Eleonora Strino: Matilde

There isn't much training around for young arts interviewers, but one bit of advice that is usually thrown out is never to ask "Where do you get your ideas?" It's a seemingly banal question that can only attract banal—and sometimes very sarcastic—answers. And yet sometimes, in context, it's exactly the right question to ask. More often than one might expect, novelists, poets, and musicians are more than happy to say that the new body of work being considered began in a single moment, with a sound, a chance juxtaposition of words, or very often an image.

[The English novelist] John Fowles said that the inspiration behind The French Lieutenant's Woman came entirely from the repetitive imagined figure of a woman, in the dress of an earlier age, standing on a deserted quay, looking out to sea. What came of that was a novel that looked deep into not just the attitudes that made modern Britain what it is, but the nature of fiction itself.

And something similar is at work here, in the new music of Eleonora Strino. We are introduced to Matilde, seen not still and bereft like Fowles's Sarah Woodruff, but strongly alive and mobile, moving to the wind, drawn in just a couple of colours, black hair and white scarf. What Matilde shares with Sarah is a certain unnerving quality. What is her story, and what is she capable of?

Fowles required many pages, much historiographic research, a steady shuttling between past and present. Eleonora Strino was inspired first of all by her late father's painting, but "where she gets her ideas from" is more complex. She draws deeply on the Spanish music, and on a long tradition of jazz guitar, the sounds of Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Herb Ellis, Grant Green, Pat Martino, Jim Hall, and Emily Remler.

In the rock era, the electric guitar acquired a curiously masculinised image, phallic and thrusting, where previously there had always been a strong unconscious connection between the body of a guitar and the body of a woman. And it turns out that the electric guitar is an instrument that offers no physical resistance to the player, that can be played crashingly loud without exertion or fast with little obvious physical effort. One thinks of a contemporary like Mary Halvorson, who looks small but plays big, or Remler's comment that while outside she looked like a nice Jewish girl from Jersey, inside she was a big black man with an outsize thumb.

Eleonora Strino creates a similar impression, and it's perhaps the impression best conveyed in that image of Matilde: of delicacy with strength, of unshakeable but unspoken purpose, perhaps even a little whiff of danger. This, I have to say, is the most exciting guitar-led music I have heard for some time. Whereas the instrument now often has to reach for elements of "rock energy" to re-establish its position in jazz, Strino seems to play in the line of the jazz greats above, but adds something of her own. It isn't a matter of pretending that Jimi Hendrix never existed, but it is a matter of understanding that there is another way of going.

Matilde does not fear being alone, nor of finding herself away from home and in unaccustomed territory. That, in a sense, is the essence of jazz. It's a music of profound individualism that puts equal emphasis on the ensemble, as Strino does with her excellent supporting players; it's music that dances alone but draws in the gaze and the attention of all.

There are, of course, reams of writing on the evils of the male gaze in particular. The question always is, who is in control of the situation, who commands the gaze? In this case we know. Quietly surrender to Matilde and she will take you on an unforgettable journey, into what it means to be a strong woman, what it means to create something out of nothing, what it means to dance in the moment.