Zilzal

The duo release—Zilzal—further defines the evolution of two master musician/composers pursing the most imaginative alternatives to the status quo. In recent years, the inventive violinist/violist Jason Kao Hwang has been fully invested in exploring diverse compositional territories. His Burning Bridge octet is now firmly entrenched as a bellwether of genre-defying modern music with a distinct jazz accent. He has travelled the worlds of opera, classical and free jazz with equal passion, crossing traditional barriers and pushing against customary musical confines. Egyptian-born Ayman Fanous has honed distinctive and unconventional methods on both guitar and bouzouki managing to synergize classical, flamenco and free jazz techniques. He has performed in duos with bassist William Parker, guitarist Joe Morris and cellist Tomas Ulrich and his performing history with Hwang that dates back fifteen years.

The album opens with a piece that only nominally sets the tone for what follows. "Nilometer at Roda," while non-traditional from world or jazz music perspectives, is melodic and harmonious at its core. Melody is not extraneous on Zilzal but improvisation is the overriding approach as the program goes forward. Three relatively brief pieces make up a partially detached suite, "DNA: Untranslated," "DNA: Messenger," "DNA: Binding Sights" and they are more representative of the album's themes. These brief sections are free-ranging explorations that fluctuate between soothing passages, recurring pulses and nondescript tones. Like all the selections on Zilzal this is thoughtful modern music not easily positioned in a genre.

The title track demonstrates Fanous's skill at merging flamenco and free improvisation. Hwang's viola races over the guitar at breakneck speed before both musicians slow the tempo a bit. Tempo variations also proliferate on "Mausoleum of Beybars the Crossbowman" which opens to a striking middle-eastern melody from Fanous's bouzouki. The violin quickly elevates and sustains the pace though the complex piece closes more resembling a lullaby. Similarly, "Lapwing" is full of abstractions and abruptly divergent dynamics that demand close attention.

Framed by beautifully rendered opening and closing works, Zilzal is an impressive and multifaceted collection. Unhurried and atmospheric at times, feverish at others, it is a cross-cultural experience through uncharted territory. As such, it is best engaged as a holistic experience free of fixed expectations.

Although it starts in a very traditional way, guitarist and bouzouki-player Ayman Fanouz and violinist Jason Kao Hwang quickly turn expectations upside down, extracting the ingredients from tradition, deconstructing forms and re-integrating them in another kind of beauty, the one in which new sounds arise from nowhere, shattering the calm contempative nature of the first track into short bursts of agony and distress. "Zilzal" means earthquake, and that is what you get in some tracks.

This is not world music. It isn't jazz either. This is music with ambition. Ambitions of beauty, artistic ambitions, for new forms of sounds, new ways to express things, full of emotional depth, with emotions that are too complex to be canvassed in old forms, too elusive to be captured in patterns, too deep to be expressed in shallow tunes.

The music forged by Egyptian guitarist/bouzouki player Ayman Fanous and violinist/violist Jason Kao Hwang is alternately thoughtful, prickly, exasperating, mournful, and enchanting. It speaks to mysteries and histories, capturing and refracting the shared language, cross-cultural references, and mystic vibes that these two men have been cultivating and exploring together for fifteen years.

"Zilzal" is the Arabic word for "earthquake," but the music on Zilzal doesn't always rumble and rupture the ground. Peaceful prayers ("Nilometer At Roda") can lead to moments of uncertainty ("DNA: Untranslated" and "DNA: Messenger, The Message"), and storms sometimes part at the last second to let the sun sneak in ("Zilzal"). There's no shortage of cage-rattling moments but they don't overwhelm or completely define this album.

Picked peculiarities and graceful arco lines merge in wonderful ways as this duo creates a hybridized form of music that draws in as much as it gives off; logic and absurdity, peace and war, congruence and discord, and hopefulness and depravity play a part in this production. The pair isn't always able to rectify these feelings that live worlds apart, but they are able to blur the lines between them, creating something that exists in a very different space.

