| June
News 2003 |
Reviews
by Dan Warburton, Nate Dorward:
|
|
Exclusive
review: FIMAV, Victoriaville
In concert: Akiyama / Butcher / Lehn / Moor
On Leo: John Wolf Brennan, Peggy Lee, Dylan van
der Schyff, Aki Takase, Rudi Mahall
Historic reissue: Frank Wright's "Church Number
Nine"
Objects: Dörner & Lonberg-Holm / EKG
On Charhizma:
Christof Kurzmann
On Fringes: Michel Doneda / Pierre-Olivier Boulant
On Erstwhile: Rowe, Lehn, Schmickler, Noetinger,
erikm, Müller, Otomo, Tilbury
Noah Rosen
Electronica In Brief: Yasunao Tone / Ven Voisey
/
Jazz & Improv In Brief : Telectu / Eisenbeil,
Flinn & Wren / Tala /
Last Month
|
FIMAV,
Victoriaville 2003
Victoriaville, Canada (Various venues) May 15th - 19th 2003
by Nate Dorward
Despite the endearing insistence in festival publicity that virtually
every act programmed at Victoriaville (officially known as the FIMAV,
but everyone calls it Victo) is a Premičre Canadienne!, Nord-Americaine!
or Mondiale!, programs always strongly feature the same few
names - John Zorn, Fred Frith, René Lussier, Jean Derome, Mike Patton,
various members of Sonic Youth - and while I enjoyed seeing them a
few times (though I can do without SY's bonehead forays into improv)
I haven't felt I needed to check in with them on a yearly basis. This
year was the first time I've attended Victo since 1996, despite being
tempted to go in various years by certain inclusions on the bill -
for instance, by the Cecil Taylor and Marilyn Crispell combo in 2000.
My uneasy attitude to Victo has also extended to John Zorn, in many
ways Victo's flagship artist, who lost me somewhere among the increasingly
kitsch recyclings of the Masada compositions in the 1990s. So it was
time to give him another try, also.
Of the 24 concerts programmed this year (the full program may be consulted
via the official website: www.fimav.qc.ca), running from May 15th
to 19th, I rather cautiously attended only seven. I managed to arrive
at Colisée des Bois-Francs half an hour late, and Zorn's Electric
Masada was already well under way when I arrived. It was like walking
in on a jam by the greatest 1970s Jewish rock band that never was.
As mindless entertainment went it was fairly good value, with guitarist
Marc Ribot injecting a little class into the proceedings and percussionist
Cyro Baptista fortunately not quite as garish as Airto Moreira, but
any emotional or historical resonance attaching to the Masada songbook
- originally part of Zorn's attempt to reckon with his Jewish heritage
- was, beyond the de facto homage to the Tribe of Onan, completely
wiped out. This was one of those obligatory bums-on-seats gigs at
Victo where the hardcore festival-going audience is vastly outnumbered
by an influx of les jeunes from Montréal who come in to see
one gig and then leave. (Besides Zorn's cachet, the presence
of John Medeski on the organ probably didn't hurt ticket sales, either
- it was the single sold-out concert at the festival.) Most hardcore
Victogoers I talked to afterwards hated the gig, were indifferent
to it or, like me, simply found it pleasantly irrelevant; but judging
by the audience's reaction it generally went down well.
Next afternoon began at the small CEGEP auditorium with the "Berlin
minimalist" duo of Annette Krebs and Andrea Neumann, respectively
manipulating - rather than playing - guitar and "inside-piano" (the
guts of a small piano) as raw sound sources for amplification and
electronic treatment. As seems to be the fashion among sectors of
the "reductionist" community and related areas like laptop improv,
interaction among the players was also reduced: directly facing each
other over two small tables positioned at the centre of the room,
they virtually avoided eye contact with each other, barring the very
rare exchange of a mutual smile. It was like watching two technicians
or computer programmers going about their work, largely in their own
little worlds. The music was carefully pieced together from discrete,
virtually static sounds: fizzes, crackles, hums, amplified dead air.
Even naturally produced sounds were often given the sound of a hard
edit, with no graduation of attack or decay: Krebs would begin to
bow something while the input from the mic was turned off, then flip
it on in medias res. Such massive levels of amplification of tiny
sounds (Neumann's caressing the piano strings or rolling steel wool
over them, Krebs' twisting the soft end of a mallet on a contact mic)
began to make me genuinely fearful that someone would screw up and
accidentally bump or strike something too hard, frying the speakers
and the eardrums of everyone in the room. It didn't happen, thankfully.
Intriguing music - not "compelling" precisely because it kept a distance
from anything you might describe as musical rhetoric - and for all
its perversity it wasn't always as austere as my description paints
it: there were several loud sci-fi firefights, and the home stretch
had a denser, more sustained texture.
Back to the Colisée, where ROVA also performed in the centre of the
space (a welcome trend), but on a square raised stage, the saxophonists
facing each other from opposite corners under plain, harsh white lights,
like some odd four-way boxing match or martial-arts contest. The first
composition definitely required this set-up, being a game piece where
all four needed to convey visual cues: the piece drew forth everything
from delicate papery tones to church-organ richness to a kind of stepwise
canon. There was some gloriously gut-wrenching R&B in the mix - Jon
Raskin's "Jukebox Detroit" and Steve Adams' "Chuck" (a hectic gloss
on Mingus's already tempestuous "E's Flat Ah's Flat Too") - and there
were some impressively tautly argued pieces like Larry Ochs' "Ruins"
and "The Drift". It was a vibrant, often bravura performance - no
surprise, given that the effect of an all-sax line-up is inevitably
to push the music upfront, whereas a more varied instrumentation leaves
more room for interplay between foreground and background. It was,
however, neither harsh nor relentless, and had an attractive openness
that the concert-in-the-round setup usefully highlighted in a
way that the habitual confrontational setup of musicians-facing-the-audience
wouldn't have. ROVA recently released the fine "Resistance" on Victo's
house label, and they were clearly coming off a high at this event,
having just celebrated their 25th anniversary with a series of concerts.
