The contemporary catalog of GleAM Records has been characterized in the last 3 years by a constant relationship with the contemporary American Jazz scene. There are occasional incursions into Jazz, more properly European. This is the case of “Human Plots”, the latest work by the bassist and composer Luca Lo Bianco from Palermo.
A musician with a wide spectrum of action and stable collaborations, Lo Bianco presents an album almost entirely made up of original music with the exception of Silent Eyes (Paul Simon). We are clearly faced with a concept with a broad ideal perimeter, that of human plots that, intertwining with or without an obvious design, determine events and sometimes changes.
The need to deal with such an elusive subject and make it fit into the circumscribed coordinates of an album, determined the leader’s choice to use each song as a representation of exemplary human gestures that in their urgency, as he himself says, find their completeness. His music doesn’t necessarily follow this association. As in program music, it’s essential to know the story in order to read the will of those who represent it in the sounds. Either way, it requires a stretch of the imagination.
The beauty of the themes written by Lo Bianco, the subterranean rhythmic joints he studied to give a particular movement to the songs and the timbre mixture of clarinet/bass clarinet and alto sax by Achille Succi with the electric guitar of Samuel Leipold are the elements for which it is worth embarking on this journey.
The resulting mood is overall alienating and imaginative. The balance in the rhythmic dialogue between Luca Lo Bianco and the Swiss drummer Clemens Kuratle is interesting, resulting in dynamic crescendos of strong impact and on which the interventions of Achille Succi on alto sax stand out. Definitely worth listening to The Librarian of Timbuktu with the intense and propulsive introduction of the leader, The Choice with an energetic solo by Succi on alto sax, 323 with its dramatic evolution between bass clarinet and electric guitar.
Human Plots is further proof of Luca Lo Bianco’s directorial qualities, skilled in managing spaces and bending the sound gesture to a narrative far from any rhetoric.
Spencer Travis
