07.13.11 - 8:00pm

Ivo Perelman Quartet with Matthew Shipp, Joe Morris, and Luthor Grey

The Ivo Perelman Quartet (Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp, Joe Morris, and Luthor Grey) celebrates the release of their album “The Hour of the Star.”

Matthew Shipp was born December 7, 1960 in Wilmington, Delaware. He started piano at 5 years old with the regular piano lessons most kids have experienced. He fell in love with jazz at 12 years old. After moving to New York in 1984 he quickly became one of the leading lights in the New York jazz scene. He was a sideman in the David S. Ware quartet and also for Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory before making the decision to concentrate on his own music.

Wire Magazine called Joe Morris “one of the most profound improvisers at work in the US.” Mostly known as a highly acclaimed guitarist, Morris added upright bass to his instruments in 2000 and has since earned a similar level of acclaim having performed on the instrument with Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Ken Vandermark, Marshall Allen, Sunny Murray, Joe Maneri, Billy Bang, Taylor Ho Bynum, Roy Campbell, Steve Lantner, etc. As a bassist/bandleader he has recorded for Hat Hut, Aum Fidelity, Riti, Skycap, Not Two and the recently released solo bass LP “Sensor” on the No Business label.

Luther Gray started playing drums in punk rock bands. He later developed a significant interest in jazz and cut his teeth playing around the D.C. area with the likes of Butch Warren, Cecil Payne, Webster Young, and Buck Hill at the same time performing and recording with indie rockers Tsunami, Delta 72, Jenny Toomey, and Ida. In 1999 he moved to Boston, where he currently resides. Luther has since worked with Joe Morris, Anthony Braxton, Joe McPhee, Cameron Brown, Joseph Daly, Sabir Mateen, Roy Campbell, Geoff Farina, Andrew White, Rob Brown, Taylor Ho Bynum, Raqib Hassan, Bill Pierce, Joe Beck, Fred Anderson, Ken Vandermark and many others. His band, Lawnmower, has a critically acclaimed CD, titled West, on the Clean Feed label. He has performed in festivals and concerts across the country and abroad and has recorded for the Simple Machines, Hat Hut, Riti, Skycap, Touch and Go, Clean Feed, Atavistic, NotTwo, Jardis and AUM Fidelity labels, among others.

Ivo Perelman Quartet: “The Hour of the Star”

by Fabricio Vieira (Brazilian journalist and jazz critic)

The literary universe of Clarice Lispector has formed a delicate bond among the latest works by Ivo Perelman. Despite the different partnerships and results obtained in each one of the now five albums named for one of the author’s works, it’s possible that in the future this collection will simply become known as the “Claricean Cycle”. The newest piece from this series is “The Hour of the Star”, its title taken from the last book published by Lispector (1920-1977) while she was alive.

“The Hour of the Star” unveils itself as a work of reunions; reunions with former partners Matthew Shipp and Joe Morris; with the piano; and, of course, with the unsettling “Claricean” atmosphere. Perelman hasn’t recorded with a pianist in a decade, since “The Ventriloquist” sessions recorded in 2001. And it’s symbolically relevant that this dialogue with the piano was taken up again precisely with Matthew Shipp. It was by Shipp’s side that the saxophonist recorded “Cama de Terra”, a work that marked a turn in the direction of his music, distancing himself from the Brazilian roots on his first albums, and moving toward a more universal and abstract sound. Another former partner who has now returned is Joe Morris. Perelman had recorded just one album with Morris, “Strings”, an unusual string duet in which the saxophonist put aside the wind instrument and ventured out with the cello. But unlike that experience, here Morris is not accompanying on his fantastic guitar: this time it’s the musician’s faceted bass.

These reunions all took place in the studio. The quartet reunited for the first time on the day the album was recorded, in September 2010. The result is a quite centered piece of work, without broad, featured soloists, with the polyphonic interaction driving the flows of conscience and sound. The cohesion and balance exhibited by the musicians on this session make it so that we might sometimes doubt that they had never played together before. But you just have to remember that they represent some of the stellar points of contemporary free music. More surprising would be to bring together Perelman, Shipp, Morris and Cleaver and not obtain a result that is, at least, compelling. The week after the album was recorded, the quartet took off for São Paulo (Brazil), the city where the saxophonist was born, to make their stage debut. Seen there were moments of magnificent, inspiring and disconcerting music.

