American, New York-based double bass player Brandon Lopez feels at home playing with the New York Philharmonic, accompanying silent films by directors Stan Brakhage and Germaine Dulac, or playing with forward-thinking improvisers like Ingrid Laubrock, Nate Wooley, Joe McPhee, Paal Nilssen-Love, Elliot Sharp and Henry Kaiser. He is currently an instructor of improvisation and double bass at the New School for Jazz.
nada sagrada (Nothing Sacred) is Lopez’s commissioned, ambitious, multimedia composition for an all-star septet – Lopez on double bass, Zeena Parkins on electric harp, violist Mat Maneri, Argentinian Cecilia Lopez on electronics, Korean DoYeon Kim on the traditional plucked zither, gayageum, and drummers Gerald Cleaver and Tom Rainey – recorded live at Roulette Intermedium during the 2023 edition of the Vision Festival (and mixed and mastered beautifully by guitarist David Torn). This composition was published during the festival as «the gospel of sans», but the cover artwork, a detail of a painting of Christopher Columbus (by Sebastiano del Piombo, 1519) points to the political nature of this composition.
It is a complex composition that explores the delicate, resonant timbres and unique tonalities of the acoustic and electric string instruments, intensified and colored by Cecilia Lopez’ sci-fi-like electronics and propelled by the polyrhythmic pulses of drummers Cleaver and Rainey. Lopez emphasized the deep listening and the collective spirit needed to realize this composition, with brief solos, and a ritualist, lyrical and compassionate, deep-toned coda. It is an inspired and timely musical statement that answers authoritarian, demented global leaders who claim that nothing is sacred anymore.
Lopez teams up again with the Korean master DoYeon Kim of the traditional Korean zither, gayageumin, who already recorded with such innovative improvisers like American guitarist Joe Morris and Catalan pianist Agustí Fernández, for five experimental, exotic-cosmic, and highly intense improvisations, recorded at Sear Sound in New York in February 2024. Both Lopez and Kim are fearless improvisers, who employ an array of extended bowing techniques, and often it is impossible to tell who is doing what or how they produce such evocative sounds and traverse these haunting sounds through the fibers of our existence with explosive vibrations.
Lopez has a spiritual explanation for such an inspired sonic alchemy. «In improvisation, in its best cases, the individual or individuals engaged in the act of it seem to be in a larger conversation that, in its best cases, are utilizing and sacrificing an individual process to a greater process, which is a process, as I’ve found it, of dialog and making and listening and intuiting». Lopez and Kim are great listeners and masterful practitioners of the art of the moment, and Syzygy, Vol. 1 promises that we are already waiting anxiously for the second volume.
Revision is already the third collaboration of Lopez with the inimitable poet, cultural theorist, and professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University Fred Moten, whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. It follows the self-titled trio albums with drummer Gerald Cleaver, and its follow-up The Blacksmiths, The Flowers (Relative Pitch, 2022, and Reading Group, 2024).
Lopez and Cleaver have been improvising together as a duo for several years, over which they’ve developed a secret, unspoken language of organically growing repetitive figures in a wide range of sonic palettes. Lopez often uses here the wooden body of the double bass as a percussive instrument or adds objects to emphasize the atmosphere of Moten’s suggestive poems. But most of the time he offers a precise and equally poetic, rhythmic basis for Moten’s commanding, poetic stream of thought, with many references to Afro-American jazz music, in the tradition of Beat poets or poets like Amiri Baraka.
Eyal Hareuveni
Brandon Lopez (double bass), Zeena Parkins (electric harp), Mat Maneri (viola), Cecilia Lopez (electronics), DoYeon Kim (gayageum), Gerald Cleaver (drums), Tom Rainey (drums), Fred Moten (vocals)
