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Thread: AAJ Review: Wingfield Reuter Stavi Sirkis, The Stone House

  1. #1

    AAJ Review: Wingfield Reuter Stavi Sirkis, The Stone House



    My review of Mark Wingfield, Markus Reuter, Yaron Stavi and Asaf Sirkis' mind-blowing The Stone House, today at All About Jazz.

    At a 2009 ECM @ 40 celebration in Mannheim, Germany that was part of the ongoing Enjoy Jazz Festival, Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava spoke, in a public interview, about how free jazz, back in the day, wasn't really free. There were rules: no time and/or no changes, for example; with memorable melodies not impossible, but not encouraged. Rava continued on to enthuse that now, in the 21st Century, free jazz really is free: if you want to play time, you can play time; if you want to play no changes, you can play no changes; if you want to play a beautiful melody, you can play a beautiful melody. Anything is allowed; nothing is forbidden.

    Wise words, indeed, but in the new millennium, technology and greater explorations into extended instrumental techniques and newly created instruments has made it possible to add another set of variables into the list of the allowable: color, texture, atmosphere...soundscape. These more modern improvisational facilities can, of course, vary as widely as the vast array of sound processing that has evolved over the past decades, with artists exploring the broadest regions of sound including Norwegian live sampler Jan Bang and producer/remixer/electronic soundscapist Erik Honoré, along with the rest of their Punkt Festival cohorts including guitarists Eivind Aarset and Stian Westerhus and trumpeters Nils Petter Molvaer and Arve Henriksen; while acoustic explorers including Henriksen and Molvær, fellow trumpeter Eivind Lønning and saxophonist Espen Reinertsen have probed the furthest reaches of their instruments, through embouchure and other means of creating hitherto unheard timbres and textures.

    But that Norwegian axis of musicians represents but a small portion of the artists out there today, exploring the possibilities of marrying instrumental expansion with, for some, the expansive, cinematic potential of applying technology...not as an add-on but as an extension of their chosen instrument(s). Artists like guitarist Robert Fripp and his current eight-piece incarnation of King Crimson: make new music out of old, in part, through the application of technology-- one of the group's founding premises, in fact--creating a truly seamless integration of instrumental mastery and technological innovation.

    Guitarist Mark Wingfield, Touch Guitarist Markus Reuter, bassist Yaron Stavi and drummer Asaf Sirkis' debut as a group, The Stone House, is another example of blending clear virtuosity with a collective imagination that allows for the expansion of the music through textural, rather than just harmonic, melodic or rhythmic means. That's not to say The Stone House's six all-improvised, non-overdubbed, "live in the studio" tracks--seven, if you're talking about the downloadable version of the album, which adds the five-minute bonus track, "Nepheline," whose trance-inducing atmospherics gradually pick up steam when Sirkis enters, turning the piece into a dense, near-chaotic closer not for the faint-of-heart--are unapproachable.

    Continue reading here...
    John Kelman
    Senior Contributor, All About Jazz since 2004
    Freelance writer/photographer

  2. #2
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    Nov 2012
    Location
    Luton, England
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    27
    Great review John, which led me to download the album from the bandcamp site. However, no bonus track was included. Is that only available from another site?

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