Livio Minafra - Born Free (2015)

There’s no disputing that Louis Moholo-Moholo’s right foot used to be one of the most furiously explosive appendages in avant- garde jazz. Listen to his work from the early 1970s with saxophonists such as Mike Osborne and Peter Brötzmann, and you can discern a drummer who pushed beyond the infectious South African jazz-in- exile that he helped shape with The Blue Notes, and created a powerful freedom dialect all his own, with a kick-drum technique that sounded like it was trying to smash through into another dimension. But, just as Brötzmann has mellowed in the 21st century, allowing melodicism to shape his previously unbridled energies, so Moholo-Moholo, now 75, has entered a period of relative calm. His recent duo with UK pianist Alexander Hawkins has allowed him to explore swelling emotions that seem intimately connected to the shimmering plains of his native continent – and here, in another intergenerational duo with young Italian pianist Livio Minafra, he covers similar terrain. Throughout this entire live performance, Moholo-Moholo plays with bamboo brushes, maintaining a quiet pitter-pat snare drizzle and cymbal fizz while Minafra hops from oceanic ripples to wonky honky tonk, from dreamy meanders to a clipped martial strut. When Minafra starts whistling along to the melody of Dudu Pukwana’s ‘Angel Nemali’ with a tremulous trill, the laugh of excitement elicited from Moholo-Moholo is pure joy made sound.~Daniel Spicer