Tag: Gianni Mimmo

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Hughes Mimmo Schlechta Volquartz – Cadenza del Crepuscolo [Amirani AMRN072]; Nicola Guazzaloca and Gianni Mimmo – Herbstreise [Amirani AMRN071]

The two newest releases from Amirani Records offer a dramatic contrast in moods and sonorities.

Cadenza del Crepuscolo is, as its title suggests, a recording that has a twilight feeling—it is the audio analogue of an abstract painting of predominantly dark colors. The ensemble that recorded it is a quartet of John Hughes on double bass; Gianni Mimmo on soprano saxophone; Peer Schelechta on pipe organ; and Ove Volquartz on bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet. Already, the instrumentation betrays a bias toward the lower end of the sound spectrum, with the single high-register instrument paradoxically emphasizing the tonal heaviness of the other three. And the pipe organ, double bass, and bass clarinets do often play in a bloc of low-pitched, densely dissonant harmonies laid out in long sustained notes. These thick washes of sound are punctuated by single lines alternating between the languid and the knotty; at those moments when individual voices break out into an animated polyphony, the music takes a dramatic and rather unexpected turn.

Herbstreise, a duet recording featuring Mimmo once again on soprano saxophone as well as Nicola Guazzaloca on piano, is tonally and in terms of pacing a much brighter affair. The seventeen short tracks present an improvised abstract impressionism that tends toward the nimble and astringent, with extended technique from both players adding a well-honed edge to a number of the performances.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Pierfrancesco Mucari & Gianni Mimmo – How to Get Rid of the Darkness [Amirani AMRN070]; Clairvoyance – Transient [Amirani AMRN069]

The newest two offerings from Amirani Records, the label curated by Gianni Mimmo, find the Milanese soprano saxophonist in two very different settings.

The first is a duet with Sicilian saxophonist Pierfrancesco Mucari, who plays soprano, alto, and prepared saxophone, as well as the marranzano, a Sicilian jaw harp. Mimmo is no stranger to the unusual format of the saxophone duet, and here as on his earlier collaborations with saxophonist Harri Sjöström, he demonstrates how two similarly pitched and timbrally closely related instruments can create a music of noticeable differences. His and Mucari’s voices in this series of improvisations are readily distinguishable; Mimmo, who often favors a kind of musical cubism based on repeated melodic fragments, pushes the style to contrast it with Mucari, who tends to weave a longer and more sinuous line. Although this appears to be Mimmo and Mucari’s first collaboration, at least on record, there’s an almost telepathic rapport between them, as they double each other’s lines, complete each other’s phrases, and provide counterpoint and harmonies nimbly assembled in real time. The music is complemented by an illuminating liner note from Ettore Garzia.

Mimmo also appears on Transient, the second release from the superb trio Clairvoyance, which in addition to Mimmo includes the Sardinian duo of pianist/toy pianist Silvia Corda and double bassist Adriano Orrù. The album is a relatively short, LP-length set of forceful improvisations. Although the performances are energetic, they don’t cross the line into chaos, largely because each player leavens the whole with his or her sense of structural constraints and coherence. As she has with this trio in the past, Corda often provides an overall framework constructed of patterned chords and regular rhythms, most notably on the track Shinjuku. Mimmo alternates between a free lyricism and—as on the set of duets with Mucari—an elaborate cubism in which he arranges and rearranges handfuls of notes to give the audio equivalent of a view from every possible angle. Orrù underpins it all with darting pizzicato lines and judiciously applied extended techniques with fingers and bow. This is a group that can balance a restless impressionism, as on the track Rippling Lake, with the fortissimo collision of overblown saxophone and double-bass-reinforced, lower register piano that defines the track Talking at Crazy Angles. A stimulating synthesis of intelligence and intensity.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Mario Mariotti – Blues for Boris [Amirani Records AMRN 066]; The Lenox Brothers – Township Nocturne [Amirani Records AMRN 067]

Although very different in sound and inspiration, these two new releases from the Amirani label have something in common: both are homages to creative figures.

