Nuance
Some time ago I have been to an amazing concert. It was a performance of a duo called NUANCE, Elisabetta Antonini – voice and Marcella Carboni on, attention, harp! In addition to that they both had effects – loopers and other stuff. First of all apart from classical music a duo voice and harp is something unusual to me. Secondly – I never could have imagined jazz played on harp… I can say that it is not only possible, but also sounds very interesting.
A harp is a complicated instrument, not just because it’s big and has a lot of strings, ha ha, but in order to change the sound from a diatonic scale one had to take a screwdriver and adjust it right on the spot. Well, this harp was a modern one not just because of it’s color, which is awesome, blue harp looks adorable, so instead of a screwdriver it has pedals, so to change the sound of the string you just press it and it’s done. I thought that the times of screwdrivering have been long gone by now, but Marcella said that some harps still work like that. Anyway, Marcella is an amazing harpist, she managed to play jazz on a harp so that it didn’t sound weird, it was touching and gentle, energetic and emotional.
Elisabetta Antonini is a singer that i like a lot, it wasn’t the first concert of her that I went to, actually when I saw her name on the poster I realized that the money will be well spent. Her manner of singing is amazing, hearing her is a pleasure, both for ears and the brain, because the phrases she uses in her improvisations are beautiful and interesting for an ordinary listener, and as to musicians – they are interesting and not easy, you can hear that she knows what she’s doing, not singing “something”, but with a certain intention. My personal respects to her.
Another thing that interested me a lot in this concert are effects. I like it very much when a vocalist is in control of the adjustments of the voice, because most of us usually rely on the sound engineer to apply some hall or reverb and the sound in the monitors is usually clean, so we can’t hear it clearly as the listener does. So when you do it yourself with the help of some pedal you hear everything perfectly and can regulate the sound according to your wishes. And a loop station is a totally different thing, which can make your life easy or extremely complicated just like that. Using a looper is interesting, it gives you a lot of opportunity’s to play with the tune, there are some wonderful examples of it in the web (like for instance THIS one, this tune was a trigger to make me fond of loopers). Using a looper is pretty hard, because it requires not only your imagination in a full range, but also some rhythmical perfections – it all depends on how well you are able to press the button. You miss a quarter of a second and it all falls into hell, because the loop you make starts moving in time and becomes a problem. Nowadays they make loop stations that have bpm synchronization, which is extremely helpful, but most of them do not have this option, so you just have to be a master of the beat to make it right. So, my honest respect to Elisabetta for mastering the button pressing business and for making this evening special.
Here are some pictures i took at the concert and a video to give you a taste of what it was. And if after that someone wants to buy the album – I will be extremely happy for this duo, because IMHO they deserve to be heard by the world.
