By Richard Thorne from New Zealand Musician Magazine

The engaging instrumental music of Auckland’s Salon Kingsadore has been variously tagged on the basis of their two albums to date. 2004’s self-titled outing introduced them as a five-piece with dual lead guitars. It attracted a ‘psychedelic surf jazz’ label, which has stuck despite the 2006 follow up ‘Hotel Azteca’ being rather different. This May will see ‘Mountain Rescue’, another step in the Salon Kingsadore evolutionary chain, released on Sarang Bang Records which is guitarist Gianmarco Liguori’s label. Just a few months back Liguori released his own second experimental instrumental album titled ‘Ancient Flight Text’,

Richard Thorne talked with him about both projects.

Born here in New Zealand, but undeniably of Italian descent (his father), Gianmarco Liguori has played music ever since he can remember. He taught himself to play the keyboard before getting trumpet lessons from multi-instrumentalist Kim Paterson from age 8 to 11.

“I could never really follow what he was teaching,” Liguori is happy to admit now. “I couldn’t read music and had a real block with it, but he understood that and I think he had the same sort of background.”

Such was his ‘block’ that Liguori still doesn’t read music, and despite devoting most of his time to the process of creating new music, has never had any formal music education. Now aged 30, he got back in touch with Paterson a decade ago when he was thinking about picking up the trumpet again. That didn’t happen, but the two started to hang out and jam together, Liguori now on electric guitar, his instrument of choice for the last 20 years, Paterson on drums, trumpet and percussion.

Close friend Joseph Gubay had a North Shore studio where the pair played, and recorded their jammed material to tape, mostly just for the hell of it. The idea of working with others of Auckland’s older jazz elite on a project evolved from those informal sessions. The result was the little known but critically applauded 2006 Sarang Bang release ‘Stolen Paintings’, subtitled ‘Musical directions by Gianmarco Liguori’.

Along with Paterson ‘Stolen Paintings’ also included musical input from a range of other established local luminaries including bassist Andy Atwell, sax/flute player Brian Smith, piano/Hammond legend Murray McNabb and Miguel Fuentes on various percussion. Recording was mostly done by Darren McShane, Ligouri playing 6- and 12-string guitars, plus extra bass and synth parts, and taking composition credit for most tracks.

Work on a follow up to that album started soon after its release and ‘Ancient Flight Text’ is out now, in a stylishly designed fold out card pack that includes art by Liguori’s uncle and a scene-setting short story, in booklet form, by JCR D’Anvers, another regular collaborator.

“We’ve been friends since we were kids. He’s a real sci fi guy and came up with that story loosely based around the music. I just let him do what he wanted so I guess it was an extension of the music and how I approached it with the musicians.”

From that list of eminent first album contributors Liguori retained just Paterson and McNabb, along with D’Anvers and Darren McShane who recorded, engineered and mastered the album at his Earwig Studios. The production credits go to Liguori and McNabb.

“I wanted to condense things and concentrate on the things that worked better from the last album. I also wanted to experiment with more electronic sounds, just keep things more focused and go for a different sound,” he says of the reduced number of collaborators.

“I never told them what to play, just gave hints and ideas and basically they came up with their own interpretations, and most of the time it was on the mark.”

Paterson and McNabb weren’t both in the studio at the same time and didn’t get to hear the music in advance of the sessions, Liguori wanting them to hear it for the first time in the studio. Mostly he would create the skeleton and atmosphere of a piece, then allow it to be recomposed by the other musicians.

“I wanted them to take the ideas a bit further – you can get so far with your own ideas, but you need some more great minds to expand things.

Everything they played was pretty much one-take stuff. It was either live with me and Kim, or me and Murray. I definitely wanted to preserve a live feel in the music so I didn’t want it to be rehearsed, I wanted that spark of creativity to be there, that initial moment where something was happening.”

Of course with such accomplished musicians it’s a challenge for the listener to guess where the ordained and the spontaneous might intersect. Although created in a deliberately ad hoc kind of fashion, the eight tracks do seem to paint coherent pictures and Liguori confirms he typically composes to a narrative.

