Swedish pianist Sten Sandell is one of the key figures in the Scandinavian free jazz and improvisation scene: a visionary and experienced musician who has developed a profound musical language. He is a member of the Gush trio, with saxophonistMats Gustafsson and drummer Raymond Strid, celebrating this year its 20th year of activity, and leads his own trio, with bassistJohan Berthling and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, and collaborates with other innovative European improvisers as saxophonists Evan Parker and John Butcher.
On Music Inside The Language Sandell investigates his musical language and attempts to formulate it anew, from a fresh perspective, without any attachment to conventions, routines or approaches. It is a philosophical study as much as it is a musical journey, and can be seen also as a political or moral text that investigates what is the role and responsibility of an artist and the most disturbing questions about the essence of art. What is music, how it is affected, how it moves and communicates with the space that is performed in, what are its relationship to a given text or images, how it changes, here and now, or between situations and places, and how it moves, acts and reacts, according to the characters of other musicians, and how the language is inseparable from the constant listening process. Sandell does not intend to have any definite answers but to sketch a few approaches that may serve him as an improviser who seeks to to expand the properties of himself as an improvising artist, fully aware that these questions trigger more and more attempts to come closer to satisfactory solutions.
This project, Sandell's tenth solo album, a 3-disc set, is divided into a few chapters, each offering a new insight, recorded on several different halls and studios. The first chapter offers three piano solos. Sandell's playing is highly poetic, his improvisations invent a syntax with a distinctive relation to time, space, silence, rhythm, repetition and timbre, and his approach sees the whole piano, including the option to hammer or twist its wires directly, as one unity.
The second chapter, the drama, where Sandell adds to his palette of sounds organ and electronics and reads poetic texts refers to music as a dramatic texture. The pieces are inter-textual compositions of sounds—musical notes and words, organic, sometimes abstract, weird and disturbing ones coupled with comprehensive, verbal lines and non-verbal overtones singing and gibberish, often in a childlike manner. Sandell follows John Cage's philosophy that saw the beauty in all sounds. This aural mixture of colliding sounds succeeds to create an arresting dramatic impact.
Read more: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=43842#.UROEL6XhEhQ
Read more: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=43842#.UROEL6XhEhQ
Live at Inage Candy, Chiba (Japan) / 18th Oct. 2010 /
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