Not One Not Two: Openings And Samādhis

Have you ever considered free improvisation musicians as part of a sangha? The Sanskrit word sangha means community, and in Buddhist practice, it refers to the collective of seekers who support one another along the path toward awakening. For Geoff Bright and Herve Perez—the duo known as Not One Not Two—the concept goes beyond metaphor. Their collaboration embodies the spirit of taking refuge in the sangha: mutual support, shared awareness and the application of compassion and wisdom to creative challenges. Their music, in turn, becomes a practice of samādhi, a deep concentration that reveals the unity between sound, silence and intention.

Both musicians are committed practitioners of meditation, following in a lineage of spiritually-attuned improvisers that includes John Coltrane, Don Cherry, Wayne Shorter and Milford Graves. In this sense, the Buddhist reflection on form and emptiness feels especially apt. The mantra "whatever is empty, that is form; whatever is form, that is empty" could easily serve as a definition of free improvisation; where the act of creating music arises out of stillness, and sound and silence continually dissolve into one another.

Across eight instantly-composed pieces, Bright (on bass and soprano saxophones, plus occasional vocalizations) and Perez (on alto and soprano) explore that tension between duality and unity. Not One Not Two is not just the name of the duo but a guiding koan, a paradox to inhabit rather than solve.

The opener, "The Samādhi Of The Expulsion Of Sacred Rage," pairs Bright's deep, eruptive bass saxophone with Perez's calm, measured alto, finding equilibrium between force and release. In this sonic dialogue, anger transforms into energy, energy into peace. The two soprano duets—"The Samādhi Of The Encounter With The Double" and "The Samādhi of Pearl Drops"—mirror the record's philosophical core: two voices merging into one timbral breath, yet maintaining their individual contours. The music is both conversation and contemplation.

Perhaps the most revealing moment arrives in "The Secret Samādhi," where sound gives way to breath itself. Here, tone dissolves into the bare passage of air through the instrument—a literal enactment of the "gateless gate," the boundary between playing and being.

Throughout, Bright and Perez approach improvisation not as a display of virtuosity but as a shared meditation on presence. Their music does not seek resolution so much as awareness. Each track unfolds like a sitting session—sometimes turbulent, sometimes serene, always awake.

In the end, the duo reminds us that free improvisation, at its most profound, is a form of refuge: not in doctrine or dogma, but in sound, breath and listening. Openings And Samādis dissolves the line between self and other, between musician and instrument, between noise and silence, offering instead a single, resonant truth: that creation itself is the act of awakening.

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