Stefano Scodanibbio, Daniele Roccato, Ludus Gravis Ensemble

Alisei (Trade Winds) gathers music for double bass by Stefano Scodanibbio (1956-2012), the Italian bassist and composer who spent his life rethinking what the instrument could say. It moves from solo pieces to a duo and an octet of basses. Two are premiere recordings: Ottetto, a half-hour summation of the extended techniques he invented or developed, and the duo Da una certa nebbia. It is his second album on ECM New Series, after Reinventions in 2013.

The guiding hand is Daniele Roccato, who first heard Scodanibbio at a Paris festival in 2008 and later founded the bass ensemble Ludus Gravis with him in Perugia. Roccato plays both solo works and is joined by Giacomo Piermatti in the duo, while Ludus Gravis performs Ottetto under conductor Tonino Battista. The sessions took place in February and March 2014 at Pitch Audio Research, Perugia, and Studio Controfase, Rome, with Gianluca Ruggeri as Tonmeister and Manfred Eicher as executive producer. For Roccato, this music is Scodanibbio's "great spiritual legacy".

The title piece, from 1986, is built almost entirely on overtones, so that the bass sings in a high, nearly falsetto register, its own voice as the composer put it. Due pezzi brillanti (1985) pushes virtuosity to its limit: its first part alternates harmonics and ordinary notes at speed, and in the second a small rhythmic cell grows through layering. Ottetto (2011) sets eight basses against each other, by turns bowed, struck and whispered, and closes on a long drone. Parts of it were first heard at Bologna's Angelica Festival in May 2011, but its first complete performance, at the Venice Biennale in October 2012, came after the composer's death. In Da una certa nebbia (2002), for "double bass and another double bass", the second instrument forms a misty veil around the first, in slow, suspended time that nods to Morton Feldman.

Writing in The Strad, Thomas Short described an ensemble that dies "away to a barely-there whisper, before suddenly breaking into a roiling torrent of skittering bowing". Dominy Clements of MusicWeb International (2018) called the album "some seriously inspiring and intriguing contemporary music", adding that it reaches beyond a niche interest in the instrument. In Fono Forum, Tilman Urbach credited Scodanibbio with waking the double bass up and thinking it anew, and described the disc as Roccato's sounding legacy of his friend.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2598, released on 12 October 2018, with liner notes by Daniele Roccato in Italian and English.