Dismantling the Waterfall
Dismantling the Waterfall’ is an album of short, breath-taking improvisations by two of Europe’s finest young improvisers Matthew Bourne and Dave Stapleton.
Seventeen episodic tracks – some clipped fragments, others stunning miniatures – all linked by a seventeen line poem by Julie Tippetts. Each line provides a title, while together Julie’s words have all the elegant simplicity of a Japanese Haiku with lines where syllables would otherwise be. For this is music of combining talents and visions. Simple and stately like the poem that accompanies it, as much the result of European Art Music as of Jazz, as inspired by Paul Bley and Keith Jarrett as by Shostakovich, Ravel and Bach.
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Stapleton and Bourne are musicians of catholic tastes, epicureans of the finest improvised and composed music regardless of genre or era. Dismantling the Waterfall describes it well, as it flows and pours and eddies around the listener. It is highly visual music that conjures filmic images and which suggest its European sensibilities. Bertolucci or Pasolini, Goddard, Truffaut or Rohmer – slow-moving pictures, cherished and iconic moments. Dismantling the Waterfall could be their musical accompaniment.
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Piano duets in Jazz are rare things indeed. Hancock and Corea, Jarrett and Corea, Howard Riley and Jaki Byard, Bill Evans with himself! Perhaps their scarcity says something about Jazz musicians’ reluctance to face the potential clash of egos that could so easily arise. For this partnership – and that is what it is – the parallels lie most immediately in Keith Tippet’s duets with Stan Tracey and also with Howard Riley. Like those examples, Dismantling the Waterfall is a meeting of musical minds and improvisational values. It is, as Julie’s poem suggests, a matter of light and shade. Dismantling the Waterfall will draw the listener into its own Empire of Light.
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Buy from Amazon.co.ukGuardian – John Fordham
“Wales-based pianist Dave Stapleton has produced one of the success stories of UK jazz over the past year, with a hard-hitting postbop band fizzing with intriguing contrasts between early-jazz elements and the free-playing avant garde. Stapleton’s skills get the chance to stretch in this collection of short piano conversations with the cross-genre improviser/composer Matthew Bourne. The music spans minimalist tone-journeys and bursts of dense, jazzy improvising, with dreamy reflections over fast ostinatos, barked low-end percussive drama, and sighing sounds against improv-skitters and rhapsodic melody in between. Both players are formidable generators of free improv, and they build up heat together. But the music often has an unexpectedly delicate charm, whether from a subtle melody being teased out of chord movements, or the sparing use of string-strumming against hypnotic drum patterns on the woodwork. The imperious Of Ionized Air heaves with jazzy figures, and some pieces have a lyrical lilt reminiscent of Keith Jarrett. The recording is careful to protect the nuances on which these two innovators depend”.
Indpendent on Sunday – Phil Johnson
“This impressive experimental duo set by tyro pianists Dave Stapleton and Matthew Bourne consists of 17 shortish, continually diverting pieces titled after lines of a 17-line poem by Julie Tippetts. There’s no show-off virtuosity, but instead a surprisingly winning regard for sound as sound, and an eclectic approach that covers Satie-like sentience, Cecil Taylor knuckle-isms and Viennese abstraction. Recorded at Besbrode Pianos in Leeds, it’s the first release of a new record label formed by Stapleton and photographer Tim Dickeson”.
Jazzwise Magazine – Daniel Spicer
“…fine collaboration between two of the UK’s most exciting young pianists…restless imagination”.
Review of ‘Dismantling the Waterfall’ by Vortex Jazz
If you like this album check out ‘Lost Something’ by Bourne Davis Kane
If you’re not taken with this, why not try ‘Circular Motion’ by Kevin Figes
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