“If the “chemystery“ is right between the players, the chances are that something magical and adventurous, even some new music, can happen. It's listening, listening, jumping into the unknown, risking, listening again and again...” Harri Sjöström
There is something slightly daunting about the notion of an improvising sextet. Do the casual math of instrumental permutations from six soloists to one sextet, adding in duos, trios, quartets and quintets, and you have something like 55 possible combinations. Literally anything might surface, but among the least likely is the superb music achieved here by Sestetto Internazionale, music that dances between the ideal poles of inevitability and unpredictability, inviting a
sense of wonder. Listening to the group, one might at first suspect the possibility of conduction, even detailed scores or extensive planning. Consult a video. They’re not watching each other: they’re just listening and playing, playing and listening, whether coming in or out, building textures or shifting roles as the gestalt seem to invite, and doing so at an exalted level.
The music’s rich complexity might be reflected in its gradual assembly. Its genesis began with a performance in Berlin in 2010, when Harri Sjöström and Gianni Mimmo improvising a duet on soprano saxophones, the principal instrument of each musician. Since then, there has been a gradual expansion, adding other voices to the initial duo. The first was Quartetto Internazionale with Alison Blunt on violin and Ignaz Schick on electronics and turntables. Then Trio Internazionale appeared, with Veli Kujala on microtonal accordion. The first version of the Sestetto added pianist Achim Kaufmann to all of those voices. During the extended process, Alison Blunt left the group, to be replaced by Phil Wachsmann whose association with Sjöström dates back to 1985.
The current group represents profound intuition, both in its formation and among its individual members. Just as two soprano saxophonists have proven so creative a duo, the Sestetto’s unusual make-up refutes convention to emphasize distinctive creative voices in a collective idiom. Sjöström defines a fundamental compositional principle: “I feel that in this music the most important thing is the pre-composed line up, that is the only composed thing.” Mimmo’s view is complementary: “I consider the most important instrument of the band is the reciprocal listening. Concentration and attention to detail is really important in a band like this.”
The complex relationships between identity and collectivity at work in this music begin in the balancing act of Sjöström and Mimmo and their initial meeting, playing the same instrument and each with a freely melodic approach. Mimmo remarks, “the contrast between the two soprano voices gives the listener a double thread to follow. Just to identify our playing: Harri is the first saxophone appearing on the recording (usually on the left channel), I’m the last saxophone sound at the end of the recording (usually on the right channel). The contrast between textural and narrative approaches seems to me one of the main keys of this musical relationship.” Sjöström, who also plays a sopranino at times, mentions using “some plastic cups and trumpet mutes for the soprano. It sounds like a trumpet, a muted resonating sound or a nasal sound, sometimes like a human singing voice.”
The unusual character of the soprano saxophone duo is extended to the larger group, which eschews any sense of convention in terms of instruments’ pitch ranges or traditional functions. The violin is a third soprano instrument, and there are even moments when Phil Wachsmann sounds uncannily like a reed instrument. The piano and accordion might be viewed as an excess of harmonic input, but Veli Kujala’s orchestral accordion is a microtonal one, expanding and ambiguating the array of pitches in the ensemble. Its reeds add a further complement to the two sopranos. Achim Kaufmann brings his own orchestral sweep and linear clarity here, while Ignaz Schick’s creative use of turntables suggests another world, a contemporary sonic environment rearranged in myriad creative ways.
The expressive range and collective genius of the ensemble is richly apparent in the extended “Mutabile I”, from the opening collocation of upper register voices, first Sjöström’s bright sopranino pecking out a melody, then Mimmo’s richer sound, then Wachsmann’s violin, initially sounding like another reed, at least close kin to the saxophones. Immerse yourself as other voices enter, combine, move closer then further apart. There is something extraordinarily natural about this music, as if, for all its invention and virtuosity, it has just happened, like Bernie Krause’s “great animal orchestra”, some original perception of the meaning and beauty in the sounds of the forest; or perhaps something synthesized from nature, like Messiaen’s passage of bird calls in the opera Saint François d'Assise. Individual decisions reward a detailed attentiveness: Kujala’s sudden maelstrom of pitches; Wachsmann’s perfect imitation of a strummed, particularly taut, ukulele; moments when Schick sounds like an unexpected visitor from space.
It would be enough to have one large central mystery arise somewhere in this work, but for long periods of time there is a succession of overlapping sonic mysteries to which one (or we, the selfless collective imagining of every close listener) must adapt, abandoning selectivity to waver back and forth in the proliferation of voices. These combinations and contrasts are at once familiar and mysterious, a kind of birthing experience in sound, so quick, so liquid and light that Kauffman’s anchoring punctuations can sound like a bass drum.
On the shorter “Mutabile II”, the levels of intuitive structure and interaction, the combination of voices, the resonances and the contrasts within the ensemble are similar, yet the music’s dynamics and space are utterly different. Achim Kaufmann demonstrates a special knack for organizing sound here, his spare punctuations becoming a key structural component.
Sestetto Internazionale is a new kind of ensemble -- one operating, multiply, merging tradition, innovation, chance and hallucination. It’s work so complex, so generous, that it invites a polymorphous listening, a collectivity of listening. Some heterogeneous music can be thick, even congealed; here the brilliant levity of the chosen musicians and instruments creates a sound world full of light.
Stuart Broomer
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