"Samādhi,- a Sanskrit word meaning “concentration,” can refer to both the activity of Buddhist meditation and the absorbed state of mind of a meditating person.

Wherever I’ve known the improvisatory gesture to manifest – whether in experimental music, live art, writing, radical research workshops or the subtle space of meditation – I’ve found a similar set of energetic qualities budding. Openness, presence, surprise, delight and even sometimes the ‘dropping off of mind and body’ (as 13th century Zen Buddhist, Dogen, called it) have all made themselves present. Paradoxically, as improvisers we prepare so very diligently for the moment of improvisatory flight and then, on entering it, immediately jettison all preparation. Why? Because we know that’s precisely where stuff really starts to happen, in that unconditional letting go. It may be very threatening to the everyday ego-self but it’s vital to improvisation, offering a radically different way of our being together in creativity: not one not two as we have it in the name of our duo.

Hervé and I are both shaped by Buddhist practice and meditation influences each of us in how we come to our instruments. Our voices as improvisers are, however, quite different. So, when I approached Hervé to form an improvising duo, I was curious to discover just how our musical, meditational and improvisational personalities would come together. What we present here is the result: around an hour of improvised music deploying bass, soprano and alto saxophones and voice. In each of two recording sessions, we started to play without any preparation and stopped when we stopped. All that happened remains in there and jostles for its own life space as our voices meet: surges of movement vie with deceleration; affect and abstraction interweave, and form and fracture lean on each other. And, just as in meditation, openings begin to occur. I think Hervé’s tonal refinement sits intuitively well with my contrary inclination towards the riotous vocabulary of bass saxophone. Equally, his subtle extended saxophone techniques balance my feral vocalisation. As in meditation, we stayed with the endeavour of ‘neither pushing nor pulling’ throughout and let everything land just as it was, an approach that left us feeling surprisingly refreshed when we’d finished. Just like you do on getting up from the meditation cushion. We hope that feeling reaches out to our listeners." - Geoff Bright