For anyone tuned into jazz, contemporary composition, outernational, improvised and experimental music over the last several decades, the AngelicA Festival in Bologna has stood as a beacon for legendary performances and landmark recordings. Its legacy is as expansive as it is enduring: from the personally foundational—Cecil Taylor’s At AngelicA 2000 Bologna , a double-CD documenting his Dance of All Seasons for piano and voice, including a bonus disc interweaving an insightful interview with performance excerpts—to the carnivalesque and theatrical—Tristan Honsinger’s This That And The Other performing Sketches of Probability , where swing and storytelling finally embody the transcendental aspect of absurdity. Then there’s the controversial—MIMEO’s The Hands of Caravaggio , a decisive and accidentally divisive live recording by the experimental electronic ensemble coordinated by Keith Rowe and featuring pianist John Tilbury; the monumentally historic—Eyvind Kang’s Athlantis, blending Renaissance texts with contemporary awe-meets-woe sonic grandeur; and the ecstatically fantastical—Ilaiyaraaja’s Music Journey, a wild ride through Carnatic rhythms paired with polyphonic counterpoint that shimmers like stained glass in an earthquake. Even for the profoundly illustrious Ilaiyaraaja, this was a career-altering moment: his first-ever live performance of his own work, opening up an entirely new realm of his practice. AngelicA is thick with a tradition of supporting contemporary developments at the forefront of musical thinking, where virtuosity and vision viscerally intersect in lived emotion.
Most of the concerts take place in Bologna at the festival’s headquarters: an old theater on a busy street in the university district. It’s about a twenty-minute walk from where I’m staying, and I pass more than a hundred bars and restaurants along the way—everything from intimate Italian fine dining to al fresco pizzerias, casual ramen and phở joints, and multiple takeout spots specializing in Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Chinese and, what else, Bolognese tagliatelle and tortellini. Walking back after the first concert, I thought I’d never seen so many college students drinking in the street. But that was a Wednesday; I hadn’t yet seen a Friday night.
The Teatro San Leonardo has a rich and winding history. Originally built in the 14th century and functioning as a church for centuries, it was damaged during World War II and reemerged in the 1960s as a hub for political theater. It remained a theater through several changes of ownership before becoming, in 2011, the home of the Centro di Ricerca Musicale—the headquarters of the AngelicA Festival. The stage inside is high, nearly a meter, with a few crumbling statues tucked into wall alcoves. Assigned seating and modern lighting coexist swimmingly within the lingering historic atmosphere. On nice days, drinks are served in an adjacent garden—though no beverages are allowed in the hall during performances.
The audience tends to be unusually devoted. A Greek man told me he’s
attended every festival since its inception. Another, from Florence, said
that even if the same ensemble plays in his hometown, he still prefers to
hear them here, because something about this space elicits their best. I’ve
noticed a healthy mix in the crowd: older women attending in small, chatty
friend groups; scatterings of loner students; black heavy metal
t-shirt-wearing aficionados; and the occasional intrepid tourist on a
pilgrimage (not just me!). It’s the kind of crowd that listens closely, and
the music earns that attention.
April 30, 2025
Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna
TWO forrrrr AngelicA
In proper there-is-no-beginning-and-there-is-no-end fashion, Charlemagne Palestine initiated a light, drifting drone from some small electric organs that leaked into the atmosphere of the theatre before the concert had “officially” begun, and before I was even consciously aware of sound beyond ambience. It was as if it had always been there, and only the turning on of awareness made its presence felt. When Massimo Simonini came out to introduce the festival, Palestine turned down his sound slightly, then raised it back up—suggesting we were always already within the concert experience, the boundaries deliberately blurred between formal presentation and atmospheric presence. The first section of the duo featured his small organs prominently, generating a continual misty, spritzy drone-wash that rose like the essence of ethereal aethers.
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| Charlemagne Palestine & Rhys Chatham |
The visual dynamic between the performers proved immediately striking. Rhys Chatham focused on movements that made no discernible sonic impact, the opposite of watching a '90s laptopist: where electronic performers once made few gestures while producing torrents of sound, Chatham made elaborate gestures yielding little audible result. Had I not seen him on stage engaged in obscure manipulations, I might have thought this was Palestine's solo performance. After lengthy fuzz, Palestine moved to the piano (dolce contra forte) and played two clear notes, squared. Following a pause, more discrete sounds emerged—variations on the two-note sequence that collided like smoke rings in slow motion. In my mind I had thought of Palestine as a spiritually playful minimalist, but I heard him talking after the concert and he disparaged any association with minimalism. He said he wanted to assassinate the term and called it a malady, rightly identifying the term's primary purpose as commercial rather than artistic. Focused would be more accurate: his intense oscillations of overtones permeated the space.
