Ivo Perelman meets three guitar wizards : Gordon Grdina, Pascal Marzan and Joe Morris with Matt Shipp & Hamin Honari : SHAMANISM - DUST OF LIGHT/EARS DRAWING SOUND - THE PURITY OF DESIRE

Ivo Perelman meets three guitar wizards : Gordon Grdina, Pascal Marzan and Joe Morris.
Shamanism on Mahakala Music : Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp & Joe Morris
Dust of Light/Ears Drawing Sound on Setola di Maiale : Pascal Marzan & Ivo Perelman
The Purity of Desire on NotTwo : Gordon Grdina Hamin Honari & Ivo Perelman

Brazilian saxophone player involved with the NYC Avant-jazz scene and iconic players like Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Joe Morris and Mat Maneri, Ivo Perelman is feeling a deep inner love story for the guitar, the instrument. Indeed, since the time of his sixth year he has practiced the classical guitar and the music of his compatriot composers like Heitor Villa-Lobos and studied in the Conservatory named after this legendary composer. His musical evolution took him to become one of the leading tenor sax player and improviser in the U.S. Perelman sax tenor playing is inspired by the saudade from Rio and one hears how marvelously he blows in the high range of his horn above its register using overtones and making them sing and curve with melody-like unique glissandos. Blindtesting, one can recognize Ivo’s playing from the first note. This specific and genuine pitch placement on any note on the saxophone, creating a kind very individual scales/intervals requires a huge daily work beyond imagination. Ornette Coleman is another great example of this. As his listeners have noticed, Ivo Perelman is working intensively with the same bunch of like-minded spirits since years as he wants to deepen fructuous musical relationship through mutual listening. But he likes, above all, renewed musical challenges. As Perelman maintains wonderful duos with Matthew Shipp, one of the most in-demand contemporary Afro-American pianist and with the very gifted and imaginative guitarist Joe Morris, they decided to create an intense soundworld contrasting and challenging the chordal and harmonic flurries and constructions of supreme piano and guitar playing simultaneously. In the piece Shamanism, the three are building pointillistic twists and turns and moving multi-angular shapes and sonic sculptures intertwining their capacities of instant composing in real time. There is some relationship to ping-pong or dancing in their improvisations specially in the interactions between the six strings and the 88 keys. Undulating on the waves of this pair, the saxophonist never looses his lyric vision and his surreal and natural sense of melodic invention. While listening to their chasing - free-wheeling flights along winding roads (Shamanism), you can always catch their precise knowledge of refined and complex harmonic structures. But as Spirit World testifies, the three are reaching the realms of balladry with a real poise and wit. Shipp’s touch reveals as a real asset and what does Joe Morris’ ricocheting with such piano playing is nothing else than acrobatic but deeply musical. On each nano second of its recording, Shamanism is coincidental music.
https://ivoperelman.bandcamp.com/album/shamanism

Coincidence came out at the meeting of French guitarist Pascal Marzan with Ivo Perelman. Like Ivo, but later in his life, Pascal Marzan dedicated his time to the learning and the mastering the classical acoustic guitar, studying and performing the same Brazilian composer that the young Ivo teethed as a youngster : Heitor Villa-Lobos and his Préludes, Études and Guitar Concerto … But after having performed classical music and also improvised music with legendary British improvisers like guitarist John Russell, violinist Phil Wachsmann and clarinettist Alex Ward, Pascal decided very recently to refound completely his practice of his axe in tuning it very differently. He bought a new ten strings classical guitar build at the requirements of the legendary virtuoso Narciso Yepes, one of the greatest guitarist of the Twentieth Century. With a lucid and premonitory intuition, he tuned each string with an interval of a third of a tone from the next string in order to develop a kind of microtonality. Coincidentally, one of the closest musical mate of Ivo, alto virtuoso improviser Mat Maneri is completely involved in this microtonal universe since he learned it from his father, the now deceased composer and reed maestro, Joe Maneri. They even both recorded for the ECM label. When Pascal and Ivo met at one London gig, they both clicked like twins. I would add that Pascal’s tuning is allowing to play in sixth of tone, because as you know guitar frets are slicing one tone in two half-tones… and in two different scales of thirds of tones and also in equal temperament as the “normal” notes are still available. Mindboggling. Ivo Perelman strives to challenge his own diving in microtones playing above or below the “pure” notes adjusting meticulously his reed and mouthpiece air pressure and sticking to no Forte, but a softer breath with more nuances. As the intervals of the notes of this 6th tone guitar are so tiny, you wonder at listening to Dust of light/ Ears Drawing Sound. Is it a hybrid string instrument, an harp or an harpsichord? For my opinion of dedicated writer about improvised music, this is the most brilliant and deepest guitar concept in contemporary improvisation since the legendary Derek Bailey. Strangely, this string arrangement produces a spooky reverberation revealing the frail nature of the Spanish guitar body made of glued tiny pieces of wood. The session went unnoticed and the result went beyond any expectation. Confronted to all kinds of plucking and touching the strings with Pascal Marzan incredible right hand, fingers and nails and his multivoiced wild arpeggios, Perelman exceeds his current inspiration concentrating his breath and fingering to extend forcefully his high soaring notes and his singing alto range while you hear clear ruminations of past jazz heroes like Ben Webster and Don Byas or nods to Albert Ayler. The variety of musical forms created in the spur of the moment is absolutely amazing and strangely lyrical and earthy, both players making a tour de force of this unexpected musique de chambre. https://ivoperelmanmusic.bandcamp.com/album/dust-of-light-ears-drawing-sounds

