Criss Cross Jazz 1426 CD

Alex Sipiagin

Reverberations



“I always try to create a story,” Alex Sipiagin says. “For me, the pieces are totally connected, even if they don’t sound that way – a standard could connect with some free composition or complicated odd meter. It’s a very logical line from the beginning until the end.”

With an eye towards realizing that aspiration on his 14th Criss Cross leader album, titled Reverberations, Sipiagin booked a six-concert tour in November by a sextet of long-time friends and bandmates from several files of activity that constitute his thriving career. After a few days off, they convened at a well-appointed studio in Bassano del Grappa, the grappa capital of Italy, a 10-minute drive from Sandrigo, the village in the north Italian region of Vicenza, where Sipiagin resides with his wife, Melissa Tham.

“My improvisations and compositions have more space, more air, more stopping to process what I feel,” Sipiagin, now 58, said in our conversation about Reverberations. “I no longer need to prove something. I no longer have this battle mood. I just want to play my music and do the best I can. Living here, you can breathe, create and practice.”

On Reverberations you can feel that attitude suffusing the contributions of Will Vinson and John Escreet, both U.K.-born, the formidable Berlin-based Russian expat bassist Makar Novikov, and Donald Edwards, a son of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. “There’s nothing super-complicated except a few melody heads,” Sipiagin says. “We took our time and relaxed, played it in the same order as the concerts, and it came out quite spontaneously. It’s my presentation of today, but inspired by memories of the reverberations of moments from the past with great musicians and great friends. For example, when I was 15, I transcribed a little phrase of Clifford Brown. Forty years later, I’m still practicing that phrase, and it still brings me ideas, because it’s so musical, so spiritual.”