The art of the duo

The new album by the pianist Elias Stemeseder and the bassist Thomas Morgan begins with variations on the piece from which it takes its name: Io Pur Respiro, a madrigal by the 17th century Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo. I love Gesualdo’s music so much that once, during a visit to Naples, I went looking for his tomb: it’s an inscribed stone laid into the floor of one of the chapels in the Church of Gesù Nuovo on the Via Benedetto Croce, should you find yourself in that extraordinary city.

Whether intentionally or not, Stemeseder and Morgan spend the first 10 minutes evoking the harmonic restlessness underlying the beauty of all Gesualdo’s choral music, the sudden shifts that make you feel as though the ground is sliding under you. Titled “Madrigal, Variation, Courante”, it opens with a lyrical two-part invention, before accelerating into an almost pointilliste dialogue, staccato phrases flying back and forth until the pair reach a conclusion so perfectly formed that it might make you gasp with pleasure.

Already it’s obvious that the combination of the Austrian pianist and the Californian bassist, both now based in New York, is an exceptionally empathetic one. I love the firmness and clarity of Stemeseder’s touch and the way, very often, equally interesting things are happening in both hands, bringing Lennie Tristano and Brad Mehldau to mind, although he never sounds like either of them. Morgan never ceases to demonstrate his ability to operate as an equal creative partner without neglecting the essential function of his instrument; in that respect, he’s the heir to Gary Peacock.

The recording was made in the Sala Vanni at the Basilica of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, during a short European tour in 2024**. The two musicians reassembled there the following morning, with the idea of making what would be in effect studio versions of the material they’d been exploring during the series of concerts, but eventually they and their producer, Martin Brugger, decided to use the live recording, despite the occasional cough from the audience.

Two of the five tracks are standard ballads. The first is Billy Strayhorn’s yearning “Love Came”, the second Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “I Have the Room Above Her”, from the musical Showboat, already familiar to the contemporary jazz audience as the title track of a Paul Motian album from 2005. Both tunes are investigated with great care and beautifully restrained warmth: listen closely to the opening section of the Kern song and appreciate how those microscopic differences in timing are evidence not of imprecision but of spontaneity, of the closeness with which they’re listening to each other.

Like the opener, the other tracks are original compositions by Stemeseder. He begins “On the Euclidian Plane” on what sounds like a spinet before moving back to the piano for a piece whose rhythmic energy is imparted equally by both players, the keyboard prodding and the bass strings snapping as they urge each other forward in a double helix of invention. “Subject Carved From Words Uttered” begins with a ruminative passage, Morgan pushing phrases against Stemeseder’s carefully spaced chords before the pianist starts to unfurl single-note lines that begin to clot into chords as the piece nears its closure. The texture thins out again as the two pace each other towards an ending in which the notes seem to evaporate, forming an elegant conclusion to a highly original and truly outstanding album.

* Io Pur Respiro by Elias Stemeseder and Thomas Morgan is released on the Squama label: https://eliasstemesederthomasmorgan.bandcamp.com/album/io-pur-respiro. The photograph is by Johannes Brugger.

** For some reason I typed “2004” and didn’t spot it before I posted the piece. Now corrected. Thanks to Paul Kelly for pointing it out.