A quartet that plays with techniques borrowed from spectral music.
Sam Comerford
tenor saxophone and clarinet
Piergiorgio Pirro
piano, LinnStrument, electronics
Cyrille Obermüller
double bass
Luis Mora Matus
drums
Is it possible to get away from traditional jazz harmony and yet keep using a harmonic system for improvisation? In researching the answer to this question, many jazzmen turned towards various kinds of classical contemporary music from 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 various 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)