Cosa Brava was the last great rock band of multi-instrumentalist-composer-eductor Fred Frith. Cosa Brava was an experimental super-group that was formed in March 2008 in Oakland and featured keyboard player-accordionist Zeena Parkins (who collaborated with Frith in Skeleton Crew and Keep the Dog), violinist Carla Kihlstedt (who collaborated before with Frith in several albums and projects), drummer Matthias Bossi (Kihlstedt’s partner), bassist Shahzad Ismaily (who has worked with Kihlstedt and Bossi) and The Norman Conquest (aka Norman Teale) on sound manipulation. This band released two albums, Ragged Atlas and The Letter (Intakt, 2010 and 2012).
Frith said that his motivation behind the sorely missed Cosa Brava formation arose from his nostalgia for rock music. «I really miss what you can do with a rock band. I miss developing material through the push and pull of cooperative rehearsals, I miss what happens when you move away from the parts and start formulating things with a collective ear, I miss the single-minded commitment to a group identity», he said in an interview to Inclinations.
Z Sides completely differs from Cosa Brava’s studio albums which focused on genre-defying songs. In live performances, these songs were constantly interspersed with improvisations of all descriptions. Z Sides, the brainchild of The Norman Conquest, takes 12 live mixes of Cosa Brava’s exciting performances in Europe and the United States from its first performances in March 2008 to its last European tour in May 2012, re-editing and re-imagining them anew by The Norman Conquest and Frith into surreal, strange yet beautiful new collages. With such a group packed with gifted and highly resourceful musicians, there are plenty of poetic, imaginary veins that extend the original themes while keeping Cosa Brava’s unique sense of spontaneous collective improvisations.
«I know that if you pick the right players, chances are the music will take care of itself» Frith said in the above-mentioned interview. «The musicians in Cosa Brava can improvise, read scores, AND rock the house. But we’ll only know what Cosa Brava is when we’ve already stopped thinking in terms of those big musical compartments and find out who we are in our group language». Z Sides distills and reimagines the infinite musical imagination of Cosa Brava and proves that beauty is indeed an elusive and strange thing.
Eyal Hareuveni
Fred Frith (guitar, bass, voice), Zeena Parkins (keyboards, voice), Carla Kihlstedt (violin, voice), Shahzad Ismaily (bass), Matthias Bossi (drums, voice), The Norman Conquest (effects)
