John Hughes – Avant Music News

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

AMN Reviews: Andrew Raffo Dewar, John Hughes, Chad Popple – Reflejos IV-VII [Waveform Alphabet WA002]

Reflejos IV-VII is the second release from the transatlantic trio of soprano saxophonist Andrew Raffo Dewar, double bassist John Hughes, and percussionist Chad Popple. Like 2018’s Reflejo, the work on which this release continues and extends, Reflejos IV-VII was recorded in Hamburg, Germany, where Hughes and Popple are currently based.

The four Reflejos are compositions by Dewar. They are members of a series of thematically organized pieces that employ forms based on inversions (mirror images or “reflections,” as Dewar’s titles have it) and related structures, as well as looped motifs. At one extreme is Reflejos V, the motif to which is a single note played by all three (with Popple on vibes, as he is on all of the Reflejos and Trizas) across staggered rhythms that produce variations in color and density. The piece eventually settles into a seven-beat pulse carried on a bass ostinato. Reflejos VII features slightly off-kilter, contrapuntally played motifs, while Reflejos VI moves from an opening featuring a reflective line on vibes floating over a gently undulating, bowed bass, to a gritty bass solo that highlights the sound of the instrument as brute material fact. In contrast to the longer and more developed Reflejos, the brief Trizas strip the music down to isolate and reveal the brief, repeated phrases that make up its conceptual core.

The melodically-organized Reflejos and Trizas are accompanied by two improvisations that explore more abstract territory notable for the salience of textures produced by extended techniques and unpitched percussion.

https://reflejoswa.bandcamp.com/

Daniel Barbiero

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