Piergiorgio Pirro Quartet

A quartet that plays with techniques borrowed from spectral music.

Is it possible to move beyond traditional jazz harmony while still employing a harmonic system for improvisation? In researching the answer to this question, many jazzmen have incorporated various kinds of techniques borrowed from the classical music of the 20th century. This quartet turns towards spectralism, a trend in contemporary music that relates to the physics of sound and to human perception.

Composition is used in order to provoke varying degrees of destabilization of the usual normative codes about jazz ensemble playing and improvisation. This is done by negotiating the spectral approach with some of the most evident surface characteristics of jazz, such as personal agency through sound production, dance-related rhythms, and an improvisational language that relies on some form of harmonic substratum – here re-defined case by case according to different spectral principles. The conceptual and cultural irreconcilabilities existing between these two paradigms – spectralism and jazz –, and the cognitive clash or shift that follows, originate the tension that is the fulcrum of the experiment.

^{(photo credits: Alfredo Monteleone)}