Mat Maneri: Trinity (ECM 1719)

| Tyran Grillo

Mat Maneri
Trinity

Mat Maneri violin, viola
Recorded July 1999 at Gateway Studio, Kingston
Engineer: Steve Lowe
Produced by Steve Lake

There’s something about the title of “Pure Mode,” prologue to Mat Maneri’s first solo album, Trinity, that describes his abilities just right. Like the nine improvisations that follow, it jumps off of a prewritten motive (in this case, by Matthew Shipp) and offers us a four-stringed experience like no other. Maneri goes unplugged this time, feeling out the forest of richness already ingrained into the wood and gut at his bow. He stews in every design for what it’s worth and walks along a slippery melodic slope as if it were dry and even ground. If we take “Almost Pretty” as a mirror, then we know this project is anything but vain, for Maneri consciously eschews the trappings of virtuosity that so often loom before the solo performer like a locked door. He is instead interested in the intricacies of that mechanism. He coaxes it open through disinterest alone. The scuttling crabs of this tidal song do not tempt him. Theirs is a rhythm he does not need. We might, then, look to the title track for a snatch of mission statement. In its 10-minute passage rests the winged key to another realm entirely, one that walks a bridge of half-light. Thus he traces the shores of his own dreams, christening John Coltrane’s “Sun Ship” on its raga-like voyage to the earth’s center. The unerring valences of his notecraft are nowhere more apparent. His quiver stocked with idiomatic arrows, he looses them into the sky, knowing they will never heed gravity. Such artistry extends into the visual, as in “Blue Deco,” for which Maneri treats the violin like paint. He chooses air in place of canvas and renders a world alone. This, along with “Veiled,” is the most chamber-like excursion of the program, a void of interpretable dots and dashes that peaks in children’s squeals. In each, solid walls of pizzicato break the flow. “Iron Man” (Eric Dolphy) and “Lattice” (Joe Morris) form another pair. Wrought in heavy matter and spindling filigree alike, they wander drunkenly into the distilled tonic of “November 1st.” This we can sip and savor, a duster for the cobwebbed staircases of the mind. Meanwhile, the house is littered with “Lady’s Day Lament.” Riffing on a tune by his father, Maneri loosens every nail until the entire structure hums.

Whether or not Mat Maneri’s sound-world will divide listeners is irrelevant, for it already fuses so many disparate strands into a single precious current that everyone gets swept up in it all the same. Open your mouth and drink it. You will never drown.

<< Anour Brahem Trio: Astrakan Café (ECM 1718)
>> Karl Amadeus Hartmann: Funèbre (ECM 1720 NS)

Robin Williamson: The seed-at-zero (ECM 1732)

| Tyran Grillo

Robin Williamson
The seed-at-zero

Robin Williamson vocals, guitar, harp, mandolin
Recorded March 2000 at Albany Productions Ltd, Cardiff
Engineer: Lawson Dando
Produced by Steve Lake

Let us paint library on the library…

“Salt of the earth” comes nowhere close to describing Scottish singer/songwriter Robin Williamson. He is, rather, earth of the salt: when caught in his bardic gaze, we cannot help but take a step beyond the minerals that make up our world and see in them an entirely new one. On his ECM debut, Williamson brings three strands together for a thick and brindled braid. First is the poetry of Dylan Thomas, which he sets to appropriate effect at lips and fingers as if it were hemp with which to weave a basket. Second are the related Welsh strands of Henry Vaughan, Llywarch Hen, and Idris Davies, which are the capture spiral of the ensuing web. Third is the songbook of Williamson himself, who had by this time shaped four decades of craft into a solo art. Armed with only a guitar, a harp, and his own throaty blade, he goes trundling through the undergrowth of joys and wars.

Having once improvised to Thomas’s words for a theater production based on the poet’s life (Geoff Moore’s Prospect of the Sea, 1984/85), Williamson draws on that internal puddle and fashions from it a dark and choppy sea. He sets his boat adrift yet remains on shore, introducing us to broken shells with words from Vaughan in “The World.” Here the voice builds a starfish pore by pore. The title track paints less jaggedly, in ochre and ash. Williamson’s register reveals itself as a different species, and we as mere children who gather round starry-eyed and hungry for tales of yore and the yet to be. In this metaphorical seascape, heroes blend into the living and the dead alike.

