http://sluchaj.bandcamp.com/album/di-logos

Guillermo Gregorio, clarinet
Paula Shocron, piano
Pablo Díaz, drums

Recorded at Scholes St. Studios, New York, on Aug. 2, 2017
Recording engineer: Rene Pierre
Mixed and mastered at Estudio Libres, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Mixing and mastering engineer: Sam Nacht

All compositions by Guillermo Gregorio, Paula Shocron and Pablo Díaz
Liner Note: Andrew Drury
Cover Design: Małgorzata Lipińska
Executive Producer: Maciej Karłowski

There are many layers of dialogue to this music, many Diálogos. Obviously the music itself constitutes a dialogue among the artists, and between a clarinet, a piano, and percussion. And the fourteen improvisations carry on a dialogue among themselves. But some other layers of dialogue seem worth mentioning.

What does it mean that two talented and intrepid Argentine musicians in their 30s, who often incorporate dance, sculpture, and experimentation in their work—Paula Shocron and Pablo Díaz—have pushed themselves and travelled a great distance with no commercial or institutional support, and sought out Guillermo Gregorio, a man who provided a significant if not widely noted chapter to the art history of Argentina, and then left the country before they were even born?

Well-known to fans of contemporary/improvised music in the northern hemisphere since the 1990s, in the late-1960s Gregorio was one of the founders of the countercultural Movimiento Música Más, an Argentinian multi-media art movement that paralleled, but was independent of, what was known as Fluxus. Identifying a collective need for openness, humor, and fresh approaches to culture and politics in a calcifying political climate that would soon harden into the brutality of the mid-1970s (aided and abetted by the USA—look up “Operation Condor” if you don’t know what I’m talking about), the MMM staged aesthetic interventions in public spaces often using unsuspecting observers. Subversive, surreal, iconoclastic art isn't generally appreciated by authoritarian regimes and before long external pressures were too much and the MMM dissolved. Gregorio eventually made his way to Europe, and then—ironically given its role in Argentina—the United States.

Shocron and Díaz came of age in a different Buenos Aires in the 1990s and 2000s and were able to study music and become accomplished jazz musicians. Shocron was identifi.......
more