Tag: Silvia Corda

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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: Samora – Quasar [Rizosfera/NUKFM]

Samora is the solo project of Enrico Marani, but on Quasar, a multimedia work encompassing sound, visual art, and text, Marani expanded Samora to a complement of five. For the ten-part musical suite that makes up the work Marani, an electronic musician known for his wide range of collaborations with international artists, is joined by Eraldo Bernocchi, a composer, producer, and electronic musician associated with the post-industrial and ambient genres; and Silvia Corda, the Sardinian pianist/toy pianist/composer fluent in both freely improvised music and contemporary experimental art music. In addition to these superb musicians, Marani brought in philosopher Davide Bertolini to write an essay and visual artist Stefano Ricci to provide images.

Quasar’s ten parts find the three musicians in differing configurations: five for the full trio, two for the duo of Marani and Corda, one for Marani and Bernocchi, and two for Marani alone. Despite the variation of voices in combination, there is a consistent overall sound linking all ten pieces—a meticulously composed ambient impressionism made up of a richly woven tapestry of audio colors. Unlike much ambient music, which relies on predominantly dark and hazily-defined layers of sound, Quasar favors a brighter palette calling up the sounds of mallet percussion, flutes, rainsticks, and tintinnabulating bells. From the harp-like glissandi and embroidering piano chords of Part One, through the electric guitar, chromatic piano, and thick bass harmonies of Part Three, the vintage synthesizer sounds of Part Six and the jet-roar chords of Part Nine, the suite casts sound as a plastic material—something to be molded into coherent forms driven by the dynamic interrelationships of contrasting timbres. To make music this way is, as Bertolini puts it at one point in his essay, “to make something from that which is other.”

https://rizosfera.net/en/prodotto/nukfmusb008/

Daniel Barbiero

 

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: João Pedro Viegas, Luiz Rocha, Silvia Corda & Adriano Orrù – Unknown Shores [Amirani AMRN058]

The ten tracks of Unknown Shores—an album from the quartet of bass clarinetist João Pedro Viegas, bass clarinetist/clarinetist Luiz Rocha, pianist Silvia Corda and double bassist Adriano Orrù—trace an arc from a fully realized, introverted exchange of lines that would be at home in a piece of Modernist chamber music, through a variety of abstract, acoustic musique concrète, and back to vigorous melodic interplay. It’s improvised music that’s well-thought out and consequently plays like a suite of intimately related parts.

From the opening moments, when Corda introduces a set of atonal motifs which she develops with variations and ornamentations, the music’s basic vocabulary is established. In a gradual, additive process the other players enter, ushered in by Orrù’s arco bass. The combination of instruments makes for intriguing contrasts and coincidences of sound, with the two reeds and bowed bass often fusing to one side and the piano offering creative opposition from the other. The four keep the textures open and polychromatic, breaking at times into changing configurations of twos and threes, and leavening conventional playing with episodes of extended techniques. All get solo space as well, which adds a further level of color affects to an already finely calibrated group sound. Recurring thematic material, much of it derived from atonal pitch sets introduced by the piano and picked up, replicated, refigured and refined by the reeds and bass, gives the music local cohesion and global continuity. If the music seems composed at times it’s largely due to the adept listening and apt responses of these four highly accomplished improvisers.

http://www.amiranirecords.com

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: A Sphere of Simple Green – With an Oblique Glance [Azoth Recordings rebis005]

Some creative partnerships are the product of steady work: regular rehearsals, residencies or running engagements at clubs or other performance spaces. The Sardinian trio A Sphere of Simple Green are something else. This electroacoustic ensemble of double bassist Adriano Orrù, pianist/toy pianist Silvia Corda, and electronics sound artist Simon Balestrazzi released one album shortly after forming in 2010, 2011’s Untitled Soundscapes; With an Oblique Glance, their second release, follows after a six-year lapse.

One of the advantages—at least in theory—of a freely-improvising ensemble’s playing together relatively infrequently is that it keeps the participants at the edge of alertness and the music consequently fresh and, when desired, unpredictable. At the same time, the internal dynamic will be driven by at least some prior experience of the sensibilities in play: as an analogy, imagine a field open to exploration that contains a handful of familiar landmarks, rather than a completely new situation that solicits a sometimes serendipitous but still essentially blind groping. With this new recording, A Sphere of Simple Green put that theory into practice.

The group’s ability to strike a fine balance among their voices is apparent from the very first track. Stabs of piano and toy piano complement a bass whose strings are struck with the bow and scraped as well; the acoustic instruments’ abstract sounds fold naturally into a discreet wash of electronics. Over the course of the set, Orrù and Corda display an adeptness at combining extended techniques on their respective instruments to create hybrid timbres whose quasi-artificiality blends well with the more natural artificiality of Balestrazzi’s palette of sounds. And yet the more conventionally produced sounds—the long tones bowed on the bass or sparse piano chords—feel just as appropriately placed. The trio’s particular gift is their sensitivity to audio space as an almost three-dimensional container of sound: something to be filled but never over-filled, a room in which objects are defined as much by what they leave open around them as by how far they extend.

https://azothrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/a-sphere-of-simple-green-with-an-oblique-glance

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Marco Colonna, Silvia Corda & Adriano Orrù: Istinti Ragionati [bandcamp]

The trio of reeds, double bass and piano has a long and distinguished history in advanced jazz and other improvisational musics. From Jimmy Guiffre’s innovative trios to the more recent trios of Paul Bley, Evan Parker and Barre Phillips, or Ken Vandemark, Havard Wiik and Haker Flaton, the drummerless trio has the dynamic range and palette of timbres to produce a kind of improvised chamber music of introspection and expression. Istinti Ragionati, a trio recording featuring Roman reed player Marco Colonna on clarinet and bass clarinet, and the Sardinians Silvia Corda and Adriano Orrù on piano/prepared piano and double bass, respectively, is an outstanding demonstration of the range, subtlety and power this type of ensemble is capable of.

