Label: Samo Records
Release date: 26. 10. 2020
Production: Samo Šalamon
Album length: 64.24 min
Genre: Contemporary Jazz
Rating: 9.5/10
Samo Šalamon is a musical phenomenon. And not just when we’re talking about the Slovenian music scene at large, whether past or present. Samo Šalamon is a phenomenon on the world stage of contemporary jazz. Outside Slovenia, his name has become hugely respected and sought-after among jazz gourmets. It’s hard to find a Slovenian musician who, for their age, has put out such a pile of albums while being involved in several projects at once the whole time – mostly with foreign musicians, but with our own too (Brest). Since we Slovenes only start appreciating what we have once we get a thumbs-up from abroad, it’ll stay true in the future too that Samo, sadly, will never shoot the kind of videos Slovenian TV channels shower their citizens with at Christmas and New Year’s. But one thing is for sure. Samo is, simply put, a brilliant mind. Spectral understanding, conciliatoriness, a constantly constructive openness to otherness – or, more precisely, a never-ending search for common ground with the language of otherness – are traits that reflect the exceptional artistic intelligence this musician has matured into, and which he keeps embodying, evolving without brakes, in his musical projects and deeds.
Samo releases several albums a year. Too bad he and Frank Zappa will never get to meet in that regard. “Almost Alone Vol. 1” is already Šalamon’s third album this year. Back in early February, teaming up with Igor Matkovič and Kristijan Krajnčan, he put out two studio albums, “Common Flow” (RockLine review) and “Rare EBB” (RockLine review). With the new reality forced on us since around mid-March this year (let’s hope it passes “yesterday”), Samo, like musicians all over the world, got a taste of how nasty it is when you can’t play your music on stage and, more generally, can’t work with other musicians in the flesh. Distancing turned everything upside down, and Samo didn’t sit on his hands. He went looking for new and different ways of connecting with musicians for fresh conceptual projects.
So Samo came up with a new project and invited no fewer than 35 guitarists from 35 countries. Samo is, of course, number thirty-six (from the thirty-sixth country, which isn’t Equatorial Guinea). Some of these players he knew from earlier collaborations – the biggest name on Almost Alone Vol 1 among them is Austrian jazz guitarist Alex Machacek – while with others he roped into the project he’d had no contact at all before. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Samo put all 35 musicians under the microscope. He listened to how they play guitar, dug into each player’s musical perception, the character of their individual expression. Then he adapted parts of the motifs he’d already prepared. He did the same with the arrangements. At the same time he created additional new motifs and song sections, completely from scratch. His inner compass followed the guitar artistry of these 35 musicians. “Almost Alone Vol. 1” thus presents the first eleven of them, each teaming up with Samo Šalamon on eleven tracks. Think guitar duets – or imagine the author of a song inviting you to jump in with a solo. The first part will be followed by a second and a third.
This is jazz! And jazz is wonderfully weird! That’s its greatest beauty and appeal. Eleven tracks, eleven different faces, defined of course by eleven different musical “conductors”. And among those eleven there’s a twelfth: the maximally flexible one, at times mischievous and flighty, yet “highly perceptive” throughout, and incredibly sparkling in its resourceful elasticity. That’s the “baton” of Samo Šalamon, keeping a watchful eye over how the album unfolds. The record favors clean, semi-acoustic and acoustic guitar tones. Most tracks keep up an extremely pleasing receptiveness – a high level of listenability, even though they’re loaded with atonal figures in the guitar work and jazz improvisation. That matters a lot in a sonic landscape that tolerates hiding behind all sorts of effects and the special effects of “studio trickery”. Even though Samo was stitching things together and his inbox was buzzing the whole time as mp3 files flew back and forth, the album speaks in a super lively, dynamic, organic and thoroughly honest three-dimensional way.
Let’s look at the material. The track titles are a subtle but solid first orientation, offering a very useful preview of how each piece develops and what character it has. The album “explodes” in an especially fun way with “Seven Cats”. Serbian guitarist Dušan Jevtović steps into the focal point here, repeatedly and deliberately lurching into mood upheavals in a way that doesn’t skimp on rough phrasing at all. Samo added some rhythmic scaffolding in places – drums, plus Moog and mandolin. He played the guitars through various effects as needed, deepening the desired character of each mood by contrast. That also produced noticeable shifts in character between the tracks. In this respect “Seven Cats” is particularly interesting – at times eerie, dark, bristling, hair-raising, and especially reflecting instincts, passions and unexpected mood swings that, despite the concise conducting, come across almost with the glow of spontaneity. In this one of the album’s most interesting tracks, the two guitarists even imitate cats meowing through their interwoven solos, reaching a peak in the final crescendo.
