TEXTS
Gianluigi Trovesi Conducts An Orchestra
Italian music is one of the languages that best overruns the appearance of the particularities to which it is
submitted. The degree of practical applicability in the most varied of contexts, as well as its mobility, assures it of
a set of peculiar characteristics that set it apart and distinguish it from the remainders. The musical history of
Italy possesses singular perception capabilities that allow it to draw from its contents, as if real visions of a
transcending brilliance would be the case, all the demands for the making of art. The passage of time and the
aesthetic necessities of men find, in this fertile ground of creative activity, exceptional research conditions. The
project “Gianluigi Trovesi Runs an Orchestra” appears in the continuation of other experiences formerly carried
out by this collective. One of the more interesting goals to achieve will be showing the relativity that constitutes
the employment of a universal maxim concerning all music. The variability of musical proposals existent in the
work of this performer and composer, the utilized references, the chosen harmonic archetypes and the achieved
originality, have reaffirmed the existence of zones of indistinctness and indiscernibleness, that permanently allow
redoing its ideas and delegating its music with ample tasks of interpretative resolution relating to encircling
reality. This capability of rereading the present time and supplying essential elements of comprehension
concerning it exceeds any conditions of origin and circumstances to its taking place, turning it into a complex
mixture of diverse artistic and non-artistic influences that vests a rare sense of freedom to it. The
experimentation carried out from this music is the combination of an immense panoply of historical, aesthetical,
social, cultural, ethical, popular elements, that intersect time and space, without limiting its ramifications, or
acting in an exclusive and nullifying way. On the contrary, its open and tolerant character leads this tendency to
an admirable value archetype that reflects upon the most carefree, ironic, caustic and good-humoured side of our
existence, inciting us to look at the surrounding crisis with wisdom and distance. Trovesi's music comes to us
embedded with an orchestral dimension, forwarding us to a trajectory of imaginary pasts, currently transmuted
into new more present and future representations. In every moment of creation a decomposition and and a
destruction, which operate reinventions, exist. These quick movements, filled with intensity, create an essential
tension to the renovation of a powerful irregular energy, manifested in a creative inconstancy, of which feeds off
the very phenomenon of making music; without this movement of creation it wouldn't be possible to rediscover
the paradigms through which all necessary conditions to new processes of induction of surprise will now be
established, amongst other mechanisms of enchantment and passion.
Danilo Perez Trio
It's easy to talk of differences. It is mostly about saying what differentiates the various kinds of music among
themselves, even though in relation to its intimate nature they seem eternally equal. In this sense they can sound
like successive repetitions, even when we try to execute our movement of separation and understanding. We feel
that in the existence of an idea, a minimum common sense through which a unique and universal process unfurls
to obtain the same effect in different places is, in a subjacent manner, always exposed. When we fall into a state
of being more or less divided between differences and comparisons, we acquire various types of doubts that
reveal themselves as characteristic signs of loss of one's faith. Afterwards we understand that what we are left
with is condensed in a set of stimuli that have not been able to oppose the rational side of our uncertainties, and
then we realize that never by way of a logical analysis of music will we ever understand its essence. In music there
will always be incrusted many elements of random nature that keep on being put in concrete writing form, the
latter assuming itself as a fundamental task to its happening. This writing should be seen as a simplifying plan of
hearing that permanently renovates itself in time without ever acquiring a final and absolute form, not even a
definitive or eternal solution to the act of creating. To repeat might also be some sort of returning, a vertiginous
movement gifted with a force capable of selecting, expelling, creating, destroying as well of producing without
going back to the same thing. This musician's art, lead by Danilo Perez, can circumscribe itself in this great idea
of universal repetition, without us ever having to go back to the starting point in order to understand it. The
whole formed by various differences is a linking; they are repetitions that associate themselves to one another in a
movement above the will of who apprehends or interprets. Its comprehensive application in an evolving reality
has an infinite potential that may later be blocked through the references introducing element that situates it in
time and space. Because of that we can define this music as jazz, with clear influences from Latin-American
culture, of the northern side of a continent. This process of decoding does not appear as a solution incapable of
solving the problems that result from its constant repetition. It is easy to talk of differences, but the synthesis that
we produce when we look into a certain object reflects itself in an extremely complex operation, where every
descriptive attempt presents terrible deficits in relation to all that is observed. In this sense reproducing becomes,
above all, a passion of repetition.
Marital Solal, piano solo
The piano acquires a central meaning in the symbolism of what is, and what is increasingly growing to be, the
dilemma of art in general in the future. In what place should we be situated between what can be considered as
music or as machine? The appearing of the word tree should be understood as a metaphor, an attempt of
perfecting caused by the necessity of achieving a resolution for the various questions that the activity of a soloist
poses, in relation to its form of learning, style, language and means to which it resorts to, when confronted with
the little innumerable reflexes produced by its music in all people that allow themselves to listen to it.
