NOW
PLAYING!
As part of the ongoing celebrations to mark the tenth anniversary
of the Paris New Music Review - and thanks to Anne Hilde Neset for
mentioning the site in the Go To: section of the October Wire,
a nice surprise - I asked some of the musicians whose work we've featured
over the years to tell us which album(s) they had been listening to
most frequently over the past month (just in case I was missing out
on something important..). Fred
Frith sent the following dispatch in from Mills College in Oakland,
California: "The music that I keep coming back to is Field Geometry
by Helen Mirra. Helen is an artist who works in film, video, sound,
text and sculpture. Field Geometry is a record of her guitar
playing along with Fred Lonberg-Holm's various instruments, with the
work of the 19th century education researcher Friedrich Froebel as
its point of departure. It's a beautiful, abstract, hypnotic and mysterious
piece of work which bears little resemblance to most of what we listen
to, and for that reason alone I thoroughly recommend it."
For Minneapolis-based poet and pianist Erik
Belgum, it's Sun Ra. "Solo Piano (Vol. 1) (1977) has been
sitting atop my top records list for the past month - we used to call
them "records" when I was your age. I'd spent weeks trying to understand,
articulate, and transcribe the Ra solo style when my nephew showed
up wanting to play me the James Bond Theme. To my chagrin, with his
unstable left hand groove, random placement of sforzandi, and all
those major-minor chords in the right hand, he put out a damn nice
Sun Ra sound, for a fifth grader."
While he prepares to pack his bags and move west from New York City,
multi-instrumentalist and composer Scott Rosenberg has "Quasi's
Featuring 'Birds' on constant rotation on my stereo. Sam Coomes'
masterful proggish anthems raging against everything from failed relationships
to the ruthlessness of capitalist society add up to the strongest
pro-creativity manifesto I've heard on a rock album. The words are
darker than anything out there, but the overall message is one of
fighting for the survival of your music. If you ever need a reminder
of how you're not alone in the struggle, Coomes is always there to
remind you that you're a foot soldier in the army of a higher cause."
Not too far away in Brooklyn, the indefatigable Alan
Licht has chosen "the CD reissue of Horacio Vaggione's 1978 La
Maquina de Cantar LP, originally on Cramps (now on ampersand 11).
The second piece/second side, "Ending", is the piece I keep returning
to. It's multitracked synth, very 70s sounding, much like David Borden's
minimal excursions of the era. After ten minutes, it stops dead and
a single synth plays a folky melody out of a renaissance fair, soon
joined by a chorus of others to make a rich (almost too rich) harmony.
Ten years ago I'd have dismissed this as being cheesy, but right now
it sounds great."
Meanwhile, back in Vienna, at the heart of Old Europe, composer and
trombonist Radu Malfatti
"just heard a part of a Mahler symphony and it was horrible! I don't
listen to music a lot anymore; the only CD I've been playing in the
last month was the forthcoming duo with Taku Sugimoto and myself,
because of all the cutting and editing, which I did at home. I'm deeply
impressed by Taku's playing and his unique sense of time, space and
material. He's a truly wonderful musician and an exceptionally nice
person too - because very strange!"
This month's issue also includes the complete text of our monumental
interview with free jazz legend, artist and educator Alan
Silva. One of the founding fathers of improvised music, in the
early 1960s Silva played with Burton Greene, Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor,
Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and Frank Wright (to name but a few), before
creating the mythic Celestrial Communication Orchestra and founding
the revolutionary art school IACP here in Paris. A passionate story,
rich in wisdom and anecdote. Bonne lecture. —DW
On
La Nuit Transfigurée
Christine Wodrascka and Yves Romain
LE PERIPATETICIEN
La Nuit Transfigurée LNT 340101
Didier Petit
DEVIATION
La Nuit Transfigurée LNT 340103
Alex Grillo
L'AMOUR
La Nuit Transfigurée LNT 340109
Camel Zekri
VENUS HOTTENTOTE
La Nuit Transfigurée LNT 340114
I've always admired the chastity of classic French paperback design,
in which clear typesetting and sturdy bookmaking are prized, and eye-grabbing
cover-images are frowned on. The aesthetic is carried over to these
CD releases - really, book-CD combos - on Thierry Mathias's La Nuit
Transfigurée label, even down to the wrong-way-round writing on the
spine. Each disc comes tucked inside a square cream-coloured book,
and there's a lot to look at and read - interviews and program notes;
portfolios of black and white photos and visual art; epigraphs, dedications,
quotations, even (in the Zekri) a reprint of an essay by Aimé Cesaire
on colonialism - although my paltry French leaves me mostly just staring
at the pictures. The neatness of the packaging is matched by the music
on these discs, which is a refined, clearly delineated kind of free
playing that remains in dialogue with song-form.
