Vinny Golia / Ken Filiano / Michael TA Thompson - Catastasis (Nine Winds
Records, 2025)
An absolute album of the year. This trio exudes not just technical brilliance,
but a raw, responsive musical empathy. The interplay of West Coast woodwindist
Vinny Golia and New York's Ken Filiano (on bass) and Michael TA Thompson
(on drums) feels like a intense conversation -- full of risk, wit, and
experience.
Catastasis is simply full of musical ideas as the trio engages in a
sonic dialogue that defies genre and expectation. With Golia’s multi-reed
wizardry, Filiano’s resonant bass explorations, and Thompson’s sculptural
approach to rhythm, their music unfolds dense with texture, alive with lyrical
tension, and charged with dynamic abstraction. Each piece feels both
meticulously fractured and spontaneously whole, as composed fragments dissolve
into free-flowing improvisation. The result is a captivating soundscape where
all the best avant-garde impulses collide, cohere, and reconfigure in real
time.
The amount of music is also quite generous, the first track "NY-1" is 40
minutes, "NY-2" is 33 and "NY-3" is 30. This is a lot of time to work through
the rich multifaceted ideas on Catastasis. 'NY-1' is a slow, well,
medium paced, build up. The tension mounts decidedly through Thompson's color
drumming and Filiano's full ungirding. They make it (seemingly) easy for Golia
to layer jam-packed melodic ideas on top. 'NY-2' finds the group in slighlty
more spacious territory, and on 'NY-3', Golia starts on clarinet, giving the
piece a different sonic texture, leading eventually to fraught, arcing lines.
The catastasis, in dramatic terms is the fourth and fifth part of
a classical tragedy, the climax before the tragedy. This is the intense part
of the work, and trusting that true catastrophe was avoided,
Catastasis, the album, presents simply the best parts.
Vinny Golia Chamber Quintet - New Chamber Idiom (Sonic Action, 2025)
This ensemble operates at the intersection of chamber jazz and free
improvisation, where compositional restraint meets expressive abandon. Vinny
Golia’s reed work anchors the group’s work, threading through contrapuntal
textures and spontaneous harmonic shifts. The music is both light and rich,
with the rooted elements supporting ephemeral moments.
The instrumentation, as one may expect is full of vibrant, organic timbres.
Golia brings from LA a cross section of his instrument arsenal: Ab (piccolo)
and Bb clarinets, soprano and baritone saxophones, and flute. Neil Welch, a
Seattle based improvisor and educator contributes bass and tenor saxophones,
while another Washington based musician, educator and sonic explorer Steph
Richards plays trumpet and flugelhorn, Aniela Perry, also hailing from the
Seattle area (this time from a nearby island), is on cello and Seattle's
Kelsey Mines plays bass and provides vocals.
New Chamber Idiom is full of shifting, shimmering sounds. It mixes
challenging but accessible melodic forays that sport atonal off-shoots and
exploratory excursions. Comprised of two tracks - a cohesive 44 minute piece
entitled 'no maps for the Interior' followed by presumably the encore aptly
entitled piece 'a little something to remember us by.' The former piece begins
with Golia on clarinet and most prominently Mines' bass and very faint
vocalizations, and is soon enriched by Perry's cello, which moves the piece in
a classical direction. In due time, Richards and Welch make their presence
felt.
New Chamber Idiom is a recording that grows, each listening revealing
new details.
*A quick disclaimer, Sonic Action is run by Free Jazz
Blog contributor Gregg Miller.
Kelsey Mines & Vinny Golia - Collusion and Collaboration (Relative Pitch, 2025)
Continuing the collaboration with bassist and vocalist Kelsey Mines from the Chamber Quintet, this duo outing is an stripped back, intimate affair that explores similar classical-like abstractions. The focus here is, obviously, much more on Golia's woodwinds and Mines' bass, with her vocalizations filling in the space between the outlines they make. The music is both gentle and sharp - to be listened to with care. The cover image, a drawing by Emile Quanjel entitled "Eternal Now (for Charles Gayle)" is a perfect visual for the sounds with in - abstract but figurative, the outlines of a man made by lite pen strokes is accentuated with splashes of color reacting to the shapes. The music does just this, hardly taking on a set structure, actual musical shapes do emerge into fully comprehensible forms. A perfect example is 'Improv 8,' in which Golia paints with a thick, but light, tone that Mines underscores. The legato lines stretch and encircle, forming a something just beyond tangibility.
0 comments:
Post a Comment