Ivo Perelman Celebrates 25th Anniversary
of Recording With the Release of Reverie -
Available on September 23 via Leo Records
"...One might fear that tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman may begin to repeat himself. To put it succinctly - not a chance." - All About Jazz
For most artists, the chance to mark the silver anniversary of a recording career - as the tenor saxophone marvel Ivo Perelman does on his new album, Reverie -
would involve a look back at the various styles and milestones that
have marked the last quarter-century. It would perhaps include the
participation of guest artists who have contributed to that period
(during which the Brazilian-born Perelman has released more than 50
albums under his own name). A 25-year anniversary offers the chance for
all sorts of majestic efforts to tie together that period with the
advantage of hindsight.
But
Perelman is an artist who keeps his sights trained on the steps ahead,
not the path behind, and accordingly, his silver-anniversary recording
features him in tandem with an artist he had never played with before,
and in fact had never met until just before their studio session. As
Grammy® Award-winning jazz authority Neil Tesser writes in the liner
notes to Reverie: "If you were expecting a grand
retrospective, a summation of all the artistic threads and spikes of the
preceding quarter-century, you've come to the wrong guy and the wrong
place. Ivo doesn't do nostalgia."
And Perelman doesn't trade in the comfortable or conventional, either, as shown by his decision to record this album with Karl Berger,
the storied pianist, vibraphonist, composer, and musical activist,
whose Creative Music Workshop - founded with Ornette Coleman in 1971 in
Woodstock, New York - has remained a magnet for musical iconoclasts and
visionary artists to this day. But despite Berger's history of
championing transformative ideas and innovative techniques - two phrases
that accurately describe Perelman's own work - the two had never met,
or even spoken, until plans for Reverie got under way.
Berger had heard Perelman's name, but never his music; for his part, the
saxophonist had once heard a Berger recording, and was well aware of
his place in the development of modern music. Still, he had never
considered teaming up with Berger until, he says, "I was talking to
another musician, and he mentioned being a big fan of Karl Berger, and
so I got in touch with him to talk about a couple of projects. These
things didn't all work out, but we did get the duo happening."
"Happening" doesn't begin to cover the level of interaction and synergy that marks Reverie. The
album is, if not unique, then certainly quite unusual among the spate
of albums that have marked Perelman's current creative burst (during
which he has released nearly 20 titles in this decade alone). Reverie juggles
and re-orders the elements that make up any Perelman project. These
include the hyper-expressivity and expanded technique of his tenor
playing, with its controlled excursions into other-worldly registers of
the instrument that most other saxophonists visit only for haphazard
effect; his ability to transform the instrument into either a gruff and
guttural warrior or a transcendent poet; and the split-second
switchbacks from mood to mood and tempo to tempo that can only arise in
an atmosphere of total freedom. (As is always the case with Perelman, he
entered the studio without any written music or even a pre-session
discussion about where each improvisation might lead. In fact, he and
Berger met for the first time at the studio, says Perelman: "I shook his
hand five minutes before we went to record.")
It
is Berger's presence, and his philosophy of performance, that re-orders
these elements into an unusually spacious Perelman album. In comparison
to the pianists Perelman has worked with in the past, he explains,
"Karl is more 'European' - more romantic, I think you can say - and so
I'm not playing my usual 'fire-breathing.' The music asked for something
else. And I'm a slave of the music - a conveyor of the emotions that
are happening."
The
"European" aspect that Perelman refers is a lyricism grounded in
Berger's use of space, and it elicits a serene centeredness in the
saxophonist's own playing - a phenomenon that Berger himself is well
aware of. "People can much more strongly express their individuality if
they're looking not just at what they play, but at what they don't play,"
Berger points out. He anticipates a further evolution of this
interplay: "My feeling with Ivo is that there's a grand potential for
him to go further even than in this album. I'm looking forward to
arriving at another place with him. If you really edit yourself down to
the essentials, it brings the listener in. If you leave silences for the
listener to play in their own mind, it answers what you do; if you leave more and more space, then more and more the listener can come back and react, and feel closer."
"Active
and passive - the meeting of two minds that are open and humble enough
to cover each other's lexicon," Perelman says of this date. "And I know
Karl was very happy about it, too: he was dancing in the studio." By
allowing Berger's relative minimalism with his own expansive
"fire-breathing," Ivo Perelman has produced one of the most unusual and
accessible albums in his monumental catalog - a startling (but typically
iconoclastic) way of launching the second quarter-century of his
recording career.
Born
in 1961 in São Paulo, Brazil, Perelman was a child prodigy on classical
guitar; entranced by the cool jazz saxophonists Stan Getz and Paul
Desmond, he soon moved to the tenor saxophone. Entering the famed
Berklee College of Music in 1981, he first studied the mainstream
masters of the instrument, to the exclusion of such pioneering
avant-gardists as Albert Ayler, Peter Brötzmann, and John Coltrane - all
of whom would later be cited as precedents for Perelman's own explosive
and ear-stretching technique. Within two years, however, Perelman found
his studies confusingly unsatisfying; leaving Berklee, he moved to Los
Angeles, where he discovered his penchant for post-structure
improvisation. At jam sessions, he recalls, "I would go berserk, just
playing my own thing." Emboldened by this approach, Perelman began to
research the free-jazz saxists who had come before him, arriving at a
more nuanced understanding of his place in this lineage.
In
1989 Perelman recorded the first of more than 50 albums now under his
own name, featuring a number of mainstream and Brazilian jazz musicians,
and a program comprising traditional Brazilian folk melodies. But even
then, he recalls "moments of real free playing, and I decided I liked
it." In the early 90s he moved to the more inviting artistic milieu of
New York, where he lives to this day, often working with in a small
coterie of collaborators that include pianist Matthew Shipp, bassists
William Parker and Joe Morris, drummer Gerald Cleaver, and violist Mat
Maneri. In recent years, Perelman has undertaken immersive study of
music written for the natural trumpet - the instrument used before the
invention of trumpet valves - so as to apply techniques used on that
instrument to gain even more command of the squeaky-high altissimo range, of which he is already the reigning master in modern music.
Ivo Perelman · Reverie
Leo Records · Release Date: September 23, 2014
For more information on IVO PERELMAN, please visit: IvoPerelman.com
For media information, please contact:
DL Media · 610-667-0501
Matthew Jurasek · matt@dlmediamusic.com
Greg Angiolillo · greg@dlmediamusic.com
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