Sergio Armaroli: Introducing A Very Heavy Person, First Visit

If you reject the assumption that time is linear, the ability to conceive of a time machine is simple. Assume for this discussion that the concepts of past, present, and future are a false dichotomy. In other words, the past and the future simultaneously occur with the present. Composer and percussionist Sergio Armaroli accepts this premise and his quintet accomplishes a rather time-less travel through twelve tracks.

Let's back up a bit. In his career, Armaroli has been a student and interpreter of the music and philosophy of John Cage. Like Cage, his music has been influenced by poetry, painting, and philosophy. This recording from September of 2023 has a through-line connection to a radio performance from May 31, 1942, in Chicago. John Cage was commissioned by CBS Radio to write music for The City Wear A Slouch Hat, a radio play written by Kenneth Patchen in 1941. Patchen (1911-1972), also known as the 'father of the beats,' was a poet, an activist, and a committed pacifist. Late in his career, he could be heard reading his poems accompanied by jazz musicians such as Charles Mingus and Allyn Ferguson. In recent times, Patchen's poems have inspired the music of Peter Brötzmann and John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet.

The City Wear A Slouch Hat broadcast was a combination of surrealism, metaphysics, and Elizabethan poetry with a male identified only as "The Voice" walking through a city and encountering people, including the homeless, gangsters, a drunk, a woman who believes (incorrectly) that her face is horribly scarred, and at some point, even the narrator is robbed. The play is scored for five percussionists who add live and recorded sound effects. While radio plays, in general, were popular in the time before television, audiences weren't prepared for the conceptual nature of both the script and the sounds generated by tin cans, gongs, woodblocks, alarm bells, tam-tam, a bass drum, Chinese tom-toms, bongos, cowbells, maracas, claves, ratchet, pod rattle, foghorn, thunder sheet, and the sound-effect recordings. While the play in 1942 suffered from what Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes described as the 'shock of the new,' with the advent and acceptance of free jazz and free improvisation today, we have no such obstacles, well at least for open-minded listeners.

Time-traveling Amaroli takes advantage of this openness. He has previously worked with Downtown legend Elliott Sharp and Steve Piccolo of Lounge Lizards fame. This session also adds two giants of the UK free improvisation scene, bassist John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders. The pair are favorites of musicians such as Evan Parker, John Butcher, and Paul Dunmall.

In the 1950s and '60s, John Cage developed an aversion to improvisation in his music, but at the time of this radio play and again in the 1970s he embraced some elements of the art form. Armaroli's Quintet doesn't so much perform a radio play as they create the audio equivalent of a graphic novel. Analogous to Patchen's character "The Voice," Piccolo opens "Intro" declaring the caveat "quite possibly extinct or soon-to—vanish sounds that will live on only in the minds of those who heard them in the past." His prophetic words detail the remaining 13 figure(s) or melodic fragments Armaroli has created for this quintet. He explains, that the music is "completely improvised from every single Figure(s) you can find in the score... melodic fragments in the key of G for guitar or soprano by Elliott Sharp and in the key of F for double bass by John Edwards. Each individual Figure was improvised freely choosing first, not always, a rhythmic groove, an idea of style, but always leaving everything possible and open to the moment." With the musical talent assembled, Amaroli's Figure(s) or melodic fragments are all he required for this storytelling adventure.

Like Patchen's script for "The Voice" in The City Wear A Slouch Hat, Piccolo's utterances describe people, objects, places, and actions such as, "iron scaffolding shaking in the wind," "chewing on crackers," and "scraping frosted windshield." Piccolo's verses which are the counterpart to Armaroli's Figure(s), could just as easily have been uttered in Chicago 1942. Both cue the assembled musicians to illustrate, for the listener, the pages of this phantasmagorical graphic novel.