After the playful, mischievous “Miss Sarcasm”, which in some distant parallel even conjures up the “Frippological” character of atonal phrasing, an eclectic collision of rock and jazz (Alex Machacek guests on it), the follow-up “Nightmare” twists the album’s atmosphere into a whole new niche. This is a track that teases both cerebrally and psychedelically. The contrasting switch between a line of heavily “reverbed 3D” soloing and its completely “clean” continuation feels especially good. An exploratory piece driven by the sensuality of Samo and Polish guest Rafal Sarnecki, it ends theatrically – with a repeating tone imitating a morning alarm. It’s a darker moment on the album and definitely a track that, like “Seven Cats”, stands apart from the rest. From there the album speaks more easygoing, lighter, in softer sonic pastels. Such is “Crosswijk” (it’s a Turkish neighborhood in Amsterdam) – from there Samo invited Turkish jazz guitarist Cenk Erdogan to solo, and he laid down a gorgeous, vivid solo on fretless guitar. This serenity and ease, despite the atonally inclined figures, carries on through “Awkwardly Placed” and also “Coalition of the Mistaken”, but only up to the last third, where the listener is provoked by deliberate experimental fragmentation that briefly flirts with the adventurism of free jazz. “Looking Back” is the longest composition and still extremely listenable. What fascinates here is the remarkable interplay of soloing – superb duels between the guitars of Samo and guest Jacob Young, which will especially reward the more demanding fans of guitar jazz shenanigans. The two musicians more than obviously caught the right moment when the chemistry kicked in, serving up a thrilling execution of a snaking slalom of lightning-fast contemplation and improvisational inspiration.
A tune that stands out and is more – let’s just say straight-up cool-jazz in design – is the track “Monked”. You guessed it. It’s a kind of tribute to Thelonious Monk. The pairing of Samo Šalamon and Swiss guitarist Philipp Schaufelberger will shoot you back to the days when Art Blakey, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck and co. roamed the planet. Of everything here, the track sounds the most retro and traditionally jazz. The album closes with the mystical, yearning Northern Wind, into which Greek guitarist Spiros Exaras blends delicately with his softness.
If you want to be fully occupied with listening to music and surrounded by the luxury of information radiating from the contemporary jazz artistry of the eleven tracks on “Almost Alone Vol. 1”, Samo Šalamon remains the brilliant address for that kind of adventure. Once again, there’s no shortage of fresh praise. Seriously. This is a thrillingly ignited project, brimming with free-spirited expressionism, yet it keeps a high degree of accessibility. Even for those of you who don’t primarily follow jazz.
So the second and third parts of the “Almost Alone” project, planned for next year, are already eagerly awaited from Samo and his jazz comrades. If this album was recorded between May and September this year and then released at the end of October, it’s clear the next two parts will be here soon. Samo is an incredibly well-organized D.I.Y. wizard, which is one of the key elements in how he manages to churn out so much new and, above all, seriously high-quality music year after year.
Interestingly, this album doesn’t really know free jazz at all. There are just enough experimental snippets with the resulting motif fragmentation to keep teasingly stoking the fire of the record’s artistic passion in all the right places. “Almost Alone Vol. 1” is an exceptionally pleasant adventure that keeps enriching and rewarding the listener with every spin in the CD player. Along the way it delivers a multitude of different faces of contemporary jazz expression, with elements of classical music brilliantly slipped in, and in little breaths even folk and rock.
Above all of the above, though, what fascinates is Šalamon’s unbridled artistic genius, boldly and provocatively thrown into a vivid transformation of many roles. These are the manifestation of achieving an incredibly effective, conciliatory and dynamic symbiosis with eleven entities of different character. The flexibility and highly intelligent musical insight with which Samo is constantly on the lookout, and with which he juggles so skillfully, are incredible. All while continually loosening up, shaping and adapting his arranging maneuvers. The very temperament of the musicians brings inherent differences to the expressive character of the tracks, not to mention the differences in how each guest approaches the magic of jazz and music in general. In short, let the first part of Šalamon’s new, vivid and boundlessly free-spirited jazz adventure begin!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Miss Sarcasm (feat. Alex Machacek) (04:21)
2. Nightmare (feat. Rafal Sarnecki) (07:00)
3. Crooswijk (feat. Cenk Erdogan) (06:06)
4. Awkwardly Placed (feat. Andre Fernandes) (05:12)
5. Coalition of the Mistaken (feat. Kalle Kalima) (05:22)
6. Looking Back (feat. Jacob Young) (09:38)
7. Seagulls in Maine (feat. Albert Vila) (05:56)
8. Seven Cats (feat. Dusan Jevtovic) (05:22)
9. Not Too Late, Not Too Soon (feat. Lorenzo Di Maio) (05:08)
10. Monked (feat. Philipp Schaufelberger) (03:50)
11. Northern Wind (feat. Spiros Exaras) (06:12)
Musicians:
Samo Šalamon – electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin, Moog
Alex Machacek – electric and acoustic guitars
Rafal Sarnecki – electric guitars
Cenk Erdogan – “fretless” guitar
Andre Fernandes – electric guitar
Kalle Kalima – electric guitars
Jacob Young – electric guitar
Albert Vila – electric guitar
Dušan Jevtović – electric guitar
Lorenzo Di Maio – electric guitar
Philipp Schaufelberger – electric guitar
Spiros Exaras – electric and “slide” guitar