Mario Mariotti’s Blues for Boris was inspired by Boris Vian, a writer associated with the Sartre circle in postwar Paris. Vian also was a trumpet player who was active in Paris’ hot jazz scene. Mariotti combines both sides of Vian’s creative life by basing the album’s music on oblique, often deliberately indecipherable reworkings of the melody to Mood Indigo as well as on pages of Vian’s 1946 novel L’Écume des jours (translated into English as Froth on the Daydream)–one of whose characters is a certain Jean-Sol Partre. Although Mariotti takes Duke Ellington as his starting point, he pushes the music beyond its roots in swing and into the territory of contemporary composition, playing techniques and orchestration, giving the sound a unique mix of melody and abstraction, of monophony and polyphony, of freedom and constraint. Also unique is the configuration of the ensemble put together for the recording which includes, besides Mariotti’s cornet, soprano saxophone, clarinet/bass clarinet, bass flute, tenor saxophone, and cello.

In contrast to the nearly lush orchestration of Blues for Boris, the sound of Township Nocturne is crafted from the rather more sparse trio of soprano saxophone, double bass and drums. The guiding spirit behind the recording is the late and much-missed pianist Gianni Lenoci, whose love of 1960s and ‘70s television detective series and noir fiction inspired the music. And there’s a certain moodiness to these pieces, whose conciseness and sometimes outright funkiness recalls the themes to those old programs, as refracted through a contemporary sensibility. It’s all well-played by the whimsically named Lenox Brothers—soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo, who also appears on Blues for Boris; double bassist Pierpaolo Martino; and drummer Francesco Cusa. The recording gives all three instruments an egalitarian salience that puts the listener right in the middle of the session—as if seated in the living room, in front of an imaginary television set playing images of a 1977 Plymouth Fury chasing a fugitive through the polyester urban night.

https://www.amiranirecords.com

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Luca Collivasone & Gianni Mimmo – Rumpus Room [Amirani Records AMRN #064]

Over the course of his career, Pavian soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo has recorded a good number of duets with a wide variety of musicians. On Rumpus Room he plays with someone who surely must be one of his most unusual duet partners: Luca Collivasone. What makes Collivasone unusual is in part his eclectic background, which includes classical guitar, electronic sound design, and rockabilly, but also his choice of instruments for this recording: the Cacophonator. The Cacophonator is an instrument Collivasone built himself from an old Singer sewing machine he bought from a junk shop; it is a unique hybrid of strings, springs, buttons and miscellaneous electronics and mechanisms that can sound like steel drums, pizzicato cello, a primitive synthesizer, or a drum machine. Producing for the most part sonorities rather than melodic material, it largely provides the field against which Mimmo’s saxophone is the figure. And Mimmo certainly responds to its unconventional stimulus in creative ways: ordinarily playing with a highly refined, rounded tone, here he plays instead with an unusually keen edge and a focus on pure sound and extended technique as well as melody. The combination of Collivasone’s and Mimmo’s two voices on this recording is astonishingly successful; open ears will be well-rewarded.

http://www.amiranirecords.com

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Gianni Lenoci & Gianni Mimmo – Reciprocal Uncles: The Whole Thing [Amirani Records AMRN063]

When pianist/composer Gianni Lenoci died last year at age 56, improvised music lost a major voice. Lenoci earned conservatory degrees in piano performance and electronic music, but he also studied improvisation with pianists Mal Waldron and Paul Bley. He played with many of the great improvisers, among whom were Steve Lacy, Roscoe Mitchell, Markus Stockhausen, Enrico Rava, and John Tchicai, but the improviser with whom he had perhaps the deepest connection was soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo. On The Whole Thing, the uncanny chemistry Lenoci and Mimmo shared manifests itself in a single, fifty minute-long improvisation recorded in May 2019 in Lenoci’s hometown of Monopoli, Apulia.

The excellent rapport between Lenoci and Mimmo is apparent from the first note. The music is always assured and imbued with purpose—and even though it was completely improvised, it moves with an implicit sense of structure that always seems to know exactly where it needs to go next. The two voices range over a variety of ambiences including an extroverted expressionism, the reserved abstraction of a dynamically controlled atonality, and a quiet introspection. Both Lenoci and Mimmo are fluent in the two major modern musical languages of the postwar classical and jazz avant-gardes. Lenoci’s pianism is highly chromatic, often fragmented and always precise. His sound here as elsewhere is permeated by the phrasing and textural sensibility of classical experimentalism—no surprise, since he was a noted interpreter of New York school composers Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, important works of whose he recorded and released. Mimmo’s playing is, as always, liquidly lyrical and marked by a strong sense of melodic continuity and a refined tone.