Peter Kowald's recent passing was memorialized at Victo by an all-star
four-bass concert of William Parker, Joëlle Léandre, Barre Phillips
and (subbing for the absent Barry Guy) Tetsu Saďtoh. This was a pointless
if spectacular pile-up of the kind beloved of impresarios like Norman
Granz. I'd have been happy to see any one or two of these players
on their own; but though they managed to eke out decent music despite
the ridiculous circumstances the concert was hardly a productive use
of their talents. They were often reduced to mere imitation in the
effort to avoid musical chaos: one bassist would start tapping his
or her instrument and the others would start doing it too willy-nilly.
Like the five-vocalist gig two days before (which I couldn't attend)
the programming here by Victo's director Michel Levasseur seemed basically
more to do with creating yet another Premičre Mondiale! than
with eliciting significant music.
Fred Frith's compositions were performed Sunday evening by the 16-piece
Montreal-based Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, conducted by Lorraine Vaillancourt.
Frith was initially off-stage, but later appeared in order to contribute
dabs of guitar and to conduct some short segments. The compositions
on the program were played without a break, interlinked by sections
of a piece called "Traffic Continues", a long, gently-paced melody
stated by strings and winds punctuated by other sounds - martial drumming,
samples, players dropping things on the floor or ripping up newspapers,
etc. OK, though not especially memorable; the concert also lacked
a real musical context, given that Levasseur's programming neglected
any other serious representation of contemporary composition.
The trio of Urs Leimgruber, Jacques Demierre and Barre Phillips has
already been documented on "Wing Vane", released on Victo in late
2001 to surprisingly little fanfare despite its being one of the most
interesting recent free-improv recordings. Pleasingly, their gig on
Monday afternoon didn't simply sound like more of the same, though
it began in similar territory to the CD. Leimgruber's vocabulary of
clicks, sucks and peeps is uniquely personal even in the ever-expanding
universe of extended technique, and Demierre, when he's not messing
around inside the instrument, rarely draws on conventional keyboard
technique, working instead with the sides and backs and palms of his
hands, plus fists, nails, elbows and arms. The effect is of a playful
fluttering around in and on the instrument rather than the hammerblow
approach of many free-jazz/improv pianists. There was a genuine sense
of risk here, of a playful but seriously meant willingness among all
three players to do unobvious things that might create friction with
the others, capsize the piece or puzzle the audience. Demierre at
one point discarded his sprightly approach for a roaring five-minute
crescendo with the pedal depressed; Leimgruber responded in kind,
but Phillips sweetly maintained his modest volume and demeanour, lightly
bowing his instrument. Later he engineered a contrasting rupture,
dropping some lovely Hadenish folk-music bass into the non-idiomatic
context established by his companions; neither he nor his fellows
gave an inch, and the music was all the better for it.
As with the same-instrument pileups earlier in the week, the climactic
double-trio gig by the Evan Parker and Peter Brötzmann trios (not
a double bill, but a one-time-only sextet) was an instance of that
dubious phenomenon, the "festival supergroup". Not that it was a bust
- far from it. As usual with recent Parker the performance was parcelled
out among subsections of the ensemble, like territory carved up by
wary diplomats around the negotiating table. The two groups were respectively:
Evan Parker, Alex von Schlippenbach (replacing Guy) and Paul Lytton;
and Brötzmann, William Parker and Hamid Drake. A brief sextet war-whoop
opened proceedings, following which Brötzmann's gang cleared the stage
and left the Parker/Schlippenbach/Lytton trio to do their thing, which
they did with characteristic aplomb. Schlippenbach began patiently
preparing the inside of his piano with cymbals, at which point Brötz's
crew returned at full blast, so the pianist had to undo all his work
and join the melee; Evan immediately walked off into the wings (not
from annoyance, I think, simply due to a need to change a reed), and
after an awkward transition we were left with a Schlippenbach/Lytton/Drake
trio, which - ironically, given the absence of the two marquee names
- took up a fair proportion of the concert and was one of the highlights.
The drummers were a study in contrast: Lytton setting to work with
a Popeye squint, Drake incorrigibly showing off, both clearly enjoying
the encounter. The pianist, talking fervently to himself, turned his
favourite figures around and around again, as if rotating an object
with both hands. After a few more spins of the dial we reached the
Brötzmann trio slot, which found Brötz shaking a tarogato in his chops
like a dog with a chew toy while Drake and William Parker hit a nice
bass/frame-drum groove. Inevitably the whole awkward, enjoyable, fearsome,
absurd and impressive spectacle lurched towards an earsplitting sextet
climax, followed by a similarly inclined encore. The spirits of Coltrane
and Ayler seemed appeased for the moment. As long loud blows go it
was a good one, though I still would have liked to hear the trios
separately in addition to this shotgun marriage.
