Weave4: La Gomma Di Dante

Did the quartet Weave4 reach back 700 years with an eraser and a comma to reimagine Dante Alighieri's famous words: "Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost?" Well, not exactly.

This French-Italian collective of pianist Benoit Delbecq, drummer Steve Arguelles, guitarist Francesco Diodati and Francesco Bigoni on tenor saxophone and clarinet follows up its self-titled album, Weave4 (Parco Della Musica Records, 2023), with 15 compositions that might, through the magic of a time machine, have been celebrated by Dante as the soundtrack to a film by Jim Jarmusch adapting The Divine Comedy.

The quartet blends acoustic and electric sounds with occasional sampling, creating amorphous, spectral shapes that seem to drift in and out of focus. They are the kinds of sounds one might imagine accompanying Dante's wanderings through that dark forest. It is easy to picture Signor Alighieri as Roberto Benigni, Tom Waits or John Lurie from Jarmusch's Down by Law (1986), stumbling through the swamps of Louisiana as the music of "Betulla" and "Sospeso" follows him. Bigoni's clarinet traces a serpentine path through dusty, muted metallic percussion, while the guitar and electronics add to the sense of disorientation.

Delbecq composed the title track, "Gomma," around stuttering fragments of music and oddly shaped mechanical beats, punctuated by jabs of guitar and clarinet and the occasional piano run. Throughout, the quartet presents these sounds with an insouciant, thoroughly hip sensibility. There is no attempt to explain or apologize for the music's illimitable possibilities. None is needed.

Weave4 draws from several distinct traditions without settling comfortably into any of them. There are echoes of Bill Frisell in the locomotive momentum of "Kind Of," the dreamlike atmosphere of Paul Motian's later compositions in "Miglia," and even a naïve chamber-music quality in "Liens Cachés." Yet these references function less as destinations than as points of departure. The quartet continually alters the landscape beneath the listener's feet.

La Gomma Di Dante is not actually a soundtrack, but it behaves like one. Its music generates images, characters and places without dictating what they should look like. Like Dante's journey through the dark wood, the pleasure comes partly from losing the straightforward pathway. Weave4 does not erase the past so much as redraw its lines, leaving behind a strange, cinematic music for getting gloriously lost.