"These improvisations were unplanned, Sergio Armaroli explains by email: "Just some vocal instructions just before playing: listen, don't play immediately, not too loud". The studio arrangement was important, he adds, with Barry Guy in the middle. "The space determined the dialogue between us. The studio is very large - it helped concentration on one's instrument and listening", Armaroli comments. "I couldn't see the others and so I could listen better!"

The improvisations are divided into solo, duo and trio. Armaroli took his approach from Franco Evangelisti's with Nuova Consonanza, where a soloist would start and the others would follow, consistent with what was being played. The vibraphonist comments that "A certain understanding was immediately created between us, which gradually dissolved in the general sound, despite a palpable tension and maximum concentration that I remember with great nostalgia...the sound and vibration between us that is life....it is all very spiritual."

He argues that "improvised - 'totally' free - music should be played very little - live - and only after a long work of spiritual and technical preparation". He adds - contradicting Derek Bailey - that "Recording is the only possible form for this music that is so fragile and lives in the moment... An idea is embodied in sound for a moment, it is fixed and lives in the listening".

At Sotto Il Mare is free improvisation in the sense originated in the 1960s by Bailey and colleagues - of whom bassist Barry Guy was one. In his classic book, Bailey set out the controversial view that free improvisation is by definition non-idiomatic improvisation, freed from generic influences. Since Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music appeared, much ink has been spilled on whether this claim is correct. I'd argue that it isn't - not because it's false, but because, as with many philosophical claims, it's misleading or tendentious, and leads to misunderstanding.

It rests on a linguistic metaphor - an idiom is a word or phrase in a language. Since ancient times, philosophers, musicologists and lay commentators have compared music to language. "Music...is a kind of language which we speak and understand yet cannot translate", comments Eduard Hanslick. Claude Levi-Strauss refers to music as "the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable".

The language metaphor is pervasive in writing on music, and many who use it fail to realise that it is a metaphor. But it should be challenged. As philosopher Kathleen Higgins comments, "both [language and music] involve sound addressed to hearing and have rules for combining elements. The resulting strings of sound events are meaningful, and both link human beings to the external world". But as she goes on to say, they differ in their means and in what is communicated.

For semiotician David Lidov, "the musical aspect of speech is of its essence". Influenced by him Higgins proposes, ingeniously, that we might justly call language a music. This is a neat reversal. (Similarly, a riposte to the common claim that learning music is useful for developing mathematical skills, is that learning mathematics is useful for developing one's musical skills.) Animal responses to human language show that it is a music. Dogs need to hear a voice that shows affection, even though they do not understand the semantic meaning that it expresses - that is one of language's musical qualities, and it is communicative.

Returning to Derek Bailey's (linguistic) claim that free improv is non-idiomatic: No music making can be entirely non-idiomatic. Removing the metaphor, the claim is that it is characterless, without personality. But despite his best intentions, perhaps, one can hear a range of influences in Bailey's own work - even if jazz isn't one of them. And the present album shows that "non-idiomatic" is the wrong description for much free improvisation. The common description "abstract" is also misleading. All music is abstract in form, humane in utterance.

Listen and ask yourself, "Does this music sound abstract?" Surely it is concrete, specific, full of life - like the finest so-called abstract painting. Consider Armaroli's solo "Interlude" (track five). This is forceful, energetic music, showing the tumbling momentum of free jazz - not Derek Bailey's model. There's nothing abstract about it. Like-wise Francesca Gemmo's piano "Interlude" that follows it, with influences from classical modernism as well as jazz and improv.

Of this trio, only Guy was well-known to me before. He's a veteran of free jazz and improv, but also a composer in the tradition of Western modernism. Being musically receptive has always been his guiding principle, and early inspirations included Mingus, Monteverdi and Xenakis. Guy's music, both improvised and composed, involves techniques from avantgarde complexity - but it can also be melodic and accessible.

Armaroli's major influences were Milt Jackson, Bobby Hutcherson, Walt Dickerson and Karl Berger - and technically but not musically, Gary Burton and David Friedman. He play marimba also, and had a great love for the xylophone and Red Norvo. He started with drums, including Afro-Cuban percussion which he studied at the Instituto Superior de la Habana in Cuba, and African balafon and berimbau. He studied piano at the Conservatorio G. Verdi in Milan, where he also studied marimba, vibraphone and electronic music. His first influence was jazz, and then contemporary classical music especially Cage and Bartók.

Gemmo has a similar history, with influences from Bley, Tilbury, Crispell and Taylor, but she was also struck by the control and poetry of Schiff, Ciccolini and Haskil. "I live as a split pianist", she adds. "My study formation is typically classical. But I have always been attracted to extemporaneous reactivity rather than on the hyperdetailing of the written text." Aleatoric compositions (Cage, Bussotti) also fascinate her, as performer and composer. On "non-idiomatic", she comments: "A certain kind of free music - which I am not inspired by - is very idiomatic and ultimately recognizable. I embrace 'non-idiomatic' in that I take the freedom and risk to go where I want, exploring, and avoiding formal paths." In that sense, the music on this disc is non-idiomatic."-Andy Hamilton, May 17, 2024