Andrea Ayassot considers compositions as spaces in which one can improvise by skilfully mixing the forms and systems practiced in jazz and contemporary music with non-European traditions, especially African and Hindustani.
This recent quartet of his explores forms ideally free from the clichés of various languages, investigating a world of rhythmic possibilities parallel and corresponding to that of melodic and harmonic intervals.
This music is played around simple ideas designed to leave the widest possibilities of expressive and formal choice. However, the small cues indicate rhythmic and harmonic-melodic characteristics that bring their coherence and colour. In this way each piece can find its characteristic phrasing, even in a rhythmic sense, and the path of usual solutions often appears irrelevant (making simplicity not always easy).
In a world where time passed much slower than ours, what appears slow here would sound faster, a trill would sound like a double chord, an arpeggio like a broken chord.
In such a world, the relationship between the pulsation frequencies of the events of a polyrhythm would be perceptible to the ear like that between two notes distant from each other by a certain interval.
Andrea Ayassot's music is imagined for this world and is built on these assumptions, the same frequency relationships that belong to the melodic intervals that define the themes of his compositions manifest themselves - at lower density - in the relationship between the frequencies of the polyrhythms on whose framework the writing unfolds.
To be even more precise, since both polyrhythms and melodic intervals coexist in a composition, to be able to hear them both it would be necessary to move between worlds regulated by different temporal speeds or, alternatively, to be equipped with an alien auditory apparatus, which extends to very low frequencies.
Such a scientific programmatic project, pursued with almost monastic rigor over many years of thought and practice, could portend a bizarre and coldly distant musical result.
Nothing could be further from reality, Ayassot's music instead amazes us with its naturalistic, almost tribal dimension, endowed with a candor and unexpected simplicity, almost as if crossing an ultra-modern hi-tech portal we found ourselves in a village in the equatorial forest inhabited by an indigenous tribe dating back to the Iron Age. It combines the experience of the alien and the ancestral and fully restores its author's vision of the world, an almost mystical idealism, the sense of communion with nature, the utopia of symbiosis in a horizontal and spontaneous social structure.
Andrea Ayace Ayassot - s. sax
Alfonso Santimone - piano
Giulio Corini - double bass
Nelide Bandello - drums, percussions
All compositions by Ayassot are chapters of his lifelong project “Quilibrì”.
Recorded live at Jazz in Bess - Lugano (CH)
by Stefano Pagani (15th february 2020)
Mixed and mastered by Enrico Terragnoli @ Little Greedy Sisters
Thanks to Roberto Pianca, Francesco Schettino, Francesco Bettini
Painting and Artwork by @ozy_worldy - www.ozyworldy.com
A very interesting album. At a few places I keep asking myself: Was this composed by Arnold Schönberg (or his disciples)? Anyway, I'm all for skilled musicians exploring the boundary (if one exists) between jazz and classical. Thumbs up! jyrki63