ALABASTER DEPLUME – A Blade Because a Blade is Whole: Music therapy and Jujitsu for a broken symphony :: Ondarock reviews

There is an indissoluble link between pain, prayer and healing, a dynamic flow that science and religions try to explain, reconciling faith and strategies of nature. For Alabaster deplovume, spirituality is a tangible source of physical and ideal rehabilitation, and it is in this intrinsically poetic and analgic key that the eleven compositions of “A Blade Because a Blade is Whole” develop. The English saxophonist embraces the world of poetry with a series of songs spoken-word, focused on the writings published in his recent book “Looking for My Value: Prologue to a Blade”, as well as on a decidedly more composite sound structure and less linked to improvisation.

Sensual, throbbing, the characteristic sound of the Sax of Deplume is similar to an oriental mantra, faint as the breath of a sleeping, visceral like the Greve pass of the blues: elements exposed and processed with sumptuous and elaborate orchestrations, where arches and piano (the excellent John Ellis) excel, recovering that emotional vulnerability already celebrated in “Gold”.
The compositions arise from deep inner analysis, the result of a discipline that has its roots in the Japanese martial art of Jujitsu, from which the plum rhythmic and cyclical pace of “Form AV” take shape, the intense breath of the suggestive “Kuzushi” and the suspended enchantment on a pinch of notes of the splendid “Too True”.

Never so poetic and spiritual, Alabaster Deplume uses his own tool as a second voice, an ascetic and therapeutic guide that urges the awareness of pain (“Thank you My Pain”), and then soothe it with a folk melody that you would expect to listen to a disc of John Martyn (“Invincibility”).
But the author knows well the semantic deception strategies, and after exhorting the man to a further awareness of his own fragility in the jazz-Trip-Hop plumbeo of “Paper Man” (“A man of paper, who turns on candles, does things he cannot manage”), retires in the silence of the notes with a sequence of hypnotic and sinuous compositions, where a tremous melodies like a flame (“Who. Are you telling, Gus “), a harmonious symbiosis between sax, violins and voice (” Prayer for my sovereign dignity “) and an unsettling incursion between Dub and Electronics (” Salty Road Dogs Victory Anthem “) are stuck in a sparkling symphony that shines like a blade, as one of the many blades that the English musician loved with him as a boy and now exhibits as a source of light. For an ecstatic future to be spent in their own garden (“That was my Garden”), finally free from the anguish of users.

27/04/2025