Luciana Bass establishes the twin poles of her new album Desatornillándonos over the course of its first two compositions, a process which is described as setting both ‘ends of the spectrum’ in the liner notes by Chuck Roth. Those notes are an act of reciprocity, as the two artists share commentary as well as a split lathe cut single on Relative Pitch Records, with the former rocker Roth breaking out his Stratocaster for the equally stellar solo guitar album Document 1 which is also out this week.
The Argentine guitarist Bass opens Desatornillándonos with ‘Blind Willie (for Sonny Sharrock)’, already embracing both the gospel bluesman and influential slide guitarist Willie Johnson (for whom the song was titled rather than the Piedmont blues fingerpicker Blind Willie McTell) and the pioneering albeit reluctant free jazz guitarist Sharrock, who could switch between chordal and modal approaches while using feedback and distortion to imbue his instrument with the dynamic attacks of a horn. Yet this take on Sharrock’s song just as readily evokes the primitive stylings of John Fahey, Bill Orcutt and other modern practitioners like Marisa Anderson and Daniel Bachman, or the slowcore subset of post-rock typified by David Pajo, especially through his work as Aerial M.
On the other hand the second track ‘Arco y Flecha’, which is Spanish for ‘bow and arrow’, proves just as elastic as the title might suggest. A wiry exploration of the timbral possibilities of her instrument, its rasping and rattling strings and creaking frame position her equally within the contemporary throng of the improvisational avant-garde.
This is a juxtaposition which works surprisingly well in terms of holding the listener’s attention and as a kind of thematic or textural gambit, stringing out and adding a bit of spunk and character to those wide plains of bluesy Americana while imbuing avant-garde mannerisms with stratified layers and staggered, sometimes even folksy melodies.
Take the fifth improvisation ‘Manos de Cromo’ for instance, which translates as ‘Chrome Hands’. On this track the Argentine guitarist manages to wring extraordinary percussive textures out of her instrument, from Latin American icons like the conga, güiro or cajón to the washboard or frottoir and even the metallophones and kendang of Indonesian gamelan music. From the brisk hand drums and mallets of the opening section the piece moves more or less seamlessly through all manner of zydeco, skiffle and countryfied fiddle. Then ‘Canción para el Che y para Charlie’ starts out spare only for its plaintive and lingering guitar lines to snag and turn into dense patchworks of fraying overtones and crackling distortions which Bass manages to harness in the field, with the spindly quality of a theremin player or the coarse hands of a trick roper who somehow manages to lasso a lasso.
As for influences Bass mentions in the album tags the names of Marc Ribot, the veteran Tom Waits and John Zorn collaborator whose wide-ranging practice belies his own claimed technical limitations as he is naturally left-handed but strains to play the guitar with his right hand, and Mary Halvorson whose recent work has evinced a softer and gauzier quality following the Anthony Braxton collaborations and solo endeavours of her relative youth. In a similar vein one might mention the shared angularity as well as the enveloping warmth and feedback-heavy approach of Ava Mendoza or the microtonal work of Jules Reidy, while with this new record on Relative Pitch the guitarist Bass can stand alongside other ambassadors of Argentine free jazz like the pianist Leo Genovese and saxophonist Camila Nebbia.
Several of the songs on Desatornillándonos serve as tributes to Latin American musical icons or some of the spiritual bastions of free jazz. Beyond the opening salvo for Sonny Sharrock, on ‘Echoes for Ornette’ the guitarist offers a take on ‘European Echoes’ from the height of Coleman’s harmolodic funk period, dusting off the blues after tackling a diverse array of the saxophonist’s music – including the classic ‘Lonely Woman’, the swinging ‘Humpty Dumpty’, the burnished offcut ‘Broken Shadows’ and an extended take on the late snippet ‘Stopwatch’ – on the quartet album Reunión en la granja in 2021.
She revisits the preludes of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, staples of the repertoire on classical guitar, and returns to another favourite with a spare take on Albert Ayler’s fetching ‘Ghosts’ which shelves the martial motifs yet straddles some of the same spiritual peaks, in fact hanging from the same crowns and loitering in some of the same nooks as Don Cherry’s aching cornet. The title track serves as one last timbral detour, showcasing the springy decay which seems like a hallmark of her sound, before with the air of a somnambulist Desatornillándonos winds down through an interpretation of Tōru Takemitsu’s cherished ‘Waltz’ from the Japanese New Wave film The Face of Another.
