Dino Saluzzi/Anja Lechner: Ojos Negros (ECM 1991)

| Tyran Grillo

Ojos Negros

Ojos Negros

Dino Saluzzi bandoneón
Anja Lechner violoncello
Recorded April 2006, Kulturbuehne AmBach, Goetzis
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

There’s no better way to describe the wondrousness of Ojos Negros than to quote dance historian Sally Sommer: “Tango is self-transformation.” This groundbreaking debut of a duo nearly a decade in the making smacks of Sommer’s insight, works its fingers raw with the labor of its fluid intuition. Tango would be nothing without memory. That bandoneonista Dino Saluzzi and cellist Anja Lechner bring such a level of awareness to every note and space between alike is graspable enough. Less so are the whispers behind their collaboration, the linking impulse through which they sing as one. This can be neither taught nor so adroitly articulated, but can only be imbibed through the music of life itself. The album’s title is therefore no coincidence—black eyes hold in their pools the truth behind all that moves us.

Anyone familiar with Saluzzi’s work will know his skill for shaping a melody so heartwarming it hurts, and know also that his creative wellspring is itself a dark iris floating in red-veined expanse. Except for the title track, an alluring tango by Vicente Greco, all of the material on Ojos Negros is Saluzzi’s. That being said, once Lechner weaves her spirit into the quivering bandoneón of “Tango a mi padre,” it’s clear that it is just as much hers. The rare partnership established at the outset is, like Ryuichi Sakamoto’s pairing with Morelenbaum2 in Casa, an unusual idea with organic results, so that one can hardly imagine the sonic landscape without their tangent. Thus caught in the lilting kinesis they so delicately render, we move with them, taking on the elasticity of gently disturbed water.

Dino and Anja
(Photo by Luca d’Agostino)

Saluzzi and Lechner tread foregrounds and backgrounds, stage left and stage right, interiors and exteriors with equal resonance, ever aware of the destinations at the heart of their storytelling regardless of whoever takes the lead. This constant give and take is the light in their prism, which shines brightest in the masterful “Duetto.” Its ashen beginnings ignite slumber before drifting back into peace, as if lazing beneath the swaying tendrils of the willow (each a necklace of time) evoked in the album’s title track. Elsewhere, the duo turns the lens a few clicks into softer focus. “Minguito,” for one, offers a stone rounded by decades of water’s passage as it relays pizzicato arpeggios to Saluzzi’s sustained builds. “El títere,” for another, invokes these contrasts afresh. A handful of especially contemplative pieces whittles the session into completion. Among them, the closing “Serenata” stands out for the depth of its emotion, pliant and mountainous.

The music of Ojos Negros is spoken for by the night. True to ECM standards, it is superbly recorded to boot, giving the bandoneón extraordinary breadth to enfold the cello at its center. As one of the label’s finest recordings and a highlight of Saluzzi’s ongoing travels, it simply deserves to be heard. It was also my first encounter with either musician, and if you have yet to open your ears to their command, I hope it may also be yours.

Luciano Berio: Voci (ECM New Series 1735)

| Tyran Grillo

Luciano Berio
Voci

Kim Kashkashian viola
Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra
Luciano Berio conductor
Robyn Schulkowsky percussion
Recorded November 1999, ORF Studio, Vienna; May 2000, Teldec Studio, Berlin
Engineers: Josef Schütz and Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The interest of Italian composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) in folk music runs as deep as the grooves in his scores—trenches, rather, through which performers have been backpacking their talents since the latter half of the 20th century. In them are remnants of decay and sound intermingling with fantastical re-creations. Much of said interest has flowed through those earthly scars outward into other lands. French, Italian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, and American sources were all fair game in the path of his net, reaching notable culmination in his Folk Songs of 1964. The range of this touchstone composition places unenviable demands on the singer, who must convey respective flourishes and qualities as if they were her own. The brilliance of the piece lies less in Berio’s settings, per se, than in his decoupling of songs from their provenance. This act of displacement lends their motives clarity and reliability (an idea that would surely have been fresh for one who had just relocated to America for a series of teaching appointments). We can therefore assume that the settings were no mere archival gesture (two of the Folk Songs are his own), but rather a vibrant shuffling of idioms. In that world we encounter a roving gallery of maidens, fishermen, even a nightingale, and in each there is a new message. It is something of a comfort to know that, in the midst of this politically charged period, Berio remained true to roots as he saw them, even when they were not his own. The folk song was thus for him a found object. Like his contemporary Italo Calvino (who would write two librettos for the composer), Berio was an interdisciplinary storyteller who meshed experimental and traditional impulses, and in the process saw fit to fit what he saw.

