Each of the three new recordings from Ivo Perelman - albums
entitled Complementary Colors, Villa-Lobos Suite, and Butterfly Whispers
(Available October 30 via Leo Records) - exhibits a different approach to
improvised music from the indefatigable Brazilian-born saxophonist. Each album
represents a unique "first" for Perelman. For most artists, releasing
three such iconoclastic forays at once would constitute a burst of the
imagination, but Perelman is not most artists. He has documented his current
creative fervor with nearly 25 albums over the last five years; you would think
that by now the wellspring of imagination might start to run dry. The fact that
he can still find a different format to frame his music - or in this case,
three different formats - should boggle the minds of most listeners as well as
his fellow musicians.
On the duo recording Complementary Colors, Perelman and his
longtime collaborator, acclaimed pianist Matthew Shipp, explore the ties that
bind the visual and the aural arts. In addition to his work as a groundbreaking
improviser, exploring the outer limits of the saxophone's tonal range, Perelman
is also a prolific and respected visual artist, whose work hangs in collections
across four continents; at the time of these releases, he was in Brazil,
overseeing the third major exhibit of his paintings and drawings in his native
land. But for all that, Complementary Colors represents the first time he has
sought to unite these two aspects of his artistic vision.
Perelman titled each track with the name of a color, which
he chose after the recording. As usual in his music, these improvisations arose
from literally nothing, with neither previous rehearsal nor any written music
in hand; given this methodology, something as programmatic as a color-coded
"concept" would be unthinkable. But the titles came naturally, since
Perelman - by his own admission - experiences synesthesia, the sensory
phenomenon by which some people "hear" colors, "taste"
music, or "see" aromas, for instance.
Up until now, this has primarily manifested itself in his
canvases. "I paint using musical impulses, translated, and transmuted into
the shapes and colors," he explains. "When I paint, I feel my
synesthesia is rhythmic; I visualize a rhythm and it's very strong in me."
From there, the rest of the painting takes shape: "The rhythmic structure
almost dictates what the colors will be; the rhythms in my paintings ask for
the colors - 'This should be a red,' for instance." But on Complementary
Colors, he applied the process in reverse, allowing the recorded playbacks to
dictate the titles, based on the hues and mixtures that came to mind. And apart
from any crisscrossed sense or extramusical pigments, the music itself occupies
the high plateau achieved by Perelman and Shipp on their previous release,
Callas, on which they attained a new level in their already telepathic musical
communication.
On Villa-Lobos Suite, Perelman again discovered a deeper
context for the music after it had been recorded: despite the fact that it
bears the name of his countryman Heitor Villa-Lobos, this "suite"
took shape without any preparatory study or even discussion of the man who is
generally considered the 20th century's leading Latin American composer of
classical music. In fact, the project originally had another name altogether; it
was only after Perelman listened back to the recording that he found qualities
unexpectedly redolent of his youth, when as a classical guitar prodigy he
studied Villa-Lobos's music extensively. "That music is to me my second
skin," he says; haunting echoes of it bubbled from the raw mixes of the
album.
What makes this recording unique in Perelman's towering
discography is the presence of not one but two viola players as his only
accompanists. In recent years, the saxophonist has discovered a new musical
soulmate in Mat Maneri, with whom he has worked on several noteworthy projects
(starting with the score to the Brazilian film A Violent Dose Of Anything in
2014). But serendipitously, Perelman became acquainted with a second violist -
the Canadian musician and author Tanya Kalmanovitch - when he heard Maneri
playing an instrument borrowed from her. Perelman instantly fixated on the idea
of performing with this small "string section"; in his words, "I
suddenly had this idea - 'What would be better than one viola?' Having two
violas! . . . . I had never thought of such a thing, because I never thought
there would be another Mat Maneri, a viola player someone so compatible with
me. But two of Mat Maneri would be better than one!"
Thanks to the instrumentation, the performances on
Villa-Lobos Suite have a classical, almost symphonic quality that helped
inspire the album's title; in addition, the violas' presence evokes the
saxophonist's own ability to mimic the sounds, range, and even the textures of
string instruments (which he has explored on previous albums with a string
quartet, as well as with Maneri alone). Writes Kalmanovitch in her liner notes
to the album:
"Listen to the relationship between the saxophone and
the strings: we are constantly exchanging our roles as soloists and
accompanists. Melodies are handed off, in constant motion from one voice to
another. . . . Ivo would probably add that his studies of the cello infused his
breath with the quality of a bow: for him, the saxophone and the cello are not
so distant after all. And Ivo would certainly add that the viola and the tenor
saxophone share not just a register, but also a spirit - mysterious, imbued
with melancholy and longing - so that the instruments know something of one
another's story before they've ever spoken."
The third new release by Perelman, Butterfly Whispers, teams
him with pianist Shipp and another frequent collaborator, drummer Whit Dickey.
So what distinguishes this recording is not the particular personnel, but
rather the overriding concept of the album as a unified piece of "program
music" - an artistic concept that, in its attempt to invest instrumental
performance with specific extramusical meaning, could not differ more
profoundly from Perelman's own methodology of total spontaneity.
The titles of the individual pieces, supplied by Brazilian
poet Diva Galvao - titles like "Pollen," "Wet Land,"
"Plowed Field," and "Secret Garden" - suggest some hidden
saga awaiting discovery. "Most modern listeners (myself included) shy away
from attaching literal narratives to instrumental music," writes Grammy® -
Award winning annotator Neil Tesser. "But on Butterfly Whispers, Perelman
actively encourages us to do so - to make up our own stories to fit the music,
whatever form those stories might take. . . It may also result from Perelman's
conscious decision to pare things down," Tesser continues. "His
improvisations have become shorter and correspondingly more focused: the tracks
on Butterfly Whispers average less than five minutes, whereas albums from a few
years ago often included tracks of two and three times that length. Here, he
says, 'I went for a more compositional approach, a more condensed way of
distilling and presenting the ideas. I wanted to edit more the musical
thought.'"
Ivo Perelman · Complementary Colors, Villa-Lobos Suite,
Butterfly Whispers
Leo Records · Release Date: October 30, 2015
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