Recordings

Deep State:  Guerino Mazzola & Alex Lubet

This album is the culmination of eight years of collaboration, including weekly sessions of pure – and practiced – improvisation.  After a period of experimentation with larger ensembles, we determined that the kind of unit cohesion that only comes from hundreds of hours of playing and listening together by the whole ensemble, as small as it is, would be our priority.  This recording is, we believe, an affirmation of that belief borne out.
 
Our commitment to a musical spontaneity grounded in lifetimes of preparation has evolved into a kind of post-genre sonic/stylistic signature.   Grounded initially and obviously in free (and all) jazz, this music is also audibly informed by the totality of American vernacular traditions – most obviously but hardly limited to the blues – and enriched by Western Classical Modernism and ideas from Africa and points East.  We have arrived at this synthesis naturally and without pre-calculation, simply by being seriously open, both to vast worlds of music and to each other’s playing, the latter by having an imaginary time consciousness of gestural shapes, in which understanding equals catching the gesture and continuing.  The intensity of instantaneous improvisatory responsiveness yields a sense of coherence and clarity that is quite different from score/recording-based composition -- in that it owes less to repetitive form and development -- while matching the intellectual rigor of such fixed media creative processes.  Of utmost importance is an affirmation of “less is more;” a time/space where timbres – emanating from our unique instrumentation and an arsenal of both traditional and extended playing techniques -- and rhythms – derived from an exceptionally worldly time consciousness -- abound, flowing out of an orchestra of two sans drums.