Voci (1984) continues the thread first spun in Folk Songs, but stares deeper into the looking glass. As the center of this exemplary recording from ECM’s New Series, it radiates with warmth and tactile force. Its focus is on the sights, sounds, and smells of Sicily, and in them finds a suitable color palette from which to sketch and paint. Its inaugural gesture of bells and viola is not unlike the solo introduction to Ravel’s Tzigane in its thorough physicality. The analogy stops there, however, for Voci is anything but a showpiece. It rings in the air like the street calls, lullabies, and folk tunes that inspired it, minimally dressed. Violist Kim Kashkashian and the Vienna RSO are ideal and formidable interpreters, bringing renewed variety to the piece’s inherent textures as compared to the reference recording by Aldo Bennici (for whom it was written) fronting the London Sinfonietta. Kashkashian carries full orchestral weight in her bow, keening her way through the piece’s epic travels with confidence. Fragmentary dances and incantations trade hands, carving circuitous paths around an elusive center. The colorful blend of percussion (courtesy of the great Robyn Schulkowsky), winds, and strings surrounding her form a pastiche of rusticity that brims with practically excessive totality. This is not the careful revelry of the attentive archivist, but rather the unrest of the enraptured interpreter, translating, transforming, and deconstructing.

In a fitting stroke of programming panache, producer Manfred Eicher includes five field recordings from the very regions that so entranced Berio. Of these, the lament is especially magnetic. Mournful though it is, it also undergirds a heavy weight of realization: the folk song is no fleeting thing. Rather, it continues to sing itself into existence even in the absence of voices, working its way into the very soil and thrumming among the dead. This makes Kashkashian’s performance all the more worthy of praise, for she does what many singers have done before her with a shaft of hair, rosin, and four strings.

After this dive into “agro-pastoral” authenticity, we return to land in Naturale (1985), which combines the composer’s own song recordings with viola and percussion. Although more than a mere Voci redux, its effects are nearly identical, drawn as they are from the same starting point. The intimacy factor is higher, the mirror more polished, the sun lower in the sky.

As Berio would have been the first to admit, the “cannibalization” process by which these strains made their way into his meticulous constructions remain free from romantic visions of preservation and speak to a process of linear progression in the continued search for new directions through the fusion of disparate paths. We can be thankful that some of those paths lead straight into our ears.

<< Charles Lloyd: The Water Is Wide (ECM 1734)
>> András Schiff: Leoš Janáček – A Recollection (ECM 1736 NS)

Anouar Brahem: Le pas du chat noir (ECM 1792)

| Tyran Grillo

Le pas du chat noir

Anouar Brahem
Le pas du chat noir

Anouar Brahem oud
François Couturier piano
Jean-Louis Matinier accordion
Recorded July 2001 at Radio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Oud virtuoso and composer Anouar Brahem returns to ECM with an inspired trio. In the company of pianist François Couturier and accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier, he emerges more as guiding wind than guiding light, forging a quietly original program that feels at once unprecedented and timeless. Brahem’s writing is especially intuitive on this outing, teetering from stream-of-consciousness currents to insightful themes in the steady arc of a summer fan.

Le pas du chat noir brings a desert’s clarity to the night air, exposing an intricate carpet of stars against cloudless sky. The color schemes are simple, but their constellations sway with deep mythology. The opening title track lacquers a table for all the puzzle pieces that follow: raindrops turned images, fragments of a whole. As in the concluding “Déjà la nuit,” its surface trembles ever so slightly from the weight of a nearby spirit’s footsteps. Of this small mountain of twelve pieces, “Leila au pays du carrousel,” which appears once properly and again in variation, is the apex. Its arpeggios tip a quill’s inkwell, pregnant with potential words. Accordion and piano configure every fractal edge, a galaxy in miniature. With their turning comes forgiveness, the unerring stare of divinity that clasps its fate around all life and breathes until it shimmers. A Philip Glass-like ostinato from Couturier lends similar regularity to “Les ailes du Bourak,” forming with the others a caduceus of song. Both tunes reveal a distinct new edge to Brahem’s instrument. Be it an effect of the playing or the engineering, its tone is prominently exposed—all the more wondrous when one considers just how shadowy Brahem’s presence is throughout. He lifts the veil, only to reveal another, this made of refraction, prisms of selfless, creative spark.