Friends and family persist in asking me about "the Victoriaville jazz
festival", which of course it isn't and doesn't pretend to be. (Levasseur
likes to describe the festival's remit as "musique actuelle", a vague
term he famously refuses to define.) Free improvisation is always
heavily represented on the program - essentially forming its backbone
- but the engagement with jazz as an independent artform is limited
to its selective engagement with free jazz (especially where closely
related to European improv) and to its representation of downtown
New York polystylism. This self-imposed limitation seems shortsighted
since much of the best improvised music today comes from areas of
jazz virtually off-limits at Victo nowadays: from Jason Moran to Paul
Bley to Paul Smoker to Anthony Braxton to Henry Threadgill to Joe
McPhee to Greg Osby to Franz Koglmann to Matt Wilson to Marty Ehrlich
to Joe Maneri to Ellery Eskelin to Simon Nabatov to Ray Anderson to
Joe Morris to Kevin Norton to countless others. Given the stress on
improvisation, representation of "new music" - i.e. composition -
is superficial, amounting to just one or two gigs per festival. This
year it was the Frith gig, while previous years have featured Tim
Brady or the Kronos Quartet. It might be helpful if Levasseur either
ditched this component entirely or, better, made it more functional
within the context of the festival by beefing it up. While improvised
music is one of the things Victo does best (I'm not commenting here
on the rock and electronic music at Victo, since those were mostly
on the days I didn't attend), little took place this year of real
substance even within those generic confines. Things like the four-bass
gig or the double-trio gig will inevitably throw up some good music
but are mere sideshows to the players' oeuvres and to what's actually
most interesting in contemporary improvisation. Victo's programming
ambitions largely concern the slightly varying reframing of favoured
musicians and styles from year to year, rather than the creation of
a more focused event that might pose more serious questions about
where contemporary music is headed and what roles listeners and musicians
might take in that process. It's basically a good occasion to catch
up on familiar names, see some players you've not run into before,
and schmooze with fans, musicians and critics. Sometimes that's enough.
Tetuzi
Akiyama, Moor / Lehn / Butcher
Instants Chavirés, Montreuil, May 25th 2003
by Dan Warburton
The French verb "chavirer" means "capsize", which is what the clubspace
tucked away in a seedy side street in Montreuil has been threatening
to do for some time now, though thankfully a large crowd (for the
Instants that means more than fifty) was in attendance to see 39 year
old Tetuzi Akiyama stroll on stage and pick up his guitar. Though
he's often associated with the Japanese onkyo set (thanks to frequent
collaborations with Toshimaru Nakamura and Taku Sugimoto, to name
but two practitioners of that pared-down style), Akiyama's playing
in fact reflects nothing less than the whole history of the venerable
instrument, from dirty bottleneck blues to screaming feedback. What
he shares with Sugimoto is a sense of poise and mastery of gesture,
along with a willingness to admit extraneous noises, particularly
the sound of the various objects he uses to prepare his instrument,
which include adhesive tape, pebbles and a rather vicious-looking
steak knife. His forty-minute set was a fine example of music that
invents itself from moment to moment, taking risks in the process.
In short, improvisation.
The trio of John Butcher (saxophones), Thomas Lehn (analogue synth)
and Andy Moor (guitar) originally convened for a gig last year in
Brussels, since when they have released a fine album, "Thermal" on
guitarist Moor's Unsounds imprint, and undertaken a brief tour, of
which this was the fourth date. While the local improv snobs muttered
tetchily at the bar - yes, dangerous music like this is far removed
from the ideological purity favoured by several locals - the group
lurched forward, frequently ending up in some pretty wild territory
(especially for Butcher, who seemed nevertheless to be enjoying his
experiments with howling feedback), but always managed to step back
from the edge of all-out Borbetomagus madness. Ex guitarist Moor was
quite restrained by his standards, but Lehn was in his element, his
synth crackling merrily away, spitting out molten shards of metallic
percussiveness. Not unsurprisingly perhaps, the overall result was
less polished than the album, but in terms of sheer risk - the trio
managed to box themselves into some scary corners on a number of occasions,
and had to come out fighting - it certainly made a welcome change
from the rather predictable fare sometimes dished up here, where gigs
are so thin on the ground that improvising musicians are compelled
to club together into a kind of mutual admiration society, rarely
if ever doing anything that's likely to capsize the boat.
New
on Leo
John Wolf Brennan / Peggy Lee / Dylan van der Schyff
ZERO HEROES
Leo CD LR 373
Aki Takase / Rudi Mahall
THE DESSERT
Leo CD LR 370
by Nate Dorward
Pianist John Wolf Brennan - Irish-born but based in Switzerland
- has been quietly amassing a pile of often very fine recordings on
Leo in recent years. This latest instalment in the sequence is the
upshot of the redoubtable Ken Pickering's luring him to Vancouver
in March of last year. On this off-the-cuff encounter with two of
the city's keenest improvisers, the husband-and-wife team of cellist
Peggy Lee and drummer Dylan van der Schyff, Brennan sounds surprisingly
at home. While much of the music is improvised, Brennan also brought
along a few compositions, the most striking of which - in effect the
album's centrepiece - is "Anyway - Was There Ever Nothing?", an exact
retrograde of Annette Peacock's "Nothing Ever Was, Anyway". The richness
of sentiment here recalls Crispell's Peacock tribute for ECM; but
Brennan's music is a lot more fun than that lovely but sometimes ponderous
record: he's too quizzical a musician for unalloyed rhapsody. His
music has a simplicity that is far from precious (though he likes
to leave space around his notes), suggesting instead a preference
for musical material that can be easily assembled and taken apart.
Such a process is particularly clear in the two solo pieces; the first,
"Be Flat", might almost be mistaken for a layered structure built
up by means of digital delay, an illusion accomplished entirely acoustically
by using the sustain pedal. Brennan and van der Schyff work together
well, if at times at slight though not unpleasant cross-purposes (the
percussionist gravitating towards a more fugitive, restless approach),
but the understanding between Lee and Brennan is close throughout,
from the gorgeous ebbing and swelling of "Eastern Front" (bowed cello,
bowed cymbals and Brennan's "arcopiano") to their ghostly duet on
"Powerful Stranger". The disc ends with an unexpected dive into the
maelstrom with "Western Front", followed by a perfectly turned, freely
improvised encore, "Zero Heroes". ("Zero Hero" was the title of an
early selection of Barry MacSweeney's hair-raising "Book of Demons"
poems about alcohol addiction; but I presume this is not what Brennan
had in mind...). The recording quality doesn't quite do justice to
the louder moments, but it's otherwise good; in any case this is only
a quibble about a welcome, thoroughly enjoyable release.
