Two percussionists--vibraphonist Sergio Armaroli and drummer/percussionist Roger Turner-- and two brass players--trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini and trumpeter Phil Minton, who doubles on voice improvisation--are heard in these studio recordings from Udine, Italy for nine "Dreams" that turn introspective slumber into restless visions through profoundly paced playing.
Label: ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd Catalog ID: ezz-thetics 1045 Squidco Product Code: 32995
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2023 Country: Austria Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded at Artesuno recording Studios, in in Cavalicco, Udine, Italy, on April 20th amd 21st, 2022, by Stefano Amerio.
"It was Elias Canetti who alerted us to the connection between the most simply definitive human action, walking, and the emergence of what it pleases us to call civilisation. The rhythms of walking, the march, the slow gathering of a crowd: these are all important operators in history. But Canetti, profound as his observation may have been, jumps at least a couple of steps. Breathing is the basic rhythm of our life, an observation whose practical implications are now only widely recognised in Eastern philosophical traditions and some branches of therapy. Advice on diaphragmatic breathing is dispensed for all manner of conditions; we're informed that shallow breathing leads to shallow thinking; that exhaling is the thing to concentrate on, leaving inhalation to manage itself. We leave wine to breathe before sampling it.
All of this, of course, has a profound implication for music. We understand without further explanation what is meant when we are told that a performance has been allowed to breathe, and we have all experienced that magical moment in a concert hall or club when we willingly but unconsciously hold in a breath so as not to disturb a delicate final cadence. Watching or reviewing a performance we praise "breath control" as one of the few technical arcanae we're even remotely qualified to comment. In short, the in-and-out of air is both a fundamental necessity for life and one of its highest refinements.
It might be argued that of the four gentlemen performing on this disc, only two are in any way directly concerned with breathing. We know that for singers and the players of wind instruments, the strength of the diaphragm, the configuration of the bronchii (an important early free-music document was actually called The Topography Of The Lungs) and the shape and disposition of the mouth-parts are all vital components. Not so much, we might think, for players of percussion, though these, in our music, are perversely the ones that we are most likely to observe out of breath. So, round and round it goes.
Take the beginning of "Bullett - Inher". Some kind of horn is lowing like a shofar. There are whistling sounds that might be birds and tiny metallic commentaries and soft chimes. But then there is the unmistakable sound of human breathing, urgent, ambiguous, a little disturbing. And, for me, the performances gather round that moment and take their meaning from it. In October 1969, underage but under the protection of a father who knew how to get round turnstiles and security guards, I was privileged to see the first British performance of Samuel Beckett's Breath at a small theatre club in Glasgow. Famously lasting about a minute, it covers an entire life from birth-cry to the same cry implying ecstasy and death, in a single inhalation and exhalation. Like Phil Minton, who like many British and European improvisers works in the same complex tradition as Beckett (check how often his name is invoked), Beckett had a wonderful sense of grim humour. The rubbish-strewn stage - all that preparation for a one-minute performance! - is a wry comment on what life consists of. Laughter, a sound that was once considered an appalling solecism in an improvised music setting (though only among the audiences and critics), is the pleasurable loss of breath, and while laughter doesn't explicitly play a part in the improvisations here, it is always somehow implied.
Giancarlo Schiaffini is constantly aware that the trombone is the instrument perhaps closest to the human voice, but also an instrument whose understood range takes in the sacred (as Mendelssohn insisted) and the comic. Armaroli and Turner remind us that the world in which we breathe and move is full of charged surfaces that give back audible reminders of our passage through it. Only ghosts don't make footfalls (another Beckett title!) that we can hear, don't need to open and close doors to effect passage. These men together are enacting over a longer duration a strong sense of life-as-lived. They are conspiring, not in the political or legal sense, but simply breathing-together. It isn't forbiddingly abstract music. It simply enacts our various ways of living together. Take a deep breath, and enjoy."-Brian Morton, September 7, 2022