Label: Confront

Derek Baileyのカンパニーへの参加でも知られるSteve Beresford、ブリティッシュ・ドラマーMark Sanders、ダブルベース・プレイヤーPierpaolo Martino、このトリオの2024年8月13日のセッションを捉えた英Confrontからの音盤。プリペアド・ピアノ、オブジェ、エレクトロニクスを操るSteve Beresfordの存在感が素晴らしく、45分間に及ぶ親しみやすくエネルギッシュな内容ながら限界に挑戦したアグレッシヴな形態が素晴らしい。自身らのアイデアをストレートに、時にノイズやエレクトロニクスを駆使しながら練り上げた濃密な2パート。



Steve Beresford: prepared piano, electronics, objects
Pierpaolo Martino: double bass, electronics
Mark Sanders: drums

Live recording by Francesco Napoletano
Bari in Jazz Festival
Minareto di Fasano
13 August 2024

Double bass-player Pierpaolo Martino has worked with Steve Beresford in the past, as part of the trio, Frequency Disasters. Together with drummer, Valentina Magaletti, they’ve already had two albums released on Confront Recordings. Here, on B-Smart, they’re working together, again as a trio, but this time with drummer Mark Sanders.

The result is forty-five minutes of very approachable, high-energy music: jazz-based, certainly, but pushing limits. Grooves are established, ideas elaborated, sometimes more straightforwardly, at others, drawing on noise and electronics. The titles of the two tracks at first put me in mind of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, but, on reflection, it seems more likely that they refer to the quote from John Milton Pullman took his title from. Milton’s ‘dark materials’ are the raw, chaotic, and unformed matter from which the God of Paradise Lost forged the world: