Auand Records Holds Back the Flood
These days, opening new CDs sent to me for review almost makes my heart hurt. The market for compact disks is small and getting smaller, and it seems like the same can be said of the market for recorded jazz. Regardless of the music’s quality (and much of it is very good), every new disc I hear is like a cry from an abandoned child.
That feeling was especially pronounced the other day as I opened a box of beautifully packaged CDs from Auand, an Italian jazz label that’s been around for nearly a decade, but which I only recently discovered. In a time when most music packaging consists of little more than a downloaded jpeg, Auand’s artful black & white photography and elegant cover design stubbornly denies the passing of an era — just as its music represents the vitality of contemporary acoustic jazz, even as it bucks the formidable odds stacked against it. Over the next few days I’ll talk a bit about the releases Auand executive producer Marco Valente was kind enough to send my way. Up first is Eco Fato by Quilibrì, a quintet led by the Italian soprano saxophonist Andrea Ayassot.
Quilibrì‘s unusual lineup features Ayassot, guitarist Karsten Lipp, acoustic bassist Stefano Risso, and percussionists Adriano De Micco and Luca Spena. The band plays a self-contained yet emotionally expressive fusion of jazz and various world musics. A useful if inexact parallel to Quilibrì‘s sound is the work of the group Oregon. Lipp’s finger-picked acoustic guitar establishes the sort of pastoral harmonic backdrop that Ralph Towner’s once did with the American band. Like Oregon (and its precursor, the Paul Winter Consort) Quilibrì surveys a variety of musical dialects, from flamenco to samba to North African idioms (if I had to do it again I’d’ve been an ethnomusicologist; as it is, I’m stuck to describe the music as accurately as it deserves).
Though the rhythm section plays with great feeling and skill, the group’s guiding light is Ayassot, composer of the nine tunes and chief soloist. Ayassot plays with a dry, lightly inflected tone, mostly free of vibrato. His lines are sparingly yet precisely articulated, melodic and rhythmic in the manner of Stan Getz. Indeed, the project seems a bit like a 21st century updating of Getz’s work with Joao Gilberto and Charlie Byrd from the early 1960s, albeit with a much greater emphasis on contrapuntal interactivity. Ayassot and Lipp related closely to one another in the course of their improvisations, as do Risso and the percussionists. In general, the passions are subtle — they smolder rather than burn — but the music is no less affecting for it.
Next up: saxophonist Emanuele Cisi’s The Age of Numbers.
