Agustí Fernández @60 - Ad Libitum Residency & Sesto Elemento - new releases from Słuchaj Foundation

It was quite a journey during the 10th Ad Libitum Festival of Imrpovised Music. The music of Alexander von Schilppenbach and his Glob Unity or the great Peter Brotzmann Quartet still rings in our minds and souls. Now we have to wait till next autumn to welcome the new decade of the festival, but there's a good news: it gives us time to listen to 2 beautiful albums recorded during the festivals former edition. First is a concert "Sesto Elemento" by Maciej Garbowski/ Piotr Damasiewicz/ William Soovik - recorded live, during Ad Libitum's 7th edition. The 2nd is a 4CD box: a complete recording of Agusti Fernandez's residency, that took place last year. The album consists of "Live in Warsaw" by Aurora Trio (Fernandez/Barry Guy/Ramon Lopez), Mnemosyne's Labyrinth (Agusti's piano solo recital), a world premier of THUNDER (Fernandez/Frances-Marie Uitti/Joel Ryan) and last but not least: "River, Tiger, Fire" - Agusti Fernandez cuducting Ad Libitum Ensemble! All of the recordings, released by Fundacja Słuchaj are available via bandcamp.com on a CD or a digital download. 

Last year Maciej Karlowski invited me to participate in the Ad Libitum Festival and perform four different concerts to celebrate my 60th birthday - writes Agusti Fernandez in the liner notes for the "River, Tiger, Fire!" box - I have to admit that Maciej’s choice surprised me as it could not have been a more motley selection, offering a range of rather disparate proposals and representing a wide range of musical projects in which I am currently immersed. But then again it represents four facets of myself that I think can give a very clear idea of what I have been doing of late.

The Aurora trio with its classical grouping of piano, bass and drums, mixes with great care and grace both composition and improvisation. This trio would not exist without the complicity, friendship and team chemistry of Barry Guy and Ramón López who always play the right notes at just the right moment.

THUNDER, initially a bold venture for a trio, was an old dream and wish that Frances-Marie Uitti, Joel Ryan and I all shared to explore pure electroacoustic improvisation. Whenever all three of us would run into each other here and there we would talk about our wish to play together and in Warsaw such an opportunity arose and we made our debut as a trio.

El Laberint de la Memòria [The Labyrinth of Memory] is a piano solo inspired by Spanish folk music, both real and imagined. Perhaps it is my personal recollection of the classical Spanish piano from my student days on the island of Mallorca.

And what we did with the Ad Libitum Ensemble consisted in a „conduction” in the style of Lawrence D. Butch Morris. This was a great opportunity to work with Polish musicians who I hadn’t known before; musicians who I chanced upon and discovered in rehearsals. Despite all of us coming from different places and different backgrounds, we saw how much we shared and had in common from our very first encounter, and this allowed us to perform and carry out some very interesting and profound work together, work of the highest quality, if I may add, which I hope we will be able to repeat again in the future. - writes the great pianist and improviser Agusti Fernandez. 

The "Sesto Elemento" is a project of the double-bassist Maciej Garbowski together with a trumpet-player Piotr Damasiewicz. Together the work as a trio Elements with Jon Falt behind the drum -kit. This time - it was year 2013, they played at Ad Libitum festival with a young drummer from Göteborg - William Soovik. 
This is how Maciej Garbowski sees this project now:

Some say that there are some beings who never learned to feel, to experience and understand. Underway in solitary confinement, unable to assess their position, or require too much time to assess the situation and get into the loop of thought, which only moves them far from understanding. Apparently for every attitude there are justified theories that are beyond their reach – so they do not understand themselves. They want to change it. They know that they need to understand … but they don’t know what to change and do not know how. Does the so called sixth sense make the remaining senses weaken?