Terry & Gyan Riley

9:30 pm, and all of Naples has its head turned skyward, waiting for the much-announced lunar eclipse to appear in the night sky. To better enjoy the rare astronomical event, many have gathered at strategic points around the city. Some have made their way to the Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory, others have preferred the terrace of Castel dell'Ovo with the romantic backdrop of the gulf. In the heart of Naples, meanwhile, in an alley leading into one of the city's oldest neighborhoods - the Stella district - about a hundred people are waiting for the epiphany of another astronomical phenomenon, in its own way: the music of Terry Riley. The man who flooded us with a river of drones to show us that we are the river. The repetition of harmonic and rhythmic patterns as a spiritual gateway to the self. They called it minimalism, and Terry Riley represented its most mystical and psychedelic wing. From Who to Manuel Göttsching ai Radioheadgenerations of musicians have elected his "In C" and "A Rainbow In Curved Air" as totems to which they appeal for the grace of inspiration.

 

His performance in Naples, an absolute first in a career spanning more than fifty years, is therefore a far rarer and more unmissable event than the eclipse, being moreover the second of three exclusive European dates with stops in Barcelona and London. The concert's location is the striking courtyard of Palazzo Ayerbo D'Aragona Cassano, an eighteenth-century complex chosen by the Morra Foundation as its Contemporary Art Archive and a 360-degree exhibition space. At the entrance portal, visitors are greeted by an installation of tires by the American artist Allan Kaprow, father of the happening and an artist who, like Riley, made an enormous contribution to the development of 1960s neo-avant-gardes.

Compared to that era, which amounts to an epic saga, Terry Riley today plays in a very different way, certainly not giving up Indian moods and minimalist suspensions, but working from a folk repertoire - or rather, roots to be more precise - filtered through an avant-garde sensibility which, rather than being related to psychedelia, seems instead to carry the same genes as ECM and its "chamber" jazz.

 

Terry takes the stage fairly punctually, around 10:10 pm. Long white beard and a floral-print shirt, he sits down at the piano and synth. His son Gyan, a virtuoso guitarist, settles in beside his own instrument. Understated in dress and professional in bearing, he gives the cue to begin with the first of many smiles that will punctuate, throughout the whole concert, a genuine family dialogue.

To everyone's surprise, the evening's first notes are produced not by the synth or the piano, but by a disarming melodica which, amid the dense interplay with the acoustic guitar, recreates border atmospheres. Desert-like, gypsy, Andalusian and - why not - even a bit Mediterranean. When the scene changes, the landscape instead becomes that of a deeply American wilderness, evoked in a fugue for piano and guitar in which father and son chase each other along the same theme, varied by Gyan's slide effects and closed by the solemn requiem of Terry's electric organ.

 

The methodological nature of how the pieces develop is clearly that of improvisation, occasionally pierced by recorded tapes reproducing hisses from cosmic music, delay e loop of female voices, other times by Gyan's dazzling guitar bravura (a vast technical repertoire ranging from slide to timbral distortion, from glissando to vibrato), and on a couple of occasions even by the roar of a plane flying overhead, whose presence is readily embraced by the duo as musique concrète, an irruption of the real soundscape into the linguistic context of art. After all, Terry Riley is also a child of John Cage.

The most thrilling moments of the evening are those when the tight dialogue between piano and electric guitar comes to a halt – as in "Sprig", a marvel for solo acoustic guitar drawn from Gyan's solo repertoire – or when it is enriched by Terry's singing, as in "Ebony Horns", where the hoarse howl is now the call of an Indian preacher, now the wail of a werewolf bluesman.

      

At the end there's even room for a few bursts of lyricism Michael Nyman-style before the definitive close, standing, with a nocturnal electric guitar arpeggio and a thread of melodica that keeps the breath suspended. That's how it ends, with a goodnight that's surprising precisely because it's so simple. Outside, the eclipse has already passed, and everyone who was in the audience missed it. In return, they bore witness to an equally astonishing phenomenon: at 83 years of age, it's still too soon for certain artistic moons to decide to eclipse themselves.