The Whole Thing ends on a contemplative note that carries a striking poignancy. For, only four months after the recording was made, Lenoci was dead. This album is a remarkable memorial to that remarkable talent.

http://www.amiranirecords.com

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Yoko Miura, Gianni Mimmo, Thierry Waziniak – Live at L’Horologe [Amirani AMRN 059]

Live at L’Horologe, a set of music by the trio of pianist Yoko Miura, soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo and percussionist Thierry Waziniak, represents a further installment in the creative work that Miura and Mimmo have done together. The rapport that was apparent between them in their duo album, 2017’s Departure, is abundantly on display in this new release.

The music on Live at L’Horologe was recorded in concert in Tracy le Mont, France, in November 2018. Composition on all nine pieces is credited to Miura, but the excitement and finesse of the music is the product of exemplary playing by all three. Although it isn’t clear how much is written and how much is improvised—an indication in its own right that the set is a success—the music is structurally sound, whether or not these structures are premeditated or spontaneous. The improvisations are built around economical motifs—a handful of notes, a slow trill, a cascading figure—that are developed through variations, transformations, deviations, repetitions, and extensions. Miura’s playing cuts right to the essence of the music and is characterized by a generous sense of space, while Mimmo’s exquisite tone and lyrical sensibility are, as always, a pleasure to listen to. Waziniak’s drumming adds a particularly bracing sense of urgency and intensity.

http://www.amiranirecords.com

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Ogni Suono – Saxo Voce [New Focus Recordings fcr213]; Vinny Golia & Gianni Mimmo – Explicit [Amirani Records AMRN057/Nine Winds NWCD0346]

The pairing of the same or two closely related instruments, when done well, can make the claim of being something like the anti-homeopathy of music. Rather than using like to negate like, as is claimed by homeopathic medicine, the successful duet uses like to enhance like. Each amplifies the effect of each while helping focus the ear on subtle gradations of timbre and, by extension, expressive force.

Ogni Suono, the Cleveland, Ohio saxophone duet of Noa Even and Phil Pierick, opened the 2018 Sonic Circuits DC Festival this past September. Their set was a remarkable, precisely played précis of their album Saxo Voce, a collection of new work they commissioned from several contemporary composers. As its title suggests, Saxo Voce is an album of music for saxophones and voices matched and sorted in a variety of ways. On a piece like Christopher Dietz’s My Manifesto and Me (2016), which alternates recitative and instrumental passages, voice and saxophone occupy distinct spheres that dramatize each other by way of contrast. On Chris Fisher-Lochhead’s Chroma (2017) for two soprano saxophones and voice, the instrumental parts—long lines moving past each other in slow glissandi—lie over a substrate of wordless voices hardly distinguishable from the sounds of the instruments. The serene pace of the work belies its on-edge dissonances, afforded by overtones, multiphonics and microtonal collisions. Ogni Suono’s facility with extended techniques is further demonstrated in Vocalise II (2016) by Felipe Lara, which rushes in with the hissing of air notes and is sustained on the drone of a tenor saxophone accompanied by a parallel, hummed line.

In contrast to the composed and meticulously rehearsed pieces on Saxo Voce, Explicit, a recording made in Piacenza, Italy in October 2014, is a foray into free improvisation by American multi-woodwind artist Vinny Golia and Italian soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo. Even so, the sympathy and judiciousness of the interplay make it sound as if it were composed. Golia and Mimmo’s close musical synchronicity is apparent from the very first notes of the opening track and develops further from there. The intricate yet spontaneous coordination of phrasing and dynamics is uncanny, as is Golia and Mimmo’s ability to layer harmonies and even set up cadences on the fly. The longer improvisations are notable for having differentiated but linked sections defined by characteristic tempos, dynamics, thematic material and density of texture: the sound of two voices alone but lacking for nothing.

http://www.newfocusrecordings.com/

http://www.amiranirecords.com/

http://www.ninewinds.com

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: This Is It! – 1538 [Libra Records 203-049]; Satoko Fujii / Joe Fonda / Gianni Mimmo – Triad [Long Song Records LSRCD142/2018]

In October of this year Japanese pianist/composer Satoko Fujii will celebrate her 60th birthday; to mark the occasion she’s decided to release one CD per month for 2018. Two of these releases, each featuring Fujii in a trio setting, are a testament to the diversity of her musical interests and her willingness to take risks at the initiation of what in Japan is celebrated as a new, auspicious stage of life.

