Browse by Artist: BERGMAN/LOL COXHILL/PAUL HESSION, BORAH

Artist:	BERGMAN/LOL COXHILL/PAUL HESSION, BORAH
Title:	Acts of Love
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17519

Borah Bergman (piano); Lol Coxhill (soprano saxophone); Paul Hession ((percussion). "With a unique, two-handed approach that dispenses with the traditional notion of piano playing as competing or interlocking lines, Borah Bergman deals with sound as mass, great chilly bergs or hot flows of magma that change shape as different layers flow against one another, hardening and melting at different rates. By contrast, Lol Coxhill is a singer, a chanticleer on the dunghill of the city or on the rooftree of your house, a head full of old songs and the harmonic codes to transform them. The simplest difference may be that Coxhill comes from a jazz tradition, never more communicative than when playing changes and subverting a saccharine show-tune, while Bergman, for all his deep understanding of blues, boogie-woogie, swing, bebop, comes from somewhere else, classical, cantorial, exclamatory, De profundis clamavi . . .What unites them, though, even beyond the astonishing lingua franca of improvisation, is the idea of music as a kind of labour. Both seem to inhabit an old European ideal, anti-romantic and the toughest creative path there is, that subordinates the idea of works, perfect icons of expression ready for admiring consumption, to the idea of work, a physical, mental and moral effort that has ritual at one end of its spectrum and entertainment away at the other. These are hugely enjoyable pieces; they also have an element of ritual to them; but at their core is something much more profound and constantly evolving."

Previous Page Index of Artists Next Page