Three Ivo Perelman Releases Reviewed

Source: Morning Star.

Born in Sao Paulo in 1961, the incendiary hornman Ivo Perelman began his musical life as a classical guitarist. He learned cello, piano, trombone and clarinet before committing to the tenor saxophone at the age of 19. He remembers what his first experience with the instrument meant to him: “It felt like an animal, all melody, air and expression — an eternity, a living thing. I became one with a living thing.” He studied at, then quickly dropped out of, Berkley music college in Boston, before moving to Los Angeles in 1986 and charging his artistry and phenomenal powers of improvisation with a whole cosmos of influences — from Brazilian folk themes and children’s songs, African sounds and Takeba Indian musical traditions, Coltrane and the rasping saxophone timbres of Albert Ayler — although he later claimed that he had never heard his recordings before he was so frequently compared to him.