Quartet Diminished was founded in Iran in 2013 by Ehsan Sadigh, who alongside woodwinds player Soheil Peghambari, pianist Mazyar Younesi and drummer Rouzbeh Fadavi, have been “drawing freely from contemporary jazz, art rock and the avant-garde”; this is their fourth album, the others are very hard to find. On this album the group is embellished by Tony Levin on upright bass and Chapman stick and Markus Reuter’s touch guitar and soundscapes; it must be said that they blend perfectly into the group’s imaginative and inventive musical realisations.
The 25-minute opening title track is a four-part suite of many components: I thought briefly of King Crimson at their most experimental, Van Der Graaf Generator for sheer atmosphere and Isuldur’s Bane because of a passing resemblance to progressive chamber, yet none might serve as comparators for such exquisitely unique music. Gradualism prevails mainly through some piano ‘rhapsodies’, with intriguing contributions from the guitar and bass clarinet. The soprano sax makes a significant entry and the rhythmic coda at the end is simply sublime, and could have lasted longer. Second piece ‘Tehran II’ clocks in at 14:30, and is more abstract, seeming to accelerate and decelerate at will, rubato style, while not deviating too much from the overall tempo; some amazing animalistic noises emanating from the sax. Third piece ‘Mirrorside’ is a necessarily short and restrained ballad, acting as an extended bridge perhaps. To my ears the best overall composition is saved until list: the 9½ minutes of ‘Allegro per il Ré’, a stunning invention cleverly based on 1 then 2, then 3, then 4, then 5 note sequences of piano.
In an odd quirk of coincidence, I have finally got round to reading Brian Morton’s biography of Shostakovich, ‘A Coded Life in Music’, and found this: “orchestral and chamber music can have no absolute meanings, or at least none beyond what the composer, his listeners and his critics choose to impose upon it.” It is a rare trick to produce a music that seems so disparate and even disconnected and yet, through its twists and turns, manages to maintain its integrity. To this listener this is where the magic lies, and the images it conjured up will remain inside my head for some time to come, I suspect. Well done to Leonardo and Moon June for bringing this group to the attention of a wider public.
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