1993 · Album
In the Tradition
Recorded April 1993 in Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, France · In Situ Records · Released: 1996
Silva's Synthesizer Breaks Free in Nancy
Five seconds in, it's clear listeners are in for a trip of another order entirely.
In April 1993, Alan Silva, Johannes Bauer, and Roger Turner gathered in Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, France, to record what would become In the Tradition (1993). The session was built on a simple premise: three musicians, no overdubs, no safety net. Silva brought his synthesizer—an instrument still widely dismissed as a pop and rock tool, despite early free jazz pioneers like Sun Ra proving otherwise. Bauer came with his trombone, Turner with percussion, and together they set out to complicate the album's title from the first moments.
What emerges is deliberately disorienting. The synthesizer work is the album's anchor and its wildcard: Silva doesn't use the instrument to approximate acoustic sounds or provide harmonic cushioning. Instead, he treats it as a textural force, generating clusters and shapes that push and pull against Bauer's trombonist aggression and Turner's rhythmic invention. AllMusic's Dan Warburton noted that the album "cooks from beginning to end," and that's exactly what happens—there's energy and momentum that doesn't depend on swing or conventional harmonic movement. Bauer and Turner match Silva's abandon with their own; this isn't three musicians being respectful to history, which is what the title might promise to the uninitiated. It's three musicians using history as a starting point for something much wilder.
For listeners accustomed to Silva's other work, this trio session occupies a particular space: it's uncompromising without being austere, adventurous without sounding like an intellectual exercise. The album didn't arrive until three years after it was recorded, released on In Situ Records in 1996, but the urgency in the playing never feels archival or delayed.
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