Improvisationen

The second album by this Italian collective, who included Ennio Morricone in their membership, found the right home on Deutsche Grammophon. The balance of austerity and playfulness here is navigated well, with great gusts of trumpet and sweeps of low-level percussion (from library music legend Egisto Macchi) giving way to entwining wind instruments and wheezy cello; the improvisations here repeatedly recede into, and then erupt out of, near-silence, and there’s a poised, avant-classical air to the proceedings, which is unsurprising given Nuova Consonanza, under the guidance of Franco Evangelisti, was constituted by ‘composer-improvisers.’ Soon they’d bring in guitar and drums and get psychedelic with it, on 1970’s The Feed-Back, but Improvisationen is a particularly pure exploration of Nuova Consonanza’s original intentions.