans se lasser pendant des heures surtout que chacun d’eux est un improvisateur attachant, amoureux et poète.

Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg

TOP 3

MORE WINDOWS & SMALL MIRRORS | MILANO DIALOGUES - part two

by  Stuart Broomer

Bel Canto

More Windows & Small Mirrors is the eighth in a brilliant series of Leo recordings launched in 2019 by percussionist Sergio Armaroli. It connects directly to the first of them, Duets and Trios, the duets with saxophonist Harri Sjöström and the trios adding trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini, and it continues the documentation of Windows & Mirrors (Milano Dialogues), the quartet and sub-groups that added the quarter-tone accordion of Veli Kujala to the trio. If, in our thoughts about music, we imagine a distinction between the orchestral and the intimate, here that illusion disappears. Armaroli imagines the music as in-built in the character of the instruments “as a form of the music that was born as a subtle dialogue between dense harmonic schematics (vibraphone and accordion) and even more free melodic profiles (trombone and sax).”

Where does such music come from? We might imagine certain national inheritances, the great Italian tradition in which ethereal sacred music gradually became the extended mythic and historic narratives of opera seria, or the rich musicality of Finland, which likely possesses more symphony orchestras per capita than any other country. Then there is the embrace of the jazz tradition. Among Schiaffini and Armaroli’s collaborations is Deconstructing Monk in Africa (Dodicilune), combining the works of the greatest composer of modern jazz with the sound store of the music’s ancestral legacy. The lighting arc extends to individual collaborations with Cecil Taylor, from Schiaffini’s membership in the Italian Instabile Orchestra that recorded Taylor’s The Owner of the River Bank to Harri Sjöström’s long membership as the sole horn in Taylor’s quartet, a role previously occupied at some length by Steve Lacy and Jimmy Lyons. Veli Kujala first appeared in an international setting in the permutating band of The Balderin Sali Variations, an international conclave of improvisers assembled in Helsinki in 2018 by Sjöstrom that had the startling Kujala matching reeds in duets with Sjöstrom himself and Evan Parker.     

The reality is that this music comes from everywhere, from every scrap of technical nuance, errant sound and lyric colocation heard in the couple of hundred years of ears gathered here, listening intensely, assembling instinctively and combining creatively. Those windows and mirrors are openings and reflections, sources and repeaters of light. A musical illumination is palpably present in the brightness of timbres here, the metallic brass and the special sheen of the vibraphone, and that wandering lightness of the quarter-tone concert accordion which moves here with a fluency of timbre and pitch unlike any other keyboard. There is a sense in which every musician was chosen for a potential collective identity that had almost nothing to do with specific instruments but rather to do with a special fluency, a joyous musical discipline. Considering the results, Sjöstrom remarks, “trusting is essential and also the trust that the music has its ways, just like water is flowing and taking its own ways of flowing and so on.”  He also quotes Cecil Taylor: “if the music is true, the form will take care of itself.”             

Dissonance is rarely heard here and when it is, it’s heard not as dissonant but as proximity, lines closing together, lines spreading apart. If collectively improvised music aims for its own set of values, somehow in embrace with the unknown, these four musicians, as duo, trio or quartet, achieve collective composition of an almost unknown order, individual initiations of material so richly thoughtful, however spontaneous, that we hear music that might suggest Stravinsky, Messiaen, Ligeti or Berio, moments in which two supportive voices will rise in a light crescendo to support a lead voice, or a single voice will rise to contrast and develop another’s theme, or a brief solo interlude might serve to connect one collective passage to another. At times this might feel like a concert for four voices, but then, where is the orchestra? It’s here, it’s them, just the two or three or four of them: making, pressing, initiating, supporting. 

Kujala, new to the group, points out the spontaneous formal richness of the group, no contradiction but the living fabric of instant composition: “What I found wonderful was that everybody was listening very carefully and used imaginatively a plethora of different compositional techniques: the classic techniques like imitations with inversions, retrogrades, etc., occasionally very effective contrasts, experimental sounds. The main focus of the ensemble varied a lot: sometimes it was a dialogue, sometimes small solos here and there, sometimes passages went from one instrument to another, sometimes the ensemble built certain textures collectively, you name it.”

The veteran Schiaffini reduces the process to its essence: “The most important (maybe the unique) action is just listen/ play/ listen/ propose/ play/ silence, and with such friends and in that studio, it happened very easily.” That felicity is the music’s earmark.

Stuart Broomer