Musicians are a diverse, changing and unstable community. Take for example this record that sees the duo composed by late lamented guitarrist Garrison Fewell and Italian saxophonist Gianni Mimmo playing togheter. Garrison Fewell was gone July 5, 2015, exactly one summer ago. Fewell was an expert guide, an outstanding soloist, a teacher, an author and an extraordinary talent. And, of course, the best way to know him is through his music. This meeting with Gianni Mimmo comes from an email exchange between the two artists, an Italian meeting that the Italian indipendent label Long Song Records documented with this nine titles’ cd, with the addition of a ghost track.
There are some musicians who like to fight with their instrument: for them instrument is a limit, a boundary beyond which it’s right and necessary to go beyond the usual concepts related to it. One way can be to playing their instrument in a completely different way, by playing it as a “no instrument”, using it like a sound generator, often with noise as a limit. Another way, more complex is to play it, adopting an unconventional technique but remaining within some already defined musical genres, the third, much more complex, in my personal opinion, is to adopt a traditional technique but inventing phrases completely different. Playing it in a not ideomatic way.
The result is an iconic record, where the two musicians abundantly exceed their limits, sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish Mimmo’s sax from Fewell’s guitar, their interplay is complex, articulated and innovative, definitely not idiomatic, definitely not trivial.
A heartfelt salute to Garrison Fewell, we miss a great guitar player.
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Andrea Aguzzi