Notable also are Brahem’s duets. With Couturier he achieves clearest solidarity in “De tout ton cœur,” while in “Pique-nique à Nagpur” he and Matinier skip through the album cover’s trees, their shadows pulling the sky like an eyelid, neither sleeping nor awake. Couturier casts lighter magic in “C’est ailleurs” (which, with its broad strokes and intimate pairings, says much with little) and reads the ether like a sacred book of Gurdjieff in “Toi qui sait.” Such are the nomadic ways of these travelers, each evoking a staggering range of topographies in his fleet passage. As in the first high notes of “L’arbre qui voit,” their leaves fall in slow motion, blown from settlement to settlement in search of a branch.

All the above being said, I might not recommend this as your first Brahem experience. A cup of tea at the Astrakan Café might be in order before taking a stroll down this leisurely, though undeniably beautiful, thoroughfare.

<< Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber: Unam Ceylum (ECM 1791 NS)
>> Zehetmair Quartett: Robert Schumann (ECM 1793 NS)

Louis Sclavis Quintet: L’affrontement des prétendants (ECM 1705)

| Tyran Grillo

L'affrontement

Louis Sclavis Quintet
L’affrontement des prétendants

Louis Sclavis clarinet, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone
Jean-Luc Cappozzo trumpet
Vincent Courtois cello
Bruno Chevillon double-bass
François Merville drums
Recorded September 1999, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Assistant engineer: Sylvain Thevenard
Produced by Louis Sclavis
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

Multi-reedist Louis Sclavis unveils a new quintet with L’affrontement des prétendants, retaining only bassist Bruno Chevillon from his previous ECM sessions. Along for the ride are newcomers Jean-Luc Cappozzo on trumpet, Vincent Courtois on cello, and François Merville on drums. With them, he forges a distinctive jazz that never fails to titillate with its artful blend of composed and free elements. Like the wonderful Acoustic Quartet disc before it, this date immerses the listener in a refreshing, driven sound.

Despite the album’s title (one might translate it as “The clash of contenders”), the dynamics within the band are anything but contentious. Sclavis’s staid formula of spiraling, precisely notated bookends only serves to foil the brilliant unraveling occurring between them. Take the 17-minute “Hommage à Lounès Matoub,” for example. The masterpiece of the set, it honors its eponymous protest singer through an epic development of mourning into celebration. Bass shadows the solo cello that begins the piece before trumpet threads an alluring stretch of politics. Merville takes an indulgent look at the landscape before paving the way for Sclavis’s soprano. Like Dalí’s famous moustache, which the artist is said to have reserved for only the minutest detail, that pliant reed renders individual leaves, glints of sunlight, and footprints in the sand. Also indicative of the band’s unity is the opening title track, in which Cappozzo is the glue that binds. From growling catharsis to klezmer touches, its idiomatic merry-go-round hinges an exemplary doorway.

Despite the sometimes-dire associations, Sclavis surrounds himself with an eminently joyful milieu. The listener may feel this especially in brightness of “Possibles” and “Contre contre.” The latter’s groove-laden vista is a particularly fluid feature for Sclavis, who over a light percussive backdrop sparks a noteworthy exchange between cello and bass. Even more memorable is that between Sclavis and Courtois in “Distances,” as outgoing as it is crumpled to a pliant core. Yet another duet, this of clarinet and bass, develops full-bodied dances from merest whispers in “Le temps d’après.” Chevillon goes rogue in “Hors les murs,” a packed solo that stomps and pirouettes in turns, and links chains of forward-thinking energy into the stratosphere. Sclavis offers his own monologue via soprano, introducing the swinging “Maputo,” for which he switches to bass clarinet, running along a distinctly swinging backbone with fortitude and oddly graceful sibilance. Last is “La mémoire des mains,” a freely improvised spate he shares with Merville and Courtois: three birds in a cage chattering themselves to sleep.

