During a residency in New York, September 2018, Argentinian drummer Federico Isasti and Norwegian bassist Petter Asbjørnsen met and developed a spontaneous musical connection. As part of the SIM workshop (led by Ralph Alessi), Petter and Federico played together a wide range of compositions with musicians within different ensemble settings. That initial musical connection and the shared way of conceiving composed music with improvisation as the founding core led to the idea of working together in the future. Just a few days later, fate would have it that they also met the Austrian pianist Elias Stemeseder, a musician that Federico and Petter already admired for his work with Jim Black and Nels Cline, among others, and his fresh approach to improvised music. For all these reasons, they decided they would have to record an album before they disappeared to different corners of the world.
The following days were spent intensively composing and exploring musical concepts and material to play in a piano trio setting. The central pieces of these explorations were a polished work of rhythm and a subtle approach to harmonies. As a result of that work, the musicians arrived at Happy Thief. Both the names of the album and the trio (Hello Cacus!) were chosen after a sour experience. Just a few weeks after the recording, Petter was back in Europe where his personal bag was stolen, containing the hard drive with the original copy of the album’s recording session. Fortunately the recordings were still stored on sound technician Luis Bacqué’s hard-drive in his studio in New Jersey, where the album was recorded. On the one hand, Hello Cacus! references to the fire-breathing roman god Cacus, son of Vulcan, killer of innocents and perpetrator of all kinds of crimes. On the other hand, Happy Thief is a plain citation to that man that almost made this album impossible to be released.
Federico Isasti
The album contains seven compositions written especially for this record. Ideas and inspiration for each piece comes from a wide range of places: the idea of distorting the notion of time by working with rhythmic displacements (Federico’s Idea), a train travel in Italy (Tren a Formia), the coexistence of diverse melodic motives in a narrow space (N° 3), exploring the nuances between contrasts through intervallic ambiguous harmony, while still anchored in a sense of tonality (Great title), the vastness of a deserted warehouse (Lagerbygning), finishing unfinished old ideas (Gammel idé), using the notes of an arpeggio to derive a subdivision, harmonic and melodic material and form (For Petter).
The music in this album is founded on three fundamental pillars: precise rhythmic ideas, a spacious sense of the harmonic field and the blurring of the frontier between written and improvised music. The formal aspect of the tunes is in the majority of the cases pretty straight forward: exposition of the main theme, improvisation with that material and re-exposition of the theme. Even though this is a common characteristic of the traditional jazz way of improvising, the music finds its identity in the nuances in timber, dynamics, rhythm and harmonies, strongly influenced by Petter and Federico’s conception of improvised music.
1. For Petter 06:18
2. N° 3 06:44
3. Tren a Formia 04:41
4. Great Title 08:27
5. Lagerbygning 05:41
6. Gammal Ide 05:44
7. Federico's Idea 05:00
Elias Stemeseder | piano
Petter Absjørnsen | upright bass & composition
Federico Isasti | drums & composition
Recorded by Luis Bacqué at Bacqué Recording in New Jersey USA
Mixed and mastered by Florencio Justo at Estudio Dr. F in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Produced by Petter Absjørnsen and Federico Isasti
Original art by Leo Cullari
Design by Nicolas Gaggero
