May News 2001 New Releases reviewed by Dan Warburton: New Production: Peter Grimes Matmos: A CHANCE TO CUT... Philip Corner Plays the Piano Simon Nabatov Quartet: Nature Morte News: Harth replaces Ohnesorg at Carnegie Hall Sun City Girls: Resurrection John Stevens LIVE AT THE PLOUGH Last Month Next Month

Peter Grimes

The Bastille in Paris is running a brand-new and visually unexpected production of Peter Grimes. Instead of the traditional fishing village, the show is set in a trailer park, a billiard saloon, etc...

Matmos

A CHANCE TO CUT IS A CHANCE TO CURE
Matador Ole489-2

"That's nice," said my wife, when I played her the first track. Then I
told her that thick squelchy sound was in fact made by human fat drawn off
during liposuction. "Ugh! That's awful," said my wife. In case you don't
already know, the source sounds of this San Francisco duo's first outing for
Matador were mostly recorded in operating theaters (with permission, of
course). During the course of the album we also get to hear nasal bones being
broken and laser eye surgery, but also an empty rat cage and even a human
skull. But you probably know this by now: "A Chance to Cut.." must be the
most overhyped "intelligent" techno product this year, attracting scholarly
post-structuralists and semiologists like flies, none of whom seem to have
asked the simple question: is the music any good? In fact, most of it is
pretty foursquare, full of standard and not very surprising clichés -
ploddingly regular forms and tired house and trip-hop beats you've heard once
too often. So what if "Memento Mori" is played on a skull? It's certainly not
"totally scary" ("totally" pronounced à la Moon Zappa, one imagines) as the
Press Release states (actually the band think it's "pretty funny"). Drew
Daniel's programming is impressive to be sure - no surprise that the
synthetic techno queen herself, la Björk, has recruited these lads as her
next house band - but there's a distinct lack of substance to this music.
"The West", Matmos' 1999 offering, was far richer. Oh, and please, let's have
no more of the following: "'For Felix'.. played entirely upon the bowed and
plucked bars of a rat cage.. evoking the broader context of laboratory animal
research." Remind me to "evoke the broader context" of child molestation and
exploitation next time I listen to Cage's toy piano music, or the Balkan
genocide next time I hear Luc Ferrari's "Presque Rien N°1". This kind of
shallow sales pitch may get the desired "barf outs" and "o my gods" from
Californian teens hanging out in Marin County malls, but it certainly doesn't
impress me. I pity the poor woman whose nose job (recorded and used, one
supposes, in "California Rhinoplasty") got botched, but who bravely invited
the boys back to record the next attempt. I hope they don't bother.

