REVIEWS

“Gypsy Jazz is an entire world. History, hierarchy, boundaries. That may be why Gonzalo Bergara, though accepted within the ranks of masters of the form, has left it behind. Not to say he won’t join an all-star jam or play a Djangofest. But he has chosen composition over what are the inevitable reiterations of genre performance. Bergara has always sounded like himself. Fast –bordering on mechanical– streams of 16th notes, strict, rigid, careful even. They’re still there, but now he sounds like nobody else. He has broken free from his own rules. The music reminds us of nothing so much as a Paul Klee watercolour, a line going for a walk. Even as he is creating the line, Bergara is following it. He discovers his composition in the playing. Nine is his strongest work. The ensemble is pared to a street corner trio. Guitar, bass, and a drummer slapping a wooden crate. A violinist stops by to join in on a few pieces. Nine episodes, none even five minutes long; that’s it. The episodes are clearly of a time and place which they both inhabit and define. Bergara conjures moods, not meaning. But even the moods are random, refusing to be pinned down. But we feel them. If music can sound philosophical, these do. He is creating a new world, informed by the pain of this one, but not destroyed by it. The band is equal to the task. Leah Zeger, always a superb performer, has carved a deeper, richer tone and a more personal, more daring vigor. Jeronimo Carmona pretends to disappear on bass, but a solid rock wall does not disappear, you just don’t notice it. That’s how he wants it. Maki Bergara, the percussionist on the wooden crate, is the most unexpected partner. He brings, sass and toughness and power and lays down an ineluctable ground. (One reason Bergara can be freer than he has ever been.) While it is wasted breath to suggest what the pieces “mean”, one might be able to say each piece is a private conversation that we have been allowed to hear, a conversation with himself, a search where every note is drawn between a careless freedom and a universe that seems to depend on it. Which it does. He is just that serious. Think a stone mason building a medieval cathedral.”.
Jeff Fiskin