Even though it’s very unlikely that Shipp, Morris and Cleaver have read any of Lispector’s books, the tone of her writing slyly echoes in different passages of the album. By evoking the name of one of Brazilian literature’s most worshipped figures, Perelman never meant to carry out an instrumental rereading of her text. What matters here is the gloomy and suffocating mood that emanates from the words to the sounds; a subtle, but vital, intertextuality. This can be appreciated from the melancholic lethargy of “The Right to Protest” to the incandescent peaks of “Whistling in the Dark Wind”.

The quartet is responsible for another great triumph, the title track “The Hour of the Star”, the culminating point of the album and one of the brightest moments of Perelman’s extensive discography. At almost 14 minutes long, “The Hour of Star” emanates the atmosphere of resonant communion achieved by the instrumentalists, soaked in a spirituality-laden mood and with airs of ardent prayer. Shipp is one of the pillars here, and it’s difficult to imagine the track without his presence. His dripping fingering acts as a counterweight to the dissonant ecstasies reached by Perelman’s playing, which roars desperately and beseechingly, as if summoning the gods, with helpless appeal, for answers. Left unanswered, the sax quiets and Shipp takes the lead, filling out the space with delicate and danceable layers, until Perelman’s heated return for the final part. In his second entrance, the saxophonist comes back even more incendiary, as if this were his last chance to be heard. At the group’s first performance in São Paulo, it was exactly this piece that hotly closed the night. The audience’s ecstatic response showed the impact and expressive and communicative force carried by this piece.

The fact that Cleaver is not a muscular drummer only serves to suit the quartet’s sound, which doesn’t demand a more robust beat. His impeccable timing creates a dynamic foundation along with Morris’ smooth and stippled phrasing, ideal for Perelman to develop his drawn-out ideas. In “A Tearful Tale”, in the prolonged passage that features just the drummer and the bassist, one can clearly make out the overlapping dialogue of the two instrumentalists, the way they achieve a contagious, circular cadence, which prepares the ears for the sax’s reentry. Next to the title track, “A Tearful Tale” is at the peak of the album, and is the perfect calling card for the quartet’s sound. On this track Shipp has more time to display his fine art, his delicate melodic fragments adding to the sweet strength imposed in some passages by his hammering left hand.

Unlike many stars of free jazz saxophone, Perelman doesn’t act just as a propeller of torrential sound interventions. He’s an improviser with high and fractured tessitura, but also carries marked melodic sensibility. This feature safely led him to a frontier where he doesn’t usually visit, the blues. Led by the contagious fingering of Morris, the saxophonist tries out the genre, in his own way, in the unusual “Singing the Blues”, which is structured through a highly singable theme, alternating with sharp and well-aimed improvisations. There’s a certain ironic parody in the air, especially in the repetitive and danceable final sequence.

Perelman’s melodic profile is also more explicitly present in “Whistling in the Dark Wind”. This is a piece that grows with each minute, slowly gaining body and intensity – a characteristic particular to the saxophonist’s poetry. After leisurely groping along in its first half, “Whistling in the Dark Wind” reaches a point of acceleration and disintegration that is maintained for minutes, with Cleaver instilling a stronger rhythm and Shipp hammering the keys until the pressure releases to reach its contemplative ending.

It’s odd that, 20 years since his album debut –with “Ivo”, in 1989–, Perelman has called upon Clarice Lispector to light the way into the third decade of his artistic journey. A master of dense writing, filled with characters searching for answers to their everyday longings and their darker fears, Lispector goes beyond simple narration, stripping down the words and leading readers to a world of daydream, one moment anesthetized, the next dangerously expanding the senses. As the musician explains, the writer’s text “transcending the word, becomes a powerful agent for expanding the human mind”. The same can be said about the saxophonist’s work, especially “The Hour of the Star”. To hear it is to have the possibility to go beyond the simple enjoyment of a beautiful piece of music. Here it’s about discovering moments of rare inspiration that grab the listener, taking them out of their comfort zone, inviting them to accept the challenge of entering a new realm, with all the risks inherent in such a venture. In the end, it would be difficult not to consider “The Hour of the Star” as a small treasure, the fruit of the brilliance of its four driving forces.