Il Ritorno del Angelo is a new improvising quartet but one with familiar faces. It comprises Barry Guy (bass), Olesya Zdorovetska (voice), Nick Roth (saxophone) and Izumi Kimura (piano). They are among the finest and busiest improvising musicians working in Ireland, but the first time we heard them all together was in New Music Dublin this year in which they played the pieces on this album.

The conceit of Spring & Asura is that each of its tracks is a composition by one of the band members that takes its name from a poem. Naturally, these poems are not lyric verses: they are difficult modernist poems of a piece with the band’s free-improvisation musical tradition. The musicians have form working with literary modernism. Guy’s Five Fizzles for Samuel Beckett (first released in 1993), for example, has been widely acclaimed, and Roth’s Unreal Cities project incorporated texts from T.S. Eliot to Seamus Heaney.

The first work of the album, by Roth, is based on ‘Le Cercle,’ by Eugène Guillevic. The poem (as far as I can tell) provides the ensemble only with a superficial inspiration, Zdorovetska singing vocalise and much of the reflexive nature of the poem not drawn out. The track opens gently with Kimura’s piano prepared to create swirling bell-like sounds, and swirling – along with spiralling and circling – recurred throughout. Perhaps this is too thin a basis for the 17 minutes of this track, as I struggled to get my teeth into what too often seemed just a jam, despite the creative virtuosity the musicians displayed from moment to moment.

The remaining works incorporate their founding poems more thoroughly. The second track, ‘I, Lethe’, is a composition by Zdorovetska based on a poem of her own. A visual poem that takes the shape on the page of a river meander, the ensemble too takes on the shape of a flowing river. The opening section is delicate, sinuous, patient – until the texture explodes with Zdorovetska’s exaltational call ‘нестримно’ (‘unrestrained’), her voice joined in close harmony by Roth’s saxophone and leading to a thunderous climax. Not less amazing than this are the intensely focused quiet minutes that draw the piece to a close.

Pastoral and celestial images
The eponymous composition on the album is by Izumi Kimura. Spring & Asura draws on a 1922 poem of the same name by the ascetic poet Kenji Miyazawa. Miyazawa’s poem draws on pastoral and celestial images – ‘akebi vines coil around clouds / wildrose bush, leafmould bog’, ‘(chalcedony clouds flow, and / where does the spring bird sing?)’, ‘the gingko treetop glitters again / Zypressen even darker’ – and there is a lightness and spaciousness in the ensemble’s playing in this work that follows Kimura’s recitation of the poem. Guy’s pizzicato bass slithers around like the forest undergrowth while Kimura plays soft, shimmering arpeggios, whilst Roth and Zdorovetska soar and glide somewhere in the distance. But the conjunction in the title marks an opposition: against spring is ‘asura.’

An asura is a restless, quarrelsome or even warlike demon in Buddhism that for Miyazawa expresses the activeness of consciousness – or more darkly, the ineluctable suffering and conflict of the human realm and, explicit in Kimura’s translation in the liner notes (she recites in Japanese), the loneliness it engenders: ‘I am a lone Asura’ and ‘the true words are lost / torn clouds fly in the sky’. The ‘I’, prominent in the poem, achieves prominence in the music through Kimura’s clear recitation. But conflict is kept at a distance: poem and music both eschew its representation in favour of abstractly lamenting it, or perhaps meditating on it.

The album ends with a work based on the poem from which the quartet takes its name. ‘Il Ritorno del Angelo’ is by Francesca Meks Taylor, a long-time collaborator of Barry Guy (whose composition this is). Again, the ensemble closely tracks the text of the poem: Zdorovetska breathes the opening ‘And air’; a line of text punctuated by wide spaces is musically interpreted by alternating tuttis and tacets; the one-word line ‘gathering’ triggers a surge of sound. The ensemble clearly enjoys charting the course of the poem, which for its part gives them plenty of material in its vivid images: Zdorovetska swoops and dives to ‘and birds / on wing / to sing / the praise / of all sweet / things’, and the closing stanza ‘and / peaceful / the angel / returning’ occasions a wonderfully dulcet and expansive close to the album, the ensemble playing as one.

Guy, Zdorovetska, Roth and Kimura have been reliably producing excellent music for many years now, but this doesn’t stop me from being taken aback by this excellent album. It is more than just a pity, then, that the poems that serve as the texts of the works can only be read by those who purchase the limited-edition hardback booklet version of the album (those listening online might have no view of them): I couldn’t find any of them online and as far as I can tell Zdorovetska’s and Taylor’s poems are unpublished. These poems are foundational to the music: before reading them, I struggled to ground my experience of it. To be sure, special editions are an important way for musicians to sell records in our age of streaming, but the importance of the poems is barely even intimated at on the album’s Bandcamp, so I fear many listeners will simply overlook the album. Those lucky enough to get a hold of one of the booklets, though, will be treated to a stupendous album.

Spring & Asura by Il Ritorno del Angelo is released on Diatribe records and available from Bandcamp. Visit https://diatribe.ie or https://diatriberecords.bandcamp.com/album/spring-asura.

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Il Ritorno del Angelo performing at New Music Dublin 2024 (Photo: Diatribe)