Artist: Resnik, Cene
Label: ZARŠ Records
Release: 2012
Length: 45:09
Rating: 4/5
This is not an album for the thick-skulled! 45 minutes of jazz that demands a total disconnect. No ratio. Simply a state of travelling without the conscious mind. It’s the state that fills us with unease, even though it’s part of us, and because of how we live we’ve turned our back on it ever since the days of Descartes’ »grand pronouncements«, and every year since! When we’re conscious we can control our actions, and that gives us a sense of safety. But that state often cuts us off from lots of information we can only be exposed to when the conscious mind is switched off. ’Joyful Spontaneity’ simply can’t withstand logical analysis as it runs through the receptor organs. In fact, every review falls short of the information this album carries. This one too.
Experimental, strictly disharmonic jazz that looks for order in the beauty of chaos and vice versa is a tough nut for the average listener. Even a gourmet needs a pretty thick skin to approach it with any dignity. This is definitely a product aimed at a narrow circle of very demanding listeners with nerves of steel and thick skin, who understand what it means to disconnect the conscious mind.
Cene Resnik, the man behind this release, is no greenhorn in the music world. He studied at the conservatory in Graz, worked with the late Weather Report legend Joe Zawinul, who was his teacher, and the two even shared a stage in 2007. Cene also honed his musical profile in the USA.
»Joyful Spontaneity« is 45 minutes of free-spirited experimentation on the interplay of tenor sax, double bass, violin and drums. All of it purely instrumental, of course. The form of the material is so loose and elastic that you could slap the adjective »formless« on it. Picture a gig played »off the cuff«, where whatever comes out, comes out. Of course, that takes perfect chemistry between the creators of such musical excesses, who in today’s world are a superb warning that we turned our back long ago on spontaneity as an element of a decent standard of living.
Spontaneity naturally goes hand in hand with a completely unexpected turn of events. The individual building blocks of the music on »Joyful Spontaneity« express themselves with total freedom, unburdened by whatever the other instruments in this quartet partnership are up to. And yet they round out into a meaningful whole, with the instruments actually fueling one another. The form kicked off by the tenor sax quickly pals up with the violin line, which goes its own way, yet the experiment never loses its thread. The drums clearly have a free hand, and you’ll struggle to find as much improvisation as they offer in their »punching holes« in the rhythms, let alone this concentrated, anywhere in music today. That goes especially for the Slovenian music scene.
The song titles reflect the emotional states the quartet tries to expose, create and offer the listener within the album’s chemistry. The track Awerness unfolds like an alarming warning, with schizophrenic back-to-back escapades of improvisation from the quartet’s four building blocks self-amplifying the schizoid state of mind of the individual today. In Preciious Jewel the quartet flirts with a more melodic form, with more calm, even prudence – which is almost too harsh a term here, and over the first two thirds of the track the double bass and tenor sax take the lead in this dialogue of solos. Then the violin wakes up and adds a feeling of frenzied obsession in the owner of precious jewelry – just one of the endless materialistic delusions of the feeble-minded, biblically brought-up »little man«, who follows only the worldviews dictated to him by the great world conspirators.
At first listen the tracks seem to develop analytically, as a slow but building ramp-up, an atmospheric crescendo, and they hit their peak in the closing phase. The album also conjures up elements of crazy lucidity, radiated by the chemistry of communication between the instruments in the track Generosity. The most originality and experimental self-indulgence, and at the same time the most interesting stuff on the album, is embodied in the message of the track Shikantaza, which will carry you with feather-light ease to the land of the rising sun.
The music on this album reflects differently with every interpretation. That’s just what spontaneity demands in art. So it’ll always be interesting to hear this release in its live stage interpretation. The freedom this album has captured, carrying it over from the boundless treasury of the musical universe into these 45 minutes, has the character of a positive »wackiness«, played with exceptional breadth of musical intelligence, and everyone who can’t stand conformist molds and already chewed-up musical forms will fall in love with it instantly. All of you who are potent enough to open your hearts spontaneously.
Line-up
Cene Resnik – tenor sax
Emanuele Parrini – violin
Giovanni Maier – double bass
Aljoša Jerič – drums
Production
Blaž Celarec