The booklet to Alex Grillo's L'Amour (tome 1) states that the
disc is dedicated to "the letter A"; a valentine inside is inscribed
to "ART", "AMOUR" and "ANARCHIE". The album's four extended "suites"
offer an absurdist portrait of l'amour, by turns gentle and tumultous.
The instrumentation of the quartet - Grillo on vibes, Christine Wodrascka
on piano, Dider Petit on cello, Hélène Labarrière on bass - is only
half the story, as all four musicians also have speaking parts. Lovers'
banal intimacies and quarrels are charmingly mimicked and caricatured,
but the lighthearted treatment also yields in places to passages of
genuine urgency and fierceness. This is engaging and communicative
music, language barrier or no language barrier; the disc's only blemish
is - as with so many CDs nowadays - the annoying bonus track tacked
on at the end.
A closer look at cellist Didier Petit is afforded by the solo disc
Deviation (titled after the Lucretian clinamen beloved
of the Oulipo circle of writers). It's impressive stuff in many ways:
he has an incredibly varied palette of sounds at his disposal, and
has the ears and wits to add to it from what's in the air around him:
on "Le Clocher du Hasard" he even enters into dialogue with the local
church bells. He is capable of an uncannily convincing replica of
traditional Chinese music ("Feu"), plays fine neo-Baroque fiddle ("Eau,
Bâton et Sang"), and even tosses in idiosyncratic renditions of "Over
the Rainbow" and "Summertime". Ultimately, however, the album is a
little disappointing - sometimes genuinely irritating. Petit's wordless
vocals are an especial problem: he's very fond of arch pseudo-exoticism
- "Feu" features some irritating chop-suey interjections, for instance,
and he likes to wail wordlessly in a vaguely world-musicky manner
- and the wacky desecrations of the two standards are more exasperating
than anything else.
Sightings on disc of pianist Christine Wodrascka are rare: the most
widely available offering under her own name is the solo disc Vertical
on FMP (1996); she also made a memorable appearance on Ivo Perelman's
The Ventriloquist (Leo, 2002), where she actually managed to
sound more fearsome than the leader (no mean feat). Her duets with
bassist Yves Romain on Le Peripateticien are much more modest
in scale: they have the taut economy of wire sculptures. Romain's
liner notes are rather antic, which belies the stillness and thoughtfulness
that lie beneath even the pricklier outings. Wodrascka's playing is
always articulate even as she steps away from any firmly conclusive
gestures; this fleetness and elusiveness is perhaps why on a piece
like "Pour Marion B., Charles T., Dennis C., Charles G., Michaël W.,
et les autres..." she's less reminiscent of Cecil Taylor or Irène
Schweitzer than the unhinged stride-piano of Jaki Byard.
The newest disc of the bunch, Venus Hottentote features Franco-Algerian
guitarist Camel Zekri. The title commemorates France's belated return
of the remains of the South African woman Saartje Baartman in 2002;
lured from her native country in 1810, she was exhibited as the "Hottentot
Venus" in sideshows in Britain and France. Zekri brings traditional
musics into dialogue with Western improvisational vocabularies and
the technologies of the studio: the long opening improvisation on
acoustic guitar, "Terra Nullius", is actually rather untypical of
an album otherwise focussed on structures built up from overdubbed
layers of electric and acoustic guitar; the results have affinities
to Sonny Sharrock's Guitar and Hans Reichel's work. The textures
Zekri creates are at once gorgeous and alarming - on the homage to
Fanon, "Les Damnés de le Terre", for instance, a blithely folksy melody
is buried under a slithering mass of string-rubbing. Disappointingly,
Zekri doesn't develop these textures much once they're set forth.
This disc would have made a great collection of miniatures, but everything
gets stretched to five to nine minutes, and time and again I found
myself drumming my fingers. Still, it's well worth a listen, especially
if you're a fan of Sharrock or Joe Morris. —ND
James
Tenney
SELECTED WORKS 1961 - 69
New World 80570-2
Nowadays, John Cage's inane grin is as universally recognisable
as the Cheshire Cat's, and Mortie Feldman's ugly mug stands out a
mile, but how many people, specifically music freshmen at US universities,
would be able to recognise a photograph of James Tenney? Tenney (born
in 1934) has certainly kept a discreetly low profile over the years,
but he is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in post WWII
American music, as this welcome reissue of these pioneering works
(originally released on the tiny Artifact label) testifies.