Contemporary works have a tendency to sell competence, in detriment of its own work force and its capability to
permanently learn and innovate - a faculty that can be updated in every context, if the pianist is capable of
instigating new regenerative assimilations to his/her art. Marital Solal incarnates this set of experiences that
intervene in the moment of concretizing music, through the development of a refined piano playing technique
that can never be quantified. The hour on the clock is no longer an interesting measure of time and can no longer
function as a liable measurement unit, when all that is created is far more than the creative act, constituting a
natural updating, where the accumulating of competence is a basis element. In this sense the aforementioned
tree , comes to us as a structure formed by its different branches of knowing that converge to a common trunk,
connected to the creative act, directed to the soloist's figure, who presents him/herself as a fundamental reserve
of accumulated intelligence. This secures the passage of all the contents of knowledge throughout time,
represented by all that accumulates and by all that is symbolized in the conserved work, in the aptitude that
updates itself constantly, in the inventive resolution and in the solution of a problem created by all the new lived
situations. This form of evolution in our activity announces a change in the productive system, where artistic
events have become its real economy. Each individual creator becomes the holder of a hybrid and universal
knowledge, which broadens in its performance through ever more universalized interactions, in networks of
knowledge and in successive discoveries of new applications to the rhythm of the more recent technical
inventions. The solo piano emerges as the real enlargement of an immense encircling minority and the pianist
represents its more fragile side, because he/she cannot stop being profoundly human.
ONJ, Orchestre National de Jazz (France)
Conductor: Claude Barthelémy
This orchestra can be considered a national project that aims to congregate some of the most talented musicians
located in France , working in a residential regime and assuring the maintenance of this collective for the
duration of, at least, three years. In this sense, the ONJ acquired a fundamental status in the launching of young
talents of European and French Jazz, at the same time that it has transformed itself into an organization capable
of accumulating information and establishing a body of availabilities for the realization of all forms of
experimentations. It undertook a role of fluctuating space, unlocalized , subject to the moving about of occasions
as a strategic factor for creation, which we can understand if we think how hard it is to clean up the terrain of the
instituted forces, refractory to innovation. The musical contents alter themselves according to the ideas of its
musical director and its process of renovation of identities and roles, lodged in the definition and conception of
the associative, places itself in a curious mechanism of working in equal terms. The dissolving of reference points
does not mean that structure ceases to exist but, on the contrary, a layout conjugated as a system of face-to-face
actions, mutually confirmed and ritually run. In other words, we can say that it is about a meeting point; an
instigating space of mutual and uncompromised collaborations. The great collective of musicians has always had
the effective effect of offering a pedagogical practice upon its elements. The group exercise stimulates
environments of interaction in presence of the answers of all who are participating. The orchestra can
simultaneously be a vehicle of propaganda and of public service, something that is perfectly assumed in the
organizational model of this association of young musicians supported by the official structure of French culture.
With a new musical director, the guitarist Claude Barthelémi, this group of instrumentalists will expand on some
of its musical ideas, already materialized in various works he has put out as a leader. These ideas are based on
cinema, being up to each of the musicians' concern to interpret the role of musical actor, in an atmosphere that
looks to remove the maximum expression of each artistic character from the sound space, through composition,
arrangements and separation and reorganization of languages. The very open result of the suggested horizons
tries to establish confrontations and tensions, in an evident homage to all decadent music. Accelerations,
ruptures, roots in New Orleans jazz, in structures that invoke contemporary electronic music, are some of the
elements that are possible to detect in the permanent order and disorder of this project that keeps on living.
Anthony Braxton Quartet
Looking to resume a few historical themes in jazz in an always intense manner, Anthony Braxton develops a set of
quotes and allusions, following the path apparently close to plagiarism, between the resources of copy and the
attentive rereading of past works, solving, with an uncommon competence, all problems of proximity with the
original renditions. Utilizing old themes as work basis, recurrent of a process of stylistic dissimilitude, this
project looks to restructure conventional discourses, superimpose them with others taken as more current. The
stylization and the counter stylization find themselves permanently converging and diverging in course, taking
the new configurations to the very negation of the original theme, through denouncement and recognition. Satire
comes to us as a fundamental element of regeneration and consequent destruction, from which the taking out of
context from the original model as swift means to the resolving for its aesthetic contemporary needs is evidenced.
