Personnel:
Luis Nacht (ts), Sergio Wagner (tp), Demian Cabaud (b), Fermín Merlo (d)
Reference: FSRCD 5112
Bar code: 8427328651127
"Throughout the history of jazz there is a trend towards reducing structural limitations and increasing the development of improvisation. At a specific moment, there was a break with various elements belonging to the jazz tradition in response to a social context that led to a stylistic revolution towards a trend of greater freedom. Jazz evolved in the direction of a freer and more atonal language.
Luis Nacht, saxophonist and composer of Argentine nationality, is one of the examples of this language, who after a dozen albums in his name publishes a quartet Canto de Montañas (2021) edited by Fresh Sound Records accompanied by trumpeter Sergio Wagner, Fermín Merlo on drums and Demian Cabaud on double bass.
Canto de Montañas is one of those records that flowed spontaneously in a magical way. In the meeting we had, Luis Nacht says that while on tour in Europe, newcomers to Porto (Portugal) decided to record (behind closed doors) a joint session at the Porta-Jazz club. The recording, with limited technical resources, turned out to be a display of fluid improvised ideas, recorded in a single take. These sessions are unrepeatable if they are not recorded, since the common thread is improvisation understood as composition in real time. For this reason, Free Jazz is one of the most alive and organic languages that can exist, and this album is an example of it.
“The album was recorded naturally like when we played. Everything has the same sense of spontaneity and non-planning. These ingredients were found in the music and in the release of the album with Jordi Pujol (Fresh Sound Records),” says Luis Nacht.
Making a retrospective, Luis Nacht's proposal, since his first album as leader, Nacht Music (BAU Records 2001), has been innovative, melody coexisting with abstraction. This album, with a format without a harmonic instrument, opens a path to another place, above all to a more lively group concept open to free improvisation.
Six of the seven tracks, with an average of eight minutes, are compositions by Luis Nacht. The album begins with the track titled A Malaby A, a tribute to the American tenor saxophonist of Free Jazz, Tony Malaby, the second track Canto de Montañas gives the album title. Later, another duet version of A Malaby A and Canto de Montañas was published with Nataniel Edelman, on piano, with the particularity that Luis Nacht plays the soprano sax and flute on this single. The third theme, Luigi, is a composition by Sergio Wagner. Two of the tracks included in the album were built one hundred percent at that time as a free improvisation (Track 5 and 7, Madre Pereza and Vidurria, respectively).
The asymmetrical lines, full of nuances far from the predictable, trace the conceptual line of Luis Nacht's compositions. An unconventional compositional form of rhythmic flexibility and harmonic freedom not subject to a planned structure that responds to a search for freedom and spontaneity in collective improvisation.
Since the end of the sixties, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus among others have separated from traditional ideas and focused on sound. Criticism is one of the obstacles that must be overcome when new ideas appear that break with the established. Jazz icons today were not accepted at first. This rupture took shape in 1960 with the publication of the album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by Ornette Coleman, recorded as a double quartet. Historical referents of Free jazz who use these concepts are influences for Luis Nacht, such as Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Art Ensemble of Chicago (conceptual principles of the AACM), Anthony Braxton, etc.
“…I propose a germ of melodic idea, an approximation of what it can be, which is completed with the improvised compositional contributions of the musicians who are building it in real time. It is a particular, unstructured way of composing that allows for stillness and elasticity. Each one makes individual decisions, therefore, the same composition has lines of bars that lengthen or shorten depending on what is happening at each moment and the piece is finished ”, comments Luis Nacht
Luis Nacht's music with roots in Argentine folklore evolves even more towards the freedom of playing without prejudice and without an organized harmonic structure. With the idea of textures generated at the moment of interaction, the focus is on sound; for this reason the music of Luis Nacht sounds alive."
—Begoña Villalobos (June 4, 2021)
http://inandout-jazz.es