"Collage #1 ("Blue Suede") (1961) uses a recording of Elvis' classic
version of the Carl Perkins hit to come up with something Christian
Marclay would have been proud of, were it not for the fact that he
was probably in short pants when Tenney created this minor masterpiece
back in 1961. "I like to think it would have pleased [Elvis]," the
composer later wrote. Well, I dunno how far The King was ever into
musique concrète, but it would certainly have elicited a wry
smile - and it's stood the test of time just as well as the original
track. "Analog #1 (Noise Study) grew from a fascination with the roar
of traffic in the Holland Tunnel, through which Tenney used to drive
en route for Bell Labs, where his pioneering research with the likes
of Max Matthews sowed the seeds for a whole generation of computer
music programs to come. "Dialogue" and the exquisite "Phases (for
Edgard Varèse)", which both date from 1963, are proof that mathematically
complex electronic music need not be indigestible and ugly. 1964's
"Music for Player Piano" might provide a clue as to why Tenney has
never quite attained the hip status of other experimental composers
such as Mumma and Ashley - its fiendishly difficult polyphony has
more in common soundwise with the Princeton serialists than with what
would later be called the Downtown scene; indeed, Tenney's prolific
output is neither Uptown nor Downtown, but rather All-Over-Town.
Of the eight works included here, only the eighteen and a half minutes
of "Ergodos II (for John Cage)" try the patience a little; "Fabric
for Ché" sounds as stormy and apocalyptic today as it must have done
back in 1967, and "For Ann (rising)" is, literally, timeless. Perhaps
his most famous work, this is Tenney's infinite glissando, the aural
equivalent of M.C. Escher's famous eternally rising staircase, a piece
of sonic illusionism that has fascinated many musicians, from Jean-Claude
Risset to the Buzzcocks. All in all, this is a disc that anyone claiming
to be interested in twentieth century American music cannot afford
to be without. The accompanying thirty-two-page booklet includes Larry
Polansky's lengthy and informative essay "The Early Works of James
Tenney", originally published as an essay in Soundings #13, and is
an impressive musicological and analytical survey of the works themselves
and an invaluable introduction to Tenney's work. —DW
Tisziji
Muñoz
DIVINE RADIANCE
Dreyfus/Anami FDM 367060
Guitarist Tisziji Muñoz's liner notes to this disc are a torrent
of fuzzy guruspeak that borders on the megalomaniac; the results are
entertaining though if you're in the right mood. This session, recorded
the month after September 11th, was according to Muñoz "a timely date,
a sacred, perhaps miraculous, creative event and spiritual gathering
in the highest sense." It was no less than a "necessary" act of cosmic
and geopolitical restoration: "It was urgent that I demand no less
than Divine Radiance from everyone, in order to balance out the loss
of light and the flood of sorrow released on September 11, 2001."
Fortunately, it succeeded: "We all cried, died and were, in a way,
reborn through this music," which was "powerful and pure enough to
reverse both the directions of ignorant hatred and the cosmic wheel
of time governing life and death. From my view, I know this, to some
degree, was accomplished. During this recording on the 30th of October,
we transcended 2001, fifty years before it and a hundred years after
it!"
Be that as it may, the band here's certainly nothing to sniff at:
in fact, the guitarist is by far the least celebrated musician in
the band, which features a two-tenor front-line of Pharoah Sanders
and Ravi Coltrane, bassists Don Pate and Cecil McBee, drummer Rashied
Ali; and (believe it or not) Paul Shaffer of the David Letterman Show
on keyboards. Shaffer's presence is explained in his enthusiastic
liner-notes: as a teenager in 1969, he encountered Muñoz (b.1946)
busking in Toronto and was so impressed that he became an apprentice
of the guitarist, and he has been a staunch champion of his music
ever since. Acting as co-producer for Divine Radiance, Shaffer
seems to have also financed it out of his pocket, if I've deciphered
Muñoz's statement correctly ("his heart's intention has been to help
materialize my musical vision without concern for having to persuade
or convince anybody as to what that is or how it should be created,
and to execute a musical project without any upfront concern for the
ever present economic limitations"). Shaffer's musical contribution
on the date is virtually invisible, and is mostly confined to pouring
syrup over the sappier moments (the namby-pamby "Fatherhood" in particular);
once the screaming and shouting kick in he quickly gets the hell out
of the way.
