HEAT THE SILENT

Multi-Awards Pianist and composer Louis Siciliano and drummer Mauro Salvatore are no strangers to collaboration. The MUMEx Duo, as they call themselves, is propelled, however, by a sense of mission and I feel slightly humbled before even listening to their latest release. Heat the Silent isn’t experimental, fusion, or avant-garde jazz, though you can make an argument it is; it is something much more ambitious, personal, and bolder. Louis Siciliano has written about his introduction to what he labels “classical Afro-American” music in the accompanying press materials for the release. He makes it clear by the end of this brief piece that Heat the Silent is nothing less than an attempt to encompass a personal interpretation of modern jazz’s history, present, and future in the body of a musical work. The hypnotic piano playing from Siciliano shepherds Salvatore’s drums like a hand steering someone falling down a flight of stairs — at first. The method in the seeming musical madness becomes clear fast and listeners can kick back and marvel at the clinic the duo puts on. It isn’t virtuosic masturbatory nonsense that’s an ego statement and little else. You get the feeling, instead, that the duo is attempting to point the way toward jazz’s future.

Colin Jordan (Music Critic)