Chatham, however, I couldn’t figure out. His fingers were hitting the strings of his electric guitar, but what sounds were they producing? I have to assume he was contributing to the ambient hum that hovered within the music. Then came some palpable puffs on an alto flute, soon looped and muffled to the point of disappearance. The resulting soundscape resembled a thick shake that refused to stir—not because the music was too dense, but because it moved too slowly to swirl properly. Palestine’s repetitions and micro-modifications were aurally fascinating, though he seemed to want more from his collaborator. Chatham’s flute eventually blew some bubbles into the coagulating smoothie.
The interpersonal dynamic between them was compelling. Chatham looked at Palestine the way Cecil Taylor studied Anthony Braxton during their first duo in London in 2007 – but unlike that encounter, these two have performed together before, though not in a decade. At one moment, Palestine concluded an incredible stream of clustered overtones with a flourish and looked to Chatham for a response; nothing coming, Palestine started anew, eventually singing a clipped Tuvan phoneme ping-pong swarm. I heard a gentle ferocity in his relentless restlessness on the piano, which seems to be cleansed by the use of his voice. There’s a rhizomatic resplendence to the colors he draws out of rhythmic nuance, varying his attacks across a narrow pitch range while Chatham added atmosphere, eventually producing appreciable guitar twiddles.
After the concert I attempted to photograph Palestine's animal totems—the
stuffed creature he had placed on his piano and the three on Chatham’s
table. While I was snapping the one on the piano, Chatham was clearing his
equipment. When I turned back to record these others, I found them
face-down on the floor of the stage. It made me feel strangely sad to see
them in this downfallen state and I regret not capturing them in this
posture, but I wasn’t quick enough to adapt to the new reality’s quiet
dismantling of my imagined plan: I had to recover from the emotion. I also
didn’t see the gesture that caused their displacement; one hopes it was
just casual and accidental. Still, there they were: toppled. It was a
poignantly unresolved coda to an evening of musical ambiguity shimmering
with charged fragility.
May 4, 2025
Teatro Comunale Pavarotti-Freni - Modena
Concerto for 33 electric guitars, electric bass and drums
My ambivalence to this concert had me questioning whether I actually like guitar music. Alas, I do. I love Hans Reichel, Hot Rats, Wendy Eisenberg, Keith Rowe and Helmut Lachenmann’s Salut für Caudwell. I just don’t think I have a taste for Rhys Chatham’s take on oversized guitar ensembles. Known for 100-guitar “orchestras,” he settled for 33 in Modena plus the electric bass of Myriam Stamoulis and the drums of Jonathan Kane, rounding out the ensemble to 35 in a nod to the 35 years of the AngelicA festival. Compared to, say, The League of Crafty Guitarists (whom I also enjoy) this music seemed to have very little compositional intent: twas all a thrumblin’ and a jiggling. The first movement was loosey-goosey ambient frogmouth foam, then came a field of glimmering strums over a pedestrian rock beat and dry-funk bass. With such a uniform soundscape, I found myself craving more prominence from Stamoulis’ bass (she was worth paying attention to throughout.) But I was probably missing the point: It’s all about the guitars, dude.
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| Rhys Chatham with 33 Electric Guitarists |
But the guitar gestures themselves were so rudimentary, it felt like space was being filled rather than shaped – and time was simply a bystander. There was nowhere near enough counterpoint––in the land of Morricone no less––to make this feel like a composition. Baby steps toward composing contrasted with the giant leap of organizing such a spectacle. Individual guitarists weren’t featured, which is an artistic choice, but even the power of the collective was underused. The only time dynamics came into play—quieting one section and then building it back up—was stunningly effective. Where was more of that? The overall aesthetic seemed to equate scale with substance. But blowing up a bland image and slapping it on a billboard doesn’t make it more compelling. The music felt childish without being playful, sugary without nuance, like Coke. This is going to sound extreme, but I had a chilling sensation that this overproduction was a desecration of the blues, scaled up for easy commodification and comprehension.
Movement 5, newly composed for the occasion, began with a promisingly wild
swirl of oblong sound—like a doppler blur stirred by helicopter blades. But
that richness soon gave way to a single, unrelenting vamp. Imagine the riff
from Wire’s “Pink Flag” repeated until it becomes an antiseptic narcotic.
(Ironically, Wire recorded a blisteringly intense 10-minute live version of
that track in 2011 in Chatham’s adopted home of Paris.) The audience gave
the performance a standing ovation, so clearly my experience was not the
standard. Chatham and the ensemble were also clearly having a great
time––which, honestly, gave me pleasure by proxy. If nothing else, it
confirmed my belief that guitars are not inherently good or evil—just very,
very numerous.