The first trio is This Is It!, an ensemble consisting of Fujii along with trumpeter Natsuki Tamura and percussionist Takashi Itani. The three have played together for about five years, originally as a quartet with bassist Todd Nicholson and later alone as a trio. For the album 1538—named for the melting point of iron in degrees Celsius—the group improvises around six of Fujii’s compositions. The composed sections are more than just expedient launching points for improvisation—often of very high-energy; they’re compelling in themselves. Fujii frequently writes complex, convoluted melodies across multiple time signatures. It’s very demanding material to play, but play it Tamura and Itani do, and with a tight cohesion. The trio’s unusual instrumentation of trumpet, drums and piano gives the sound an aggressive edge that is perfectly adapted to Fujii’s jagged, stop-and-start lines.

The second trio consists of American double bassist Joe Fonda and Italian soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo. Unlike the standing trio with Tamura and Itani, this trio was put together for the occasion. Fujii and Fonda have a longstanding musical relationship, but Mimmo was a new factor. The set of improvisations was recorded in Milan on 9 October 2017, Fujii’s 59th birthday and the day after the three had played a concert—the latter being the first time they’d played together as a trio. One wouldn’t know it from listening to the music, which coheres as a tight fusion of compatible sensibilities. The three seem to share a sense of improvisation’s ability to trace a quasi-narrative cycle, which here takes the form of a long-term oscillation, consisting in waves of expressionistic intensity dissolving into introspective duets or solos. All five pieces, including the forty-minute-long Birthday Girl, show a remarkable attention to structure; the playing is in the moment, as is all good free improvisation, but every moment also seems to anticipate not only what the next moment will be, but what, given the current state of things, it should be. Fujii is an intuitive pianist who seems to approach improvisation with a composer’s sensitivity; she can fill audio space with cascades of sound or can allow ample breathing room with sparser, quasi-premeditated pitch collections. Mimmo—who was an inspired choice for making the Fujii-Fonda duo a trio–plays with characteristically refined lyricism leavened by timbral experimentation at the edges; his finely etched lines never lose definition, even at extremes of volumes and speed. Fonda’s forceful and often percussive voice provides a solid foundation; even in this free context he conserves the bass’s traditional function as anchor. Occasionally he switches to wood flute, which makes for a surprising, and surprisingly engaging, color contrast.

http://www.librarecords.com

http://www.longsongrecords.com

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Yoko Miura & Gianni Mimmo – Departure [Setola Di Maiale]

sm3140Defining a paradoxical music of luxuriant austerity, Departure is a beautiful duet for Japanese pianist / composer Yoko Miura and Italian soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo. The music inclines toward an elegant economy in which no notes are wasted, even during moments of complex development. Although mostly improvised, the music was at least partly composed by Miura, a refreshingly circumspect pianist, whose arpeggios and ostinati provide the harmonic skeleton that Mimmo fleshes out with chromatic, intelligently convoluted lines. Whether through spontaneous chemistry or prior agreement, Miura and Mimmo often converge on unison notes that serve as points of gathering in before pivoting into themes and structural joints for the ongoing flow of sound; the music is analogous to an ink painting that works through implication and subtlety, suggesting much and consequently neglecting little.

http://www.setoladimaiale.net/

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Gianni Mimmo, Martin Mayes & Lawrence Casserley – Granularities [Amirani AMRN045]; Gianni Mimmo & Garrison Fewell – Flawless Dust [Long Song Records LSRDC138]

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These two fine new releases situate soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo in small ensemble encounters with the extraordinary improvisers Garrison Fewell, Martin Mayes and Lawrence Casserley. Flawless Dust sees Mimmo in a duet with the late Fewell, an American-born guitarist who lived and taught in both Europe and America. Recorded in Novara, Italy in October 2014 and dedicated to Fewell’s memory, the music develops through the creative confrontation of two voices along several axes of contrast: Of timbre (Mimmo’s reedy, serpentine lines against Fewell’s prickly points of sound), duration (the breath-carried sustain of the saxophone again the guitar’s short, pizzicato eruptions), and phrasing (the legato of the wind instrument against the staccato of strings). Granularities: A Trialogue is, as the subtitle indicates, a trio date featuring Mimmo with Mayes on French horn, hand horn and alp horn, and Casserley on percussion and granular signal processing, recorded in September, 2010 in the UK. The intersection of the two wind instruments, which often interweave smoothly phrased lines, and the atmospheric interventions of Casserley’s granulations, make for a multifaceted but ultimately integral overall texture that Mimmo in the liner note aptly characterizes as a “complex event.” The constant running through both these rewarding sessions is Mimmo’s distinctive voice, which remains unfailingly lyrical at heart no matter how abstract the surroundings.

http://www.amiranirecords.com

http://www.longsongrecords.com

Daniel Barbiero