G2 is the second generation of Joe's Gravity compositions, first made in 1975. In the beginning they were experimental scores designed to bring a greater clarity and color to large improvising ensembles. And they remained unplayed until a chance meeting between Joe and pianist Paul Bley in 1978. Bley's interest in the music resulted in the recording GRAVITY (Breeze Records).
The recording disappeared quickly, but not before DOWNBEAT's Francis Davis heard it and wrote in that magazine:
The music on Joe Giardullo's first LP is collectively improvised and intensely democratic in spirit... I have no idea who any of these people are but I find their combined work stimulating and very special. Theirs is a mobile music, with one voice-or two or three- rising for a moment above the others, then receding, then rising again in different, shifting combinations. To describe it in greater detail would require borrowing concepts like "pointillism" from the language of science or painting, and "discontinuity" from the language of mathematics or geology. It's easier, if not completely accurate, just to say that it resembles the records Anthony Braxton made in Paris with Leroy Jenkins or Leo Smith, or that it suggests improvised Webern or Schoenberg. Like much new music, it is often needlessly, bloodlessly abstract.This is music governed by the mind, but I applaud it for its frequent brave shows of muscle and heart." Francis Davis DOWNBEAT 4 Stars * * * *
It's almost 30 years later and the music has evolved. Another writer,John Szwed, wrote in SIGNAL TO NOISE magazine about the second release of Joe's Gravity music, RED MOROCCO:
"(This is) an elegant, shimmering, ringing music, like colors spiking across the plane of a Monet canvas, or spinning as if it were a piece of Calder's kinetic art; a constantly evolving, deeply sonic performance, collectively improvised, yes, but decentered; a self-organizing musical system, with minimal input or constraints from outside, a music that is emergent in its details though not in its form."