A set of duets for bass clarinet and piano could be a dark and dour
affair, but Aki Takase and Rudi Mahall's "The Dessert" is as bright
and emphatic as its delightful Natsumi Komatsu cover-art (coloured
paper cut-outs of a duck and stork, in gentle allusion to the physical
disparity between the performers). Bass clarinettist Mahall's playing
has improbable poise: playing virtually the entire album in his instrument's
higher registers, he conveys a dancer's grace, an image almost literalised
by his foot-tapping stoptime feature on "Apple Cake". Takase approaches
the piano without pedal and usually with a non legato - but not percussive
- touch. Always pointed and selective, she rarely plays a note merely
transitionally, as a stepping-stone in a larger sweep across the keyboard.
Her phrases, always carefully telescoped, are studded with accents
that serve the same purpose as punctuation marks in prose - and even
end with the dynamic equivalent of a full stop. Influences in the
air on the disc range from the classical piano repertoire to children's
songs ("Panna Cotta" could almost be a lullaby) to Wallerish stride
piano to free improvisation; there is also one track, "Granatapfelsirup",
which sounds to my ears like a gloss on Carla Bley's "King Korn" (perhaps
via Paul Bley's reading on "Footloose"). The disc compiles three separate
sessions that are all clearly though differently recorded - a few
abrupt changes in acoustic between tracks result - but the music,
at once bracing and playful, is at a consistently high level throughout.
Frank
Wright
The Frank Wright Quartet
CHURCH NUMBER NINE
Black Keys CD 7701
by Dan Warburton
After the much appreciated reissue of his two Center Of The World
albums on Fractal three years back, an even rarer example of Frank
Wright's ecstatic jazz has now been unearthed and reissued on the
French label Black Keys. "Church Number Nine" was originally released
in 1973 (though apparently recorded on March 7th 1970) on a label
called Calumet which promptly disappeared - only 300 copies of the
album made it into circulation, the rest were apparently destroyed.
The two sides of the original vinyl were originally entitled "Parts
One" and "Two", even though each was recorded as an individual piece
in its own right, and remain separate (untitled) tracks on the CD,
whose booklet reproduces the original front and back covers (complete
with liner notes by Val Wilmer) and also includes a handy complete
Frank Wright discography. The line-up is the same as on Wright's BYG
Actuel outing "One For John": Wright on tenor, Noah Howard on alto,
Bobby Few on piano and Mohamed (sic) Ali on drums. The first piece,
a monumental twenty-six minute slab of holy rolling free gospel, finds
Wright extending the tradition of fire music's two most influential
saxophonists, Coltrane and Ayler - the theme is a primordial I - IV
- I - V - I chord sequence straight out of Ayler's church, and adding
additional percussion (when not blowing their horns to bits Wright
and Howard make an almighty racket on sleigh bells) is a habit Wright
evidently picked up from his brief stint with Coltrane. Few's solo
is particularly explosive, alternating churchy licks with post-McCoy
Tyner comping and furious volleys of clusters and glissandi, after
which a rock-solid groove kicks in briefly at the twenty minute mark
(Ali's drumming throughout is closer in spirit to the raw energy of
Sunny Murray than it is to the polyrhythms of brother Rashied), before
the whole edifice comes crashing down like the walls of Jericho under
the blasts of the horns. The second piece has no theme as such other
than an unharmonised ten-note motive Wright blasts out ten times before
embarking on a solo consisting of tight bursts of energy, mauling
and ripping notes to pieces like a famished lion before finally settling
on one and doing it to death. Howard is more florid, but Few and Ali's
relentless pummelling and Wright's sanctified vocals and percussion
eventually push him (and us) into the upper Aylersphere.
PTM
exclusive offer: as this album is released in a limited edition, we
appreciate it might be difficult to find. However, help is at hand:
you may obtain a copy directly from the record's producer, Didier
Kowalski, by contacting him at the following address: Didier Kowalski,
2, place des Fédérés, 208a, 93160 Noisy Le Grand, France. (Mobile:
33.6.60.12.80.88), or preferably by email at dkowalski@club-internet.fr
Prices, including postage, are as follows: 15€ / $15, Ł12. Watch this
space. -- DW
Objects
1 & 2
Axel Dörner / Fred Lonberg-Holm
OBJECT1
Locust Music 23
EKG
OBJECT2
Locust Music 24
by Dan Warburton
Recorded at Chicago's Truckstop and partnered by local cellist Fred
Lonberg-Holm, German trumpeter Axel Dörner once more reveals his prodigious
extended technique on an album whose music and graphics (predominantly
white) recall the austere productions of the Japanese Meme and the
French A Bruit Secret labels (Dörner's solo album "Trumpet" appeared
on the latter in 2001) - with the crucial addition of five small black
and white photos: one each of the artists, one chest X-ray, one Brillo
pad and one bowling ball. The press release from Locust describes
the album as "soundtracking" the objects, though exactly how this
is done seems to be left up to the listener to figure out (as I was
aware of the existence of Bruckmann and Karel's project - see below
- before it was officially released by Locust, I suspect the "Object"
concept was decided upon after the recordings were made). In keeping
with the rather clinical imagery, Dörner and Lonberg-Holm go about
their work with the methodical precision of laboratory assistants
patiently conducting experiments. The five pieces take their time
to explore texture and sonority, the busier moments recalling the
pair's earlier outing on the (late, lamented?) Meniscus label, "Claque",
but without Michael Zerang's nervous twitching percussion behind them
on "Object 1", Lonberg-Holm has more space to explore the outer limits
of his cello and Dörner seems perfectly content to lay down his characteristically
static breathy metallic tones, teasing microtonal nuances out of his
custom-built Holton slide trumpet. Neither player pushes the other
about - the music is neither conflictual nor consensual, but intensely
focused on the moment. A challenging but rewarding listen.