The omens might look pretty grim, but actually the disc's not bad
by any means. Muñoz is a windbag, alas, and Ravi Coltrane seems to
be there purely on the strength of his surname, as he's completely
wrong for this company - I've liked his work in a mainstream or Steve
Coleman bag, but he's way too softspoken to contend with this kind
of hurly-burly. But any disc uniting Sanders, McBee and Ali has plenty
going for it, and the all-out fury of the 24-minute title-track is
worth a taste if you're a fan of so-called "ecstatic jazz". Divine
Radiance can't be recommended without a long list of caveats,
but it does manage at least to partially fulfill the promise of its
star-studded lineup. If you're a fan of some of these players and
are adept at tuning out the more grating elements then it's worth
a listen, but otherwise it's fairly missable. —ND
Michael
J. Schumacher
ROOM PIECES
XI 127 2CD
For several years now, composer Michael J. Schumacher (the J is
in there presumably to help your Google searches bypass thousands
of pages devoted to the Formula One driver) has curated two gallery
spaces in New York City, Studio Five Beekman and Diapason, taking
advantage of a haven of peace and quiet in Manhattan to present his
exquisitely crafted site-specific installations. "Room Piece" started
out as a 16 track sound environment back in 1994. Those coming to
Schumacher's work expecting wholesome slabs of heavy drone - the composer's
long association with La Monte Young is well documented - will be
surprised (most agreeably) at the diversity and richness of the sounds
on offer in this 75 minute version of the piece, one of fifteen versions
the composer has so far realised. The predominant heartbeat of Schumacher's
work is slow, with strands of drone drifting high in the sonic sky
like cirrus clouds, but numerous tiny disturbances appear throughout
the piece, modified samples triggered by a complex set of computer-controlled
algorithms. The composer remains in overall control of several parameters,
notably pitch - computers might be awfully good at scattering the
events about but there's no way they can grow a pair of ears as superbly
sensitive as Schumacher's. This music positively glistens - the sheer
beauty of the sound events and the uniformly excellent mixing of the
whole are simply breathtaking.
As if this were not enough, there's a second CD in the box, twofers
now being the norm on Phill Niblock's XI imprint. "Piece in 3 Parts"
features samples of Jane Henry's violin and Tim Barnes' percussion,
processed by Max/MSP software (to create a loop around the pointer
[on the computer screen], loop length being constantly modulated,
it says here). The texture is somewhat more abrasive, but the ear
is still right there, as it is in the two versions of "Still", the
first of which features "bowed friction sounds" from cellist Charles
Curtis. 1999's "Untitled" is a denser affair, a layer cake of accelerating
and decelerating pulsed tones forming a thick but finely calibrated
drone texture.
By way of cherry on the cake, the set includes not one but three sets
of liner notes - by "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Julian Cowley and Ian Nagoski,
respectively - each of which provides informative information on the
composer and discussion of his procedures. Ultimately, however, the
proof of the pudding is in the listening, as it were - mere words
fail to do justice to the outstanding beauty of this music, and unless
you're fortunate enough to live within visiting distance of Studio
Five Beekman and Diapason, this might be the only chance you get to
experience this extraordinary work. You'd be a bloody fool not to
take it. —DW
On
Mode Records
Christian Wolff
COMPLETE WORKS FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO
Mode 126
Morton Feldman
LATE WORKS WITH CLARINET
Mode 119
Mode's Christian Wolff edition has now reached Volume 5, though
Complete Works for Violin and Piano sounds rather grand considering
there are, in fact, only two of them: 1961's "Duo for Violinist and
Pianist" and 1999's "Pebbles". This latter was written for Marc Sabat
and Stephen Clarke (who perform it here), and is for the most part
fully notated and precisely coordinated, though the musicians are
periodically required to proceed independently, and the duration of
pauses is often left to the performers' discretion. There's a certain
austerity to its two-part counterpoint and, from time to time, a rather
old-fashioned motoric chugging to its rhythmic regularity, but it
sustains its 35-minute duration without flagging. Curiously, the earlier
"Duo" - heard here in two extremely different versions, one seventeen
minutes long, the other less than six - sounds more abstract, more
"modern", as it were: while "Pebbles" makes no use of so-called extended
techniques, the surface of the 1961 piece is peppered with odd abrasive
scrapes, unconventional bowing effects and occasional leaps into the
bowels of the piano. As my ancient vinyl recording of the work performed
by its original dedicatees Kenjo Kobayashi and David Tudor is showing
its age rather badly, I'm delighted to see this fine new CD out and
about.
