Guitarist Pedro Gomes, Trumpeter Sei Miguel Contrast Free Sound Worlds on Turbina Anthem

The free improv duet tends to bring out the musical personalities of the participants in bolder relief than an ensemble set. It's more than just a matter of the increased exposure a smaller number of voices affords; it's also a matter of the two-way conversational dialogues that can develop, with each soloist responding to the interaction more directly and immediately. Like a good two-person conversation brings out the thoughts and speech-patterns of the speakers to perhaps their best advantage, so it can be in free improv duets.

So that is at least on Turbina Anthem (No Business NBCD 29), a new release that features Sei Miguel on pocket trumpet and Pedro Gomes on mostly electric guitar. Here are two players that stand out by bringing an electric-noise guitar element into close conjunction with post-Don-Cherry out bugle-call aesthetic.

Both players stay in their own zone throughout. But by the contrast and the judicious use of brief silences, they establish a two-in-one space so personal and original that by the end of the disk you feel you know the players as individual musical speechifiers, not generic new thingers of a semi-anonymous sort.

Pedro detunes, scratches out abstract oaths, and alternates pitch, noise and electronic distortion in ways that continually play against the fragile, insistent and dancing intervallic skips of Sei Miguel's brassiness. As you listen to Sei Miguel on this disk you realize that what at first sounds random is really more thematic in a very expanded sense. He favors certain intervals and their repetition in such a manner that it makes for an interesting response to Pedro's noise clusters. But just when you think you've figured out what will happen for the rest of the disk, something changes it up. For example when Pedro switches to acoustic guitar and coaxes from the instrument some gently arpeggiated or simultaneously sounded clusters.

It goes without saying that this recording will not appeal to everybody. Those patient and open to out aural spaces will perhaps like me grow to like hearing the dialogic logic of this particular brand of freedom unfold over the course of the record. After hearing Turbina Anthem a few times I felt that I could recognize these players fairly readily in a kind of blindfold test if I were to hear them on other future recordings. That IS what it's all about. No Business releases this in a limited 500 copy edition, so grab a copy now before they go. I've added a No Business link to this page in case you feel the urge to do so.

Guitarist Luis Lopes and Afterfall in an Avant Set

We recently encountered guitarist Luis Lopes as part of the Humanization 4tet (see January 13th posting). He returns today as a member of the equally adventurous Afterfall (Clean Feed 208). It's a free-avant encounter with a quintet that includes Lopes, Joe Giardullo on soprano and tenor, Sei Miguel on pocket trumpet, and a rhythm section of Benjamin Duboc on upright bass and Harvey Sorgen on the drums.

This is five-way interaction, a cooperative date all the way, with all five members sharing the composing credits. What that translates into for the listener is seven musical vignettes, each somewhat different in mood. The freetime feel is pretty constant, with time sometimes more overtly implied and sometimes in a free falling zone. Some numbers are sparser and more reflective, some more extroverted and energetic. Sei Miguel's always muted pocket trumpet forms a good contrast with Giardullo's shining soprano or gruff tenor and Lopes' sound-color oriented guitar.

A high point is Giardullo's tenor work in "American Open Road with a Frog," where he is is rippingly muscular over churning drums and bass. "American Tryptich" finds some room for Lopes' spicy, floating chord voicings and chopping staccato-line crafting, some after-Miles-and-Cherry tartly stating-the-fact trumpet inventions and grainy bowed bass. "Return of the Shut Up Goddess" brings a storm of bowing thunder and weighted brushwork underpinning more Miguel muted eloquence and then vibrato-laced sustained guitar lines of a rough beauty. There are plenty of such moments, each one with a slightly different mix of musical voices, shades and degrees of emphasis.

This is a sleeper. It is so subtle in many ways one has to listen a number of times before the logic of the improvisational language truly speaks to you. But I found that it did after a time. And what it said was most definitely worth hearing.