Two new recordings from southern Europe feature duets pairing the piano with another instrument often found with it in standard rhythm sections. The results on both albums are anything but standard.
As its title declares, Out from Athens was recorded in Athens, Greece, by two musicians, separated by a generation, who are natives of the city. Double bassist George Kokkinaris, the younger of the two, is currently based in Athens after having spent time pre-Covid living and playing in Berlin; pianist Pandelis Karayorgis has been part of the Boston music scene for decades, having gone there to attend the New England Conservatory in 1985. Out from Athens, which will be released later this month, is Karayorgis’ second release of piano and double bass duets in recent years; a previous one, featuring Damon Smith, came out in 2023. This album of concise piano and double bass duets follows the disc of duets Karayorgis released last year with free improvising double bassist Damon Smith. As with that earlier collaboration, the current one features a bassist who pushes the instrument into territory defined primarily by colorations of sound. On most of the tracks, Kokkinaris plays with a focus on extended technique and with frequent use of preparations. On Athene Noctua, for example, he uses the body of the bass as a percussion instrument; on Argle Bargle he draws rough-textured sounds from the prepared instrument with the bow. His solo piece I Wake to Sleep and Take My Waking Slow highlights the range of his sonic palette. In contrast to Kokkinaris’ willingness to distort pitch in order to take his instrument to timbral extremes, Karayorgis’ playing thrives on maintaining pitch relationships with the musical equivalent of precise diction. His sense of texture runs to the porous, particularly on the spare and abstract Throughgoing Line, a piece inspired by the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky. Even in the densest, most turbulent passages, such as on the high-energy Mumbling Urban Poems, Bumpy, and the title track, he retains a cooly managed and well-delineated sense of space.
On Così com’è (roughly, “that’s how it is”), the duets are for piano and percussion. Drummer Stefano Giust and pianist Giorgio Pacorig are both based in Friuli-Venezia Giulia in the northeastern edge of Italy; they’ve played together in various combinations since the early 2000s and appear with each other on several albums. Both also share a background in jazz-derived improvisation with leanings toward open form playing. Their new album features three long improvisations that undergo constant mutations of mood and dynamics. Pacorig is the more introspective player of the two, although on the second performance he plays with an outgoing, high energy; otherwise he tends to favor a discontinous line of short bursts and splashes of chords. Giust maintains a taut tension throughout, as he lays down a flexible pulse that pushes the music along with expanding and contracting tempos and dramatically varied phrasing. Giust is a master colorist, and the two sometimes become difficult to distinguish when Pacorig plays directly on the piano strings with hands and objects.
Avant Music News 