This leads us into a most enchanting triptych. First is “Skull And Nettlework.” One of Williamson’s own, it emotes like the artistry of Patrick Ball steeped in a brew of ancestral grievances. In its images are many scales. Of neither fish nor dragon, they gleam of their own accord, beyond the narrative strokes trying to whittle them into something recognizable. The balance between the two registers—string and throat—is inescapably harmonious. It is a ribcage sheltering flames that flicker at the expulsion of Thomas’s “Holy Spring” before opening the cap of a scrimshawed horn in “To God In God’s Absence.” Here is Williamson’s soul on stoneware, alive and impervious to prod of fork and interpretation.

Thomas bleeds in multiple directions throughout the program, at times inscribing verses across the backsides of our hides (“In My Craft Or Sullen Art”), at others dancing to the clink of emotional coinage (“On No Work Of Words”), at still others galloping along the stringed hills with the touch of knowing fingertips, as in “Hold Hard, These Ancient Minutes In The Cuckoo’s Month.” Just as the latter is a catalogue of calendrical time, so is “Poem On His Birthday” a charting of avian life and watery graves. And though melodies launch themselves in the occasional skyward arc, they always settle in the spoken word, where the quaking peace of breath trickles down the throat of a premature end.

Half-spoken, half-sung, if not both at once, “Lament Of The Old Man” is an ode to small things that, without care, bring us pleasure in spite of the heartless land, crooked like a stick bent under the weight of an aging shepherd. Memories of sprightly pasture abound in “Verses At Balwearie Tower.” They dance around the spring of human joy where bathe our transgressions, naked and mute. “Can y Gwynt” is a riddle of creation that fills our cupped hands with the waters of the Weary Well. Under its watchful eyes, wishful romance blossoms away from ours: a memory that tickles the scalp at night and quivers in the reflection of an ale glass by day. Keystones interlock in “The Bells Of Rhymney.” Set to Pete Seeger’s tune, it trips along a trail of ifs on the way to an unborn then and glows like light pollution in low cloud cover—pink yet tinged by the gray of a passing storm. With the decayed smile of a tree-lined horizon, “The Barley” welcomes us to settlement. Williamson drags his feet through the mud in “Cold Days Of February,” clear now in the hierarchy that one censored this old protest song. In its present restored form, it speaks with the power of Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley, a song from the lips of veterans and those too conscionable to fight. It lumbers through foggy paths and obscured vistas of blood-soaked battleground, leaving us paging through “For Mr Thomas” as an epilogue, if not an epitaph, to the album’s inscrutable muse.

Where others have explored Dylan Thomas and his roots, Robin Williamson has tapped them and siphoned the visceral bite of their learning. Their taste may challenge our complacent buds, but never for want of sincerity. Even if we’ve never heard them before, we can be sure these odes to the unlit dark and the snuffed flame have heard us. They know us that well. And if this smirking scholar has anything meaningful to offer in return, let it ultimately be my admiration—the only poetry I can muster.

If purity is a throwaway concept, it has been reborn here.

<< Alexander Knaifel: Amicta Sole (ECM 1731 NS)
>> Annette Peacock: an acrobat’s heart (ECM 1733)

Updated covers

| Tyran Grillo

Here at between sound and space, I strive to bring the highest quality reviews that I can. But for the nearly three years I’ve been working on this blog, I’ve skimped by appending only small covers. In an effort to correct this, over the past few months I’ve been painstakingly scouring the Internet in search of the highest resolution ECM album covers available and have replaced each with a larger one in my older reviews. That way, we can all enjoy the significant visual contributions our favorite label has made alongside its sonic ones. Large covers will be the norm from hereon out.

If you ever find yourself needing a hi-res ECM album cover, save yourself some time and check here first. And if you find (or have) any better ones, feel free to let me know.

