BORAH BERGMAN & STEFANO PASTOR / Live at Tortona
Borah Bergman (piano); Stefano Pastor (violin)
The five pieces on this recording highlight Bergman's amazing ability to have each hand go its own way. Instead of accompaniment and melody, what one hears are often two completely different melodic lines being played simultaneously. Stefano Pastor¹s style of playing the violin is strongly based on an imaginative reworking of bop wind instruments¹ language. A great deal of experimentation led him to re-consider the set-up of his instrument. Pastor has re-strung his violin with extremely rigid electric guitar strings to obtain a heavy sound, allowing his violin and the way he plays it to speak like a wind instrument with breath and power.
The resulting music is sometimes rasping, sometimes lyrical, a not rarely prodigious dialogue between the piano and the violin, with Bergman¹s hands running about on the keyboard producing cascades of notes, each with an exact, determined precision with its own very limpid specific weight. Pastor plays the game wonderfully, intervening with his violin with its sanded, gravelly, very earthy sound. This CD was recorded on July 1st, 2007 at the Jazz Fuori Tema Festival in Tortona, Italy.
TRACK LIST
Spirit Song (10:52)
When Autumn Comes (6:44)
Wellspring (5:51)
Crescent (3:20)
The Mighty Oak (16:37)
REVIEWS
Bergman's piano and Stefano Pastor's violin truly "make music together", though it's not for "tame listeners"... your ears need to be open to the spirit of improvisation in order to enjoy this. Those (like me) who want something different will find this one of the more challenging listens this year... Borah's expressed sentiment about his keyboard playing is that "each hand can go in its own way when it wants to"... though many pianists want that to happen, few are able to make it happen without sounding like a train wreck. There was a fellow (many years ago) named Greg Goodman who came close to Bergman's skill level, but clearly there is no one in my recent listening experience who can play this "disjointedly" and still make the visions mesh as seamlessly as this gent. When you pair that up with Stefano's interjectory strings, you'll realize that there is be-bop available that ain't "just the same old thing". I was especially attracted to the second track, "When Autumn Comes", probably because of the strong chords that make it "sound like regular jazz", but it was the marvelous duo on "Crescent" that totally captured me... Pastor's strings almost sound like a horn (something the liners say he intended)... for the uninitiated, this may remind them of what the inside of a terrorist's thoughts might sound like, but for those who want innovation in their sonic adventures, this is the cat's meow! I rate it MOST HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, & award it an "EQ" (energy quotient) rating of 4.85... high end pandemonium, no doubt!
Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic
I've never been all that happy about duos where one person's name gets printed bigger than the other's, ever since I found out a few years ago that Max Roach once apparently got paid fifteen times as much as Randy Weston for a concert they gave together at a local festival (nor have I ever understood why two people doing the same job for the same company can earn wildly differing salaries – one of reasons I suppose why I never became a Wall Street trader, though I can think of plenty of others). OK, so pianist extraordinaire Borah Bergman is the better known of these two, but Stefano Pastor's muscular violin playing (normal strings aren't tough enough for him, so he uses guitar strings instead, which explains that thick, heavy sound) is just as impressive in these five tracks – three Bergman compositions, two free improvisations – recorded at the Jazz Fuori Tema festival in Tortona, Italy (the local church clock strikes from time to time, punctuating "The Mighty Oak" beautifully and rounding off "When Autumn Comes" in style).
Though he's often compared to Cecil Taylor – an occupational hazard for any free jazz pianist, I guess, but such comparisons are pointless, as nobody really sounds like Taylor – Bergman, to quote Chris Kelsey's bio of him over at AMG, cites Tristano, Monk and Powell as formative influences. But his playing has never been as overtly Monkish as Misha Mengelberg's, nor as boppy and linear as Powell and Tristano's. The one thing that invariably gets mentioned when discussing Bergman is his ferocious ambidexterity: freed from its tiresome traditional role as harmonic bookmark, the left hand goes ballistic, frequently crossing over the other one to action-paint the upper octaves, leaving the right hand to carry the tunes. And tunes they are, anchoring the music, no matter stormy it gets out in the harbour, to a clear tonal centre. Pastor is the perfect partner here: this music simply wouldn't work with a more, umm, avant garde fiddler. Like Leroy Jenkins and Michel Samson, he's a melodic player first and foremost, and one I hope to hear more of in the years to come – and see get equal billing with whoever he plays with. What a terrific album this is.