Now the third piece of this unusual guitar-focused Perelman tryptich is centered around the oriental lute or oud of Gordon Grdina, also a jazz guitar player. His oud is of the same family of instruments of the Iraqi and Turkish classical music, the oud played by the geniuses - composers Munir Bashir and Cinuçen Tanrikorur. And to keep the music pulsating closer to its origin, both artists conveyed Hamin Honari, a specialist of the daf and tombak, the classic hand percussion instruments of Persian and Kurdish music. All three musicians of this Purity of Desire are avoiding “fusion” but create the interpenetration of their own musical experiences into new realms. In Purity of Desire – their first piece, Honari’s rhythms on the daf are pure Tabriz half-root Kurdish half-Persian radif with some fierce gyrations of crossing meters and rubbed and scratched effects on the skin. The saxist his biting his reed and overblows his fire articulation while the oudist plucks like a mad cellist would match wild Mingus fingerings. This is the embarkment ! Caution ! Each piece is nailed to propose the listener new rhythmic patterns and refreshed revamped melodic turns inclined to different kinds of trilogue. Everyone is an equal member of the group. It goes far beyond the so-called Folklore Imaginaire, once a moniker for improvised jazz blended with native music practice. This is real life for a Brasilian overblowing saxophone poet, an unconventional oud player with bravado and a pure Middle Eastern rythmician con fuego. Gordon is playing his oud in a quite original way improvising on the finger board like a dervish possessed, keeping the pulse and the extemporizations altogether, Hamin unleashes fingers strokes on the skin which bounce like a water stream on mountain pebbles. Gordon Grdina’s playing oscillates between his idiosyncratic soulful duende and some Middle Eastern reminiscences like a Scott La Faro on acid. As long we plunge the next pieces the music becomes purer, stronger and the improvisations more straight ahead, specialy when Hamin Honari handles the pear shaped tombak (The Joy That Wounds). Ivo Perelman is pushed inside his reserve extracting the weirder harmonics in synergy and syncoped shakes with his two compadres. His haunting high sounds match the purposeful odd intervals and his lyrical extreme bending overtones. There are some interesting common grounds inside the playing of both oudist and saxophonist in the way they calibrate their sounds, curving the notes : the ghosts of mutual listening almost perceptible. A serious, joyful and dramatic journey in between “world” musics creating a marvelously unknown but palpable musical adventure.

With such three uncommon recordings, Ivo Perelman demonstrates his determination to explore new musical ways and sounds’ occurrences extending the real time instant composing / free improvising practices through the meeting of new very gifted individuals (Marzan, Grdina, Honari, Mahall) and deepening his longstanding collaborations into his NY brotherhood (Shipp, Morris, Parker, Dickey, Cleaver). About Dust of Light again.What does Pascal is beyond "normal" imagination. And this also the case of Ivo with his crafted curved notes !! Pascal 's guitar is tuned this "strange way" as I can exemplifiy here : one string open is by example tuned one third- flatted D , the second fret is thus a one third- flatted E and the middle point / first fret has a one third sharp D + one sixth . The next higher string open is a natural D. So there are two series of thirds following the position of the left hand fingers on either the odd frets or the even frets (french pair/impair) . Piling up sixth of tones : plucking different strings stopped on even or odd frets one fret of each other . That seems quite complex saying it but this requires a quick mind to manage such tuning and creating architectures of patterns, waves , lines etc... juggling in between the idiosyncracies of such resonances and their connecting points / notes ... It is actually mind boggling. Not only does Ivo Perelman have a superlative instrumental talent and is a very original musician, but in addition he knows, through instinct, his deep sensitivity, and his instant imagination, how to play the things that go best with many different situations and the most varied instrumental and personal configurations, which as far as I know are written in purely acoustical music. In the beginning he was involved with his own selected colleagues such as Matt Shipp, William Parker, Michael Bisio, the late Dominique Duval, Joe Morris, Mat Maneri, Gerald Cleaver, Whit Dickey, etc. But now, he himself discovers his abilities to express the unspeakable in blending in as close as possible with the universe of a Pascal Marzan or a Rudi Mahall, while remaining faithful to his own language with a marvelous suppleness and very fine empathy. The points of convergence are drawn by an innate sense of suggestion and micro-details which one captures in the wind in the unfolding of improvisation. These qualities are not shared often by all improvisers, even among the most esteemed or legendary ones. Some are even geniuses, but certain confrontations don't change their sound print by one iota. This particular quality,for example, is the essence itself of the art of Derek Bailey during his ascendant period, or the great Fred Van Hove who could stay himself in his own universe while creating dialog with such different players like Albert Mangelsdorff, Paul Rutherford, George Lewis, Anthony Braxton or Lol Coxhill. Like both these champions of free improvisation, Ivo's playing unleashes secret hooks to tie these unexpected little correspondances and ephemeral echoes with the other's players sounds and signals in a way that (deep) mutual listening is genuinely palpable. This is what, I think, makes his work important, as a worthy proper expressive musical heir (fire eater) of an Albert Ayler with a stunning capacity for melodic invention, Ivo Perelman became a true free-improviser (and never behaving like a "soloist - jammer") entirely involved in constant close mutual listening and creative imagination, while remaining a real jazz player.