Philip Corner

40 YEARS AND ONE: Philip Corner Plays the Piano
XI 125

Philip Corner is one of the more fascinating (and scandalously
under-recorded) American composers of the post-War period, a figure whose
work, like that of Franco Donatoni and Luc Ferrari, manages to explore almost
all the significant movements in contemporary composition - serialism,
graphic/text notation, Fluxus, tape collage, minimalism - while retaining a
strong sense of identity and utter sincerity. This fine survey of Corner's
piano music is a good place to start discovering his work (while noting that
Alga Marghen has recently reissued his tape and gamelan music from the 1960s
and 1970s: both strongly recommended).
Like serial pioneers Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen (but also
Ferrari), Corner studied with Olivier Messiaen, and came under the influence
of "the master's" "Modes de Valeurs et d'Intensités", a groundbreaking study
for solo piano that set out to serialize not only pitch, but also duration
and dynamics. However, avoiding the complexity of the total serial world that
dominated European contemporary music throughout the 1950s, Corner's 1957
"Short Piano Pieces" are deceptively simple exposés of the serial principle.
Number IV's stately, regular octaves (that interval so rigorously tabooed by
European serialists!) recalls not only Gregorian chant, but also Rosicrucian
period Satie (a composer scorned by Boulez but venerated by Cage). Number
XIII toys with serializing other parameters than pitch, but as Corner
astutely limits himself to only ten notes, it's perfectly possible to hear
what's going on. Only the early (until "Kontrapunkte") works of Stockhausen
and the recently-issued premiere recording of Boulez's epochal "Polyphonie X"
are as structurally lucid and eminently listenable.
After years of vociferous polemicking, composers - Boulez included - realized
that total serialism was a compositional dead end, and consequently sought
various ways out of the impasse, including the use of notational and spatial
innovations and chance procedures. Corner's "7 Joyous Flashes" (1958) are
tiny, exquisite splinters of music, with pitch notated but precise rhythmic
placing more flexible, as the performer encounters the notes along the stave
in a kind of time/space notation. Though hardly dodecaphonic (most last
barely long enough to run through the regulation twelve tones), they flirt
with serial principles such as aggregate completion, recalling Webern's
famous impression that once all twelve tones had appeared, the piece was
over. With "Flux and Form No. 2", Corner frees things up one step further by
specifying interval rather than pitch content, once more leaving the rhythmic
dimension loosely notated (to clarify matters even more for the listener, the
second version of the piece included here superimposes three versions of the
piece).
"Concerto for Housekeeper", written one presumes in the early 60s while
Corner was associated with the wild and wacky world of Fluxus (one gripe:
with only a couple of exceptions, the dates of the pieces are not clearly
stated on the album), belongs to world of "action concepts" - the sound of
the piano - keyboard and elsewhere! - being "cleaned" is guaranteed to raise
a smile (and reminds this writer of his mother attacking the family piano
with a cotton duster each weekend). Charlie Morrow, quoted in the liner
notes, refers to the "crystal clarity of the concepts" in Corner's piano
music, especially evident in "Pulse: a 'Keyboard Dance'", which starts on a
middle F and proceeds to accumulate adjacent pitches to form ever-widening
clusters until the extreme registers of the instrument are reached. The
conceptual simplicity is evident from outset - we know where the piece is
going - but the listening experience is unpredictably fascinating, the ear
drawn both to the rich harmonic spectra of the chords and the surface
irregularities of Corner's playing. It is precisely this interface between
conceptual perfection and performance imperfection that breathes life into
the music (a MIDI realization of this piece would be stultifyingly boring).
Just as extraordinary is the following "C Major Chord" (the score of which,
published in 1965, says: "You can do anything you like provided it is a C
Major Chord") where Corner repeats an arpeggiated triad on middle C for over
17 minutes. Sounds dull? You'll be amazed at how much there is to hear -
variations of dynamics and attack produce dazzling overtones (Charlemagne
Palestine's piano music comes to mind), and the ear rapidly becomes sensitive
to minute fluctuations in pitch, as louder attacks produce microtonal
inflections - towards the end I was convinced the tuning of the piano had
subtly changed, the upper G and middle E having moved somehow closer
together. Only extended repetition sensitizes the ear to such nuances
(Satie's "Vexations" can also produce the same disturbing perceptual
disorientation).
Finally, "perfect", a text-score consisting of the instructions
"Round-bottomed object(s) wobbling on strings - of piano - of other resonant
surfaces balls rolling too" calls for a collection of metal (and wooden?)
objects, including what sound like Tibetan Prayer Bowls, in an intriguing -
if a little on the long side - exploration of the inside of the instrument.
Now that XI have set about reissuing long-deleted works by Phill Niblock,
let's hope for more Corner from them soon. Strongly recommended.

Simon Nabatov Quartet

NATURE MORTE
Leo CD LR 310

Setting text to music has long been a territory associated with classical
composition; in a jazz context, apart from several legendary poetry readings
accompanied by or simultaneous with (there's a difference) music - notably by
Beat poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth, and by free
jazz revolutionaries such as Leroi Jones, Hart Leroy Bibbs and Sunny Murray -
few are the jazz composers who have actively sought to set text as song.
Michael Mantler and Steve Swallow come to mind, the former for his intense
collaborations with Robert Wyatt, the latter for his exceptional "Home" (ECM)
setting poetry by Robert Creeley. It's a tricky feat to pull off, even
leaving aside stylistic preconceptions - "what does (American) jazz to do
with (European) poetry?" - the finest examples of German lieder have often
avoided the "best" poetry, according the music and text the same status, and
well-intentioned attempts to tackle the heights of Rilke, Beckett and Dylan
Thomas have often resulted in uneven results, with the text far outweighing
the music. But setting your standards high is what it's all about, and
Russian émigré pianist Nabatov has courageously chosen to set, in George
Kline's fine English translation, a poem of the highest order, "Nature Morte"
by Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) who also fled the Soviet Union at age 32 to
live in the USA. Not for a moment do I doubt Stuart Broomer's assertion in
the notes that "Nabatov has read this poem so deeply and repeatedly" that he
"expresses it another language", but disagree fundamentally with him when he
states that we "cannot ask what it means." Associating text - printed, spoken
or sung - with music necessarily invites the listener not only to reflect on
its meaning, but also, inevitably, to impart to the music some kind of
explanatory function with regard to the text, be it directly descriptive
(Schubert, Wolf, Wagner) or supportive (Mantler's brooding, gloomy writing
for the Jazz Composers Orchestra becomes "understandable" in the context of
the accompanying quotes from Beckett's "How It Is"). We cannot but ask what
it means. Nabatov's master stroke here is to use Phil Minton not only as
singer/speaker but also as instrument in his own right, thereby blurring the
distinctions between language and music, words and sounds. Though it seems
churlish to criticize Minton, who is incontestably the finest male vocal
improviser around, I detect at times just a hint of detachment, even irony,
in his spoken declamation of the text. When the poet concerned is Ezra Pound
(Minton recently "starred" as Pound in Franz Koglmann's Pisan Canto cantata,
"O Moon My Pin-Up", reviewed here previously), that element of distance is
entirely appropriate, inscribed as it is in the very text, whereas Brodsky,
like Beckett, writes from the guts (perhaps only the late and lamented,
Richard Burton or Patrick Magee, could really do this justice). While this
music will inevitably find its way into the "jazz" bin, it should be stressed
that Nabatov wisely avoids using the jazz vernacular (as did Koglmann, though
for reasons clearly dictated by his text), opting, in the composed sections,
for a mix of athletic ostinato à la Stravinsky and lyrical serialism à la
Dallapiccola. Nabatov's astounding virtuosity - especially in Part 4, where
his left hand negotiates a ferociously intricate octave bass line doubled on
trombone while his right solos ecstatically (and I'm sure there's no
overdubbing involved) - is matched by magnificent performances from Frank
Gratkowski on winds and Nils Wogram on trombone.

