Iva Bittová
Fragments
FormatCDLabelECM RecordsGenreExperimental
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The Czech singer, violinist and composer Iva Bittová made her first ECM album under her own name alone with voice, violin and kalimba. Its twelve pieces, simply titled Fragments I-XII, sit between Moravian folk song, contemporary composition and improvisation, and move between them without effort. "Deciding on a name for my style of music is far from over yet," she has said.
A well-known actress before she turned to music in the early 1980s, Bittová has since worked in genres from jazz to opera, including with the New York ensemble Bang on a Can. She was last heard on the label singing Vladimír Godár's cantata Mater (ECM New Series 1985) in 2007, a work inspired by her vocal art. This solo record was made in February 2012 at the Auditorio of Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due. Manfred Eicher produced and Stefano Amerio was the engineer. Apart from two borrowed texts and one melody, the music is hers, and the release appeared on ECM simply as Iva Bittová.
The voice and the violin are partners rather than singer and accompaniment. "The violin is a mirror reflecting my dreams and imagination," Bittová says, and their exchanges and counterpoint can sound uncanny. Written pieces and stream-of-consciousness improvisation blur, and the serious and the playful sit side by side. The album opens and closes with voice and kalimba, the soft pulse of the thumb piano setting a climate of reverie. In Fragment III she sings a text by Gertrude Stein as naturally as a folk song, and Fragment VII sets words by Chris Cutler. Her violin moves from austere and earthy to romantic, and is at times a tool for pure sound exploration.
Writing for All About Jazz, John Kelman called it "an overall eccentric yet thoroughly compelling performance that possesses its own dramaturgy." For Laura Jurd in London Jazz News in 2013 it offered "evocative melodies, hypnotic loops, sonic exploration of the voice and the violin." Reviewers kept returning to the problem of labels, since the music draws on the sounds of her native Moravia and on Slovak and Roma traditions, yet also on the extended techniques of the avant-garde.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2275, first released in March 2013.
