The 2nd concert with Free Fall, in Padova, Italy, goes even better than the 1st. Sometimes I’m startled by how quickly a group of musicians can find their rapport again, even with long periods of ensemble inactivity. In Padova the music opened up much further than in Graz, it feels like the trio wants to develop the band interplay by reaching a greater distance from the source material than ever before; on the last tour Free Fall tried to compress things- shorter pieces, condensed improvisations- as an organic response to the completely improvised album, “Gray Scale.” After 15 months of not playing together, it seems that pushing the present compositions as far as they can go is the way we’ll be dealing with the current book of material. It has only been 2 gigs, but it already feels like things are moving very quickly. This intuition after the concert in Padova was further confirmed by Free Fall’s performance in Rijkevorsel, Belgium, the next online thailand evening at a beautiful club, called Singer, a former sewing machine factory (it’s going to be one of “those” tours, not only a gig in a different city each night, but a different country). Here the band played 2 sets and dug deeper into the 10 pieces we’ve worked on since Graz: Molloy, E.C., Mythologies (Wiik); Accidents With Ladders, Collisions With Signs, A Wiik Of Birthdays, Two Ninety One, Music For Clocks (Vandermark); and a new untitled piece by Ingebrigt; about half of these compositions have yet to be recorded. While in Padova, I used the free afternoon on Friday to take photographs of the city and finish work on the 2nd of two new pieces for the band. When Free Fall heads to Berlin Monday we’ll spend a couple days rehearsing brand new material and the few other compositions that were added to the book during our last tour. An interview with one of my favorite photographers, Saul Leiter:
http://photographyinterviews.blogspot.com/2009/04/saul-leiter-quiet-iconoclast-saul.html
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