The practice carried out in this approach of recuperation of the past, expropriates and creates conditions so that
the auto-regenerating discourse itself is profoundly destructive. In this sense, difference does not pass as a
duplicate but, on the contrary, as an effect that overruns its own initial characteristics, through the mutation that
a new interpretation implies. This paradigmatic posture of present times cannot be understood as an attitude of
reaffirmation of the past, since it redefines notions of probability and it poses a challenge to all that a pre-
existent music can allow in deconstructive actions. All of us are always repeating the same; original ideas or ones
that cause surprise are few and far between. When we find someone that, in a simple and humble way, resolves
some of the contentions of our time, presenting interrogative and stimulating proposals, we can attain a unique
feeling of personal satisfaction, capable of breaking through future experiences. This way of being is a brilliant
lesson about current questions concerning creativity and its limits. Anthony Braxton intelligently appropriates a
few identifiable phrases of the original theme, turning to an extremely skilful way of strategic acting, where a
dose of uncertainty against memorized solutions and all that is easily predictable is applied to them. This way a
state of rupture is created, transformed into a type of moment free from history, where only a profound
connoisseur of the latter is capable of avoiding the danger of standards and revert all the process to the
consummation of the creative act.
Bobby Hutcherson Quartet
Jazz can be considered as the set of messages that work in a dynamic sonic configuration, resending other
messages to its exterior, which are always interpreted differently. Who attributes a meaning to it has an essential
role in this system of exchanging of information, where the musical work acts as a translated, understood and
assimilated manifestation of spirit, in a mental and affective matter. If intelligence has, evermore, a collective
dimension, music will have, in the same proportion, a more intelligent symbolism. Everything that is around us is
capable of getting attention from us and, in this sense, making us think. In this context, music allows foreseeing
that other forms of understanding that escape practices and customs, where all explanations that concern it are
always very incomplete. Here, relations establish commitments between the members of each collective. A few
musicians take the status of living representations of a language, which makes it more accessible to the outside
world, where art emerges at the service of that empirical activity. One day this format of manifestation may cease
to exist. In the future there will be a historic moment of dissociation in which we will pursue other modes of
fulfilment. The most conventional expression of its representation will be questioned by the artist's creative
ability and by the technological development of his/her mediums. The moment will come when we will stop
thinking of stages, concerts, musicians, production, audience… Everything keeps repeating itself to the
demolishing rhythm of a collective transportation. Apathy and looking into the void are apathetic symptoms of a
thought without an object, which goes through our conscience in a routinely trajectory back home, after an
intense days' work. The suburb arrives as metaphor to a possible peace, surrounded by an almost endemic
violence, where many social cases announce an inevitable decadence. Bobby Hutcherson symbolizes an interval,
by impeding that the immediate consummation of this scenery of life, so diminutively likeable, thickens even
more. His music saves spaces, in a time full of real particles, supplying an ocean of sonic ideas that confer it its
own energy, potential, transitory, capable of transforming everything it touches - a photographic form that
animates itself in an extraordinary seizing of transfigured symbols. Everything is language in the sense that it
attempts to transmit intellectual contents. A minimum movement of knowledge can bring some solutions to this
circumstantial dilemma in which we find us. A role will certainly be presented to jazz.
Matt Wilson Quartet
One of the fundamental ideas of the contemporary jazz musician is his/her basis of work reflecting that he/she
finds him/herself permanently available for new contexts of survival. From a critical, sometimes radical, acting
upon everything that exists around him/her, the musician develops a model of action leaning in what was held
for a long time as a secure and valid source of artistic affirmation. For a long while this idea of certainty has been
present in any creative act. When in a particular moment in our history of ideas someone started questioning
every certainty assumed in the past, an enormous downfall in the order established up until then was verified.
The conclusion that is drawn from these irregular movements, that configure a new way of posing questions from
pre-existing matters, is the surfacing of a state of negative thinking, as a way of analysis, from which the
believing in certainties ceased, which in turn validated some of the most important structures of the organizing of
our knowledge. In this way there is no more, knowledge, originality, representation, and history in the sense that
we don't allow ourselves the possession of the smallest certainty, in a radical refusal concerning its meaning as a
stable force of categorization. We arrive at a moment where the artistic activities have turned into ramifications
of a creative model that built itself through the process of inverting the meaning of the utilized contents. Now it is
admitted that everything can be a target of creative treatment and it is concluded that a manner of making art
from its own deformation exists. The music of this group of people, conducted by Matt Wilson, applies these
models of simplification and sonic imitation, presenting them with a parody component. The deformations
carried out in the simulacrum of certainty, organized in the totality of the characterized elements of music
through the application of more or less evident, processes of ridicule that announce new forms of questioning our
time. The degree of dispersion bestowed reiterates an idea that the best solution for art will be to consider that
there is no truth, nor error, nor fiction nor lie, and that these presuppositions are manifestly insignificant as
vehicle holders of any affirmative value. Many are the concepts that come to us aggregated amidst intensities and
associations - pastiche, satire, paraphrase, quotation, are some of the detectable elements. This quartet reveals a
jovially burlesque side of the show, privileging humour as an object of self-deprecation. The humour no longer
results neither from the process of exploring incapacities of adaptation nor from subverting logics, but on the
contrary, it is found in the elaboration of musical gags in mechanics deliberately full of stimulating comicalities,
that invites dialog in the performances that were common in the coffeehouse concerts of the past, where the
audience would jokingly interrupt the artists out loud.