May 7, 2025
Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna
Naïny Diabaté & Eve Risser
ANW BE YONBOLO «We Are Together»
It’s rare to find music that is both careful and frolicsome, but this duo excels at exactly that. Their songs are accessibly proportioned and might be passed overdismissively as a kind of multi-culti folk-pop. Except they sound awesome—and are crafted from improvisation and infused with meaningful themes, including female empowerment, dignity and survival. Since 2018, when Naïny Diabaté and Eve Risser brought together their respective Kaladjula and Red Desert orchestras to form Kogoba Basigui, this intergenerational Malian-French collaboration has developed a music that is as meaningful as it is welcoming. Their performance radiated a buoyant spirit of camaraderie, calling to mind the alchemical heights of Barney Wilen’s “Gardenia Devil” from his 1968 album Moshi.
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| Naïny Diabaté |
Risser’s piano was prepared at both ends, with the middle left seemingly
clean—allowing her to weave meticulous melodic patterns from the center and
add dramatic percussive punctuation from the edges. Though often considered
a modern, ultra-Western instrument, the prepared piano here evoked
traditional African percussion: buzzing timbres, complex distortions and
idiosyncratic tunings. Risser takes full advantage of these resonances,
infusing short-form tunes with flares of colorful density. Diabaté’s voice
was a warm proclamation: part jubilee, part incantation. She spun short
phrases into fine embroidery, or held long notes just long enough to reveal
their bodily vibration. One song asked, “Where are the women with
instruments?”—an invitation for more female musicians and a call for
greater recognition. Yes please. Another declared, “We are the lionesses”
(Nous sommes les lionnes), a welcome moment of positive
self-identification, expanded by audience call-and-response. In the
persistently dark times of global politics, this music broadcasts
affirmations—and, maybe more importantly, invitations to affirmation. The
duo’s interplay embodied the very themes they sang: Risser joined Diabaté
on vocals occasionally, doubling and reaffirming, like a hand on the
shoulder saying, “I’ve got your back.”
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| Eve Risser. Photo © Massimo Golfieri |
The tone was lighthearted, but that levity floated on emotional depth and technical intricacy. On a song calling to the ancestors—“the good ones!”—Diabaté’s voice, lightly soaked in reverb, seemed to reach back through time. She modulated her phrasing in subtle play with the echo, bending it just enough to stir something ancient but undormant. Throughout, Risser bounded across the keyboard and inside the piano (sometimes striking it with a mallet), animating the music with a prance-and-pounce energy. It was this attitude—committed to being engaging without simplification—that brought the music fully to life: joyful, clear-eyed, and undiminished even when facing complex and deeply human concerns.
* Postscript on Eve Risser—because it needs to be said somewhere. I think of her as one of the most vital voices of my generation. The breadth of her work is crucial: a formidable solo piano practice; multiple working duos and small bands with musicians from an array of backgrounds; unflinching openness to first-time collaborations; and leadership or co-leadership of four––4!––different orchestras. But it’s not just the scope—it’s the depth with which she commits to each project, whether it leans toward punk, toy instruments, free improvisation or something altogether uncategorizable.
It should feel ordinary—this kind of attentive, enthusiastic engagement with the wildly diverse musical landscape we inhabit—but after three decades of listening and participating in music, I can say without exaggeration: her combination of commitment and breadth is anything but standard. It’s rare. And of course, none of it would matter if her piano playing weren’t so sublime: powerful and whimsical, deeply textural and corporeal, always dexterous—and above all, fun.
All of this comes before even mentioning her dedication to creating opportunities for underrepresented people. Arts organizations and professional administrators make gestures toward equity all the time, but Risser actually does the work. Not because it’s a grant requirement, not for optics, but for the real reason why it matters: it gives all of us access to deeper music. One that emerges not from the dominant narratives of taste, but from what should be the most basic recognition: that everyone has something to offer—and that sometimes the truest sounds are the ones we help each other discover.
I’ve seen her live in four very different settings and listened to
countless recordings, and I keep coming back to this feeling: I want her to
stand for what music can mean—for me, and for the people of my time.
Apologies for the proselytizing––Eve and I are friends, so I hope I’m not
making her blush––but sometimes praise just needs to be sung.
May 8, 2025
Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna
Simone Beneventi
Nine Bells (1979, Tom Johnson)
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| Simone Beneventi |
The performance of this landmark piece, devoted to the ringing of bells, auspiciously took place shortly after the announcement of the new pope and the massive bell of the Basilica di San Petronio rang out over Bologna. Though only marginally familiar with Tom Johnson’s music, I was instantly mesmerized by this performance. Nine Bellsrequires the performer to move through a 3x3 grid of bells, their path dictated by a series of geometric patterns. Each of the nine movements centers on one bell, though others are always involved.
