Ivo Perelman: Seven Skies Orchestra

In another reality, where the love one makes is what gets the headlines, the big money, the streaming specials, ceaselessly inquisitive saxophonist and downtown legend Ivo Perelman might just top the list of good guys. The guy who pushes for the better mind, the better heart, and confesses it all to tape or lacquer or binary code; chronicling one man's pursuit of the day. while hopefully inspiring others to cut the course the same.

Even before the most recent cries of our most recent war, Perelman heard them and swore them into existence on Seven Skies Orchestra. Trumpeter Nate Wooley (particularly emphatic on "Part Two") heard them too. Cellist Fred Longberg Holm, bassist Joe Morris, vibe man Matt Moran and Mat Maneri on viola heard them too. And responded in kind for the 2CD, Seven Skies Orchestra.

The music is ethereal. Like it is not happening. But it is. A lot like war. But it is also like peacetime if we ever, as a human cooperative, exercised that particular option in our survival bag. Laced with switchbacks and moments of tense calm, beguiling ease, and gracious beauty. There is ugly too because, like it or not, that is how it is within the course of human events.

Which is, defiantly, what Seven Skies Orchestra is: A human event. Like war. Like "Part Five:" Maneri ringing like arguing clouds as Morris bickers and screeches. Recorded in one session on November 2022 at Parkwest Studio Brooklyn NY; sans drums to define any given course and piano to distract from it, the sextet takes up the battle and triumphs via active communication ("Part Six") and willful cooperation ("Part Seven," "Part Three.")

Like all human events, there is collision and collusion ("Part Seven" again); rage and redemption ("Part Eight," "Part Ten"); and an acute awareness that history may, momentarily, desire conflict, but in the end it is only union by which we thrive.