leonel kaplan - with diego chamy, ivar grydeland, axel dörner [download]
"The music presented here was live recorded in France and Chile across a two month period way back in 2004. There is a gap of seven years between this music and today, though I believe they don’t sound like belonging to any particular historical era and are a fine example of my music. The music here is all about a deep, collaborative interaction feeling. We try to listen to each other in the moment, blending textures and dynamics together."
Leonel Kaplan: trumpet
Diego Chamy: percussion
Ivar Grydeland: banjo and electronic devices
Deck, Valparaiso
22 July, 2004
The Live Music Archive Series is an occasional collection of free lossless downloads of music. The music in this new series is available only as a lossless FLAC download. The decision to release the music in this format only is a conscious, considered one. If you need to know more about FLAC or where to get a free player/converter visit this site. If you have any trouble listening to the music here otherwise drop me a line and I will see if I can make alternative arrangements for you. There is also no audio player on the page, so you cannot just stream the music at the click of a button. Why is this? Well I firmly believe that this kind of music suffers a lot if compressed in any way, and as a lover of music I want to present it in as good condition as I receive it. Also, many people nowadays listen to music via their computer’s internal speakers, which are inevitably not very good. By not adding a stream player at the webpage I hope I am encouraging people to download the music and then either burn it to a disc and play it on the stereo or load it onto their iPod or similar.
text borrowed from “The Listen Series” by Richard Pinnell
The good old, bad old conservatory-trained composer in me is more drawn, I'll admit, to Moments Of Falling Petals, which finds Captain Akiyama back on acoustic guitar in the world of recognisable, even singable (yes!) pitches for a delicate and elegantly understated three-way conversation with alto saxophonist Éden Carrasco and trumpeter Leonel Kaplan. This could be a clue as to why I happen to find Akiyama such an intriguing musician – returning once again to the less-is-more world of Bar Aoyama and Off Site where he first made a name for himself, I'm struck by what I once described elsewhere (referring to an Arthur Doyle album, of all things) as "relaxed intensity". There were only two ways out of Off Site: either by playing even less – the Taku Sugimoto solution – or by playing more, which was Akiyama's strategy. (Toshi Nakamura can't decide which way to go, which is fine by me too..). There's an extraordinary tension to Sugimoto's work, both improvised and composed – I well recall him sweating, physically suffering to place those oh so few notes in just the right place in a concert with Radu Malfatti here a while back – while Akiyama in concert has never seemed to me to be in the throes of such an existential crisis. Can music be intense without necessarily being tense? I'd say it can, and Akiyama is a good example. Pursuing the comparison for a while, that Connors / Licht duo once more comes to mind, with Taku playing Connors, agonising over each sound, while Akiyama sits back (Licht positively slumps back) and lets the notes come – not that there are many more of them here than there used to be on echt Akiyama outings like Relator, or his wonderful duos with Jozef van Wissem, Proletarian Drift and Hymn for a Fallen Angel. There's a real sense of tonal – not in the traditional sense of course – interplay in this 33-minute piece, with Akiyama's delicate chordal threads and micro-melodies drawing Carrasco and Kaplan back into real pitch play (rare these days, that), which counterpoints their more "extended" techniques to great effect. It's glorious stuff, and strongly recommended.
Ferreous spots of swiftness in contrast with rusted kitchenware smelling of gunpowder; silence lurking amidst the gurgles of tonal renegation, while stretching harmonics and patches of instrumental encroachment agitate the sleep of an already resigned mechanical soul. Speculating about the undesirable parts of what once we called an instrumental lexicon, Dörner and Kaplan keep their valves in constant dire trouble, plunderers of hot air to be resold as gaseous tightroping. Chamy oversees these hobbling conversations while trying to be kind and smiling - only, his percussion array has no front teeth to flash, which makes his metallic sibilance even more specific. This peculiar association of silent skeptics falsifies the banknotes of pally improvisation, evidencing once again that joining someone does not necessarily mean that you must wear a fancy dress.
