This record came from one long session in early 2020, pre-pandemic, where we were looking at a good room, a good piano, and a blank slate. Going in without preconceptions or pre-composed material was nothing new for any of us. Rossi and Hess met in the late ‘90s at a dinner party, and played numerous freely improvised gigs at Rossi’s long running series at Spectrum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; Hess would join him in the Philip Glass Ensemble in 2016. Hess joined percussionist Matt Moran’s Slavic Soul Party! in 2008 and the two have been close collaborators since, co-founding Diskonife in 2019. Rossi and Hess’s earlier duo record Cut the Red Wire, and their subsequent release concert with Moran informed the twist and a key to the creation of You Break You Buy; the idea that though the raw material for these pieces would be completely improvised, that we’d not just build them out later with production and overdubs, but carry that idea with us in the improvisations; operating in the present and the future at the same time. Hess says “There are so many places I can point to in these where I was playing a single line, you know, monophonic; but in real time, I’m hearing the other lanes, the voices and sounds that are a part of that music unspooling in one moment even if we weren’t capturing it just then. That had an even greater effect on the structure and geometry of the improvisations than I expected. Like composing in shorthand, and writing the complete sentences later.”

World events and the suspension of public performance and travel in 2020 left Rossi and Hess an opportunity to get deep into the tapes; a hurricane of file-sharing, experimentation, recording, and excursions into memory and re-composition followed. These pieces are all linked by the process, unified by the group imagination.

You Break You Buy was the first thing we did that day and it filled the sails for the rest; themes and a groove revealed themselves, Hess is picking up and putting down instruments, we’re leapfrogging each other. Panopticon might be a prelude to the next piece on the record, shaking out a sludgy, Jack Johnson-esque mantra before the long, chiaroscuro landscape of El Dorado, where bass clarinet is openhearted and clear against a backdrop of B3 and vibraphone.

Constants features Moran’s vibes against a shifting undercurrent of saxophone and clarinets. Hess says “…that’s another place where I imagined a broader palette than the saxophone quavers I played in real time; I knew the clarinets would be a kind of halo around the tenor, so learned the tenor part by heart, cut the clarinets, then used just the reverb return on a fader to play just that return like their own instrument.” Similarly on Jean Rollin, in tribute to the French cinema maverick; “The tenor melody, I had in mind that I wanted to keep it concise enough to double almost completely on flute, heard it that way at the time, and the process let me be my own octave pedal.” Prepared piano and hyper-extended vibraphone technique create a landscape that gets navigated by the acoustic winds.

Dragonfly (for Jon Gibson) takes its title from a story told by the recently departed saxophone master and composer, Hess and Rossi’s longtime colleague in the Philip Glass Ensemble. “It’s an elegy, of sorts… Jon told this story of seeing John Coltrane in California, maybe Monterrey, where as the music was washing over the crowd, he was transfixed watching a dragonfly hovering and weaving through the air. This is the Eb clarinet here, an unusual, rather unique sound, not unlike Jon: his 1977 “Two Solo Pieces” record made a huge impression on me. The harmonium is part of the Rossi signature, maybe hints at Jon’s organ improvisations… he and Jon worked extensively together for 25 years.”

Zero-Day is an excursion for Hess’s tenor and Moran’s vibraphone: for over 15 years the two have gigged weekly at Brooklyn’s creative outpost Barbes with Moran’s Balkan-inspired brass band, though with Hess on alto and Moran on the Serbian bass drum known as goc. Free Lunch is a solo Rossi improvisation that hints at his love of both Shostakovich and Mahavishnu Orchestra. Hess: “When Mick went to the organ on the end of the last one, I almost had to stop playing and laugh, I knew I wanted to call this one Youngstown right then. In 1996 I played with organ legend Jack McDuff there [Youngstown, Ohio] on his 70th birthday, and on the first tune I think I blew three choruses… he leaned over and said “No LPs, if you please!”, then explained later that’s “long players”, like an LP record… he meant “keep it short, kid!”. So I’m thinking about this after 5 minutes of trying to turn the soprano inside out, I almost broke up.”