7 Paintings: Music for the 7 of them.

This solo project is part of a broader corpus where my investigation into form finds its expressive possibility.
I can always perceive something wonderful and also terrible in the solo formula, and especially in an improvisation experience. There is nakedness, inexorability, dramatic weight and lightness, which can be caught or remain ephemeral in a solo.
Such a direct and inevitable relationship with silence occurs that every sound seems to yield major responsibility.
A maestro of mine used to say that solo improvising is always a matter of life or death.
In the last few years new connotations have added to my instrumental voice, and possibly so has a more compositive aptitude to my improvisation.

Sometimes it is as if I could see a form ‘beforehand’, as if I envisaged a sound as a possibility to position formal elements in space.
Perhaps even in the most assertive moments, the physical ones, so to say, I clearly feel that what inspirits my music has a contemplative origin.

My sources of greater inspiration lie in painting, in styles and artists even quite far off from one another in time, and stylistic code. I feel there is a sort of fascination, of suspension in which, just for an instant, everything is crystal-clear and quintessential in its formal inflection. 

In 7 Paintings, led by curiosity but cautiously I am travelling through seven very different paintings.
They are all artists I love, and who have affected me. For sure I could speak at length about these works of art by Francis Bacon, Magritte, Milton Avery or Piero della Francesca.

Here I want to include an extract from a letter Piet Mondrian wrote to the Dutch painter Henk Brenner that, to my mind, really seems to describe the relationship between abstraction and form with lyric faithfulness, as well.
A connection I want to refer to in this performance of mine:

[…] I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true […]

Enjoy the show and the music!

Gianni Mimmo

The collaboration with brilliant violinist Alison Blunt starts in 2013 in London, UK. Both interested in deepening the chamber attitude of their style and in a neo-formal approach to improvisation, they decide to record a live concert in the challenging acoustic of St. Leonard Church in Shoreditch.

The concert is successful and becomes a celebrated album titled “Lasting Ephemerals” released on vinyl LP thanks to a co-production among Amirani Records, LongSong Records and Teriyaki records.
The album is for sure one of the best in Gianni’s discography and receives a huge amount of excellent reviews from magazines, being broadcasted in several avant- garde oriented radios in Europe and USA.

The duo has performed live more than 60 concerts together touring in UK, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Finland and in a three weeks tour in the United States, with concerts in Chicago (Create Festival), New Mexico (Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos), California (San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Los Angeles) and New York.

The duo played in theatres, churches, little venues, clubs, house concerts, festivals, boats, gardens, streets, galleries and so on.
The duo has been invited at the International Society of Improvised Music annual Conference on New York in 2015 at the New York School of Music and has been invited to perform and to lecture in schools as well.

Mimmo-Blunt acoustic duo features a contemporary wild chamber attitude, improvising instant compositions, sound texture explorations and sudden lyrical flights.
Their improvisation, that has been defined "A Gentle Vertigo", freely crosses boundaries and welcomes rich contradictions between melody and blessed chaos. Experimental flavours, multi-perspective intuitions and reciprocal listening are the extremely well balanced blend of this duo that strives for an improvisation where "things happen", able to face pulsing silences and airy architectures as elements of a sound sculpture. Relationship among inner voices, live attention to detail, lyrical declinations and violent assertive moments are on display in their performances:

"All you could ask for from an improvised performance”
Michael Holland, Nov 2013 Eyes4eyes.blogspot.it

"A wonderful collaboration. I spent half of their set in a semi conscious mystical state.
http: //thisplaceatthistime. blogspot. It

“The alert gracefulness and reciprocal regard through which Mimmo and Blunt explicit their intertwined instrumental togetherness convey the same sense of fulfilment that irradiates the most surprisingly revelatory instants of normality[...]
When the duty calls, the pair is willing and ready to show the listener how peace can be restored, nimbly sailing to calmer waters without apparent effort: a musician's thorough control of his/her means of expression is something that can be attained only by "living" the instrument day in, day out, a principle respected as The Word by authentic improvisers [...]”  Massimo Ricci, www.TouchingExtremes.org

