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Ken Filiano
The Brooklyn-based double bass player Ken Filiano is one of the few responsables (Mark Dresser and Dominic Duval being the more notable ones in the United States) of the present return of the arco playing in today’s jazz and freely improvised musics, but his pizzicato can galvanize an entire combo without even trying any protagonism.
With classical formation and inovatory perspectives (it’s been said that, if he knows very well the bass role, “fills it in unexpected ways”), he stands usually as the backbone of a colective.
We only notice his decisive importance for the whole when he stops feeding the music. His solo album, “Subvenire”, show us a musician that is in love with the resonance of the wood of his instrument and with the lower registers, continuing a line that goes back to Peter Kowald’s “Was Da Ist”. Like the late German bassist, he works with harmonics with special taste and sense of measure.
His use of the volume pedal is fundamental for the kind of dynamics he designs, seeming that he’s in several places of a musical structure at the same time. If we don’t count some casual and movable preparations (with sticks, brushes, knitting needles), that’s all we get in terms of extended techniques and tools. Everything is centred in the relation of his fingers and the strings and that materiality transpires to the listener, even if we know that what arrives to us is mediated by an amplifier and a microphone.
 Ken Filiano's records on clean feed |
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Motion
Lisbon Improvisation Players |
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