Elina Duni Quartet: Matanë Malit (ECM 2277)

| Tyran Grillo

Elina Duni Quartet
Matanë Malit

Elina Duni voice
Colin Vallon piano
Patrice Moret double bass
Norbert Pfammatter drums
Recorded February 2012, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineers: Gérard de Haro, Nicolas Baillard
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“This album is the echo of my childhood, my exile and my reconciliation with the two worlds that have shaped me—the Albania of my roots and the Switzerland of my life today.”

Matanë Malit. Beyond the mountain. The title of Elina Duni’s ECM debut. Yet something more. A call to the spirit in whose hands rests the diary her quartet inscribes with accounts of a tormented past. With one eye longing for her childhood in Albania, another taking in the classical, blues, and jazz traditions into which she has since grown, Duni treats every word that crosses her lips as if it were the first. By paying homage to the land of her birth, she forges a land in and of itself, each song a tectonic plate beneath the soil of the group’s atmospheric arrangements.

It was pianist Colin Vallon, with whom Duni studied at Berne’s Hochschule der Künste, who encouraged the developing singer to mine the past for inspiration. Her duo work with Vallon formed the seed of the current project, fleshed further by drummer Norbert Pfammatter and Vallon’s trio bassist, Patrice Moret.

In assembling this program, the quartet had to clean out the dust of political distortion that had gathered in its crevices, for many of the songs therein found themselves lyrically changed to suit the propaganda machine of a fervent communist regime. The titular shepherdesses of “Çobankat” long once more for self-sufficiency in the face of an inflexible marriage tradition, their voices wafting over the hills through Duni’s earthen diction with determination, beauty, and wit. Such individualism surely ruffled the feathers of agitprop pundits, who recast these once “progressive” women as “brave” allies bringing provisions and darning socks for anti-fascist partisans in the mountains. Such history further informs “Mine Peza,” a verse often sung by Duni’s maternal grandfather, who fought alongside those very partisans at the mere age of 12. Written under Mussolini’s shadow, it tells the tragic story of its eponymous hero, ending the album on its most solemn note:

Let’s cast off the chains
of this cruel occupation
cries the mother.
But the gun in the hand
of the treacherous soldier
shoots the mother dead.

Along the way, however, we do find moments of joy in a place where even the longest political arms cannot reach: the human heart. The secret love made manifest in “Ka një mot” (For a year) begins the album with youthful optimism, and is emblematic of the group’s democratic energy. Duni’s presence is close as a whisper, even as it seems to sing from a distance. Moret, Pfammatter, and lastly Vallon buffs every rock of this landscape until it speaks. There is also the invigoration of “U rrit vasha” (The girl has grown up), a wedding song from Kosovo that finds a living smile in every change of terrain.

The girl has grown up
in our mountains.
Her body is tall like a cypress
and the birds sing.

“Erë pranverore” (Spring breeze), a once-forbidden song from 1962, rises from the ashes here a beautiful organism. Every muted sentiment rejoices anew at the wonders of a life without borders. Vallon’s muted strings provide a percussive and melodic backbone as Duni follows roads to lovers in full bloom. True to the history being told, however, she looks also at the destitute. We stand with the “Vajzë e valëve” (Girl of the waves) as she yearns for her husband who may never return, invisible as he is among the waves of his vocation. Her love remains potent against the attacks of violent waters, but for how long?

Beautiful birds
my only hope lies in you.

And many of us will relate to the shattered protagonist of “Unë ty moj” (Me and you), whose love proclaims itself far too late, only to find the idol of its affections in the arms of another.

Burn my soul,
burn.

There are, too, the hero songs, which place emphasis on Albania’s vast diaspora. “Kjani trima” (Cry brave ones), for one, pits us against the mighty Ottoman Empire and searches futilely for those lost in the aftermath. Like the evocative “Ra kambana” (The bells are ringing), this is a song of the Alvanitas, Albanians living in northern Greece. “Çelo Mezani,” for another, tells of a local southern Albanian hero whose tragic death by bullets leaves a despondent mother behind. Heartrending even without knowledge of its content, the music embraces his fallen body and inters it with palpable care. Each note is a quiet cry, a reflection upon waters long disturbed but still as glass in memory.