Pianist Borah Bergman’s signature style employs both hands with dizzying ambidexterity. Bergman’s rigorous practice routine creates what he calls ambi-ideation: “each hand can go in its own way when it wants to.” His ambitious improvisations are equally freed from technical and ideological constraints. Although steeped in bebop and post-bop traditional styles, Bergman can also let rip cacophonous free jazz with the best shredders out there.
Bergman is joined by violinist Stefano Pastor for a 2007 live date in Tortona, Italy. Three compositions by Bergman, and two duo improvisations, underline the pianist’s dualistic division of labor between honeyed bebop and frenetic free playing. Some passages of his composition “Spirit Song” adopt a balladic lyricism imparted with yearning, sostenuto beauty; elsewhere, he prefers dissonant runs and bellicose clusters. “Wellspring” incorporates the blindingly fast uptempo harmonic changes of bop with a hyperambidexterity that makes the listener apt to do a double take, checking the liner notes to see if this is for piano four-hands.
Pastor proves a worthy foil for Bergman. Apt to bend a pitch rather than leave it statically squared in the middle, he revels in microtones and attacks bravura passages with an acid-toned eschewal of neo-romanticism. Like the pianist, he is steeped in traditional jazz styles, but is able both to adopt and, in turn, parody their conventions with equal believability. A baldly triadic passage in “Spirit Song” finds Pastor lampooning simple major-chord arpeggios before setting off on a skittering chromatic solo – one envisions an impish grin on the violinist’s face. On “Wellspring,” he matches Bergman sixteenth note for sixteenth note down the breakneck home stretch of the piece’s climax. His violin keens cantorially on the effervescent set-closer the “Mighty Oak,” providing a sinuous pedal against Bergman’s cadenza-like riffs. One hopes that this is merely the beginning of a series of collaborations for this formidable pair.
Piano and violin duets are quite rare in jazz, but this album shows that the format has something to offer. This duo is even more unusual because of the two musicians' idiosyncratic styles. Although considered a free jazz pianist, Bergman actually makes an amalgam of musical styles, being as versatile in classical modes (as on the last track), ragtime, blues, accompaniment for silent movies, romantic moments and pounding and swirling avant-garde. Not only does he do it all in one piece often, but even with both hands playing in different styles and epochs. And the great thing, he infuses his music with the occasional hint and moment of humor. Stefano Pastor is also in a different category: he plays the violin but the "voice" that he gives his instrument is unique: it sounds deep and full, something holding the middle between a clarinet and a soprano. I wondered before how he achieved this, and the liner notes solve part of the mystery : he uses "extremely rigid electric guitar strings" on his violin, which, with lots of practice, made him achieve this warm sound. His tone is more melancholy than Bergman's, yet it forms the perfect complement for the piano, and the way both musicians interact, dance around each other, mirror phrases and co-create, is a joy to hear. While their journey on this album indeed covers lots of ground, it still has a great balance between relatively accessible and "out there" moments, and maintaining a nice sense of intimacy all through the performance. The sudden sounds of the local church bell gives it an extra dimension of closeness and proximity.
Massimo Ricci, Temporary Fault
Italy is again heavily involved in this superb set featuring bionic-fingered Bergman (77 this year…) and a violinist from Genoa, a big surprise for yours truly who never met him previously. Pastor’s style is a cross of sorts between Stephane Grappelli and Don “Sugarcane” Harris, born from an extensive period of experimentation culminated in the adoption of hard-tension electric guitar strings on the violin, thus obtaining a hoarse kind of sound which recalls those wind instruments from which Stefano was principally influenced during the formative years. This doesn’t detract from the astonishing poignancy that those lines evoke, chains of call-and-response jewels with Bergman literally touching the soul’s deepest depths. The pianist is obviously his usual extraordinary self, the legendary independence of the hands generating coordinated movement halfway through a Nancarrow piano roll and the purest poetry that the human ear can listen to. He seems to wander carelessly along the keyboard at supersonic speed then, all of a sudden, lets us realize that an eye had been left open, masterfully returning to the tune’s foundation with supreme nonchalance sprayed with unequalled technical elevation. A welcome extra presence in the recording is the local bell tower, whose tolling appears several times to add further magic to the duo’s exchanges. Ultimately, it’s the strong logic of insightful personal research shared by the couple that allows this music to shine, placing Live At Tortona at the inner edges of an elite neighbourhood.
