Alternating Currents Live presents The Bridge #2.8

Hunter Diamond—tenor saxophone & electronics

We’ve seen it a hundred times before, and never before. Two saxophones (and other things) on each side of the tour, in France and in the U.S., pillars in flames of course—first in France with the framework of a double bass and all the terraces of the drums when it was was Mikel Patrick Avery with Tracteur Hammer (a band name inherited from their tour of France, at the height of the mobilization of the Coordination rurale, whose machines threatened to invade Paris . . .), with olula negre and their cello grooves. Or conversely, now coming to Milwaukee and Chicago, the house will turn upside down, when Hunter Diamond, Florian Nastorg, Yoram Rosilio, and olula negre will decide to do things differently. “What's certain for me,” says Nastorg, “is that whatever I plan or expect, the music can be something else. In improvisational contexts, whenever I expected music to go this way or that way, it always went another way. And that other direction has always been the right one. The music decides, we play it. It’s as if we were the tools that make it possible to listen to it.” The music can decide, for example, to be built like a house with windows everywhere, dormer windows, portholes, window wells. And the musicians make openings, embrasures everywhere, each showing a different exterior.

“Part of my current creative practice is site-specific improvisation,” says Diamond, “and I’m a great believer in the ability of a space to influence the energy of a performance. We achieve a collective sensibility through contact with the spaces in which we play, and the development of a group sound is indebted to the character of these spaces, to the objective and renewed lenses through which musicians engage.” Which this collective did, once, many times, in France, in January and February 2024. Indeed, Diamond’s ideas, like those of Avery or olula negre, were heavily influenced by the culture of improvised music in Chicago: rejection of rigid boundaries between genres, approaching or ascending music from all sides at once. Because there’s this “trust in the impalpable magic that can exist between living, sensitive beings,” which Rosilio knows very well, “endowed with the ability to externalize and materialize small chemical and electrical mysteries, which can be received and taken into account by other living, sensitive beings, and find a meaning, an echo, a resonance, a response, a shadow, a contrast, a rebound, a crush, an engulfment, a disappearance, a crush, an explosion. . . .” An adelphity born of an epic journey. We haven’t seen anything yet.

The Bridge is supported by the French Ministry of Culture, Centre National de la Musique, Adami, Sacem, Spedidam, Institut Français, Experimental Sound Studio, Woodland Pattern, and the University of Chicago.

Concert: Alternating Currents Live presents The Bridge #2.8