<< Stockhausen/Andersen/Héral/Rypdal: Kartā (ECM 1704)
>> Jean-Luc Godard: Histoire(s) du cinéma (ECM 1706-10 NS)

Stockhausen/Andersen/Héral/Rypdal: Kartā (ECM 1704)

| Tyran Grillo

Karta

Kartā

Markus Stockhausen trumpet, piccolo trumpet, flugelhorn
Terje Rypdal electric guitar
Arild Andersen double-bass
Patrice Héral drums, percussion, live electronics
Recorded December 1999 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Although the title of Markus Stockhausen’s Kartā is Sanskrit for “higher power,” the music serving it suggests a path of regression from bird to egg. The trumpeter-composer fronts a superb trio that includes Arild Andersen and Patrice Héral (a percussionist whom Andersen characterizes as “a European equivalent to Nana Vasconcelos” and who can also be heard the bassist’s concept album, Electra). Guitarist Terje Rypdal guests, adding swirls of Technicolor to the band’s monochrome. True to collective spirit, much of the pre-arranged material was jettisoned in favor of the spontaneous improvisations that ensued for the recording session’s first ninety minutes. From this came the lion’s share of an 11-part set list. Of the four composed pieces that made the final cut, Andersen and Stockhausen each contributed two.

Looking out from “Legacy” (a sweet breaking of bread that evokes late-night Miles) at the album’s center, one sees Andersen’s pieces at the farthest reaches. Where “Sezopen” allures with its droning cries and floats Rypdal’s autumnal heart murmurs with ease, “Lighthouse” draws powerful arco lines, evoking not the structure itself but the rays of promise it emits and the vessels they rock to sleep. The resulting traction leaves us with a time-lapse photograph to cherish. One layer inward, in either penultimate position, are Stockhausen’s tunes, which between the rubato “Flower Of Now” and the amorphous “Choral” open various doorways of possibility into the ad-libbed nexus.

In said nexus reside creatures of great dexterity (viz: Andersen’s fingerwork in “Wood And Naphta” and Rypdal’s in the fiercely programmatic “Wild Cat”) and natural girth (“Sway”). Yet it is in freer tracks such as “Auma,” “Invocation,” and “Emanation” where the musicians’ sacred touchstones appear. Together they form the weight of a Foucault’s pendulum spun in resourceful filament. At times they reach fevered pitch at the suggestion of Andersen’s ebony ululations, while at others they slip into ghostly blur. Whatever the climate, they hold fast to their timekeeping in constantly shifting clockwork with admirable constancy.

Stockhausen is a player who bathes in outer space, finding freedom in the darkness between the stars. With Kartā he has crumpled a nebula back to its planetary state.

<< Gianluigi Trovesi/Gianni Coscia: In cerca di cibo (ECM 1703)
>> Louis Sclavis Quintet: L’affrontement des prétendants (ECM 1705)

Herbert Joos: Daybreak – The Dark Side Of Twilight (JAPO 60015/ECM 3615)

| Tyran Grillo

Daybreak Dark

Herbert Joos
Daybreak -­ The Dark Side Of Twilight

Herbert Joos fluegelhorn, trumpet, cornet
Thomas Schwarz oboe
Wolfgang Czelustra bass, trombone
Strings of Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart
Recorded October 1976 and July 1988 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Carlos Albrecht
Produced by Herbert Joos and Thomas Stöwsand

German trumpeter and fluegelhornist Herbert Joos’s flirtations with ECM have been few, contributing to the big brass sound of Eberhard Weber’s Orchestra and notably to Cracked Mirrors, a marvelous and, it would seem, overlooked date with guitarist Harry Pepl and drummer Jon Christensen. Yet it was with Daybreak, recorded in the fall of 1976 for sister label JAPO, that the knot of Joos first audibly untied itself alongside Thomas Schwarz (oboe), Wolfgang Czelustra (bass and trombone), and the strings of the Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart.

The emphasis on classical textures will feel familiar to admirers of Keith Jarrett’s likeminded forays, especially In The Light and Bridge Of Light. That being said, the overall effect is shadowy, overhung, though equally honest. “Why?,” for example, answers its own question up front in the very asking. Although an obvious reference to Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, its progression spins closure from an interrogative oboe. The normally pastoral associations of the instrument are shed along with lingering symphonic details, such that when Joos’s breath cuts the air with its golden knife, the strings drip like lifeblood from its plane. None of which is meant to suggest that the music is in any way macabre. For what can there be but hope in the cyclical motif that churns during fadeout? “When Were You Born?” asks another question answered by its own sounding. The delicacies of Joos’s high-register playing render far more expansive maps in this instance, touching proboscis to firmament and sampling sunlight until nightfall. “Leicester Court 1440” features Joos in muted soliloquy. Riding a horse of compressed time, he enacts an agitated recession into the title piece. Joos has only his own echo for company before the inward journey is externalized by the dark arrival of strings. Hence, the “Black Trees” looming not far away. Yet despite the title, they actually let down the brightest of the album’s seeds with an approach that gives voice to nature and seeks universal truth in a bird’s nest. Joos’s lines bespeak haughty quest in “Fasten Your Seatbelt.” This playful frolic through arco fabric balances laughter and fearless arpeggios, while scuttling crabs and landlocked others communicate without need for sound. And when the seatbelt fails us, we are thrown into a life of slower motion, lit by “The Dark Side Of Twilight.” The latter appears only on the 1990 CD re-issue (ECM 3615) and, at 15 minutes, is the album’s most brooding texture. Relaying brass-synth and string chorale settings, it walks a broken circle with its head hung in thought, an outlier among the album’s modest population.

