Aves’ Holy Grail

It was jazz drummer Richie Quirino who said that his former bandmate in the uber jazz rock band Destiny, Bob Aves, may just have come upon the holy grail of Pinoy jazz in Aves’ latest release on Taomusic Records, Translating the Gongs. Well said, and Quirino knows whereof he speaks: in the intermittently barren musical landscape it is the likes of Aves, Johnny Alegre and Quirino himself who continue to push the envelope for jazz in this small corner of the world, always to seize the moment of compleat understanding and a love devotion surrender supreme.

These guys seem to have been around forever, or at least since the ’70s with Destiny as in the case of Quirino and Aves, whose instrumental version of A Taste of Honey captured many an imagination, and with Alegre’s Hourglass and Phase 2 whose In Love With You staked its claim as the ultimate make-out song of the time. Of course they’ve since gone their separate ways, each growing in his own way but with music a constant presence, because how else can one grow?

Alegre is working over the latest mutation of his band Affinity, Quirino still pounds the skins for Jazzphil ensemble, and Aves has linked up with Grace Nono to translate, redefine, rearrange the boundaries and demarcations of what we’ve come to know as jazz, world music, our Ave Maria of a holy, holy grail.

That stumbling introduction out of the way, we can now concentrate on the music, the translation of these transcendental songs. It was the Penguin Café manager Butch who remarked that he loved the sound of Aves’ octavina, which inhabits the entire CD Translating the Gongs. Anyone who has had a passing fancy with the guitar may be astonished at the relentless creativity with which Aves imbues the instrument, indeed not since the league of that trio of jazz guitarists –John MacLaughlin, Al Dimeola, Paco de Lucia –has the guitar as ensemble or solo instrument made a leap of faith, so that what we get are adjacent mirrors of an ever shifting void: Happy, sad and all the variegated colors in between.

There’s Nono and Faisal Monal chanting in the first two cuts and the second to the last one, outlining an altogether new geography of voices. They weave against a backdrop of both standard time jazz and bebop, but never do the proceedings give an impression of slapdash happenstance: things fall comfortably into place, melding together into both the old and the new, a reassuring sieve of sound.

What for are you rushing? The music seems to calm us down into gong-like enlightenment. There’s Dr. Binalig that playfully balances on a kudyapi and threatens to become edible, and Aves’ own A Lighter Shade of Brass that could be described as a tour de force on octavina for want of a stronger word, and reminds us of a guitar showcase of another Bob, Mould with his band Sugar and a last song about exploding: The state of jazz is always arriving, and being present at every breath because there is only now.

The inherent ephemeral quality of sound is backstopped by tons of research that apparently went into the making of this CD, specifically on the varied Maguindanao music forms courtesy of Nono, from the sinulog to the binalig to the tagunggo. They are translations into the jazz setting in real time, with Aves presiding.

To say that the gongs are derivative is to miss the point altogether because all music derives from a greater being, the ocean of our aural existence. This may well be the musical equivalent of the fall of the tower of Babel. When suddenly everyone is speaking in tongues and we come upon a new language, Esperanto mon amour.