Beyond many works with video-makers two main live sound-tracking projects deserve to be mentioned:

“Mistaking Monks play on Sayat Nova”
Mistaking Monks is a trio with Xabier Iriondo on table guitars and Cristiano Calcagnile on percussions. The project is born to perform a live soundtrack on the visionary film Sayat Nova, by Georgian/Armenian director Serghei Paradjanov.
It has been performed in many situations: concert halls, cinemas, house concerts, social centres, film festival and venues.
The music recorded has been released in 2012 by PhonoMetak Labs on a cd titled “Mantic”.
Described by Federico Fellini “ One of the greatest cinema magicians ever”, by Michelangelo Antonioni “Among the best directors of the contemporary cinema, master of beauty and perfection”, by Tarkowsky “The man with a paradoxal poetic and freedom”, Serghei Pardajanov really embodies one of the highest results of poetic expression in filming.. Paradjanov has an extremely original intellectual angularity, a refined artistic skill, able of a perfect synthesis between theatre and mythology, image and narrative force, dream and premonition. His famous “Tableaux Vivants” with their formal perfection and pulsing symbolism make his filming incomparable and unmistakable.  “Sayat Nova”, also known as “Colour of the Pomegranate” is considered his highest masterpiece. Surprising in its symbolic modernity, this relationship between music and image can’t be didactic. The involvement is deeper and dramatic. We’re dealing here with a contemporary key re-reading of the film, a reciprocal and re-morphing relationship between the image and sound.
Strong, imaginative, spiritual images find in music a sort of translation, conduction, explication an another level.

 “Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed” by Lotte Reiniger (1926) live soundtrack. Commissioned by the international film festival “Bergamo Film-Meeting” 2016 in collaboration with Bergamo Jazz 2016, this live soundtrack is completely built on a time score realized on the extraordinaire film by the seminal director Lotte Reiniger. The live soundtrack is played by Gianni Mimmo on soprano sax and electronics and has been acclaimed as a visionary re-reading of this pioneering film. The composition investigates different narratives aspects: linearity and subliminal suggestions.

“Heraclitus-Luminosi Frammenti” is one of the main works on text scores Gianni Mimmo wrote. The initial idea dates back in1986, after the reading of two different critical analysis about the remaining fragments of the greek philosopher Heraclitus. After few partial performances of the work in the past years, it finally has been entirely played in the church of Santa Maria degli Amalfitani in Monopoli in 2013 thanks to the support by the Cultural Association Talking Lands in its trio version with Gianni Mimmo on sax soprano, Gianni Lenoci on piano and electronics and Nicholas Isherwood bass-baritone singer. The score includes some theatrical gestures including fire-eating/spitting, ritual movements and collective lament.

Among the several dance works, the long-term collaboration with dancer Marcella Fanzaga deserves to be mentioned: with her Gianni performed in Italy and Switzerland in works like “MooooveMe” (2004-2009) and the Meeting Point experience involving dancers from all Europe.

Gianni is a part of the project “Swan, a poetic body” by the brilliant american dancer Martina L. Young. It has very successfully been performed in Italy and is set up to further develop in 2017

The collaboration with Austrian dancer Sebastian Prantl has been performed in the famous Colourscape in UK and Finland (2012-13)

The work “Panji- Archaetypal Dance” has been performed in different groups thanks to the collaboration with Javanese Court Dancer Mr. Norontako Bagus Kentus.
This last work has been performed in Switzerland and Italy also in May 2016 in a new version including Gianni Lenoci on piano/electronics and Los Angeles based wind player and composer Vinny Golia.

The project consists of a body of graphic scores compositions prepared for unusual lined up chamber quintet (soprano sax, French horn, English horn, percussion and violin) and sextet (trombone, C trumpet, soprano sax, basset horn, viola, double- bass). The idea is based on multi perspective interpretations of a given form, asking the involved musician to move along a sort of “constellation of possibilities”.

