NINNI MORGIA CONTROL UNIT - Ninni Morgia Control Unit

The season of esoteric, ritual free-jazz, which looked almost more to Asia than to Africa — the era of late John Coltrane and his disciple Pharoah Sanders, of the most spiritual Sun Ra, and of mavericks like Sonny Sharrock, Alice Coltrane, Burton Greene and many others — seemed to have closed long ago. Forgotten for decades, this highly distinctive school of improvisers, which sidestepped any easy ethno-world pandering, whether it be arid philology or a forced reduction into solid pop grammars, had experienced a few fresh stirrings in the 2000s thanks to New Weird America and the compulsive rediscovery of anything that could be labelled strange folk material.

Saxophonist Daniel Carter was one of the many forgotten and unlucky protagonists (due to missed opportunities and reticent producers) of that last great season of free-jazz, and like others (see Arthur Doyle, first rediscovered in the no-wave era, or Charles Gayle, who didn't set foot in a recording studio until the end of the 80s) he recorded very little during the white-hot years of the new thing — just a couple of appearances on albums by Gunther Hampel and Bob Moses, and that already gets us into the 70s. Like the old bluesmen, Carter seems as though he was never young, and thank goodness that in the 90s William Parker and Matthew Shipp wanted him on board. So his name started circulating again, and in the 2000s, besides rightfully re-entering the top tier of the improvised-music scene, he flirted with indie-rock and weird-folk, enriching records by Yo La Tengo and Soul-Junk and contributing to an entire album by Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice ("Gipsy Freedom").

Today, thanks to the involvement of "our own" Ninni Morgia (The Right Moves, formerly of White Tornado and La Otracina), Carter has finally been able to make a record that, while rightly credited to everyone involved and to Morgia in particular, marks the state of the art of ritual free-jazz, turning it into a genre that is definitively modern without giving up its fundamental traits.

The Ninni Morgia Control Unit pairs the guitar (as well as bass, sitar and kalimba) of the Catania-born leader and the horns of Carter (he plays everything: sax, trumpet, clarinet, flute, and even handles vocals) with the percussion of Jeff Arnal, hitting the target of a music that's evocative, lightly smoky as the genre demands, yet perfectly lucid and above all "light", like fresh air scented with incense. Dynamic and emotional ups and downs abound, and yet the record keeps no fixed centre of gravity: every moment could be the beginning or the end of a larger discourse, and its strength lies in a buoyancy that is anything but lacking in substance. A fluttering swirl of subtle electric webs, arabesque exorcisms signed by Morgia, underlies the oily flow of the sounds, with Arnal always present with a light touch and Carter floating enveloping melodies with an otherworldly freedom, so at ease in that space that he makes it look like the easiest thing in the world.

The three of them play, in short, with consummate ease. And the record has no rough edges or difficult passages, even though the material is seething and ungraspable, psychedelia of the soul with no intermediary. So there's little point in dwelling on the wonderful electric elasticity of "Foreign Visitors", the reckless underground trajectories with the wah-wah of "Arriving At A Statement", the emotional suspensions translated into spiced spirals on "Nothingness", or the slow, dark bubbling of "Crystal Clear", right up to the gentle spatial ascents of "Misty Space" — perhaps truly the best possible ending for a record that only stops short of going on forever because of technological imperfection.

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25/01/2010