Rossi/Hess/Moran – You Break You Buy

On Rossi/Hess/Moran, You Break You Buy, these three eminent artists, major players in multiple uber-creative settings, across multiple genres, came together with no script, a large array of instruments (and one dog toy) at hand, a blank canvas, and no plan other than to document the day and the many moments we are treated to on this album. “We just wanted to decorate time for some hours and create a sonic event, capture it, and share it,” said Hess. So ultimately this is a free improvisation record, but there are many other factors at play that combine to bring us this highly distinctive long-player.

Achieving a real identity as a trio comes from the players reacting to each other, listening, supporting, subverting and blending. Hess explains that, “the individual things we each bring aren’t coming out of thin air: in the arc of being a true improvisor, each statement has been growing, mutating, coalescing into its present form for a lifetime; getting at something purely new isn’t impossible but the seeds fall in old growth. So we’re carrying the past, the history of music as we know it, with us at all times. That’s what makes ‘improvisor’ an identity rather than a just a vocation.” What the trio of Rossi, Hess and Moran improvised on that day wouldn’t be the last of these sounds, as the music was later manipulated, harmonized, distorted and fortified. “For this album, in the singular moment of improvising, we’re rooted in the past, creating in the present, and looking to the future when these sounds will take their final form. Aware of this, we’re often improvising the foundation of what the pieces will finally be. Or sometimes the top floor first, or maybe even the garden out back. There are two layers of imagination here, not just what we’re going to play in the moment but what else they imply that we’re going to include later. Thinking beyond our own individual sounds, into a larger context, while still trying to speak out clearly, was a part of the brief. That said, there’s a good part of the record we left alone, in its space in time. There are places that we built over, layered up, and later stripped it all back to reveal what was underneath,” said Hess.

You can try to put a name/genre/label on this music, “but I don’t think it’ll do you any good. All three of us play jazz. All three of us play thorny, notated modern classical music. We all play pop music and traditional song forms. We study, practice and swoon over music from different parts of the globe,” explained Hess. He continues, “call it jazz and one immediately ponders what’s not there. Call it ‘classically influenced’ and then we can start rehashing tired old arguments about harmonic rigor and structure. Each of us, very consciously, has carved a place in the musical world where all these forms live at once, without hierarchy; past, present, and future, not just an attempted syncretism. In all of those concerts we’ve heard and records we love, it’s the individual sounds of the artists that’s often most captivating, the thing that leaves one spellbound. A few years ago I was lucky to briefly meet Wayne Shorter, and he gave us the imperative to ‘Keep going forward!’, and this record is completely in that spirit.”