A duo of free and spaciously building exchanges between Dutch drummer George Hadow (Zwerv, The Blue Lines Trio) and Belgian guitarist Dirk Serries (A New Wave of Jazz), in an extended dialog of great technical skills and creative use of their instruments, performing live at the 2021 JazzBlast event held in the chapel Groels Kapel in Bocholt, Belgium.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2021 Country: Portugal Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded live at Groels Kapel, in Bocholt, Belgium, on September 4th, 2021, by Dirk Serries.
"While the Belgian guitarist Dirk Serries, as an ambient/drone/noise musician, controlled his sounds to perfection, as an improviser he is an eternal seeker, audibly and visibly trying to find new ways and sounds - however small - and immediately to give. In his first free improvisational years he did this on the electric guitar, but for some time now an acoustic guitar has been his most faithful musical friend. Serries also tries to extract sounds from that instrument that he has not yet discovered, with his fingers or hands, but also with accessories if the music asks for it.
Recently two CDs were released on which Serries can be heard as a duo.INSTOCK The first is a live recording by the guitarist in collaboration with drummer George Hadow, the second is a recording with the Belgian double bassist Peter Jacquemyn. This also concerns a registration of a live performance. Both releases show how well Serries' eternal quest works in combination with two very different musicians.
George Hadow is from England but he operates from Amsterdam. He studied with Han Bennink and Michael Moore and he is a member of the Blue Lines Trio, The Bertch Quartet, the Xavier Pamplona Septet, Zwerv and Kuhn Fu, among others. Chapel is not the first collaboration with Serries, because three years ago Ideal Principle was published by a quintet that consisted, in addition to Hadow and Serries, of John Dikeman, Luís Vicente and Martina Verhoeven. It is also not the first duo CD of the two, because Outermission was already released in 201 , on which Serries played electric guitar.
That is not the case now and that has a major influence on the sound of the duo. Another difference with the previous duo album is that the music is not divided into eleven fairly short improvisations, but contains one long improvisation. The music of the two is not large, but is located in the small space and also comes into its own in a small space. As always, Serries is searching. That search is what it's all about. In addition, the guitarist has a trained ear for small nuances.
Hadow is, as you can hear on this album, an ideal sparring partner. He also doesn't think big, but in sounds, small sounds that can make the difference. The music is not always loud. That doesn't mean the music is good. Certainly not. Even at a low volume it can get unruly and angular. The music is not for everyone and it takes a lot of guts to make music like this, although the musicians will not consider it as guts but as a pure necessity. They must make this music; it's urgent. That is what this music radiates in the small space and in that sense makes it great.
The album was recorded in the Groels Kapel in Bocholt, Belgium, and if the recording is representative of how the live performance sounded, then that chapel has beautiful acoustics. Opduvel often has a preference for the electric guitar over the acoustic guitar, but with Serries it is exactly the other way around. The different sounds seem to distinguish better acoustically and thus come into their own better.
Serries is still growing as a guitarist and he manages to add more and more variation in his playing, whereby it seems that he often lets the tones resound a little longer. Perhaps that is also the influence that Hadow's dazzling and inventive drumming has on his way of playing. The drummer plays freely, with virtually no repetitions and using his entire drum kit. His playing with brushes is beautiful, which invites Serries to fabricate short experimental sounds on his guitar, which contrasts nicely with the rustling sound of the drums. At other times, the two musicians find each other in more intense passages, in which the guitarist scratches and scrapes and the drummer shaves his toms and hits edges.
The music can create a buzz of interest, but both musicians are also adept at creating tension under the skin, when the volume is dampened, the tempo drops and the music seems to be being played from silence. You know that the musical mood can change at any moment, you just don't know when. Hadow and Serries are constantly busy not only challenging each other, but also the listener with new discoveries, new timbres and changes in intensity. Even at the end, at a moment when you would think that the ideas would run out or the musicians would be tired, the duo surprises with a few high-pitched beeps, new sounds that come up spontaneously and serve as an excellent finish. Thus ends the exciting improvisation, which can be regarded as a sound investigation bursting with ideas."-OpDuvel, translated by Google