Last year, I reviewed AVA Trio’s EP Ash for another publication. This new release continues their “archaeo-musicological study” of the imaginary music of the ancient world.
The trio was formed in 2015 and this is their fourth album. AVA is two Amsterdam-based musicians, the Italian Giuseppe Doronzo and Turkish-Dutch Esat Ekincioglu, plus Italian percussionist Pino Basile, based in Altamura. Like its precursor, The Great Green is a hypnotic album that brings together jazz, improv and folk in a beguiling synthesis.
Doronzo, who wrote all the compositions, is assisted by Pino Basile’s researches into traditional frame and friction drums of the Mediterranean. The saxophonist comments by email that “the melodic and improvised context of jazz, improvised and folk music has a degree of microtonality, more or less conscious, and at the same time a high emotion”. He finds inspiring “the way folk musicians approach their instruments in a quite experimental way while staying within the folk idioms”. He cites Steve Lacy, Lee Konitz, Kudsi Erguner and the Master Musicians of Jajouka as members of Don Cherry’s “Organic Music Society”.
The results are haunting, plangent and rather melancholic. The album’s nameless hero, a simple fisherman, looks on The Great Green, as the Mediterranean was called. His journey begins with tasting the Tears of Didima, the ancient Greek sanctuary whose temple is dedicated to Apollo and Artemis. He escapes Didima’s Maze, surrenders to The Great Green and is washed up on Timanfaya, a cursed island of putrid smell. He hears a faint sound of bagpipes and drums in the distance, and is rescued. On the boat that sails to Tsamikos, he suddenly sees that The Great Green is really blue.
The album is a beautiful and intriguing mix of ancient and modern, and makes me look forward eagerly to the trio’s next release.
Discography
Didima; Maze; Timanfaya; Tsamikos (39.40)
Giuseppe Doronzo (bar, f, ney anbān); Esat Ekincioglu (b); Pino Basile (pc). Groningen, Netherlands, 16-20 January 2023.
Tora Records TORA005