Duni pens the most effective song of the set. Setting verse by the great Ismail Kadare, her “Kristal” fits seamlessly into the rest. A dance of death and forgetting, it lets us fall until we are at peace with what has transpired. “Poetry,” writes Duni in her liner notes, “is what guides and fascinates me,” and this is precisely what we feel coursing through the music even when she absents herself from it. Her silences and wordless flights lift us into a world preserved beyond not only the mountains but also the clouds, giving space for her band mates to expand upon what is painted before us. Their palette is the Albanian language itself, and by extension its heritages; their canvas, the mirror of ignorance that still surrounds this neglected republic. In paying due respect to the past, they have created an anthem for the future.

And when you remember the old house,
the friends we’ve lost
and those who are gone.
You will remember me too
like a stranger.
Like a statue whose arm you broke
in a wild embrace!

(To hear samples of Matanë Malit, click here. See this review in its original form at RootsWorld here.)

Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble: Drawn Inward (ECM 1693)

| Tyran Grillo

Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble
Drawn Inward

Evan Parker tenor and soprano saxophones, khene
Philipp Wachsmann violin, viola, live electronics, sound processing
Barry Guy double-bass
Paul Lytton percussion, live electronics
Lawrence Casserley live electronics, sound processing
Walter Prati live electronics, sound processing
Marco Vecchi live electronics, sound processing
Recorded December 1998 at Gateway Studio, Kingston
Engineer: Steve Lowe
Produced by Steve Lake

The spheres of composition and improvisation are not so far apart. In fact, Evan Parker and his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble seem to say, they are as inseparable as water from the ocean. Since 1992 the Ensemble has gone, as the title of its 1997 debut suggests, toward the margins, and is content in the asymptotic nature of those margins. This follow-up welcomes Lawrence Casserley and his computer wizardry into an already eclectic admixture of sound processors, thus enhancing the overall atmosphere with real-time entanglements. Because the result feels so much like an aural diary, I can only offer a written one in return.

(1) there is a jagged line in the egg, and the light that spills from it sings, crackling like rain on tarp. in the crooner’s sigh there are wounds, in his laughter there is healing.

(2) aroused from my dream, i creep like a shadow toward the lighted window, throw open its transparent lungs and breathe in the dew-kissed air. but a serpent in the sky mars this otherwise idyllic dawn with S-curved passage, the only afterimage to linger in these eyes as it wriggles through gauzy cloud cover and parhelia. Parker’s lockdown is arresting, a Glassean riff turned on its head and spun like a top.

(3) to travel in the homeland is to walk away from yourself. catharsis of will and locomotion. in the absence of progress, the feet quicken their pace. in the absence of goals, they slumber even as they ambulate. hidden in the watering can behind the barn is the drop i left before parting for the city, where only sewer drains collected the tears of so many others and stirred them into an underground cocktail, never again to be tasted. it is not so radical to think that one might live here, but to think that one might die here. i can turn the radio dial however much i want, but will never find the beacon that i crave. instead, a diffuse comfort whereby the winds of opportunity blanket me with their hush.

(4) to look into the spouting bowl is to blind yourself to the truths of which it is an indifferent receptacle. i can lasso these words to its underwater circus yet fear i might not have the strength to hold on ’til i reach bottom. a fidgety existence i lead when it’s all i can do not to fall away from others’ attention.

(5) the music tells me i can deploy my love as an agent of unrest and offers in that possibility a temptation in whose surface i cannot see myself reflected. my heart is already lost to the cause. i stand in a booth on the corner making collect calls to strangers, my fingers all a-blur at the number pad in their furious attempts to communicate.

(6) i have found it: the spinning globe of circumstance on which i was trapped like a drone on a treadmill. now i can hold it, toss it as a child would a ball. but in so being endowed, i find there is only guilt and discomfort, and the knowledge that the top of the pyramid is a lonely place. i can only follow my wayward guides, playing the part of the child again as i slide down its brick-laid slope.