Although fully improvised, the music shows the kind of balance and organization ordinarily associated with small-ensemble, composed chamber music. This is most immediately apparent in the trio’s supple control of texture, which arranges sounds in order to allow space for individual and ensemble passages to develop in an uncluttered environment. While often abstract, these passages retain a grounding in melody even when the vocabulary turns atonal and the dynamics veer into the heated expressionism of free jazz. Colonna often favors a long line that moves easily between pantonality and a lyrical modalism; when not providing harmonic support for tonal episodes, Orrù takes the bass into the rich territory defined by free counterpoint and pure timbre. As the hinge between wind and strings, Corda deserves special mention. She’s capable of binding the two other voices with suggestive harmonic fragments, or braiding them by serving as a third line within the polyphonic whole. In addition, her harmonic clusters and phrasing do much to flavor the group sound with the cerebral astringency of the classical avant-garde.

This is superbly thought out improvised music whose spontaneous formal sense makes the title—loosely meaning “rational instincts”—seem particularly well-chosen.

https://marcocolonna.bandcamp.com/album/istinti-ragionati

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Palimpsest Trio – Stanze [pyr168]; Orrù Mar Rocha – Live at MIA 2015 [Endtitles ET2]

Improvisation can be, among other things, a kind of spontaneous composition. Two improvisational trios whose common element is Sardinian double bassist Adriano Orrù are exquisitely aware of this and play accordingly. The Palimpsest Trio, made up of Orrù on double bass, Silvia Corda on piano, and Paulo Chagas on reeds, and the trio Orrù Mar Rocha, in which violinist Maria do Mar and clarinetist/bass clarinetist Luiz Rocha join Orrù, take approaches to improvisation which have in common a grounding in compositional principles, while differing in the details.

palimpsest-trio-web_V2-1024x924The Palimpsest Trio’s concern for compositional values—for choosing and putting elements into balanced relationships—is apparent even in the title of their new release, Stanze. A stanza (plural “stanze”) is a compositional unit in poetry as well as Italian for “room” or “stopping place;” the common meaning is of boundary or limit, and by extension a container of discrete measure which can function as a constituent part among parts comprising an appropriately proportioned whole. Terms like “proportion,” “room” and “balance” bring to mind architectural properties. And in fact the nine tracks making up Stanze are permeated by an intuitive concept of musical architecture.

For Orrù, Corda and Chagas, architectural balance takes multiple forms. First is the basic push and pull of very different timbres and articulations holding the strings, piano and reeds in an elastic tension. Sounds are placed with care beside, beneath and above one another, resulting in textures that highlight timbral contrast or concord as the moment requires. Corda’s piano is mostly a sparse, staccato source of vertically-stacked tones; Chagas’ legato lines add a fluid, vocal quality to much of the music; Orrù’s use of bowhair and wood, fingers and foreign objects to excite the strings builds a polychromatic bridge between percussion and wind. The evocative Aubade, with its modal sax melody, is a good example of how this dynamic plays out.

Just as important as timbral balance is the balance between filled and empty spaces. Orrù, Corda and Chagas use staggered and coincident rests as fundamental elements for collating phrases into larger, collective compositional units. This is evident on all tracks, but most especially on Enjambements, where open spaces play as significant an overall structural and expressive role as sounds.

a1734723754_16In contrast to the Palimpsest Trio’s use of substantial blocks of empty space as structural elements, Orrù, Mar and Rocha build their performances more out of the timbral interplay of instruments that overlap substantially in sound color. Over the course of two pieces recorded live in Portugal earlier this year, the three weave an often dense texture of contrasting and complementary colors and articulations. Their instruments’ capacity for braiding long, sustained tones is demonstrated right from the opening of the first piece. The arco double bass and violin sometimes sound like a single stringed instrument of unusually wide range, while the registral coincidence and timbral similarities of bowed bass and bass clarinet are capable of blending into one seamless sound. At the same time, the three are more than happy to explore the unique sound profiles of their individual voices, creating often intense passages of starkly opposed timbres that effectively play off of the surrounding moments of instrumental confluence: Broken figures emerge from a smooth field, which eventually reabsorbs them.

Despite outward differences, what each of these pieces by both trios share is a meticulous placement of sound and a nuanced internal balance among three independent voices. Close listening is the prerequisite for doing this successfully, and as both of these recordings amply demonstrate, that is a skill that these five fine improvisers have in abundance.

http://panyrosasdiscos.net

http://endtitles.ch

Daniel Barbiero