CD – Monotype Records

Under the Monotype Records brand (it is exactly their ninety third release) Christian Kobi collects for the occasion three compositions on tenor sax, one on soprano sax and for the fifth (the central in the album) he invites Wakana Ikeda on flute, Taku Sugimoto on guitar and Yoko Ikeda on violin. We are in territories of radical and rough improvisation, free contemporary jazz, that exists in the mixture of two different traditions, the European and the Oriental one. The tracks are set in a quartet, dubbed Atta!, which means “I just found it”, to work as a conceptual passe-partout. A piece of music with hissing and suspended settings, looking for ancestral sounds and refined harmonies, with the guitar and wind instruments that modulate individual notes and for which is the old rule that what’s not there is as important as what is there” (for example the vibrato, but in general the structures within which the jam session move, between pauses, dilated moments and audible emergencies barely detectable). References to Zen culture, as with everything that over decades have pushed what someone has defined poetics of indetermination, are inevitable. “Pure improvisation”, as recalled by Jhoanne Rivest in his brief but historic essay “Alea, happening, improvvisazione, opera aperta”, it’s probably the most radical form of the rejection of writing and, its vessel, of the same notion of work”. At the same time, the improvisation process, we point out, is an immanent act in time and for its fundamental nature, something that happens and that is hard to classify. Certainly, a possible connection between jazz and Oriental Europe traditional music is not something new and Kobi himself had already experimented in past collectives focused on such a function. Now, for the Swiss musicians, the research seems to be better defined, so much that the solo tracks shine of a temporal imaginative flow, supporting at the same time a tormented technique, which requires a remarkable emission and control. Atta!, “I just found it”, could then be a declaration of joy, the awareness of an inner emotional need that finally takes shape free from ornaments and nonessential formal constructions.