WE INSIST! Music on Show – Situations | October 16-26, 2019
What is seen here is coessential to what is heard. It is an intertwining of moods, thoughts, occasions, things, and sounds that also reflects the fabric of existence, in the undefined and clear zone of shared intelligence.
Giancarlo “Nino” Locatelli meets Maria Borghi, who also has a passion for music, and records for her We Insist! Situations.
It is a further rethinking of the music of Steve Lacy, the most European of Americans, one of the most prolific and fervent branches of the prickly stock of Thelonious Monk. Of his music, and of his way, in which on the one hand the source idea of sound is scrutinized until it becomes essence, and on the other hand the nourritures come from continuous transits and contaminations with worlds that specialism would like to be others, poetry, image, visuality.
By generational chance, I grew up in the Milan of Demetrio Stratos and Gianni Sassi. I was at Area and Lacy’s Event ’76 at the State University on October 27, 1976, which would later become a legendary album in 1979. I collected Sassi’s Cramps “DIVerso” records, including Lacy’s Straws. 1977 – and I soaked up the lessons of Anthony Braxton and Giorgio Gaslini: etc.
And I knew full well that improvisation, thought, and the fundamental value of solo sound also concerned words, writing, experiences of freedom, and inventive chance in vision, or rather the world of fastosi insoumis in which I grew up with the things of art.
This is the humus in which Locatelli has his roots, and which this initiative aims to convey in a concise and succinct manner.
There are the papers of Franco Beltrametti, a nomadic Locarno native who was, among other things, an accomplice of Adriano Spatola and Corrado Costa in the adventurous and ingenious Geiger editions, and a colleague of geneticist Tom Raworth, who is often featured in Beltrametti’s Riva San Vitale: it was here that Absence was born, conceived by Lacy in 1995 from a text by Raworth and dedicated to his Swiss friend who had just passed away. Locatelli made Il grande quarto d’ora (The Great Quarter of an Hour) for/with Beltrametti in 1998, and Raworth was naturally also part of the project.