The music of Daybreak speaks to children in the language of adults. It photographs the illusion of age and melts it into a sea of numbers. Not every detail will be preserved in that translation, but in the process we come to understand that history and music are sometimes like water and oil. In this chamber of the past, futures hide in corners the light struggles to reach.

Daybreak
Original cover

Dino Saluzzi Group: Juan Condori (ECM 1978)

| Tyran Grillo

Juan Condori

Dino Saluzzi Group
Juan Condori

Dino Saluzzi bandoneon
Felix “Cuchara” Saluzzi tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinet
José Maria Saluzzi acoustic and electric guitars
Matias Saluzzi double-bass, bass guitar
U.T. Gandhi drums, percussion
Recorded October 2005, Estudios Moebio, Buenos Aires
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

A Dino Saluzzi album is the audio equivalent of looking through a family photo album. Not so allegorically in this case, as Dino’s brother Felix (saxophones and clarinet), son José Maria (guitars), Felix’s son Matias (basses), and honorary kin U.T. Gandhi (drums and percussion) join the bandoneón virtuoso for this set of 12 moving pictures, each with its own thumb-worn page. Although named for a childhood friend whose free spirit holds special place in his heart, Juan Condori is less a personal portrait than it is a biography of a time and place preserved in memory. Indeed, from memory come the building blocks of Saluzzi’s music, the very blood without which it might never reach those bellows.

The themes of Juan Condori cross a few historical hairs, from the dying wisdom of South American indigenous peoples (“La Vuelta De Pedro Orillas” and “Chiriguano”) and the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires (“Memoria”) to the life force of music itself (“La Parecida”). If any such references describe a world we know, then it is all we can do to seek hope in these instruments of light: not only memory, but also remembrance. Aside from the acoustic “Soles” by José, written metallic on wind carrying an attic’s scent, the Pedro Laurenz tango classic “Milonga De Mis Amores,” and the spontaneous “Improvisacion,” all the music here is Saluzzi Sr.’s own. Father and son share moments of clear telepathy, as in the airy dance movements of “La Parecida,” in which they paint starbursts of light around the Matias’s deep axis. José enchants further in “A Juana, Mi Madre,” in which his electric evokes the nocturnal stylings of John Abercrombie, and in the title track, while Felix’s pastoral clarinet in “Las Cosas Amadas” and “Los Sauces” deepens the feeling of locality. These and more comprise a set one can only admire for its thematic integrity, its emotive charge, and the quiet flow of its sustenance.

Pay close attention to this one. It brings water to the desert.

Gianluigi Trovesi/Gianni Coscia: In cerca di cibo (ECM 1703)

| Tyran Grillo

In cerca di cibo

In cerca di cibo

Gianluigi Trovesi clarinets
Gianni Coscia accordion
Recorded February 1999 in Zürich
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The virtuosic duo of multi-reedist Gianluigi Trovesi (performing here on clarinets) and accordionist Gianni Coscia makes its first ECM appearance with In cerca di cibo. Over the course of an affectionate hour, these two points of light join to create a binary star that shines in full spectrum. The album’s title means “In search of food,” thus indicating seeds sown and re-sown until they bear new fruit to nourish the ears. It also points to the music’s folk origins, glazed and fired to perfection.

The title piece in duplicate bookends the 15-track program with selections from Fiorenzo Carpi’ score to the 1971 TV mini-series Le avventure di Pinocchio. With the artistry of a wind-blowing cloud on an old map, it christens this sonic vessel and guides its sails as true as Trovesi’s psychoanalytic leaps. “Gepetto” is perhaps the most insightful in this regard. A far cry from Disney’s bumbling songster, it takes us instead into the soul of a man tortured by the fact that his only hope for a child’s love is to carve that love from the forest’s very flesh and bone. These sentiments are echoed in the heartrending “Fata Turchina” (Fairy) and “Lucignolo” (Candlewick). The duo further references the 1994 film Il Postino in its title theme by Luis Bacalov, here but a heart murmur, a flash of romance crocheted into warmth.

