Tom Hull - on the Web
The Best Jazz Albums of 2023
Nov 1, 2023 — 68. Don Fiorino/Andy Haas: Accidentals (Resonantmusic)
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Monolith Cocktail website: monolithcocktail.com/tag/accidentals/
Don Fiorino & Andy Haas ‘Accidentals’    (Resonantmusic 017)
After two decades of intermittent collaboration, Don Fiorino and Andy Haas have found a common language of challenging, free-expressive experimentalism and exploration together. Speaking that sonically, atonal and often non-musical dialect fluently across the previous albums of Death Don’t Have No Mercy and (the monolith cocktail profiled) American Nocturne, these two highly impressive musicians/artists have pushed thresholds and boundaries to emit a tumult of squeezed, pulled, squealed, entangled, gabbling, whistled and indescribable sounds from a host of stringed instruments and the saxophone. The duo’s third album is no exception, with thirteen descriptive, indicated and playful titles of the pressurized, near-distorted, flutter, fizzed, bandy and bended. Benut before we go any further, a little CV check. Former Muffin, saxophonist maestro and transformer Andy Haas first blazed and scorched Martha’s ‘Echo Beach’ hit in ’78, before relocating from Canada to New York City in the early 80s; making a name for himself in the post-punk, no-wave and avant-garde scenes, and collaborating with such luminaries as John Zorn, Ikue More, Marc Ribot, Ken Aldcroft (which comes the closet to Haas’ improvisations with Fiorino)…the list goes on. Nearly two decades later and Haas relocated back to Toronto, just in time to prove an in-demand foil to a new generation of artists and producers; firstly joining the orbit of collaborators around Matthew ‘Doc’ Dunn’s head music super group, The Cosmic Range, and then Meg Remy’s U.S. Girls led vehicle, performing on 2018’s In A Poem Unlimited and on the subsequent tour – I personally witnessed Haas blowing up a storm on the tiniest sax I’d ever laid eyes on! A multitude of projects, solo albums fill the gaps in-between; many of which were released on this album’s label, Resonantmusic.  Likewise, Fiorino’s backstory spans the decades with a diverse range of improvisational projects as an incredible guitarist and painter – the latter informing the former. This expands to the glissentar, lap steel, bass, banjo, lotar and mandolin, and covers a host of influences from across the globe. You can find him filed under the Radio I-Ching trio and The Hanuman Sextet, but he also appears on the late drummer Dee Pop’s various projects, and with Daniel Carter, John Sinclair and Adventures In Bluesland. It all amounts to a lifetime of experimentation for both partners in this venture. Accidentals isn’t the easiest of listens; rooted by the sounds of it, and by that title, to the accidental results of close quarter improvised wrangling and inquisitiveness; the captured, freeform and untethered results recorded in-between longer performances perhaps? An intimate reaction to downplay perhaps? By chuffing, rasping, stretching out and releasing tensions on the saxophone, and with Fiorino switching between his racks of stringed instruments, there’s some wild and crazy far-out flexed, physical contortions. Valves let out the steam slowly, as unrecognizable sources trill, flutter, suck, ripple and resonate. When on the fretless bass, it sounds like Bunny Bruen or Percy Jones or Mohini Dey thwacking, patting, tabbing and slapping full-trebled thickened strings. Haas meanwhile channels everyone from Antony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell to Marshall Allen and Jeremy Steig. Within that sphere of inspiration, his sax finds moments of melody, serenade and the heralded. Whilst there are evocations of jazz-fusion, La Monte Young, Walter Semtek, Federico Balducci, Zappa, the Middle and Far East, the personal ‘Eulogy 4 Dee’ (that’s Fiorino’s foil and band mate, the drummer Dee Pop) crosses Mali with Louisiana Delta Blues and Mardi Gras for a purposeful goodbye. And the flit, flighty and reed-squeezing ‘Curled Time’ merges Stooges Fun House with the sort of uncoying, stripped of artifice stringed recordings found on Ian Brennan’s recordings from forgotten parts of the world. But for the majority of the time, Accidentals is an album of abstraction, extraction and free-play, performed by two musicians at the height of their perceptive and explorative skills; the language now almost telepathic, with no prompts needed for expressing the chaos, tumult and stresses of the environment and greater geopolitical climate.

Dominic Valvona / Monolith Cocktail   www.monolithcocktail.com  December 6, 2023


Rough translation from German of review in Bad Alchemy:
DON FIORINO & ANDY HAAS Accidentals (Resonantmusic 017):
Aah, salt of the earth, not enough sung holy helpers. Haas, split between Toronto and New York, as saxophone player with Martha and The Muffins from 1978-81, with U.S. Girls 40 years later, with John Zorn, Zeena Parkins, Marc Ribot, Ikue Mori and God Is My Co-Pilot, with “Taballah” in homage to Muslimgauze, and throughout as a critical mind, who with “The Ruins of America” and “Paradise of Ashes” angrily sighing shook his head about the way things go. On “American Nocturne” together with the NY string twister Fiorino, his partner in Radio I-Ching and The Hanuman Sextet. And also in the 13 clashes here, that only exceed 3 minutes twice, Fiorino with electric guitar and fretless electric bass once more mixes his tapping, crawling and string bending, which has been tanned in x adventures in bluesland, with the alto and altissimo thrusts and air holes, frayed by Efx, of his old companion. Stinging sound is effectively extended, tonguing throws trilled waves, with a salty grained tongue. Fiorino's fingers dance over the strings as if they were wearing nailed shoes, twanging riffs alternate with contemplative tones, but without any fear of twisted dissonances. But 'Elegy 4 Dee' in memory of Dee Pop (1956-2021), the drummer for Bush Tetras, Radio I-Ching and Hanuman, is pure melancholy. This is, of course, followed again by wild caprioles between plonking or whirring tremolo and dreamy poetry, howling distortion, fluttering tongues, trebled split sound, sharp trilling. As, not unlike life itself, constantly knotted contrasts that are acrobatically balanced. Without notes and without accidentals, the door and ears are open to idea(s) [Einfall], coincidence(s) [Zufall] and accident(s) [Unfall] – think of Badiou's 'event'.

Bad Alchemy, Rigo Dittmann
December, 2023