(7) back to concrete, i run pell-mell, pushing the capabilities of my social craft to the flexible limits of their stature, dangling before myself a carrot of progress. i cannot want this; i must let it want me. somewhere in the body of a cello, my bones are breaking and mending by the laser vision of gas stove flame.

(8) at home in the universe…nowhere else i’d rather be. it is our terrarium, our humid sanctuary, our light and love.

(9) i am writing on ice, using the ink my mother gave me. i let myself seep into the surface, tracing imperfections with newfound script.

(10) they have captured something in the frame, glued it inside with the adhesive of acceptance. timetables and train tracks curl into a tangled ball, it’s shadow the signature in the lower left-hand corner.

(11) the thread has unraveled and the secret is out. i am here only so long as i write myself to be. i take your hand and bid you to take another’s, so that by the end we stand as one. this is the music that goes on in the attic when we are asleep, in concerts attended by mice and other wall dwellers. if we are drawn inward to anything, it is ourselves.

<< Eleni Karaindrou: Eternity and a Day (ECM 1692 NS)
>> Peter Ruzicka: String Quartets (ECM 1694 NS)

Maneri/Phillips/Maneri: Tales of Rohnlief (ECM 1678)

| Tyran Grillo

Tales of Rohnlief

Joe Maneri alto and tenor saxophones, clarinet, piano, voice
Barre Phillips double-bass
Mat Maneri electric 6-string and baritone violins
Recorded June 1998 at Hardstudios, Winterthur
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Produced by Steve Lake

Tales of Rohnlief is an exercise in recitation. Joe Maneri’s histrionics call out to grasslands and briny spray. He preaches at the edge of the world, where rocks cut like scissors through wrapping paper: only a push and not a squeeze. In his voice is all the landscape one needs to find purchase for the journey that follows. The voice expresses itself by way of throat and reed, a pitch-bent nightmare turned frosty and sweet. It pales into a spontaneous croak as Barre Phillips and Mat Maneri press their palms to an elaboration of surrender. And with that, these three uncannily attuned improvisers touch the sky with more sky. A break in the clouds reveals a backdrop of revelry.

“A Long Way From Home” feels like anything but, so intimate is its delivery. It whisks us through points of contact as familiar as our subcutaneous selves, and just as sensitive to the errant touch. Mewing cats trade places with stone idols flicking their tongues in the face of condemnation, licking away the possibility of failure as a hand wipes away condensation. Paltry rhyme schemes fail, however, to express the depth of this game of halos. We may, then, search for another method to the genius we now face. I propose that we turn our ears away from what is being told and focus rather on the telling itself. For if we look beyond titles like “When The Ship Went Down” and “The Aftermath,” neither of which help us despite the wonders of their contents, we realize that the inaugural voice has never left us. Its register curls a ghost’s hand and guides us through the gnarled lessons of “Bonewith” until, lo!, it casts its oracle shadow across the “Flaull Clon Sleare” and watches, silent, as we attempt to “Hold The Tiger” (a particularly brilliant pop-up). Watery yet never watered down, the song cackles. “The Field” is another notable mention, if not for its mournful qualities then for the color of its blood. Three dark and winding paths bring us to the tongue-tied destination of “Pilvetslednah.” Now that he’s shown us the yard, Joe welcomes us into his home, forever full of warmth.

There is so much sincerity in this music that it hurts.

<< András Schiff/Peter Serkin: Music for Two Pianos (ECM 1676/77 NS)
>> Alexei Lubimov: Messe Noire (ECM 1679 NS)

Philipp Wachsmann/Paul Lytton: Some Other Season (ECM 1662)

| Tyran Grillo

Philipp Wachsmann
Paul Lytton
Some Other Season

Philipp Wachsmann violin, viola, live electronics
Paul Lytton percussion, live electronics
Recorded October 1997 at Hardstudios, Winterthur
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Produced by Steve Lake

Following one untouchable duo with another, producer Steve Lake and engineer Martin Pearson fly ECM’s banner into further uncharted waters. Taking the label’s exploratory spirit to heart, they bring us Some Other Season. Last heard among the roaring mitochondria of Toward The Margins, here Philipp Wachsmann and Paul Lytton render that flame blue, gaseous. The two are more than experimental pioneers of their respective instruments, violin and percussion. They are, too, more than the electronic parasites that have grafted themselves so organically on to their craft.

