Swiss electric guitarist Florian Stoffner (Manuel Mengis Grupp) and Spanish/Portuguese saxophonist Albert Cirera (Agusti Fernandez Liquid Trio) present the 8 part "IRMA" in concise free improvisations, restrained but alert and quick-witted dialogs that explore their instruments with alternate approaches to each in articulate ways.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2018 Country: Portugal Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded in Lisbon, Portugal, on March 31st, 2017 by Luis Candeias.
"Isn't it marvellous ? (- or are you reading this before you heard the music?) Anyway, I think it's marvellous : two young guys thriving to dedicate themselves totally to Total Improvisation. Everything that jazz gave birth to as of central importance is there : rhythm, dynamics, a plentitude of original ideas, fast reactions, individual sound, listening to each other as a whole; even the shadow of an undefined groove. Hard work : continuous focus. The pieces are short, but they are neither cut nor edited (something that many "free" improvisors did in the early days fifty years ago, and some still do : no doubt, a kind of post- composing). It takes years of concentrated effort before the spinning of the musical thread flawlessly flows into a long set. Fortunately, these pieces are presented here in the order they were played. What happens in one leads to what happens in the next.
The next one would be different had the one before not been what it was. The act of playing this stuff is performed in a special mental state, a sort of trance. In its uninterferred continuum, one thing organically leads to the next. After recording, when the instruments are put down, when the musicians do what is called "listening back" to what they did, the mind works differently : conscious decisions are made following only criteria formed by thoughts that originate in taste or compositional planning and ideas. That's not improvising. No! - hands off : it was, and it became, so don't mess with an intuitional process! It has been said that it takes twenty years to know how it works, and it has been observed that it takes another twenty years to be able to do it. These guys are well on the way, so stand by: we'll check and see in a few decades. Perhaps (and hopefully) they go for something that a young Italian lady-poet once described to me thusly: "Don't try to do something new, try to do what has always been there". Lo!"-from the liner notes