Kyle Bruckmann (on English horn, suona and electronics) and Ernst
Karel (trumpet and electronics), collectively known as EKG, continue
the series with a set of six austere, slow moving soundscapes in keeping
with the prevailing tendency in new improvised music to move away
from rapid-fire interplay - improv's free jazz heritage - towards
territory more traditionally associated with contemporary classical
and electronic music. Assembled from recordings made between 2000
and 2002, some of which were live and slightly marred by occasional
muffled coughs, "Object 2" is as much a landmark of the genre as the
highly acclaimed releases on Jon Abbey's Erstwhile label. Bruckmann
has in recent times preferred to downplay his dazzling virtuosity
on the double reed instruments, as documented on his solo debut for
Barely Auditable, "Entymology" and his outstanding collection of duets
"And" on the Polish label Musica Genera, in favour of patient exploration
of the microtonal and micro-timbral inflections of long-held tones,
which combine with Karel's plaintive trumpet and the grainy analog
electronics, blasts of white noise and crackling static to create
music of an extraordinary intensity which richly repays repeated listening.
Watch out for more Objects coming soon from Locust Music - future
releases are planned featuring Jason Ajemian, Matt Bauder, Tetuzi
Akiyama and Utah Kawasaki.
Christof
Kurzmann
THE AIR BETWEEN
Charhizma 021
by Dan Warburton
There's a page in John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" showing a painting
of a cornfield with black crows circling above it, followed overleaf
by the same image with the caption "this was the last painting Van
Gogh finished before he killed himself" - the point being that what
you're told about a work of art prior to experiencing it necessarily
conditions your response to it. Christof Kurzmann's latest CD on his
Charhizma label is a case in point; if it hadn't come accompanied
by a press release describing Kurzmann's horror at the unfolding military
situation in Iraq, and if it didn't include a text by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, a hard-hitting and defiantly critical open letter to George
W. Bush in fact, one might be tempted to listen to its dull low end
thuds and intermittent menacing backbeats (Kurzmann acknowledges Richie
Hawtin in his liners) differently. The added political dimension invites
the listener to meditate more on US foreign policy than on Kurzmann's
music, and it's unfortunate. More unfortunate, given Charhizma's track
record as one of the best labels around in terms of graphics, packaging
and above all sound quality (this work is beautifully recorded and
expertly mastered by Christoph Amann), are the shoddy spelling mistakes
and punctuation gaffes in the English translation of the Marquez text.
That music and politics are related is beyond doubt, but, as John
Tilbury's recent response to Brian Olewnick's article on him in the
Wire magazine shows (Tilbury complained that the real reasons behind
his decision to refuse to play in the United States until further
notice were edited out, along with a quotation from Lenin), the subject
needs sensitive handling. Kurzmann is perfectly at liberty to express
his opinions (opinions that in this case I happen, moreover, to share),
but associating them so inextricably with his work as a musician is,
for this listener at least, problematic. That said, I cordially invite
Christof, whose work I have admired for several years, and with whom
I've had the pleasure of several conversations, to respond to the
above points.
Michel
Doneda / Pierre-Olivier Boulant
SOPRANINO / RADIO
Fringes 13
by Dan Warburton
Maybe it's that label name, maybe the limited edition rarity (500),
maybe the odd format (18 x 13 cm), but Giuseppe Ielasi's Fringes imprint
always seems to summon forth the most extreme - and ultimately the
most rewarding - performances from the artists it features. After
last year's highly acclaimed Annette Krebs solo album and John Butcher's
recent "Invisible Ear", it's now the turn of French saxophonist Michel
Doneda to produce his most challenging solo album since 1998's Potlatch
release "Anatomie des Clefs". Except "Sopranino" isn't a solo album.
Doneda is joined by Pierre-Olivier Boulant, who manipulates a small
radio and handles editing and recording (as he did on the recent Potlatch
outing, "Placés dans l'air", on which Doneda was joined by fellow
soprano saxophonists Alessandro Bosetti and Bhob Rainey).
Taking full advantage of the large number of tracks available on a
CD, pop this one into your machine and you'll find it contains no
fewer than 64 of them. In fact, the first 63 clock in at just over
24 minutes - Doneda's "concerto" for sopranino sax and radio was recorded
at home, by the fire, and consists of numerous fragments that the
listener is invited to play on random shuffle. (What with this and
the recent Rowe / Lehn / Schmickler on Erstwhile, it seems random
shuffle is where it's at these days.) Doneda, whose playing in recent
times seems to have moved into the same territory as Rainey's - timbre
becoming more important than pitch - is accompanied by the high pitched
whistle and occasional pop from Boulant's transistor, as well as crackling
from the fireplace and the odd squeak from a chair. Track 64, which
lasts 39 minutes, was recorded in and near Doneda's home in the south
of France, and intercuts recordings of his sopranino made on four
locations on the Montagne Noire region. Well, it's cheaper than a
studio, and much prettier. Despite - and in response to - the sites'
different acoustic conditions, the resulting music visits similar
areas of saxophone technique, albeit exploring a wider dynamic range.
Many years ago there was a BBC TV programme called "Call My Bluff"
in which celebrities were invited to guess the meaning of obscure
words found in dusty corners of the Oxford English Dictionary. One
I happen to remember was "pledget", which is apparently the word for
that bit of fluff that manages to collect in your navel at the end
of the day (I kid you not). In a sense, Doneda's album is - and I
do not mean this unkindly - a collection of musical pledgets, an assemblage
of tiny, fluffy, intimate things that almost makes you embarrassed
to listen to them, as if listening itself was an act of intruding.
Secret noise from the fringes. It's a challenging listen, not because
it's difficult listening as such, but because it forces you to question
the very act of listening itself. What does one listen to music
for? Normal considerations of structure - the old-fashioned rise and
fall, development of motives, etc.- don't apply here, and the very
idea that the disc can be appreciated as much by playing it in shuffle
mode completely breaks open the concept of "work". As such, it's a
fascinating addition not only to the consistently excellent Fringes
catalogue but to the discography of one of Europe's most original
and accomplished musicians.
