Reinhard Gagel & Mirio Cosottini - Pieces Without Memory (IRC, 2014) ****½

By Stef 

For some albums it is impossible to find information. This one is a great example. You find no information about it on the website of pianist Reinhard Gagel, and you find no information about it on the website of trumpet-player Mirio Cosottini (except for a first review in Italian). The website for the label is also impossible to find, if it has one.

So what's the point of reviewing the album if the chances to find it are pretty slim? Still, for the courageous ones, it is worth looking for it.

We've reviewed several albums with Mirio Cosottini before, of which two five-star albums. Reinhard Gagel was unfortunately unknown to me. Both artists are explorers of music, both in theory and practice, and educators, and their approaches merge here for the first time, as the result of three years of practice in the cities of Vienna,  Cologne, Arezzo and Berlin.

Their music is highly inventive, improvised on the spot, playing with pitch, duration, pitch and dynamics, leading to a very intimate cocreation of sound, with lots of quietness and silence to listen, to capture, to interact.

Gagel has his theory of "emergence", the systemic process which "due to interdependence and self-organisation of various factors, results in unforeseeable creative processes and structures". The interaction creates the structure, and the other musician is invited in. Cosottini's approach is one of "invariance" as he calls it. It could be described as the "nature of a quantity or property or function that remains unchanged when a give transformation is applied to it". So it can be with sound or even with the character of sound, which may remain unchanged even if it is altered.

Their music is hard to pigeon-hole in a genre, chamber music, abstract, classical, jazz, improv ... but lightfooted and creative, with often suprising sounds and wonderful interactions. They never fill the space, but leave much room to silence or to the other instrument, which makes the listening more intently, by both musicians and audience. The result is a beautiful economy of notes, delivered with precision and focus, never too much, yet also not minimal.

Intelligent emotions.