The seventh volume of Mode's Feldman Edition features Paris-based
clarinettist Carol Robinson in three sensitive and well-recorded readings
of 1971's "Three Clarinets, Cello and Piano", 1981's "Bass Clarinet
and Percussion" and 1984's "Clarinet and String Quartet". This latter
was previously available only on HatHut, but three other recordings
of "Bass Clarinet and Percussion" are currently available. Indeed,
there's now so much Feldman out and about on disc that would-be completists
are either contemplating bankruptcy or faced with some difficult choices
- for example, quite why Mode has chosen to release another version
of "Three Clarinets, Cello and Piano" so soon after the Barton Workshop's
version of the piece on Feldman Vol.5 (Mode 107) is something of a
mystery, especially since there are (amazingly) still quite a few
Feldman works - admittedly not featuring clarinet, so they'd be excluded
here - that have never been commercially available, notably "The Swallows
of Salangan" (1960) "Rabbi Akiba" (1963) and several large orchestral
works. That aside, the above-mentioned discographic proliferation
raises two questions of critical import, namely which version of a
given piece should one choose to buy and, more problematic, perhaps,
which of Feldman's works can be considered to be more important? Autrement
dit, can we speak of "major" and "minor" Feldman works?
There are no truly "bad" recordings of Feldman's music that I know
of (though one can admit preferences, especially in the case of the
solo piano works, in terms of sound - microphone placing, pianists'
use of sustaining pedal, and so forth), so the answer to the first
question inevitably comes down to matters of personal taste. Very
few reviews I have encountered have actively championed one version
of a Feldman work over others, choosing instead to avoid the question
by descending into the usual stock descriptions of the Feldman sound
universe. The second question concerns on the reception-history of
each specific work - one imagines for example that "Rothko Chapel"
will remain something of a cause célèbre in Feldman's output,
if only for its (atypical) closing section - and as Feldman's compositions
are discreet affairs rather than spectacular showpieces (as are many
of Stockhausen's works from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s, for example),
it may take some time for that elusive beast, the "canon", to make
its own value judgements - arbitrary at times though many of them
seem in retrospect. Feldman anecdotes and quotations are hardly thin
on the ground, but ultimately the music tells its own story better.
One imagines that Mode's Brian Brandt's predilection for Complete
Editions is a sign that he already has one eye out on the future,
when recordings such as these will be indispensable elements of a
comprehensive (as far as possible) archive of late 20th / early 21st
century contemporary classical music. —DW
On
Hibari
Costa Monteiro / Barberán / Fages / Okura / Ezaki
/ Unami
ATAMI
Hibari 03 CD
Kazushige Kinoshita / Yoichiro Shin
EKE
Hibari CDR
Various Artists
from:/to:
ABS201 / Hibari04 / fragm 003 / p:rec 020 / vp0302
What in Japan used to be called "onkyo" (a term that seems to have
been around as long as "electronica" and which is just as vague and
woolly, but we're stuck with it) has evolved along two markedly different
lines during the last three years, as illustrated by the work of two
of the movement's principal practitioners, guitarists Taku Sugimoto
and Tetuzi Akiyama. Whereas Sugimoto has continued to subtract notes,
finally arriving at a piece of music for seven guitarists, "hum",
that instructs them to do nothing at all other than create amp buzz
(released on A Bruit Secret, ABS 103), Akiyama's playing has become
much more combative and noisy - witness his outings recorded in New
Zealand and released on Bruce Russell's Corpus Hermeticum imprint
(International Domestic, reviewed in these pages recently).
The prolific output of Taku Unami, who uses a laptop to transform
sounds sourced from various instruments including lapsteel guitar,
percussion and other small objects, sits squarely at the fork in the
path. His solo recordings - all released on his Hibari label, more
often than not as limited edition CDRs - are pretty spare affairs,
with silence playing an important role, whereas in larger ensembles,
notably the sextet outing Atami, the textures are denser and
the sonorities he chooses more abrasive.