New
on Erstwhile
Keith Rowe / Thomas Lehn / Marcus Schmickler
RABBIT RUN
Erstwhile 027
Jérôme Noetinger / erikm
WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD
Erstwhile 028
Günter Müller / Otomo Yoshihide
TIME TRAVEL
Erstwhile 029
Keith Rowe / John Tilbury
DUOS FOR DORIS
Erstwhile 030-2
by Dan Warburton
In a review of Burkhard Stangl and dieb13's "eh", for The Wire,
a remark I made comparing Erstwhile label manager Jon Abbey to ECM's
Manfred Eicher was removed from the text. The editors of that fine
organ probably thought the comparison was somewhat flippant, though
it was certainly not intended to be. Whether or not one is a diehard
fan of the label and its recent flirtation with crossover classical
box office (Garbarek meets Hilliard Ensemble, or the dour neo-tonal
stuff that's been drifting down south from the Baltic like a rain
cloud), ECM's track record cannot be argued with. Not only has the
imprint overseen the release of numerous landmark recordings of a
wide range of jazz - not exclusively European jazz either - it has
left an indelible impression on the consciousness of a whole generation
of record buyers. Everybody knows what you mean when you talk about
"the ECM sound" - "jazz for people who don't like jazz", one wag once
described it - or the "ECM album cover": clouds scudding across a
Northern sky, with maybe some brightly coloured washing fluttering
in the breeze..
In exactly the same way, Jon Abbey's Erstwhile imprint, with its distinctive
(often textless) Friederike Paetzold cover art has, in a relatively
short space of time, established itself as the reference label
for electroacoustic improvised music, specifically of the subgenre
described once by Phil Durrant as "laminal", i.e. a music consisting
of relatively slow moving sound strata that consciously or not seeks
to avoid the trappings of individual virtuosity in the interest of
creating a unified ensemble sound. The clear precursor of this aesthetic
is AMM, and Jon Abbey would the first to admit as much. AMM's legendary
"The Crypt" is effectively an Erstwhile album thirty years ahead of
its time. That Abbey is a huge AMM fan is well known - no less than
five albums on his label feature AMM's Keith Rowe - indeed, the welcome
return of guitarist Rowe to the forefront of improvised music after
far too long in the wilderness (in his interview for this site he
recalled how until relatively recently AMM only managed to play in
public once a year) is due in no small part to Abbey's persuasive
mixture of enthusiasm and aggressive marketing. Unless my memory serves
me incorrectly, all but one of his releases - the atypical (for Erstwhile)
"Fire Song" featuring Earl Howard and Denman Maroney, Erstwhile 003
- have been reviewed in The Wire, the reference magazine for hundreds
of smaller publications around the world. Abbey maintains a whole
network of contacts with promoters and journalists (I'm quite happy
to be part of it), and spends inordinate amounts of time surfing around
internet newsgroups and chatrooms spreading the word. Hard work pays
off, too. While some other labels - who Abbey jokingly used to refer
to as "the competition" - such as Grob and Potlatch have released
the occasional damp squib, Abbey won't put anything out he's not 100%
satisfied with, hence his decision to hand-pick projects and often
finance the recording itself. For "Duos for Doris" he flew to France
to oversee the recording sessions at the CCAM studios in Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy
in person. Such concern for branding certainly guarantees coherence
with regard to image and sound, but at the expense perhaps of a certain
sense of surprise. Of these four new Erstwhile releases the freshest
- but not the most impressive nor moving - is "What A Wonderful World",
arguably because the two musicians, Marseille-based erikm and Metamkine's
Jérôme Noetinger, had not worked together before Abbey instigated
the project, though they were of course familiar with each other's
work.
Erstwhile 012, "Bart", back in 2000, was a rambunctious analogue vs.
digital tussle between Thomas Lehn's trusty old synth and Marcus Schmickler's
laptop, and Abbey's original plan was to release its sequel as Erstwhile
024, adding a musician - Keith Rowe - according to a numerological
scheme of his own devising (presumably Erst 036 would also feature
Rowe, Lehn and Schmicker plus someone else, and so on). Unfortunately,
the vagaries of the release schedule are such that "Rabbit Run" is
actually Erstwhile 027. Apart from the elegant box and cover art (Rowe's
trademark pop art reconfigured by Cologne designer Heike Sperling),
the album is notable for its "two-in-one" concept: listeners are invited
either to play the 41-minute piece in its entirety or use the random
shuffle button. Schmickler has subdivided the work into 42 shorter
tracks, with the result that there are literally billions of billions
of possible orderings of the material. The placement of the track
indexes is far from arbitrary; the cunning use of hidden markers in
fact results in a random shuffle version of the piece that is twenty
minutes shorter than the "normal" 1 - 42 version. The concept of a
work (that hackneyed term "work in progress" might be more apt) whose
constituent elements may be ordered differently at each performance
isn't exactly new - Stockhausen's "Klavierstücke XI" explored the
idea back in 1956 - but it makes a welcome change from the somewhat
dogmatic purity of much recent improv. The music reflects this fragmented
nature of the concept, advancing in fits and starts even in normal
play mode, a bewilderingly complex assemblage of sounds that will
likely as not be just as unfathomable after 100 listenings as it is
after two or three. I've tried it seven times and I'm still pleasantly
surprised.
