Search - Borah Bergman;Stefano Pastor :: Live at Tortona

This new CD by pianist Borah Bergman and violinist Stefano Pastor was recorded on July 1st, 2007 at the Jazz Fuori Tema Festival in Tortona, Italy. The five pieces on this recording­ three compositions by Bergman and two improvisations by the duo ­ highlight Bergman's ambi-ideation: his amazing ability to have each hand go its own way. Instead of accompaniment and melody, what one hears are often two completely different melodic lines being played simultaneously. Stefano Pastor's style of playing the violin is strongly based on an imaginative reworking of bop wind instruments' language. A great deal of experimentation led him to re-consider the set-up of his instrument. Pastor has re-strung his violin with extremely rigid electric guitar strings to obtain a heavy sound, allowing his violin and the way he plays it to speak like a wind instrument ­ with breath and power. The resulting music is sometimes rasping, sometimes lyrical, a not rarely prodigious dialogue between the piano and the violin, with Bergman's hands running about on the keyboard producing cascades of notes, each with an exact, determined precision with its own very limpid specific weight. Pastor plays the game wonderfully, intervening with his violin with its sanded, gravelly, very earthy sound.