The title of “The Re(de)fining of Methods and Means” says it all: the hermetic tinkerer must splash his craft against the earth and revel in the sounds. There is treatment to be had, to be discovered in the walls, lurking among asbestos and frayed electrical wire. It is the voice of a profound past cloaked in future guise. One can almost hear fingers tapping in the interstices, flipping signatures like fuses of the brain. In “Shuffle,” the violin sheds a skin with every utterance, stirring its accoutrements with impending fury while bells and cymbals dance in the upper atmosphere. Lytton dips “Leonardo’s Spoon” into the shadow of a painted veil, and from this ladles the prompt for Wachsmann’s solo “Choisya.” Like “The Peacock’s Tale,” it finds a choir in the single string, fanned and feathered.

This duo, then, is redefining at every turn, tapping the fractures of “Shell” to reveal the five-part “The Lightning Fields.” At its core is the ecstatic interaction of Field 3, which bubbles over into something like an Ikue Mori experiment in Field 4. Hereafter the session reveals its deepest biological secrets. From the thin, gurgling colors of “Whispering Chambers,” essential to what the album is (not) trying to achieve, to the final title track, which contrasts drones with the skittering vocabulary of finality, it rolls its tongue through a series of linguistic asterisks.

Sounding at times a hurdy-gurdy’s dream, at others a biological nightmare, Some Other Season wafts through our aortas with the wind of Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura and the immediacy of a London Improvisers Orchestra bonfire. A scraping and gravelly spelunk into the depths of communication, it skates along the surface of consciousness with a playfulness at once mammalian and insectile. This music is four-dimensional. One can smell it burning.

<< Joe Maneri/Mat Maneri: Blessed (ECM 1661)
>> Dave Holland Quintet: Points of View (ECM 1663)

Joe Maneri/Mat Maneri: Blessed (ECM 1661)

| Tyran Grillo

Joe Maneri
Mat Maneri
Blessed

Joe Maneri alto and tenor saxophones, clarinet, piano
Mat Maneri violin, electric 6-string and baritone violins, electric 5-string viola
Recorded October 1997 at Hardstudios, Winterthur
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Produced by Steve Lake

The stone gate. Vagary of an age lost to the water that swallows its knees. To listen to this record is to step through that gate, and find on the other side not ocean but a new kind of air in which water and vapor bleed like the sun’s light from the moon, the parent in the child. Many father-son teams have thus riddled the history of jazz, but between Joe and Mat Maneri one not only hears the biological bonds at play, but feels their electrical charge, and nowhere more so than on this first duo recording for ECM. Much can be made of the microtonal grammar that Maneri Senior has perfected over decades and which rests so intuitively at his fingertips, but at the end of the day it’s all about physicality and attunement. “If I play a thousand microtones, what’s that worth if the rhythm isn’t happening,” he tells us. “In some ways the rhythm is the most vital part of what we’re doing.” Listening to them emote is akin to listening to Paul Motian on the drums. Such is their fluency. Comparing them and their fashionable counterparts, however, is night and day. Which is to say, night on Earth and day on a different planet. By the same token, there is something so deeply integrated about the playing that we cannot help but look inward to find its pulse.