Fragmentation is also the name of the game on "What A Wonderful World",
which after an initial squall of noise settles into a patient exploration
of the two musicians' veritable arsenal of electronic equipment. erikm
is billed as playing "3-k pad, 8 system (whatever that is), MiniDiscs
and turntables", while Noetinger adds his customary mixing desk, radio
and contact mics to create a fascinating profusion of sounds, sometimes
recognisable (voices, passing traffic, snatches of cheesy FM radio),
sometimes transformed beyond all recognition. Though both musicians
are talented and experienced live performers, they share a concern
for detail in montage deeply rooted in musique concrčte. Culled
from two recording sessions in Marseille, the nine tracks on offer
here were patiently reorganised and crafted into music that Noetinger
describes - rightly - as "based on improvisation, but not 'improvised
music'". The track titles are taken from the lyrics of the (in)famous
George Weiss / Bob Thiele song "What A Wonderful World", which became
the album title after the earlier suggestion "Revox Chili Peppers"
was rejected (shame, that). Whether or not the musicians intend the
work to be some sort of ironic comment on the times we live in (as
was Michael Moore's use of the song in his film "Bowling for Columbine")
isn't made explicit. In fact, the album's multidirectional chaos is
playful rather than terrifying - Cage's electronic mixes from the
1950s often spring to mind - and it's an extremely accessible, often
amusing piece of work.
Swiss percussionist and electronician (does this word exist? if not
it does now) Günter Müller and Japan's Otomo Yoshihide (electric guitar,
turntables and electronics) turn in their latest Erstwhile outing
with "Time Travel". Both appeared on last year's "Poire_z+" (Erstwhile
022) prior to which Müller had collaborated with Lę Quan Ninh on "La
Voyelle Liquide" (Erstwhile 010), and with Taku Sugimoto and Keith
Rowe on "The World Turned Upside Down" (Erstwhile 005),
while Otomo had teamed up with Voice Crack on "Bits Bots and Signs"
(Erstwhile 011). Despite having met on several occasions (hence the
track titles of this album, which I had mistakenly assumed to be the
dates of the recordings themselves), Otomo and Müller had, surprisingly
enough, never played as a duo until their meeting at last year's Amplify
Festival in Tokyo. On this new outing, recorded just prior to that
encounter, the two musicians use the means available to them to the
full to create soundscapes of considerable richness, with their respective
instruments of origin - guitar and percussion - at times showing through,
but soon enveloped in a thick cloud of hums, hisses and crackles.
Time is distorted in the music as cunningly as the international time
zones distort the world map, as represented in Paetzold's cover artwork.
However commendable and accomplished pieces of work the above may
be, the real pick of the bunch this time round from Erstwhile is the
extraordinary "Duos for Doris", a double CD consisting of three extended
duos by Rowe and pianist John Tilbury. Rowe's admiration for Mahler
surfaced in our 2001 interview, and the seventy-minute "Cathnor" that
occupies disc one is certainly Mahlerian in scale. Of course, it doesn't
present the same panoply of tortured emotions (if ever somebody sets
up in practice as a Freudian analyst of music, you can bet Mahler's
scores will be sitting on the couch at opening time), but the shattering
climax it builds to at the forty-five minute mark is surely something
Mahler would understand. It's all the more cataclysmic given that
Rowe and Tilbury are past masters of understatement. Tilbury in particular
often sounds almost detached from the delicate groups of notes he
inserts into the musical fabric, as if he were stepping back from
an unfinished canvas before returning to add tiny dabs of light and
colour. Similarly, Rowe, who can be downright abrasive at times, rarely
allows his trademark blankets of sound to rise to such a peak of violence.
"Duos for Doris" is dedicated to the memory of Tilbury's mother, who
died aged 96 just two days before the music was recorded, and it is
tempting to imagine that Tilbury's forlorn, elegiac playing is in
some way a kind of requiem. The fact that the album liner notes (rare
for Erstwhile) mention the fact would seem to imply that the musicians
themselves have no specific objection to such an interpretation, but
were the album titled differently, or not at all, this extraordinary
music would not fail to move the attentive listener. It's Rowe's finest
work since his solo "Harsh" (Grob) and the duo with Toshimaru Nakamura
("Weather Sky", also on Erstwhile), and arguably the finest release
to date on Jon Abbey's label.
Noah
Rosen
Noah Rosen Trio
TRIPS JOBS AND JOURNEYS
Cadence CJR 1152
by Dan Warburton
Since 1991, pianist Noah Rosen has chosen to live and work in Paris
(for various reasons, but finding gigs can't be one of them, given
the dearth of places in the self-styled "capital of World Music" where
you can hear - let alone perform - innovative jazz and improvised
music), where this trio set with veteran French free jazz bassist
Didier Levallet and the criminally underestimated Japanese drummer
Makoto Sato (also active in Marteau Rouge, with Jean-François Pauvros
and Jean-Marc Foussat) was recorded live at La Fenętre in September
2000. (So Noah did get a gig after all..) "Trips Jobs and Journeys"
is Rosen's long-overdue debut as a leader, and an impressive one.
Cadence's Bob Rusch is correct to signal traces of Mal Waldron in
his playing, but the list of influences should also include Andrew
Hill, who Rosen sought out to study with in California after a spell
at Bennington College working with Bill Dixon and Milford Graves,
as well as the usual suspects Ellington, Monk and (less evident, but
in there somewhere) Cecil Taylor. There's more than a touch of Gershwin
and Garner in there too, as Rosen likes to play locked hands style,
thickening up his lines with juicy harmonies, but if you're expecting
an hour of easy listening cocktail piano, you're in the wrong place,
matey. Rosen grabs his musical ideas and worries them like a cat toying
with a mouse, turning them over and pawing them until he's extracted
every ounce of pitch, rhythmic and harmonic information. Levallet
and Sato wisely observe operations from the sidelines - if all three
musicians played with Rosen's fearful intensity, things would get
pretty muddy - but shout out essential directions and encouragement
nonetheless. In its freshness and musicality, this recalls John Bickerton's
unjustly overlooked Leo Lab outing "Shadow Boxes" from 1999 (with
Matt Heyner and Rachid Bakr). Like Bickerton, Rosen's just too musical
for his own good at times, and also too principled an artist to sell
out and head for the safe options of the piano bar and the trendy
fads of hiphop. In Paris, where mediocre local musicians run the jazz
scene as a veritable xenophobic closed shop and where the only venue
actively promoting improvised music - Les Instants Chavirés, in Montreuil
- can't even afford to buy a piano, the road is long and hard. All
the more reason why any self-respecting aficionado of intelligent
and creative free jazz should seek this album out without further
ado.
