Adding drums and percussion to a reeds-guitar-bass trio that had learned to live without them might be seen as either a return to some basic formula or an expansion founded on drums-free achievement.
For Italian bassist Andrea Grossi’s Blend 3 trio, the arrival of American drummer Jim Black “profoundly altered the balance and functions of the instruments within the music”. Even without knowing what the trio had been up to previously, that would always have been an understatement. But maybe there’s a loss of nuance in translation.
The 20-minute Axes suite – Grossi defines “axes” in the album’s context as the convergence of compositional materials – is a polymodal work from 2023 based on a major scale and its inversion. Dark Bloom, extra-musically anti-fascist, employs a transposition technique of French composer Olivier Messiaen; Pedinte recalls the “interval areas” of Italian pianist Franco D’Andrea. And so on.
Grossi is thus strong on how such building materials result in the album’s music, where he and alto saxophonist Manuel Caliumi double clarinets, and the former also plays electric bass and the bowed, single-string Albanian lahuta. Grossi is attached to that country and it inspired the Interlude of the suite, a distant soundscape drawing closer, mirroring the natural world and constructed with smart electronica.
The prominent component is counterpoint, even though Black makes an early impression on the Suite’s opening Game, where rhythm is Grossi’s main focus, not least in suggesting that linked bass and guitar appear to require no help in supporting Caliumi’s febrile and slippery sax. But percussion, in its punctuating role, can be contrapuntal, too. The sum total of sounds available, especially Michele Bonifati’s buzzing guitar and those clarinets supplying low-register shade, is formidable.
There’s plenty of Grossi’s “novelty and variety” on the album, from the limited harmonic movement of Dark Bloom to the saw-edged melody of BadAxes with its vamping bass. Interesting.
Discography
Axes Suite: Game, Interlude, Riddle, Coda; Dark Bloom; BadAxes; Pedinte/BadAxes reprise (42.48)
Manuel Caliumi (as, bcl); Michele Bonifati (elg); Grossi (b, elb, Bb cl, Albanian lahuta); Jim Black (d, pc). Italy, 13-14 November 2023.
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