Even without a track list in hand, the cinematic contours of nearly every piece are apparent. Whether navigating Trovesi’s descriptive “Villanella” or the nimble fingerwork of “Minor Dance,” to say nothing of his wailing inscriptions in Coscia’s “Le giostra di Piazza Savona,” there is plenty of storyboarding at play. The co-composition “Celebre Mazurka alterata” further epitomizes the duo’s wide range of moods, abilities, and technical flourishes—a masterpiece that lends Ángel Villoldo’s classic tango “El Choclo” all the verve it needs to leave its meteoric trail across the sky. Also noteworthy is “Django (Donadona)” by pianist-composer John Lewis: not only for its superb music, but also for the narrative arc it takes on in the present rendition. From mourning to frivolity, Trovesi and Coscia are omniscient purveyors of their domain, such that when they close the album’s bright, tempestuous circle with the very shadows from which it was born, we know that the melodies will continue to dance into the distances of their hearts.

What we’re left with is a scene cinched by the drawstring of politics, war, and indecision, shaken free of its inhibitions and re-clothed in passion. It takes us as we are, provided we leave our preconceptions at the door. As Umberto Eco says in his liner notes, “there’s no need to wonder about in which temple we should place the music of Coscia and Trovesi. On a street corner, or in a concert hall, they would feel at home just the same.” It may just be that they feel best at home with you.

<< John Surman: Coruscating (ECM 1702)
>> Stockhausen/Andersen/Héral/Rypdal: Kartā (ECM 1704)

Michael Galasso: High Lines (ECM 1713)

| Tyran Grillo

High Lines

Michael Galasso
High Lines

Michael Galasso violin
Terje Rypdal guitar
Frank Colón percussion
Marc Marder double-bass
Recorded November 2002 and April 2004 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Konghaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The late violinist-composer Michael Galasso—whose solo album Scenes is a personal label favorite—returned to ECM more than two decades later with High Lines, a multifaceted set of music that draws on his love for theatre (as a longtime collaborator of dramatist Robert Wilson), film (having scored for Wong Kar-wai, Martin Provost, and many others), and dance. These activities brought him to many places around the world, among them Iran, where rhythms and melodies swirled their way into much of the writing realized here. From his soundtrack to Secret Ballot (dir. Babak Payami) to his extensive incidental work with Wilson, the program references many touchstones of Galasso’s varied career. Along with ECM stalwart Terje Rypdal on guitar (brought in at producer Manfred Eicher’s suggestion) and bassist Marc Marder with percussionist Frank Colón (brought in at Galasso’s), he opens himself to new interrelationships.

Because Scenes proved Galasso capable enough to row the waters in a boat of his own making, the presence of another distinctive voice in Rypdal bears mixed fruit. Whereas his atmospheric contributions in “Spheric” and “Fog and After” give sanctity and tactility to the surroundings, as an agent of melody his guitar feels like an afterthought in the context of tracks like “The Other” and “Swan Pond.” There’s not a single thing off about the playing itself: it’s pure Rypdal flame. It just doesn’t always have its eyes open. Then again, High Lines is more about the music than about the names behind it, and ultimately succeeds in this regard. Spread like ceremonial salt across a sumo stage, it prefaces a slow-motion ballet of powerful bodies in motion. Some of those gestures are cryptic, others hypnotic, and still others are intensely filmic. In the latter vein we have “Gothic Beach,” a brief passage pairing violin and ocean waves. Every footprint on those sands glows with life.

And really, the four strings conveying these things are the album’s heart and soul. A few pieces find Galasso multi-tracking on delicate fulcrums (“Iranian Dream” being a standout in this regard) and even experimenting with starry digital delays, as in “Boreal.” Lost travelers from Scenes (e.g., “Chaconne”) cross our paths, swaying and arpeggiating to the metronome of distant winds, while less familiar figures also sell their wares along the way. As one title would have it, this is an album of crossing colors, and in the final “Gorge Green” we have a churning stew of them. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that Rypdal achieves strongest congruence of purpose here, tethering the journey at last to a foreseeable destination.

Yet lurking in the chemical composition of these sounds is an element that belongs to no instrument or music-maker. It is one that Galasso’s music activates of its own will, a wish made real in the asking.

<< Michelle Makarski: Elogio per un’ombra (ECM 1712 NS)
>> Thomas Zehetmair/Camerata Bern: Verklärte Nacht (ECM 1714 NS)