Giuseppe Doronzo | Andy Moor | Frank Rosaly

Futuro Ancestrale (Clean Feed, 2024)

08

Octubre, 2024

Futuro Ancestrale. Clean Feed, 2024. Giuseppe Doronzo (baritone saxophone, Iranian bagpipes) | Andy Moor. (electric guitar) | Frank Rosaly (drums, percussion)

By Ricardo Vicente Paredes

Photos: Eric Van Nieuwland

In a title full of intention, the reed player Giuseppe Doronzo (baritone saxophone, Iranian bagpipes) together with Andy Moor (electric guitar) and Frank Rosaly (drums, percussion) present a diaphanous arc to reflect through their music, in the present, a future made of ancestors. A record composed of four guiding lines of thought – made up of themes from previous and current compositions. The album is a recording of the concert at the BIMHUIS hall in Amsterdam in June 2022, in the space of the complex dedicated to free jazz and improvised music.

This trio defies ready-made conventions and plunges us into primordial sound elements, whether through the use of Rosaly’s minimalist percussion, which draws subtle spectra from the cymbals, or through the use of distant voices coming from muezzins in imaginary minarets, or through the inebriated registers of the Iranian double-voiced bagpipe – the ney-anbān – operated by Doronzo. These concrete elements put into practice by Doronzo, Moor and Rosaly bring an ancestry that becomes organic and functional when intertwined with the other instruments, such as the baritone saxophone, the electric guitar and the snare drum and related percussion elements.

With ‘Neptuno’ the matrix of the discourse is inscribed, a brief entrance in which an idea of distant time is imposed, largely due to the sparse and torn timbres of the percussion brass and a languid tubular voice of breath coming from afar. In addition to the distant time orientation, they dare to play on the floor, organised by Doronzo’s previous writing in ‘Hopscotch’. An exploration between stimulus and response, coming from the release of the marker, either by the baritone or by the guitar, in a permanent rhythmic stimulus by Rosaly’s drumsticks. In a framework defined by the trio’s entertainment, it’s clear that they enjoy a broad, playful gift for understanding. A theme in which the electric strings of Moor’s guitar explore possibilities that a Derek Bailey once inscribed in the panorama of free music atonality. In another constructive revelation in real time between the three, there is the notion of sudden time, very much due to an exuberant sound manifestation. The rise of material as if it were lava through the sound of strings and drums. This is evident in ‘Magma’, where the expression of Rosaly’s dry, bubbling snare drum illustrates the matter that expels air before becoming rock. This emanation is heard in a wondrous bagpipe that leaves us in a state of sonic enchantment. The temporal idea explored so far is projected diachronically in ‘Digging the Sand’, with which they make a deep cyclical excavation of the bordered strings, a passage into the future, supported by a journey whose lulling by the sound of the muezzin’s call from on high transports this summoned ancestry. The ritualised tempo of the march is the warm, whistling phrasing that leads along an endless path that opens up to a final non-closure of the narrative, towards the future.

Since the future is only an imaginary construction, lived in the present, it is essential that it can be wished for with an idea of salvation. In this sense, and still in this time, this recording by Doronzo, Moor and Rosaly is linked to the philosophical reflections collected by the Indigenous thinker Krenak in ‘Ancestral Future’. This is the future we can start to live now, in a dance of wonder and celebration. We will have to listen with hope to the time to come, knowing how to wait for the moment when the ‘Graduate of Witchcraft’ is revealed, as a magical step that the very near future holds in the record.