Randy Weston Trio
There was a time when it was necessary to win over resistances and difficulties of all kinds to be able to exist.
Nowadays we find many works that offer precious indications about those problems of the past. Each historical
analysis appears like a continuous movement, like a river that divides itself into a thousands arms. Its structure
has its basis on rhythm: a succession of relations that decompose and compose themselves into new figurations.
In this sense it becomes difficult to make a lasting adjustment to each of them and to the very structure created in
the meantime, from where new bodies constantly arise, even more vast and complex. We understand that the
explanations about music are like projections that conceal infinite movements in a variable order. When we talk
of projections we are thinking in the spectrum of colours that unify themselves in light. These associate
themselves in relationships of complementariness and contrast, causing each colour, through its limit, to
reconstitute itself into a whole and afterwards be reunited to the remaining in the immensity of white. Randy
Weston's music is an elaboration of lights that ignites itself from fantasies by associating colours originated in a
space of warm and equatorial clarity. One light and one colour for Africa . A music that acquires expressions
condensed in bright and dark figures, where joy emerges as the evident clarifying connotation that leads us to the
light. Its shadow effect restores a place of sadness. The conjugations of these elements supply increases,
decreases, clarifications, and darkening that, being so many times partial, total, ambiguous, mutable and mixed,
allow the developing of refined symbolisms of incandescence. Thus we found a sort of third state of light, the
elevation to an optical world that concerns projections. Music stands forth as a beaming figure of luminescence
above a concept of velocity that can explain its duration. We all know the effects of sun on our body. The sense of
heat, of colour, perception of form and of distance, signals that express our spiritual state at a determined
moment. This integrity elaborated from an enormous wealth of principles can only be developed by a man with
an artistic personality that will reveal itself as one of the most solid we can find, in a world impoverished of truly
unforgettable moments. Rhythm appears as a fatalist instinct against boredom, in a joyful transition concerning
our representations of the world. All rhythmical components have a dynamic that accompanies the cult of
naturalness and rejuvenation. Weight and gravity of emotions stay deprived of ballast in an open and flexible
musical idea. An alleviation of signs is verified, softening of discourses, leaning on playful neutrality that
expresses itself in the end of hierarchies and stratifications.
Jorge Lima Barreto & Eddie Prévost: Palolo Revival
A concert can hold a great story; acquire a way of narration that forever stays with it. It can possess an
identifiable image capable of causing a movement of interest upon the work of art, which affirms itself in the
visual and sonic context of its elapsing or vice-versa. This concert presents itself under a delirious and extreme
form, as the sublimated illusion of a world dominated and pacified through music. António Palolo is a visual
artist that will provide the visual component of this project. In the good manner of the entirety of the pop-art
movement, present in a considerable fraction of his work and his attitudes, it is attempted to show one of the
most important visual artists of the late 20 th century in Portugal . When image and improvised music are
associated, one simultaneously wishes exulting in the subjective component of the artists and find a dimension
for this artistic domain so scarcely explored. Languages confound and influence themselves by developing a
process of redefinition of the object that pulls it a little away from its reality. Language can be an image of
synthesis. We can place a few interrogations about the limits of the interpretation of the real, one of the more
recurring aspects of the contemporary artistic phenomenon. Music never stopped using the most common
techniques of the post-modernist concept, which leaves us unable to refer the existence of an inversion upon the
idea of collective that is proposed to us. The individualism reiterates itself into a dynamic associated to the
conception of this project, through which movements of liberation are expanded and fostered, beyond the desire
to break up with tradition or of counteracting pre-established ways of expression that may guarantee success.
The art that was being reproduced into a vision of hate upon what was established ended. The musician was not
being situated inside the very performance space, formulating a new reception for his/her work. This redefinition
of space may involve a displacing in the central role, attributing the observer a variation in the Euclidian concept
of musical scenography. As the Futurists used to say, “the spectator must in future be placed in the centre of the
picture”. We feel that this new state of experimentation can allow the force of the direct music's impact to be
found, impelled by the force that is associated with it. Impact also arrives from the image that comes to us now in
a cinematographic perspective and scale. According to Brecht “all modern art, due to its experimental
productions, is based on the effect of distancing and provokes awe, suspicion or denial, interrogations concerning
what a work and art itself are”.
