Paolo Angeli - Mede
(Recorded)
It must have felt like a bit of a coup for the High Zero festival to get Italian Paolo Angeli to perform at the 2003 incarnation of the Baltimore institution. Angeli isn’t exactly a well-known name in this country, has few releases easily available on this side of the ocean, and High Zero might not seem an obvious place for him to play, but, on these nights in Baltimore, none of this mattered. Angeli plays a heavily modified Sardinian guitar, an instrument with cello-like proportions, augmented by hammers, cross strings, and other little implements, sometimes played by a metal bow. The folk music of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia serves as the inspiration for Angeli’s improvisations, with the language reworked and mutated via Angeli’s distinctive instrument.
“Distanze,” the twelve-minute track that opens the cd, is a solo tour-de-force for Angeli, whose nimble hands elicit a surprising number of voices from his guitar. The track begins with rhythmic percussion of the guitar body, but Angeli covers so much territory in the span of the twelve minutes that it’d be impossible to relate it all here. Bowed notes, melodic staccato figures, whispers of static, and clanging missives each find their way into the mix, with two, or sometimes three, voices cohabitating in the track’s more crowded bits. Angeli is highly capable of captivating an audience on his own, so his work with some of the other High Zero 2003 participants is more about interplay than singular performances. “Mede,” Angeli’s duet with Dan Breen, starts quite subtly, with Breen’s electronics and clavinet not always finding sympathetic ground with Angeli. However, there are moments of beauty, such as when Angeli gently taps a lively rhythm over Breen’s electronic whine. Angeli’s collaboration with Neil Feather and Mike Evans, “Pedoni,” clocks in at over twenty minutes, and features some of Mede’s most fractured instrumental interplay. Evans’ percussion supplies some of the album’s most obvious rhythmic foundations, but “Pedoni” also features some of the disc’s most abstract and drawn-out music. It’s the album’s most episodically disparate piece, and, most likely for that reason, the quality of the music ebbs and flows.
It’s a shame “Pampani” lasts less than five minutes, as Angeli’s meeting with cellist Audrey Chen and violinist Katt Hernandez is Mede’s most enjoyable work. Given the nature of his collaborators’ instruments, Angeli seems to avoid bowing and the elongated voices of his guitar, opting for tinier, more percussive sounds. Hernandez and Chen begin with bowed tones, but soon join Angeli in a wonderful chorus of percolating pizzicato, before finishing with a stilted round of choppy slashes and chunky clunks.
Mede may well serve as many Americans’ introduction to Paolo Angeli and his work. The High Zero festival, with its emphasis on putting musicians in neew situations and contexts, is perhaps a daunting place to be introduced to the American listening public, but the performances here point to a musician, as an already idiosyncratic rethinking of a traditional style, who has no problems playing well with others.
|
