Jordina Millà and Barry Guy: Live In Munich

There is an elusive, impossible logic to Live In Munich, an album that could sound so much like so many before it. But it does not. Because the music that roils tidal between Catalan pianist Jordina Millà and British bassist Barry Guy on their debut concert performance may be more the sound of creation than music as listeners have come to comfortably conceive it.

Categorically ECM recordings contain creative fire and brimstone, symphonic contours, minimalist patina, and concepts striding. Live In Munich embodies open expression in its purest form: the moment is the sound and the sound draws you into a world unknown. A world in the twilight. Building upon their initial recording, String Fables (Fundacja Słuchaj, 2021), "Part I" is a gripping drama. A volatile narrative that finds Millà with her senses heightened, her response time instant. A musician mentored by Spain's free music guru Agusti Fernandez, she splashes new colors in broad strokes across Munich's Schwere Reiter Hall. Her instrument is its eminent self for one moment and a harp afire the next.

Undulating with a telepathic fervor and seemingly spawned from Old Testament fury, "Part II" opens as Barry Guy—his pizzicato a runaway train—fiercely thrums, bends, and arcs. He pulls and weaves, leads and relents as instinctively here as he has for the last fifty-plus years. "Part III" is Millà's meditative moment. But, as the appreciative applause falls silent, it is a moment quickly dispersed by the nomadic questing and realizations of "Part IV." Refracting in and out of silence, Millà and Guy probe the margins of abstraction: His bow cuts into the flaring dialogue. Then silence. Then, with the pianist's classical yearnings and the bassist's knowing intuition on full display, comes the swirling, sonorous, elliptical "Part V." "Part V" opens with a frenzy of piano and tonic scraping, like the sea itself has opened up. Then it rolls back upon itself, leaving no trace of what came before. Given the aesthetic both artists pursue and their resolution to create what has not existed before that makes for a pitch-perfect ending to Live In Munich.

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