Electronica
In Brief
Yasunao Tone
YASUNAO TONE
Asphodel 2011
by Dan Warburton
The San Francisco-based Asphodel label is rather good at wrapping
up perfectly respectable, if not extraordinary, electronic music in
reams of dense structuralist theory that mean next to nothing to anyone
who hasn't studied such literature and which, moreover, have little
apparent bearing on the music coming out of the speakers. Personally
I find it of greater interest to see examples of how ideograms of
a Man'yo-shu poem (drawn by Tone using a stylus on a WACOM tablet
in Sound Designer II) are instantly transformed into wave forms than
it is to read that "the real in Lacanian theory is [..] a traumatic
nucleus that eludes from [the] symbolization process." I'm not so
sure about nuclei, but there seems to be a fair bit of trauma on offer
in these three pieces from Tone's "Wounded Man-yo" series. It's like
a 21st century version of Rimski Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumble
Bee", except that instead of a cute little insect buzzing from flower
to flower, what we have here is a gigantic digitized wasp zapping
relentlessly back and forth across the stereo space and stinging everything
in its path. Where one draws the line between exhilaration and exasperation
is a matter of personal taste; this may be Easy Listening for Merzbow
fans, but it's hardly something you'd want to put on in the background
while you read Lacan's "Seminar XI".
Ven Voisey
8L
Naninani NREC 002
by Dan Warburton
Given that San Francisco's Ven Voisey used to have a website showing
"an arty photo compilation of some really fucked up death scenes",
it's fair to assume that "8L" is aimed at something of a niche market,
as they say in advertising. Available in a limited edition of 100,
it consists of six tracks of processed field recordings (not too sure
about that word "field", since all the sounds were all sourced in
an apartment, 100 Font Blvd 8L, hence the title), accompanied sporadically
by a storm of harsh digitized bleeps. It might not be to everyone's
taste, but the overall result is tighter and more satisfying than
the previous VV outing that came this way, 2001's "Note" on CIP/Crank
Satori. By design or otherwise, the abrupt jump cuts from distant
rumbles to angry screes of noise are disconcertingly effective. The
CDROM element shows brief glimpses of the six rooms inside the apartment
that provided the source sounds. If I lived there, I'd have a word
with the landlord about installing some soundproofing.
Jazz & Improv In Brief
Telectu
QUARTETOS
Clean Feed CF 006 (3CD)
by Dan Warburton
Telectu is a Portuguese duo formed initially way back in 1981 by
pianist Jorge Lima Barreto and guitarist Vítor Rua. In recent years
they have performed frequently with British soprano saxophonist Tom
Chant, often adding a drummer to form a quartet. These three live
sets recorded between May and December 2001 feature three different
drummers, masters of the instrument no less - Sunny Murray on disc
one, Eddie Prevost on disc two, and Gerry Hemingway on disc three.
Comparing the drummers is a fascinating exercise in itself, especially
since traditional assumptions (along the lines of Murray plays jazz,
Prevost plays free and Hemingway can do both) come in for a battering.
Murray's flailing cymbals and growling toms are recognisable at once,
but close your eyes and drop the needle on either disc two or three,
and see if you can spot who's on the kit. While Chant is in his element
surfing on the waves of cymbals Murray sends out, Rua seems to be
somewhat overwhelmed by Murray's capacity to power the music forward
ceaselessly - implying but never explicitly stating a backbeat - but
his splattery electronics come into their own on discs two and three.
Barreto's piano playing covers a whole range of styles, from all out
fisticuffs to lyrical, folk-inflected lines - he's especially fond
of the black notes - and takes the music in many different directions.
True, the live recordings might have benefitted from a bit of additional
mastering, and one questions the wisdom of releasing this as a three
disc box rather than in separate volumes, but it's an intriguing set
and further proof that there's a lot going on down there in the Iberian
peninsula.
Stephen Flinn / Bruce Eisenbeil / Tony Wren
KEEP THE METER RUNNING
9 Winds NWCD 0246
by Dan Warburton
An out of focus photo of what I assume to be a bulldog stares out
from the back page of the booklet. And "Keep The Meter Running" certainly
has teeth. Guitarist Eisenbeil has that rough and ready open-eared
approach to improv that comes from playing with Cecil Taylor, and
Flinn's splattery percussion work is just as strong. Tony Wren is
often quite happy (on tracks like "Soup Line") to explore his bass'
upper register harmonics, leaving Eisenbeil to dig around the bass
on his detuned guitar. "Soup Line" is in fact the longest piece on
the album; none of the other fifteen tracks go over the five-minute
mark, and six of them check out before two and a half minutes are
up. This makes a refreshing change, since most improvisers never know
how to take a break, let alone shut up altogether. It's not that the
shorter tracks are necessarily all that dense, but they explore the
condensed form with rigour and constantly sustain interest. Hopefully
the punters who have followed Eisenbeil's work on jazz imprints such
as CIMP will step across the border into the world of free improv.
Tala
DANCES AND RITES
www.talamusic.com
by Dan Warburton
Trumpeter Brian Boyes has assembled a fine septet with Noah Bernstein
on alto, Zach Tonnissen on tenor, Mike Chorney on baritone, fellow
trumpeter Tom Morse, Robinson Morse on bass and Gabe Jarrett on percussion.
This ten-track CDR showcases their considerable versatility (and virtuosity),
moving from hard-swinging charts reminiscent of early 60s Impulse!
and Prestige ("Loonies") to M-Base inspired funk jams like "People
Make The World Go Round". "Minister Malcolm" combines the two worlds
with a long arching head, powered steadily forward by JBs-style percussion
from Jarrett. The arrangements throughout are solid, the soloing strong
and original and the recording excellent. Expect to hear more from
these guys as time passes.
Copyright 2003 by Paris Transatlantic
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