Several pieces herein can be grating and challenging, but they always have a payoff; "Lapwing," for example, strikes plenty of nerves but gives way to a moment of serenity at the end. It's this journey from point A to point B that makes this piece, and many of the others, so compelling.

The duo of Ayman Fanous and Jason Kao Hwang doesn't shy away from anything. It's a partnership built on mutual respect, conviction, and a yearning for truth in sound. Zilzal says that in inimitable fashion.

What Zilzal represents is not an easy genre of music. Of the many modes I tackle, it's among the most difficult precisely because it tallies such an unusual cross between vivid but highly unorthodox explication and abstract variations. Guitarist Ayman Fanous put it perfectly when, in auditioning violinist Jason Kao Hwang, he soon found the violinist "had an uncanny ability to navigate the incongruent harmonic tapestry I threw at him, a bird in flight careening and somersaulting to a hidden instinct". Their debut showcase thus produced "strange and beautiful music". Both adjectives are quite correct but only if the listener is not of the herd, of the dull listless Everyman programmed to trudge through airwaves clogged with infantile, growth-arresting, produced pabulum designed to dull the senses, perceptions, and thinking, not sharpen them, not wake one and all up more fully. 

I suspect the Lapwing track, my favorite, was the one Fanous most had in mind regarding 
his characterization come to fruition 'cause that's exactly the imagery I caught of Hwang's nimble inflections: a bird slipping through air, clouds, and emigrating flocks to exult in a hedonistic freedom only avians can plunge into. Fanous is often his foil here and evokes wild sets of obstacles, breezeways, slipstreams, and wind shades for Hwang, Fanous' playing more than a few times highly reminiscent of Kevin Kastning's individualistic work. Then he also takes off for the stars, plucking speed runs, atonal clusters, and the sort of vocabulary one expects from idiosyncratics like Frith, Bailey, and others…while always tracking fragments of orthodoxy in upside-down fashion. 

If you're fond of Penderecki and some of that genius' more extreme opuses, Night of the Electronic Insects for instance, there's plenty of that beyond-the-pale work here, enough in fact to even start re-igniting memories of the old Wild West days of the Nonesuch electronic/experimental era 'cause these two cats are of the exact same crazy mentation as many of those hallowed estimables. Then, of course, there's been Paul Giger, the aforementioned six-string mavericks, and a welter of superior work in this style. Do not, I am warning you, leave your brain at the mall while essaying this outré but riveting release. If you do, you'll find it staggering back home bedraggled, bewildered, and wondering what the hell was going on while it was out indulging in, to quote the Coneheads, mass consumption. Zilzal's the antidote to that. 

Two sons of immigrants, from Egypt and China, respectively, in the world we live in today--each have dual cultural backgrounds to call upon, if everything is right. That is the case with violinist Jason Kao Hwang and guitarist-bouzoki player Ayman Fanous. There is the music of the homeland somewhere embedded in their musical minds and there is what they have invented themselves out of structural-improvisational forms they have absorbed here in the US. 

You can hear that come across very clearly and brilliantly on their duo recording Zilzal (Innova 869). It's music with the freedom to explore tonalities and sound color. Each has his very own way. Neither sounds quite like anybody else. 

The full set of improvisations take us to the world we are in now--one with a communications network and patterns of migration that continually enrich the culture we experience. But we do have to do a little looking for it. On the surface of pop culture there is some kind of homogeneity that can be found globally in one form or another. Some of that, even much of that can be vacuous, a white bread of bland product. 

You get the opposite here. There is great freedom, technique harnessed to the ends of making a statement musically, and the sort of magic that results when all of that works, comes together. 

