Johan Arrias - Self Portraits

For over two decades reedist Johan Arrias has demonstrated an insatiable artistic hunger, exploring countless points along the improvised music continuum. I was lucky enough to have heard his first working group Gul 3 back in Chicago in 2000, and more than two decades later the keening beauty of the trio’s music continues to stand apart for me. But Arrias had other territory to dig into, and in the years since his creative practice has evolved steadily. In 2019 he shared a vital slice of his sonic research, releasing his first solo saxophone recording, Pour Alto Seul. Whereas the music Arrias made with Gul 3 offered tenderness charged by a slightly naïve sense of possibility, his solo music now conveys a realism-spiked maturity, a resolved fighting spirit pushing through it all despite the difficulties that become more and more present with time.

Given free time due to the pandemic, Arrias dug deeper into that solo practice, with a focus on soprano saxophone, which he hadn’t played in almost 20 years, turned off by the horn’s innate sweetness. Picking it up again he discovered idiosyncrasies of the instrument that made it simpatico within the sort of harmonic world one encounters with music in just intonation, such as how certain notes can trigger a push into almost spectralist terrain, feeding a fascination for the physics of sound, and how a single tone can open up like a new universe. At the same time Arrias had been spending time with recordings of some of his early free jazz influences like Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and Cecil Taylor, and his sound clearly conveys a shift toward more jagged gestures and shapes, loaded with wild intervallic leaps and early extended techniques. The connection to those sonic pioneers is clear, but Arrias functions in a much different way, preferring to humbly channel their internal presence as “light houses”, providing aid in navigating the path forward.

The album title is Self Portraits, and its six sonic sketches paint the reedist’s musical reality. As with any self-portrait, subjectivity always skews the depiction in fascinating ways that can change in the moment or over time. There’s no missing the echoes of Roscoe Mitchell’s Nonaah in the opener “Full Figure II,” a glorious, extended meditation built on corkscrewing lines that quickly charts its own angular path. The deeper stuff happens within each tone Arrias produces, as his ability to pry apart the components of a given note, imparts those sixteenth-note burtsts with a bittersweet richness. Arrias intersperses a couple of improvisations that use garden hoses among the four saxophone sallies. For “With Bottle” a length of hose fitted with a mouthpiece is dropped in a plastic bottle partially filled with water, bobbing in and out of the liquid, while “With Hoses” uses two hoses with mouthpieces simultaneously, a la Rahsaan Roland Kirk, except it sounds like a contrabass clarinet mimicking a diesel engine. 

Arrias has lived with this music and these ideas for many years, but there’s something invaluable in the fact that he waited so long to address it in this way, with such directness. All that time has helped him process it in his own singular way, addressing something crucial only when he was ready to voice something new. That patience has paid off.

Peter Margasak

Berlin, May 2022