What struck me first—more than the sound—was the choreography. The physical movement through space, the navigation of proximity and avoidance, created a new kind of listening. The performer often passes bells without striking them, leading to a beautiful tension of anticipation and deferral. As the audience sees the performer approach a bell, we expect the strike—but are often denied. This produces the illusion of a sound that never arrives, even as the reverberations of earlier notes still hang in the air. You begin to feel sounds that aren’t there as vividly as those that are. Hallucination can be good for you.
The final movement, focused on softness, was especially powerful. Most
mallets struck near the bells’ edges, producing delicate, hovering tones.
Often, Beneventi would approach a bell with unmistakable intent—only to
withdraw and head in another direction. These non-strikes carried as much
weight as any sound. I found myself reflecting on decision-making itself:
all the near-misses, the paths not taken, the false starts—and then:
thwack!
There it is, the boom that was inevitable all along.
May 9, 2025
Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna
MILESDAVISQUINTETORCHESTRA!
Sylvain Darrifourcq, drums
Valentin Ceccaldi, cello
Xavier Camarasa, piano, prepared piano
Pierre Borel, alto sax
Emilie Škrijelj, accordion
Michael Thieke, clarinet
Stretchin’
I’ll admit it: this performance left me delightfully unmoored. It operates simultaneously as a scientific research project and a musical ensemble—both committed to exploring asynchronization: the art of not playing in sync with those around you. It started innocently, each musician looping small rhythmic fragments. To the ear, it felt inviting—simple, even. But soon, it revealed itself as a dense, swirling field of competing tempi, each musician improvising within tight, shifting constraints. There’s no score. No conductor. Just structure, instinct, and timing. (I suspect there are some composed cues built in, but I couldn’t tell for sure. There’s a documentary that provides the background for the project, but honestly, I’m glad I didn’t watch it beforehand.)
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| MILESDAVISQUINTETORCHESTRA! Photo © Massimo Golfieri |
The band’s name invokes Miles Davis, which the press release dismisses as a play on on how marketing works: symbolic material meant to distract us from what really matters. Maybe so. Still, I couldn’t help but recall Davis’ Second Great Quintet—with Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams—and their deep dives into temporal elasticity within an explicitly jazz context on tracks like “Nefertiti,” “Agitation” and “Stuff.” Coincidence? Influence? Just my brain chasing ghosts? Noticeably, there is no trumpet in this group. Though in one moment Thieke’s mouthpiece-free clarinet spumed moisture-tinctured breathiness, conjuring the shadow of a trumpeter clearing a spit valve.
Trying to isolate “moments” in this performance doesn’t quite work—though I have to mention Škrijelj’s fingernails rapping on her accordion’s casing, instantly evoking the crackle of Black Cat fireworks snapping on the summer pavement of my youth. But unlike a lot of improvisation, this performance wasn’t about moments: it was about entering a sonic time-space unlike anything else. Conversely, perhaps we’re always living inside some desynchronized time-space, and this music simply magnifies it.
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| Sylvain Darrifourcq. Photo © Massimo Golfieri |
I’d like to put it more poetically, but this performance was a mindfuck. In the best possible way. Sixty minutes of astonishing untogetherness, seemingly from A Swirl Beyond. It was hard to know where or how to listen, like being inside a cracked kaleidoscope of rhythm and intent. (I did think of Milford Graves and Sunny Morgan’s Percussion Ensemble, where polyrhythms overlap and erupt with interlocking energy. But this felt more like temporal freefall, each player spiraling on their own axis. The cohesion wasn’t in shared propulsion, but in the sheer tension of divergence.)
The collective sound tempted me like I was on the edge of a black hole, attracting me to get further and further within. Seductive yet impenetrable, no matter how deeply I plunged I couldn’t access the root. What a beautifully forbidding siren. The essence of incomprehensibility that seemed like the center of what my experience was orbiting also felt like a shoutout to the integrity of the inexplicable, as if the unknowable deserves not just attention, but reverence. The black hole beckons us all: uniquely, commonly.
They stopped on a dime after an hour and I was happily wobbly.
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With a third of the festival now underfoot, I feel justified in my years of ogling the program from afar. Even factoring in my ambivalence regarding Chatham, the bulk of the performances have attained supreme heights of specificity and transcendence. The one thing I didn’t grasp from afar, simply perusing the lists of events, was how much focus each show is given: only one event per night. What this sacrifices in terms of a carnivalesque atmosphere of abundance within a short time-span, it makes up for in the space it allows each performance to breathe and retain a level of autonomy from the fray that intrudes on all our lives. Here’s to one third of thirty-five: eleven and two thirds, a number that refuses to resolve neatly into wholeness, a resistance to integer form that mirrors how truth often eludes complete capture – there is always a remainder, something that exceeds our understandings, our categories, our definitions.
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