Carnegie Changeover

New York News Item: Robert J. Harth, the chief executive of the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado, has been chosen to replace the outgoing and controversial Franz Xaver Ohnesorg as head of Carnegie Hall. We regret the departure of Mr. Ohnesorg, who seemed to have visionary ideas for transforming this venerable but old-timey institution, and we particularly regret the unpleasantly partisan role that was played by a critic at the New York Times.

Sun City Girls

CARNAVAL FOLKLORE RESURRECTION
1: CAMEO DEMONS AND THEIR MANIFESTATIONS
3: SUPERCULTO
6: SUMATRAN ELECTRIC CHAIR
(Abduction POB 9611 Seattle WA 98109)

The Sun City Girls, despite a penchant for dressing up and wearing masks,
aren't as elusive as The Residents, with whom they're often compared. Alan
and Richard Bishop were born in Michigan and met drummer Charlie Gocher in
Arizona in the early 80s, since when they've pursued their own idiosyncratic
course through left field alt.rock tinged with free jazz and Middle Eastern
influence (the Bishops are of Lebanese origin), collaborating along the way
with the likes of Eugene Chadbourne, Climax Golden Twins and Eyvind Kang.
"Carnaval Folklore Resurrection" is their latest limited-edition (1000)
offering, and is as annoying and fascinating as we've come to expect (though
none of the albums here scales the heights of 1990's "Torch of the Mystics",
still the best SCG outing so far). "Cameo Demons" and "Superculto" were
recorded in 1997 in Seattle. The former is the least engaging of the three,
leading one to wonder where the line should be drawn between aimless jamming
and free rock (and whether any of it should be recorded at all, never mind
released). "Superculto" was laid down in one day (and sounds like it), and is
a anarchic ragbag of polystylistic improvisations ranging from do-it-yourself
gamelan ("Mopti Ghetto Still") via unbridled vicious guitar noise ("Now
Playing") and squeaky "free jazz" ("The Gospel According to Philly Joe
Jones", indeed!) to extended Chadbournesque banjo-like doodling ("Camp
Sulawesi"). Enthusiastic travelers, The Girls once found themselves jamming
on a Sumatran ferry along with an Indonesian house band, though it's unclear
whether "Sumatran Electric Chair" is a recording of that auspicious event or
their twisted recollections of it. In any case, the opening Burmese song "My
Friend RAIN" is so hilariously awful that both the Girls' aesthetics and
sense of taste ought to be seriously called into question - then again, these
are the guys who released "Midnight Cowboys from Ipanema", a whole album of
unspeakably dreadful cover versions, so perhaps I should know by now what to
expect. Leave your brains outside.

John Stevens Trio

LIVE AT THE PLOUGH
AYLER AYLCD 007

If you're expecting the intricate, crystalline insect music of John
Stevens' Spontaneous Music Ensemble, you can put this one back in the rack.
Stevens was equally at home playing rowdy jazz rock and hard-swinging bop,
and March 1979 found him in one of his familiar haunts, a sweaty, smoky
London pub called the Plough, fronting a trio with veteran British altoist
Mike Osborne and a young Paul Rogers on bass. Not only that, but the
program on offer here includes two venerable chestnuts, "Summertime" and
"Cherokee", as well as Jackie McLean's "Blue Rondo" and four straight-head
originals by Osborne. Jan Ström's Sweden-based Ayler label has got quite a
bit of flak recently (from me included) regarding the occasionally dodgy
sound quality of its releases, but with historic material such as this (and
Ström apparently has several thousand concerts in his archive!), as with some
of the legendary Charlie Parker live recordings and the early Leo releases
whose tapes were smuggled under the Iron Curtain, such criticism is petty and
small-minded. We can hear enough to say that Rogers was already a damn fine
bassist, Osborne an extremely inventive post-bop player, and Stevens a
veritable propulsion engine of a drummer. Of course, if your idea of a good
time is a spotless, cool, Nordic ECM studio recording or Incus/Emanem-style
thorny no-concessions improv, this may not be for you, but if you're not
afraid of Jazz (with a capital J) and want to have a real idea of exactly
what those fabled London pub sessions were like, pull yourself a pint of warm
ale and put this on nice and loud. Now, I wonder if Ström has a tape of
another pub gig Stevens did about that time with Eugene Chadbourne and
Toshinori Kondo..

Copyright 2001 by Paris Transatlantic