by Francesco Martinelli

[…] With such different careers behind them, just how these two musicians came to meet is lost in the mists of excited days past. Schiano’s first encounter with the composer is described in the same interview (interview with Mario Schiano by Stefania Gianni in Archivio Musiche del XX secolo, a monograph about Domenico Guaccero, CIMS – Palermo 1995) as an obvious fable: the two of them – who we are supposed to believe had never met before – ran into each other in the corridor during a recording session, when Schiano promptly invited Guaccero to play on On the Waiting List, his third official album, which he recorded between 17 and 19 December 1973.

Happy Days and Golden Nights and Brasil ’99 are the tracks where we find the academic composer fully accepting the group’s challenge, where, as Franco Pecori wrote on the sleeve, "only the game counts; but a game where life itself is at stake". On the first track, Guaccero and Schiano get onto the same wavelength straight away, opposing the winds’ oppressive riff, while the dissonant flights of the Hammond organ are snapped off, echoing the soprano sax, fighting against every temptation to swing, until they develop into a great, iridescent chord. As fashionable then as a handful of creative originals and a plethora of imitators have made sure that it still is now, the funky organ comes in for a real attack in the grand style: if you want to find anything similar now, you could do worse than try Bug John Patton’s recent recording with John Zorn doing instrumentals and vocals. In the second track, a specially prepared piano mixes in with the group’s percussion, changing its nature and searching like Tippett or Taylor for the instrument’s hidden resonance.

After De Dé was recorded in February 1977, no other recorded evidence of Schiano and Guaccero ever working together came out until 1990, when Splasc(h) published a version of Lover Man recorded live in 1978 during a RAI broadcast (Sud, Splasc(h), CD H 501.2).

In the four years that elapsed after their first meeting in the recording studio (the two tracks in 1973) and the whole LP they recorded together (De Dé), relations between Schiano and Guaccero developed outside the concert halls, to say nothing of other recording studios. […] Schiano and Guaccero actually created a line-up of their own, called the Musical Workshop, which was very busy in 1977 and 1978, occupying all the spaces possible for such borderline music: the annual leftist political rallies supporting l’Unità, the daily newspaper of what then the Italian Communist Party, civic centres in towns with left-wing administrations and cultural clubs belonging to left-wing organisations of every different shade of red. And the five short unpublished tracks that complete this CD were actually recorded live at the National Festival of l’Unità in 1977 in Modena.

It was a period when Schiano was accumulating some of his most important experience, although at the same time having some difficulty in pursuing his own ideas in the jazz scene in the stricter sense. […]

De Dé has everything it takes to be part of this phase of research, in which it stands for a totally different direction, the quest for pure sound, along the lines of Roscoe Mitchell in Chicago and AMM in England. The recording also features Alessandro Sbordoni, who later went back to composing, and Bruno Tommaso, who plays percussion and various sound object, as well as a viola da gamba, an instrument that he very seldom uses when he is not playing early music. Wen you slip this venerable piece of vinyl out of its sleeve, you can hardly remembering that the majority of the few hundred copies pressed were sent back for recycling, so that only 50 or 60 are left today: a truly limited edition. As we find in other recordings of Schiano’s, the two sides have different personalities. The first is taken up completely by the long title suite, inspired by a verse by Mallarmé which – an interesting detail – provides the text basis for a Barry guy composition that the bass player recorded with the Hilliard ensemble in a recent CD (New Music for Voices, ECM New Series 4453 259-2). On more than one occasion, the four musicians achieve that state of perfection when the music seems to flow on its own, without distinguishing between personal contributions; jazz, big band and popular song and dance music are all subjected to a process of quotation and dissection, cropping up as sometimes dear, sometimes obsessive memories and then dissolving again, in a flow that would have been appreciated by Ives and is accurately pinpointed in the liner notes by Guaccero, along with Varèse. Although the balance of the sounds is precarious, Bruno Tommaso’s comments are so appropriate, he supports the group’s improvisation and urges it on so acutely, connecting its parts, that his voice often stands out. For their part, Schiano and Guaccero really enjoy they way they chop and change from instrument to instrument, putting their souls into it, in a continuos, sometimes apparently amazed discovery of affinity: in the dramatic unfolding of Quattroetrentacinque, where a melody hinting at Mediterranean atmospheres emerges from a forest of percussion; in the contrasts between electronics and sax on Sequentia, in the desolate night-club of Quell’estate senza te, in the intense, suspended atmosphere of Come silenzi, which rounds off a recording that can stand up and be counted among the most significant explorations of sound of recent decades and that we are now lucky enough to find back in circulation with some additional material. […]

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