“Oh yeah, definitely. I’ve never been into lyrics for some reason, never into writing songs so much, but I like to describe places I’ve been – or never been – places that don’t exist or may have existed at some time in history. It’s definitely quite spiritual music in a sense. I would like my music to sort of unlock parts of people’s minds that they haven’t necessarily explored yet, to take them to places they didn’t know about…

“I never know how tracks are going to sound until they are finished. Bronze Frog for example was just thousands of layers of tracks and could have gone anywhere basically. That took us a couple of days to work through, there was so much stuff recorded for it. I have a basic idea of where a song is going but the whole process [causes] changes and that’s how I like to work.

“I had a definite feel I wanted the music to get to, and I think we achieved it more on this than the last album – which was kind of feeling around for ideas and trying different configurations. I wanted the whole to be a coherent sequence, kind of like a soundtrack to a movie. I’ve always been into Italian and European soundtrack music and also a lot of primitive music – folk music sort of, built around one chord. There’s a lot of freedom in one chord and that’s what I tried to do with this album, to get away from chord changes.

“I was creating a different context for these jazz musicians of a different generation. What would happen if I got these really experienced musicians to get involved in my compositions?”

He’s no doubt happy with the answer as, it seems are his more seasoned collaborators who have since agreed to play some live performances together over the coming months. Ligouri now has two bands on the go.

Salon Kingsadore originally got together back in 2000 to write music to a stage play for a mutual friend, and kept on writing cinematic instrumental music simply because they found that there was plenty of room to explore in that arena. Vocals are seen as unnecessary, Salon Kingsadore preferring that their music take the listener on a journey that isn't predetermined by a set of lyrics.

That big soundtrack coup has yet to happen but various television series from both side of the Tasman have taken advantage of their jazz-founded grooves and Kiwi FM has been employing the band’s music hourly on its weather bulletins.

First a five-piece, with Matt Sandford on drums, Hayden Sinclair bass, Billy Squire playing Fender Rhodes and Johnny Guy Howell sharing lead guitar, by the second (2006) album Howell and Sandford had left and Chris Dawson was drumming. For their upcoming third, ‘Mountain Rescue’, Steven Tait is on drums but the other three remain a constant. Together they write, record and perform instrumental pop/jazz. That doesn’t really cover it well enough but Liguori admits that the band have themselves always struggled to define where they fit.

“It’s a funny band, there’s no leader. We all have our own separate projects, coming from different angles, but somehow we have found some common ground and it works. Maybe that’s a good thing that we can’t be pinned to a genre.

“This (‘Mountain Rescue’) is our third album and each one we have redefined ourselves. The first we had two guitarists and it was more a dual lead sound. It was little more pop-oriented and the second album stretched out a bit more. We lost our other guitarist, got a new drummer and a lot more jazz influence. The third album has a new drummer who has been with us since the last album was out, it will be a summing up of what we’ve done so far. Brian Smith guests on sax and flute, so there is definitely a jazz influence. It’s a lot more raw in places, a lot of the songs we recorded in rehearsals and never intended releasing, but looking back decided we could. A lot of tunes are up-tempo, frantic, so it’s quite different.”

The title of the second track, Jan Hammer’s Garage may well give a clue to some, although it is far from the most frenetic of the 13 tracks. Typically for such critically appreciated, independent local releases, the albums sell in barely okay numbers here, but do find a more active market in countries like Germany and USA.

Sarang Bang is Gianmarco Liguori’s label, with assistance from Sinclair in running the website and “technical things”. Liguori started it in 1996 in order to release his own music and now with various vinyl singles, compilations, friends’ projects and things like that ‘Mountain Rescue’ is the 21st title in the catalogue.

Liguouri has adopted the description ‘Specialists in the Psychological and Physiological Applications of Music’ for the label, an allusion to the sort of functional music that might be used in a supermarket or office.

Vinyl releases are a regular theme (Sarang Bang released an album-plus-7” pressed in the Czech Republic by recording engineer Darren McShane and his band Superturtle last year), but surprisingly given the relatively low sales volumes (typically at best measured in hundreds) digital releases haven’t yet been embraced. Liguouri says he has always been into the physical aspect to “anchor the music down so people can hold it in some way”. He has designed the covers, artwork and posters for many of the label’s releases and with the use of devices like the short stories found on his own releases clearly believes that the musical experience should go well beyond simply listening to a digital file. No surprise to learn that he would like to hook up with a like-minded director and work on film projects.