Press Reviews---------------------------------------------------------------------------

There have been a succession of recordings overe the century of jazz that have sought to describe cities and their stories with their sounds.

There is Yusuf Lateef's Detroit: Latitude 42 Degrees 30, Longitude 83, Malachi Thompson's 47th St suite of Chicago or George Russell's New York NY with Coltrane blowing a metropolitan storm.

Much Further back there were Wllington's sound essays of Harlem, New Orleans street songs and marches or Fats Waller's London Suite from Soho to Limehouse, from Chelsea to Whitechapel – all evocative of the ripe humanity of city life.

But few musicians have used the actual acoustics of real urban locations in one particular city to contribute to the sound textures of their recording.

Here is one that does just that, with deep sonic understanding of a city and a unique timbral beauty.

From ordinary urban sounds, of Liverpudlian voices and echoes of pubs, performances, roads and tunnels, sirens and voices, engines, rivers and boat horns, applause and crowds, sheer solitude and warm company, light and darkness.

An insight of saxophones into the living soul of Liverpool is the album Where We Were, by a woman and a man, a Californian and a Yorkshireman born in other cities – San Francisco and Leeds – and their horns alone, with not a rhythm instrument in sight or hearing.

It's an astonishing record, nothing trite, a unique sound conception, love song, and a praise song indeed to Liverpool and its people.

Caroline Kraabel grew up in Seattle and came to London as a teenager “just too late to realise my punk dreams.”

Instead she directed her alto saxophone towards free improvisation, has recorded with bassist John Edwards and pianist Veryan Weston, and the large-scale London Improvisers' Orchestra, always conscious of “the implications of electricity related to recording, synthesis and amplification.”

Phil Hargreaves – the sole horn of the amere3 trio – is the multi-instrumentalist of Where We Were, playing tenor and soprano saxophones and flute.

He lives in Liverpool, where as Kraabel describes in her sleeve notes, he “was tireless in finding extraordinary acoustic locations” for the recording, which include The grapes public house on Mount Street, Jump Ship Rat on Parr street, the Wallasey tunnel and Picton Library, a street and alleyway near Penny Lane, a greenhouse on Sefton Park Allotments to the Anechoic Chamber of Liverpool University and St George's Hall in Lime street.

I'm a Londoner, so I'd need to know the city of Liverpool better than I do to recognise these spaces, intimate to Liverpudlians.

As the record opens, the pub atmosphere, warmth and company changes to the rhapsody of the two horns burning out of the distant whine of sirens before the riverine and subriverine silences, sounds and menace – and the vehicles which hum and groan across and under the Mersey every second, every day, every night.

Hargreaves blows achorus of spitting notes while Kraabel's long, almost agonised howls give out the host ovoices of a struggling city and the music ripe in Liverpool's soundshapes and the Scouse incantation of all the moments of life and hope.

There are sudden sometimes startling “crossfades of one space blossoming into another during the same musical material,” as Kraabel describes it, so much so that the desolation of one sound picture, perhaps in a bleak tunnel gallery, can change to another, perhaps in a green allotment smallholding, filled and chiming with a blessed birdsong.

For this recording is full of changes, rapid like nature, yet of human growth and fullness too, as in all our cities.

Kraabel wrote that this record embraces “the specificity of spaces and sounds that only live acoustic music can completely celebrate,” and it takes audacious musicians to attempt and achieve it.

It radiates the spirit and sound of Liverpool, yet it speaks, sings, whispers, howls and narrates to city-dwellers everywhere, in every country.

A man and a woman, two horns and a city – with machines to eternalise their sound and their humanity. That's what it takes.

Chris Searle, Morning Star----------------------------------------------------

These duets were recorded over a perios of four years in several different locations throughout Liverpool: an anechoic chamber, a tunnel, a street, a dome-shaped library, a pub etc. Hargreaves and Kraabel than mixed all the hours of tape using computer software to create a single 50 minute piece of music that blends the ambiences, extraneous sounds and improvised moments together. It's a delightful listen. However, as nice as the saxophone (and brief flute) playing is, that's not really what draws one repeatedly back to the disc. Instead, it's the feeling of stepping into a journey that two musical friends took together all over a city for a number of years: we get to tag along on their fun in a way that makes us feel at home even as they venture beyond their own.

The various atmospheres make room for multiple horn attacks – drones, yips down a well, staccato vocal bounces etc – as the gifted duo mine their playful instrumental breadth and traverse their town. Even when you can't tell where they are, the different kinds of silences that surround their sounds tell a vivid story. Where We Were is an invitation to an intimate musical adventure shared all over a city's public spaces.

Andrew Choate, Coda---------------------------------------------------------

I’ve always enjoyed albums that play with the concept of recording in some way– an artist sampling from other tracks on the same album, collections of found sound, or even musicians breaking the third wall to address the listener directly. When the Leo Records release of Caroline Kraabel and Phil Hargreaves’ “Where We Were (Shadows of Liverpool)” begins with an anonymous listener telling a crowd, “we’re going to start off by listening to some fantastic music,” it’s one of those they-know-that-you-know situations.

It’s this type of nested-doll thinking that permeates “Where We Were,” Hargreaves’ and Kraabel’s musical exploration of Liverpool. You see, unlike a ‘pure’ field recording, Hargreaves and Kraabel abandoned the idea of documenting a location in favor of playing it– and then went one step further, from the place-as-instrument concept to something more like recording-as-place.

Don’t worry, I’m having a bit of a difficult time explaining it to myself, despite my great enthusiasm for the results. Kraabel and Hargreaves give their all to this recording; using the alto and tenor saxes to flesh out a greenhouse, a tunnel, an anechoic chamber, and four other unique environments. Throughout, the crystal-clear binaural recording reveals the dual purpose of many of the players’ musical choices– a combination of improv feel and physical need– one gets as much a sense of heart as of the shape of the local geography!Consider a point about at about 17:30″, where the long tails of sax notes suddenly disappear, with the ‘virtual room’ crushing down around the listener, a claustrophobic experience of sonics. Somewhere near 29:00″, a series of truncated honks punctuates total silence before flowing into a larger, more open space where similar honks are free to linger about the listener’s head.

In a sneaky way, Kraabel and Hargreaves lay the old “studio versus live performance” question to rest, showing listeners that neither can be fully realized without the other. The performance aspects of the album give listeners an “on the ground” quality often unheard from studio-tanned musicians, while the engineering allows the effective and telling ability to contrast and hybridize these original recordings.

As disingenious as it is for me to admit, “Where We Were” is one of those albums you’re just going to have to hear for yourself before gaining any real understanding of what’s happening. I recommend that you do, though, it’s definitely worth the effort.

As a delightful bonus, Hargreaves and Kraabel maintain a website specifically for the album, packed with extra information about all aspects of the recording. I find the section detailing each location to be of special interest.

Startling Moniker--------------------------------------------------------------------