One of a series of pianist Thollem McDonas' Astral Traveling Sessions, this unique duo configuration with NY saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh uses a sonic palette of eight re-tuned pitches for piano and saxophone in an attempt to expand harmonic empathy, bringing Eastern pitch relationships to Western improvisation through a series of extraordinary solo and duo recordings.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2021 Country: USA Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Tracks 1-8 recorded in San Francisco, California, on August 12th, 2018.
Tracks 9-12 recorded at Park West Studios, Brooklyn, New York, December 18th, 2019, by Jim Clouse.
Notes by Hafez Modirzadeh: Here is a sonic palette of eight re-tuned pitches for piano and saxophone, explored in an attempt to expand harmonic empathy. The aesthetic that arises from this interrelating of the foreign with familiar reveals an intrinsic logic, or inherent beauty, that lifts hegemonic remnants of one temperament from another. And there, within where the Tao splits, every fundamental tone illuminates a person, resonating facets of every ancestral partial, sounding humanity from its source. Thollem has radiated this humanity ever since our first meeting at an improvisation class back in the early 90's - the joy exuded on that day, from that piano, opened the sky for me. Liken this to our flat view from earth of a constellation-filled sky, where Thollem's astral purview encompasses the depth of these distances, traveling near-to-distant between such destined points, his sound being as the line seen between the stars. To hear his sound, then, is to gaze up into creation and smile in awe, feeling a rotating canvas of ideas in ecstatic order, holding us together in generous surrender to a facet-pouring spirit of friendship. These Facets and Improvisations are from the very first sessions with this particular re-tuning, in San Francisco, capturing the compositions in their most essential form, while the Improvisations that close the album are from the very last session in Brooklyn. Altogether, here is a befitting resolution to a decades-long idea, delivered with/by a comrade whose life-arc in music completes my own.
Notes by Thollem: "I first met Hafez when he was playing at Ajax (might have still been Upper Eulipia's at that point) in downtown San José. It was one of the essential transformative moments for me. What I absorbed that night I have carried with me throughout the last three decades. It wasn't necessarily the music he was playing, though I loved the music. What really shook me was his profound relationship to sound itself and what felt to me as a sacred experience. I recognized my connection with the eternal in that moment, unlike any moment I had had and this radically deepened my relationship to my own music and artistic path going forward. I ended up studying Persian music with Hafez, collaborating with him in a variety of ways over the years and most importantly have enjoyed a life-long friendship!"