Label: Samo Records
Release date: 2021
Production: Samo Šalamon
Album length: 52.18 min
Genre: Contemporary Jazz
Rating: 9.0/10
The string dancers teaming up this time for a challenging and downright singular aural adventure in contemporary jazz idioms go by the names Samo Šalamon and Hasse Poulsen. Two acoustic guitars intertwined, in a contemplation of dancing twists and turns. Both with a pile of schooling behind them, loaded with vast technical know-how and the keenly exploratory spirit of improvisational adventurism, and above all, this is a meeting of two seriously different musical characters, expressive entities who, hanging out together, keep daring each other with a dose of bold audacity and complementing each other creatively. That’s exactly what they bring with the album »String Dancers«, a new musical one-of-a-kind.
A lot has been said about Samo Šalamon. But it’s never too much. And not just that. There’s never enough said about Samo. Why? He’s one of the most active Slovenian musicians. Not just right now, but for the past several years. And on the international jazz scene at that. He creates and records. Non stop. He puts out as many as three albums a year. Especially now that ‘lockdown’ is becoming the new social norm, a kind of abnormal normal, and proper live gigs are hard to come by. But that frees up time for creating. Music. Inspiration comes from elsewhere, not necessarily from gigs and snapshots from tours.
Hasse Poulsen is already a true legend in Denmark on the contemporary jazz scene, and beyond. Samo’s idea of making an album of improvisations together is, right from the starting point, a generator of the one-of-a-kind musical adventure this album embodies
The creative process went something like this. Each of them wrote a few compositions or sketches (lead motifs), which they swapped by sending files back and forth, filling in the missing parts as they went. At home, in home studios. The two of them made the album very quickly. Through last June and June. Like I said. Under ‘isolation’ conditions, and yet the process felt very natural and stimulating, since each one’s ideas creatively challenged the other’s talent. The flow of information in both directions was boiling. That way they got past many an seemingly insurmountable obstacle, which through clever solutions reached a new expressive level. A new reach. The language of free-spinning guitar kinetics of jazz improvisation.
The album is definitely set up as an improvisational interweaving of two guitar figures with a contemporary jazz character. Throughout, neoclassical touches are strongly present, and at moments world music too. The motifs are solid and compact, even though in development they reach a feeling of ‘lightness’, since they by no means worm their way into your ear, but thanks to amusing, challenging, often playfully tuned atonal figures, they keep the ‘consumer’ of this music teasingly entertained and engaged. The solutions, or the core of the compositions, thus give the listener constant followability. No weird outbursts, no avant-garde escapes, no fragmenting. Even when the whole thing drifts off toward the choppier waters of avant-jazz weirdness, the two musicians, like seasoned tightrope walkers, catch themselves at that point of ‘falling apart’ and bring the moment where you can smell potential chaos brewing back to a state of sailing calm waters of chosen motifs. In a brilliantly complementary balance between a note of carefree, free-spinning, freedom-loving dance of improvisations that coexist in tune within motif frameworks. A fascinating dictation that speaks with a note of ‘expect the unexpected’.
You can actually even hear a ‘slip’ across the strings in the style of John McLaughlin from the period when he hung out with Paco De Lucia and Al Di Meola (e.g. Soft Grass). In short. This album will thrill anyone who’s into instrumental guitar playing of strictly acoustic, organic pastels. Definitely challengingly colorful maneuvers of improvisation, but with constantly followable compositional figures. On equal terms. No one guitar dominating the other. Complementing and fulfilling. Eclectic and, as I’ve hinted a few times in this essay, endlessly charming.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Ultra Serieux
2. Austrian Lake
3. Coverless
4. Two Sides of a Mountain
5. Sometimes a Bird
6. Free Noses
7. Soft Grass
8. String Dancers
9. Mind Fuel
10. Cornering
11. The Scent of Rain
12. A Word We Heard
Lineup:
Hasse Poulsen – acoustic guitar
Samo Šalamon – six- and twelve-string acoustic guitar