And yes, we may search for the pulse, but in doing so forget that the search is itself the pulse. Its most potent strain breathes through the lungs of “There Are No Doors,” “Never Said A Mumblin’ Word,” and the title track, all three of which feature Maneri Senior at the piano. If the titles seem to be proclamations, it’s only because the Maneris practice what they preach, tracing the crevices of experience for all the grit we’ve left behind. From this they build microscopic castles and flag them with rapid eye movement. “Sixty-One Joys” is perhaps the most achingly beautiful animal Maneri Junior has ever tamed, an electric baritone violin solo that drinks pathos like honey and exhales sugar in the raw. The insectile blues “From Loosened Soil,” another thing of elemental attraction, bridges us into “Five Fantasies,” which draws on Webern’s bagatelles and ends on a light scream. “Is Nothing Near?” comes closest to an identifiable place, a place where reedmen convene to spit life in the dead of night. Waves of arco fortitude flounder in slow motion, the outtakes of a film starring cigarettes and rainwater. And what of light? For this, we turn to “Body And Soul,” an acoustic violin solo knocking at the door of a homespun dream. It is the rat in the kitchen who eyes the cheese, the teacher in the classroom who nods off mid-lesson, the child in the playground who sees a rainbow and cries, “Race You Home.” The clarinet gets a klezmer test spin in “Gardenias For Gardenis” before shifting into a Lombard Street drive in “Outside The Whole Thing.” At the end of it: a hole in the ground.

Unearthed is what this music is, like a gold nugget or gemstone—only these two mavericks are not interested in priceless rarities but rather take exquisite interest in the sifted dirt. When watered by the gifts of these performances, the dirt burgeons with syllables. They may not be of a language we can all produce on command, but it is one we can always translate.

<< Mats Edén: Milvus (ECM 1660)
>> Philipp Wachsmann/Paul Lytton: Some Other Season (ECM 1662)

José Luis Montón: Solo Guitarra (ECM 2246)

| Tyran Grillo

José Luis Montón
Solo Guitarra

José Luis Montón guitar
Recorded April 2011, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“In this music I have tried to translate all the sincerity and love of art that I appreciate so much when I encounter it.”

After hearing José Luis Montón play so dazzlingly in Amina Alaoui’s Arco Iris, one of ECM’s finest records of this or any year, producer Manfred Eicher invited the Barcelona-born guitarist back twelve moons later for a solo session. The result: Solo Guitarra. Paying homage to the flamenco music that continues to challenge and inspire him, Montón took this opportunity, as he did with Alaoui, not to build on or recreate some monolithic tradition but rather to use his instrument as the starting point for independent compositions through which a mythic past flows unimpeded.


(Photo by Dániel Vass)

As with the implied figures of the Max Franosch cover photo, there is nothing “solo” about this guitarra, for the architecture of its player’s technical and idiomatic acuity has many chambers. The farruca, a (possibly) Galician strand similar to Portuguese fado, is referenced in the two opening pieces. This light and airy style is most evident in the understated virtuosity of “Rota,” but also shows a darker side in “Española.” Already we have witnessed the depths of Montón’s abilities, turning six strings into a choir just yearning to proclaim and meditate in turn. The acrobatics of the bulería come out through “Son & Kete,” a spiraling and almost tense flurry of activity. “Altolaguirre” and “Hontanar” give us the chameleonic tango. On the surface fragile as rose petals yet thorny as the supporting stem, it lives as it sings: without the need for words, and in service of that one moment when all is cast away. Next is an enraptured tarantella. “Con permiso” turns said folk dance into a diary of consummated love. There is the unsure touch, the cheek quivering at first caress, the pile of shed inhibitions cushioning every pinpoint of oneness. The relatively unornamented shapes of the Andalusian cantiñas and soleá roll like children down a hill through “Al oído” and “Conclusión,” respectively. Theatrical use of slaps and rasgueado (those distinct hummingbird strums) speaks to Montón’s experience as a composer of incidental music. The seguirilla, one of flamenco’s most expressive and formidable variations, shows him at his spirited best in “Detallitos.” The inventiveness of his mid-range melodies is second only to his intuitiveness of rhythmic control. “Tarareando” is without citation. As a result, its wide steps bolster the innocent joy of “Piel suave,” a rustic Cuban guajira that turns like a Rubik’s Cube, the solution of which glows flush in an endearing rendition of “Te he de querer mientras viva.” Nestled in the heart of all this is the Bach-inspired “Air,” which gives respect to the famous movement of the Orchestral Suite No. 3. It is an enlightening reminder of the many paths we travel to find the sound that best expresses us, only to discover that those paths all lead to a shared origin.

(To hear samples of Solo Guitarra, click here.)