LIVE's
LIVE’s is Mäâk’s Spirit’s first album, recorded live at at three concerts in “Café den Turk” in Gent in april 1998.
At the time Mäâk’s Spirit was still a quartet. Apart from Laurent Blondiau and Jeroen Van Herzeele, who are still part of the collective,and constitute the brass section on this album, the quartet also included Salvatore La Rocca, on double bass, and Hans Van Oosterhout, on drums.
LIVE’s is intelligent and passionate music arranged into short themes, open forms and often daring tempos with a great deal of liberty for the musicians, it becomes free wheeling and lightly exorcising. As so often the first take houses the soul.
In the late fifties Ornette Coleman, don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins had a naive, nearly primitive style. Faltering, searching for the words, they created unusual music with a remarkable lyric, poetic expression. LIVE’s incorporates Coleman’s inheritance and Mâäk’s Spirit pay tribute to Coleman with their version of his “ Beauty is a RareThing” (1960). The other tracks on this album are compositions where we encounter more unity, less fragmentation of sound and a unique fusion of saxophone and trumpet. The arrangements are not preconceived- they are approached freely and openly. The themes expound intuitively, floating above the rhythmic section.
LIVE’s is the foundation of Mäâk’s sound…the music will evolve but the Spirit is already there.
