Colin Stetson

"Remember to breathe," I told myself. "Nice deep breaths, because it's not you up on stage anyway, it's that force of nature called Colin Stetson." That's how it goes every time I go see a solo horn player, ever since the first time I happened to hear Luciano Berio's "Sequenza" for bassoon: by the end of those ten-odd minutes my hands felt cold, my mouth completely dry, as if I'd been holding up those long sustained notes myself the whole time, with nothing but my own untrained non-musician's strength. The same thing happened to me when I found myself watching Colin, purely by chance, open for the first Godspeed You! Black Emperor reunion show, in January 2011. His second solo album for Constellation, "New History Warfare Vol. 2", had just come out, but nobody yet knew they had in front of them such a dazzling, singular talent, capable of pushing the art of the saxophone to new, unimaginable heights.

A lineup as prestigious as JAZZMI 2018's could hardly do without such an intense appointment, one able to draw in younger audiences as well as longtime avant-garde devotees, all within a scope of interest that extends well beyond pure jazz - fertile hybridization being the real key to a festival that, now more than ever, invites everyone to take part.

And so here we are again in the stalls of the Teatro dell'Arte at the Triennale, three days after the opening with the extraordinary concert celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Three silent saxophones on stage, one of them - the bass - even more imposing than we remembered. A few words of introduction from the artistic director, and then he walks on: a trained but hardly titanic build, the beard and frown of a seasoned artist, barely acknowledging the audience before picking up the most classic of his instruments, the tenor sax.

One deep breath, and a pervasive cloud of amplified, reverb-soaked sound pours out of the speakers: the almost sacred meditation of "Spindrift" is the first of just six pieces performed tonight, which already gives you an idea of how long each one runs. Every change of instrument heralds a fresh feat of strength, if anything even more staggering than the last, in that continuous, stoic self-outdoing that runs through Stetson's entire discography, one that reached new expressive and technical peaks with "All This I Do For Glory", the record on which the percussive qualities and vocalizations - with which perhaps only he is able to cut through those swirling, circular melodic lines, a minimalist legacy that by now runs spontaneously through his veins - are pushed even further.

What I honestly didn't expect was to witness, already tonight, the future developments of a sound that's already so strongly defined and recognizable: the silvery gleam of the contrabass clarinet - also used on the recent "Hereditary" soundtrack - dissolves into a dark, shuddering drone, at the end of which a new additive pattern begins layering unfamiliar elements still hard to pin down, in an atmosphere that seems to blend Burial's nocturnal dubstep with the dense glitch webs of the most reductionist Pan Sonic.

But beyond the more or less obvious or explicitly acknowledged influences - for instance, the rhythmic inlays of Aphex Twin on "In The Clinches" - how can one ignore the essentially spiritual nature of these solo immersions? How can one not recognize the same yearning for absolute elevation, a pure transcendence beyond earthly art and life? Big words, you'll say, at least until you get the same chance to experience firsthand the staggering truth of such a live act, a polyphony of the self that no guru could ever hope to achieve.

And even if, before long, Stetson were to hit a dead end and find himself unable to push past that limit which by his very nature he'll always tend to exceed, he will already have done more than enough to be remembered, and to make us proud to have witnessed such a triumph in our own lifetime.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google