Improlevitas is the Bolognese improvisational collective of Maurizio Lesmi, soprano saxophone and effects; Lorenzo Tosarelli, piano; and Roberto Bartoli, double bass. Eros, recorded in Bologna this past May, is their first album. It represents an auspicious beginning.
Improlevitas’ approach to playing is influenced by Italo Calvino’s notion of a life as consisting of a continuous shuffling of styles, influences, and ideas – a kind of instability, but a creative one. An acknowledgment of improvisation as a potentially volatile admixture is contained in the group’s hybrid name: “Impro” (improvisation), and “levitas” (lightness and changeability). We can hear both lightness and changeability in the six performances here. The group may coalesce around a drone tone or fall into a harmonic or rhythmic pattern, generally set by Bartoli, punctuated by Tosarelli, and elaborated upon by Lesmi; they may on the other hand spin away from each other in ever-broadening, concentric circles of counterpoint. But always with a sense of melodic levity. The album’s long opening track, Puer Aeternus, puts all of this on display; it captures in microcosm Improlevitas’ variable approach to improvisation. There as on the other tracks song underlies much of the trio’s interplay, sometimes quite literally as when Bartoli sings wordlessly along with an arco bass melody, sometimes more abstractly, as in the deconstructed tango of Tango a tre. The group’s overall attention to the way individual lines and harmonies can interlock and unlock is a reminder that as with any free improvisation the nowness of the moment, encoded in agreements and oppositions, hesitations and forward momentum, and above all in sympathetic listening, is what the playing is all about.
https://www.setoladimaiale.net/catalogue/view/SM4700
Daniel Barbiero
Avant Music News 