A multi-level event that is different every time, referring to an initial complex given composition, asking the musician to be open to sudden variations and permutations. The first version of “Prossime Trascendenze” composition for sextet includes two compositions, “Daphne” and “The Nestled Thought”, inspired by two paintings of Felice Casorati (1883-1963).

Other compositions have been written for quintet and include three pieces and two interludes.
Prossime Trascendenze will be released for Amirani Records in the end of 2016 and will premiered in Spring 2017.

Gianni Mimmo started his solo performances on soprano sax in 2000.
The solo concert is considered by Mimmo: “Something special: something beautiful (because the possibility to match one’s sound with silence is a terrific opportunity to deal with chosen “areas to play on”, tools to work with, horizontalities and verticalities, dynamics weight and empty-full objects...) and terribly challenging (because those same silences are going to unveil your licks, your sudden lack of concentration, leaving you naked out there...)
A solo is a mirror asking for special concentration, responsibility and openness [willingness] to get lost...”.
He played solo concerts in UK, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Finland, France and USA

Two albums are been released featuring Gianni in solo:
The first is “One Way Ticket” (Amirani Records 2005) with pieces coming from composers like Lacy, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Anton Webern, Roscoe Mitchell and other original compositions by himself.                       The second solo album is “Further Consideration” (Tarzan Records 2015) on a limited edition vinyl LP produced by Andrea Dolcino and Fabrizio Testa.
The work is entirely inspired and dedicated to painters Piet Mondrian, Mario Sironi and to the late Gilles Laheurte (author, soprano sax player, architect, producer, inspirational figure and friend).

The use of extended techniques, the result of intense hard work on the instrument, is never “encyclopaedic”, but a function of an aesthetics that looks carefully at the relationship between monodic sound and silence.

Both the albums have been excellently reviewed.

An international constellation, a luminous tria-logue among very original voices of the new music: the dazzling inventiveness of Satoko Fujii on piano, the assertive solidity of Joe Fonda o double bass, the abstract lyricism of Gianni Mimmo on soprano saxophone.
A trio that works on intersections and parallel voices, evocative improvisations and careful sound investigation through dense and readable lines, tribal chamber lights and splendid shapes.

Last year, Fujii, bassist Joe Fonda, and Italian soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo went into the studio to record Triad (May 25, 2018, Long Song Records) on Fujii’s 59th birthday.
Though they had only played together once, in concert the night before, the trio is remarkably confident and communicates on a deep level.
The music is unhurried and graceful, yet always challenging. 

Fujii and Fonda were planning a European tour in October 2017 and asked Long Song label owner Fabrizio Perissinotto, who released their 2016 album, Duet, if he knew of any opportunities to perform in Italy. Perissinotto talked with his good friend Mimmo and a concert and recording session were arranged. They had never heard Mimmo before, but “Joe and I listened to his music and we both had the feeling this would be great,” Fujii says. 
They were wise to trust their feelings; the album is consistently engaging.

The music they make transforms and flows effortlessly while always maintaining focus.
It evolves organically as the trio splits into different instrumental combinations and shifts between lyricism and abstraction, highly rhythmic passages and gently flowing ones.

“Satoko Fujii exhibits a kind of boundless exploration that finds her often in new pairings or with new lineups, a never-ending pursuit of new sounds, new groups and collaborations.”
Lee Rice Epstein, The Free Jazz Collective

“Joe Fonda is a real virtuoso and composer of the highest order.”
Anthony Braxton  


"Gianni Mimmo’s music . . . is based on balance. Not only the moment-to-moment balance of register, phrasing, dynamics, and articulation, but a larger, more fundamental balance of abstraction and direct lyricism.”
Daniel Barbiero, Avant Music News

http://www.satokofujii.com/shortbio.html
http://joefonda.com/biography
http://www.giannimimmo.com/en/home