Violinist Jason Kao Hwang was among the first Asian-Americans to add his experiences and musical vision to the vanguard jazz scene.  Emerging from the loft scene in the late 1970’s, he has made strides as both an instrumentalist (on violin and viola) and as a composer. While he has made his individual stamp through countless albums, he has always been a ready collaborator with others’ visions.  The early 80’s group Commitment was among the first to mix Asian-Americans (Hwang and drummer Zen Matsuura) with African-Americans (reed player Will Connell and bassist William Parker). His 90’s group The Far East Side Band with Korean kayagum virtuoso Sang-Won Park, American tubist Joe Daley and Japanese percussionist Yukio Tsuji created a unique improvised music during that decade. Hwang has always seemed to be a willing collaborator in anomalous situations. 

Not as well-known but an equally intrepid player, guitar/bouzouki player Ayman Fanous was born in Cairo but moved to the U.S. at the age of five. He started on violin, switching to guitar at age 12, and eventually added the bouzouki to his arsenal. His playing mixes a Middle-Eastern flavor into a very modern approach to improvising. He’s played in duet situations with Bern Nix, William Parker, Ned Rothenberg and Tomas Ulrich.  It was through Ulrich (with whom he recorded Labyrinths (2007) that Fanous met Hwang and they immediately clicked.  They shared a love of the sound and texture in string combinations and they also shared a common bond in free improvisation.  And the way both draw on their respective cultures informs the music with a unique quality. 

From the opening moments of this disc, one can tell this is something special.  The resonant tones of Fanous bouzouki ring out and over it, Hwang etches a baleful melody on viola with a rich, burnished tone.  Listen to them slowly evolve on “Nilometer At Roda” is a study in how musicians listen and respond.  And that is the case throughout this disc.  Both players have lightning quick reflexes.  And neither musician is tied to improvising melodies. Abstraction is the order of the day on three “DNA” tracks: pizzicato strings from Hwang and harmonics from Fanous predominate.  While there’s no melody per se, it creates an environment in which the listener can get lost.  The album wends its way through 63 minutes without a lull in the proceedings.  Each track has something of merit and taken as a whole, this is one of the finest duet recordings I’ve heard in recent memory.

 (google translation)

The outstanding American violist and violinist Jason Kao Hwang and Egyptian guitarist - and outstanding performer buzuki- Ayman Fanous are two of the most exalted representatives of multiculturalism that characterizes the musical advanced the new millennium. 

Throughout his career Jason Kao Hwang, besides being associated with the movement of Asian American Jazz, it has managed to develop a permanent cultural link between East and West materialized in the meeting of avant-garde jazz, contemporary classical music and free improvisation with the musical tradition from their Chinese ancestors. The epicenter of the aesthetic proposal is expressed in the phenomenal quartet Jason Kao Hwang / EDGE that integrates with Taylor Ho Bynum, Andrew Drury and Ken Filiano (embodied in the album Edge 2006 Stories Before Within Crossroads Unseen in 2008 and 2011), octet Burning Bridge (his debut very record with the self-titled album in 2012) and string ensemble Spontaneus River (with whom he released the shocking Symphony of Souls in 2011). 

Ayman Fanous was born in Cairo (Egypt) but developed the main body of his musical career on American soil. Fanous worked with cellists Tomas Ulrich (with whom he recorded the Labyrinths album in 2007) and France-Marie Uitti, guitarist Bern Nix and Joe Morris, percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, the stickista Greg Howard, violinist Mark Feldman and vientistas Kinan, Ned Rothenberg and Lori Freedman, among many others. 

Now, Jason Kao Hwang and Ayman Fanousunen forces to present the album to mark his recording debut as a duo: Zilzal. 

In Zilzal (word which in Arabic means "earthquake"), the duo offers a collision between different musical worlds through the language of free improvisation but alternating climates ranging from the visceral lyricism, melancholy and contemplative abandonment rhythmic and jazz imprint on the cinematic and orchestral. 

The launch of this material (recorded by Sal Mormando and mastered by Grammy winner, Silas Brown) announced on November 19 through Innova Recordings record label.