Across the five duets of Shakkei – a Japanese term for the art of ‘borrowed scenery’ which has been described as the principle of incorporating distant views into the composition of a garden, a process of framing and layering which might emphasise snowy hilltops, active volcanos or mountain foothills ripe with foliage, castles or more humble dwellings and lakes, ponds or streams – the saxophonist Alexandra Grimal and pianist Giovanni Di Domenico offer a limpid and windswept blend of jazz and contemporary classical influences, at once capable of receding pleasantly into the background or captivating the listener with a sense of staggered beauty and infinite depth.
Take the opening track ‘Komori ęØå®’ for example, which roughly translates as ‘tree guardian’ and finds Di Domenico introducing these lovely rolling piano keys, his watery legato flowing together like a stream while when the saxophone arrives somewhere approaching the four-minute mark, it sounds barely there, no more than a murmur on the wind. Di Domenico’s piano clusters carry that stream through eddies and cascades as Grimal’s horn becomes more plaintive and urgent, before a brief lull gives way to a more furtive closing section characterised by the susurrations of the soprano saxophone.
On the second piece ‘Ishi No Irai / Request of the Stone ē³ć®ä¾é ¼’ the metal chimes of the celesta accompanied by the impish sprites of the soprano imbue the whole with the soothing character of a lullaby, a quality which sustains through percussive sounds as Grimal taps at her saxophone keys breathlessly, some plunking chords and scampering winds as the duo initiate a kind of chase sequence then a few more assertive notes on the horn. While both musicians have plenty of experience in more conventional jazz settings, ‘Ishi No Irai / Request of the Stone ē³ć®ä¾é ¼’ reminds me especially of the song ‘Gratitude’ from the Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack, where Bjƶrk enlisted Will Oldham plus the harpist Zeena Parkins to unspool a song of thanks regarding the lifting of a whaling moratorium off the Japanese coast.
On ‘Ishi No Irai / Request of the Stone ē³ć®ä¾é ¼’ and across the five duets of Shakkei, the result of such framing is sometimes like the auditory equivalent of a stereogram or autostereogram, one of those oscillating images which encode a three-dimensional object within a two-dimensional screen, a type of optical illusion which plays with our sense of depth perception and requires relaxed vision or crossed eyes to see, or the dolly zoom made famous by Alfred Hitchcock in his psychological thriller Vertigo, whereby the camera moves towards a subject while zooming out or vice versa, creating a disorientating effect as the subject remains the same size but distorted while the world around them rapidly shifts.
Following her breakthrough album Shape with Antonin Rayon on organ and clavinet and Emmanuel Scarpa on drums, Grimal moved from Europe to New York City and released Owls Talk with a legendary cast of musicians in Lee Konitz, Gary Peacock and Paul Motian, keen collaborators who during the course of their long careers played with everyone from Bill Frisell and Keith Jarrett to Albert Ayler, Paul Bley, Bill Evans and Miles Davis, stretching out from the ECM Records sound of the seventies and eighties through the first strains of free jazz all the way back to the Birth of the Cool.
Just a couple of months later she released her first featured collaboration with Di Domenico, who played alongside the bassist Manolo Cabras and percussionist JoÄo Lobo as Grimal led the quartet through Seminare Vento. Their first album as a duo arrived the following year, with Ghibli and Chergui – whose ‘koans’ were both an aesthetic gesture and compositional principle, as the pianist drew upon their cryptic or aphoristic forms to introduce thematic material through a series of short vignettes – succeeded in 2020 by their latest release Down The Hill.
At times blurring the borders between composition and free improvisation while overwhelmingly featuring Grimal on her trusty soprano saxophone, these three albums blended contemporary classical practices with the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, or avant-garde expressionism with aspects of experimental pop music. In the meantime Grimal has been a soloist with the Orchestre National de Jazz and featured as a member of JoĆ«lle Leandre’s tentet and the Hans LĆ¼demann TransEuropeExpress Ensemble, while Di Domenico has enjoyed longstanding relationships with Akira Sakata, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Jim O’Rourke and JoÄo Lobo, with some of these connections segueing more recently into his work with other distinctive practitioners like Eiko Ishibashi, Silvia Tarozzi, Atsuko Hatano and Kalle Moberg.
‘Kuden å£ä¼’ which refers to a tradition of oral teaching immediately sounds more urbane, with a bluesy late evening atmosphere as piano clusters crowd the scene. Those keys serve as backing for Grimal’s saxophone until more sustained notes from the middle of the keyboard begin to jostle with her downcast winds, giving way to a waspy swarm as the low tones of the piano reverberate and hang in the dimming air.
A muted organ opens ‘Sanmai äø꧒, like a submerged trumpet or bagpipe which Grimal now on the tenor saxophone seeks to match through sustained foghorn blasts, less in the manner of a siren or warning than a means of making others simply aware of her presence. Duly noted, her saxophone is swallowed up by a throng of pipes as Di Domenico runs through his organ’s stops, which Grimal again strives to match through a few trills and some growling at the edge of her tenor.
Here in the early stages ‘Sanmai äø꧒ – a form of concentrated meditation which corresponds to the Buddhist or yogic states of samadhi – takes on the aspect of drone music, as Grimal’s saxophone adds a bit of texture to Di Domenico’s sustained pipes, with the piece becoming almost threnodial before the mood dissipates and the composition takes on a more arboreal nature. With a touch of whimsy, the tenor plays earnest and plaintive notes over a lighter drone which still readily shifts in character, from uplifting and melodious to more foreboding or balanced deftly on a knife’s edge.
Then just beyond the halfway point of the twenty-minute composition, the organ goes it alone for a low bass solo which gradually takes on baroque airs, before Di Domenico doubles up through a high pitch redolent of a sine tone as the saxophone flits and yaps between the two poles, with Grimal playing flutter tongue in a faltering bid to ascend some higher plane or perhaps to expose a more troubling undercurrent.
The deep bass, shrill sine and struggling saxophone each subside and we end up with a few loose and submerged noises, a sloshing saxophone juxtaposed by the sunken cathedral or carnivalesque sighs of the organ, which stretches out into a nice birchen drone while the odd plunking chord, sharp spouts of saxophone, piercing yet still reedy whistles and scrambled snatches of celesta bring the piece to a spectral denouement. Finally the duo of Grimal and Di Domenico draw the curtain on this Shakkei, as the album closer ‘Yorishiro ä¾ä»£’ – which to Shinto devotees indicates those objects, especially great trees, which are capable of attracting the nature spirits called kami – takes on a more drifting or wayfaring character, the keys a percussive constant beneath Grimal’s winding sax, a wagon or caravan under moonlit skies as the twosome trail off into the distance.
