BARRY GUY PLAYS

MLP2401
Double LP
€ 35.00 postage Europe: € 10.00,
rest of the world: € 15.00
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Essay (1975) Luca Lombardi
Ausdrücke – Rondo for a Clown (1978) Hubert Stuppner
Theraps (1976) Iannis Xenakis
Memo I (1971) Bernard Rands
Voicings (1977) John Anthony Celona
Anaklasis (2002) Barry Guy


The bass music you will hear on this album is, it might be said, a child of the seventies. A ferociously radical time in the development of the double bass as a solo instrument found composers eager to formulate soundscapes that would send our Bottesinis and Dragonettis running for the exit !

As an emerging bassist in these heady times, immersed deeply into the art of improvisation where almost on a daily basis colleagues pushed the boundaries of instrumental possibilities, I found myself additionally being drawn into the world of composed music, researching novel sonorities and extended techniques. Somehow the two disciplines (in those days they were mutually suspicious of each other) seemed to coalesce around a large wooden box with strings attached. The double bass was everything you wanted it to be !

In my studio, various archive recordings from the seventies of dubious sound quality have silently collected dust (and years) in various boxes, and a recent tidying of these surviving articles prompted a little retrospective listening. This revealed a rather exciting slice of double bass history which I thought might be of interest, but a genius was needed to bring these various recordings into a sound frame that would make sense. Ferran Conangla (Barcelona) is the genius that brought all this together - a sound engineer who I have recorded with many times, and a man who knows how to deliver a vibrant sound picture of the double bass.

Barry Guy