Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Šalamon, Samo
Label: Clean Feed Records
Release: 2018
Length: 58:29
Rating: 4/5
So what’s our Samo Šalamon been up to these days? Soaking up fresh musical challenges, again and again. The man, who’s considered one of the most revered jazz guitar heroes of the new generation, who racks up glowing reviews around the world and keeps collecting praise, just keeps grinding. Creating, crafting. And he’s inspired. The inspiration isn’t fading. He only recently put out a new album with the renowned harmonica player Howard Levy, and here’s already another one, forged under the direction of his boundless musical vision. Samo is once again the commander-in-chief.
This time he’s put together a jazz trio without a bass guitar: (tenor and alto) saxophone, guitar and drums. And he’s invited along a couple of his old pals and friends! That’s saxophonist Tony Malaby and drummer Roberto Dani. So the guys have crossed paths a few times in the past, recorded a dozen-odd pieces of good jazz together, and as a result know each other really well. On stage, as far as chemistry goes, a glance is enough, a tiny nudge from a small gesture – that’s how well these three musicians communicate and sense each other. Listen up! It was April 2017. The trio’s gig in Ravne na Koroškem. There was only one single shot at it, and what you hear on this album was played live on stage. In one take, as part of a one-of-a-kind concert performance.
What’s interesting is that, despite the fact that the main visionary Samo Šalamon is once again behind the conductor’s baton, the guitarist isn’t even front and center on this record – instead it’s saxophonist Tony Malaby who keeps taking the initiative (at least gently) throughout the album. Samo mostly paints in the background. Often with an extreme hailstorm of rapid-fire bursts of notes, and his painting is constantly active and vivid, since Samo uses both clean and distorted guitar sound. That kind of effected sound also comes in handy when he fills the part of the soundscape where the low tones rule. The guitar can also completely smear the space of the background soundscape with a thick fog of distortion, and then it’s distanced in the background and colors the drums. In Grey Matter, in a calmer passage, the band serves up incredible subtlety and playful softness, the sensual communication of the trio gets even more intense, with all three instruments able to speak so gently at the same time. Malaby is out front here, sure, but Dani and Samo remain very much noticeable, creating a contrasting rhythmic and musical platform with an extremely interesting development. Any saxophonist in an improvising passage can only wish for that kind of instrumental backing.
The band revels in boundless freedom. No limits. Not even the sky sets limits for Samo. We’ve quietly gotten used to this kind of musical authenticity from Samo. That each of his musical stories is a chapter of its own and a blank sheet of paper, and that the music and idea of every album will take you who knows where, sweetly shock you and charmingly surprise you. At every turn. »Traveling Moving Breathing« leaves the same feelings behind. Samo’s guitar and Malaby’s sax often join in criss-crossing dialogues, weaving sequences of tonal progressions one after another, while Roberto Dani, of course, fully lets loose on his drum kit in those passages. The two musicians can come together in splitting up simultaneously played lines that each of them picks freely, with feeling and intuition (Moving Target). Then the situation suddenly flips and Samo »sneaks« up beside Dani and follows the drummer’s improvising experiments with low tones, while Malaby steps into the center of the story, all on his own, blowing things up at will in improvisational acrobatics. The album moves from solid, tangible parts of motivic formatting to moments that of course smell of free jazz, but the band doesn’t overdo it and doesn’t veer into excessive loosening up, which means they keep the red thread running through the playing.
This album is a shade lighter and more accessible than, say, last year’s »The Colour Suite« by the Samo Šalamon Sextet, which has more polish, but let’s be honest. There’s twice as many musicians there. This time we have a jazz conglomerate of just three instruments, which feelingly open up creative space for solos to one another in a gigantic expanse. And that space, even though it’s created by only three instruments, they use more than satisfactorily. That sweetly adventurous spatial boundlessness emerges, which all three keep creating in their playing. With every burst of full-blooded inspiration, as they (almost instinctively) step onto new and new fields of improvisational experience. The reactivity is outstanding. The responsiveness. The moment one of the trio drifts away motivically, the other two musicians deftly »catch« him, »catch up«, and the track »sails off« toward a new (undiscovered) sphere, so the way things unfold on the album is constantly totally unexpected and gives a feeling of spontaneity. So this wide-open space means the trio could easily have integrated another instrument or two.
But the whole point of the record is precisely the »bass-less trio« format, the get-together of old friends and the full-blooded enjoyment of fusing three musical worlds, which in the activity of these three musicians co-create and build the image of modern jazz. That’s how a one-of-a-kind conglomerate came about, yet another exceptionally beautiful piece of work and achievement of Samo’s genius and his musical openness. It’s built on a triangle of extremely effective chemistry in their interactions, big moves in the playing that speak unpretentiously and totally relaxed. The result is an album that will thrill all fans of Samo’s exploits so far, and demanding music gourmets in general, who are looking for the unusual, and in that unusualness, generated by exceptional ease, sensitivity, intuitive perception and most often sheer instinct, constant musical provocation. A new accomplishment of great merit, which first and foremost thrills and entertains, and that’s the essence of its point. And the best part is the realization that Samo won’t stop here and probably already has a pile of ideas for new and new musical collaborations in his head. Samo is thus not only one of the most interesting guitar heroes in the world of jazz right now, but also one of the most active ones, who in his generation actually drive the world jazz machinery forward and upward with a clearly visible and striking intensity.
Lineup
Tony Malaby – alto and tenor saxophone
Samo Šalamon – guitar
Roberto Dani – drums
Production
Samo Šalamon
Tracklist
1. Dephony (06:02)
2. Moving Target (06:04)
3. Breathing (06:34)
4. Grey Matter (09:12)
5. Traveling Without Motion (06:14)
6. Too Much (04:02)
7. Kei’s Dream (07:42)
8. Arnold (08:04)
9. Pedro Is Clean (04:26)