Atami was recorded in Barcelona in October 2002, during a hectic
European tour for Unami, trumpeter Masafumi Ezaki and saxophonist
Masahiko Okura, and teams the Japanese trio up with the locals, in
the form of trumpeter Ruth Barberán, accordionist Alfredo Costa Monteiro
and no-input mixing board operator Ferran Fages (these latter two
also known as Cremaster). David Casamitjana's close-miked recording
catches every creak, plop and fizz of the encounter, from Okura's
draughty plumbing to the wheeze of Costa Monteiro's accordion. While
the sounds on offer throughout are indeed intriguing, there's a certain
two-dimensionality and naiveté to the music - Tomoya Izumi's cartoon
squiggle cover art is most appropriate. Whereas several notable earlier
onkyo outings managed to create an extraordinary sense of quiet intensity
(thinking of Sugimoto and Akiyama's solo albums, Toshi Nakamura's
Weather Sky with Keith Rowe and Siphono with Bruno Meillier),
recent releases seem to confirm that the stylistic conventions associated
with the so-called reductionist trend seem to have frozen into something
resembling "accepted performance practice". The rules of the game
are relatively simple: dynamics remain low (occasional isolated blasts
are permitted but not too often); sounds should be as abstract as
possible (anything resembling a clear statement of a recognisable
pitch is avoided in favour of grainy noise); ensemble playing is a
question of simultaneity rather than interaction. Atami is
quite dense, texturally - there's relatively little silence to counterpoint
the sound events - but otherwise it proceeds according to the rules.
It would seem that the only way to go beyond such rules and avoid
stagnation (to quote Radu Malfatti) is to adopt some form of extraneously
determined system that prevents performers from falling into the habit
of introducing tried and trusted pet techniques, "tricks", as Paul
Lovens calls them. Violinist Kazushige Kinoshita has found a novel
way to introduce a degree of indeterminacy into his performance -
laying the violin flat on his lap, he uses a half-size bow and applies
maximum pressure, moving as little as possible. On Eke, a new
duo CDR on Hibari, the inevitable friction caused by the tiniest involuntary
movements of his bow on the string(s) produces a series of irregular
twangs and/or rasps that complement Yoichiro Shin's cymbal work (it
makes for an interesting contrast with an earlier live concert recording
from 2001, on which Kinoshita's playing seems - ever so slightly -
more conventional). Even so, and despite the element of randomness
inscribed into Kinoshita's performance, the resulting music soon becomes
rather predictable, not to mention soporific; one finds oneself crying
out for the occasional surprise, be it an explosion of frustration
or even - heaven forbid - a recognisable note (the earlier CDR, Eke
/ Expo Live at Torii Hall was, after all, at least notable for
a throaty cough followed by a bloody great cymbal crash at 28'39").
from:/to: is co-produced by no fewer than five small labels
- A Bruit Secret, Fragment, Pricilia, Vert Pituite and Hibari (three
of which are based in Metz, in Eastern France) - and takes the form
of eight Europe-meets-Japan duo encounters. Jean-Philippe Gross' electric
conductors fizz and crackle amiably along with Utah Kawasaki's synthesizer,
Olivier Brisson's amplified percussion is paired with Yoichiro Shin's
cymbal and laptop, Hugo Roussel's self-input mixing board meets Masafumi
Ezaki's trumpet, guitarists Quentin Dubost, Sharif Shenaoui, Norman
Mayer and Fabrice Eglin team up with, respectively, Yasao Totsuka
(mixing board), Okura (bass clarinet and tube), Unami (banjo) and
Kinoshita (violin), and vocalist Ami Yoshida takes on Alfredo Costa
Monteiro's accordion. There's a much wider range of music on offer
here, and it's a more globally satisfying collection of diverse approaches
to collaboration. The Europeans seem more prepared to throw spanners
into the works, be they in the form of splashes of colour (Brisson),
vicious shards of noise (Roussel) or weird subterranean gurgles (Shenaoui).
Yoshida provides further evidence of her extraordinary abilities,
producing something that sounds like a small bird with a contact mic
stuffed down its throat being slowly crushed to death in a paper bag.
It's pretty unsettling stuff, after which the Sugimoto-like plings
of Unami's banjo sound positively baroque. Definitely recommended
for anyone curious about the latest state of play in French improvised
music, from:/to: could end up becoming something of a landmark
release. —DW
Where's
Ware?
David S. Ware String Ensemble
THREADS
Thirsty Ear THI57137
The saxophone acquires a particular resonance when backed up with
luscious string arrangements, slipping away from its moorings as just
another member of a jazz combo and assuming a kind of heroic, Romantic
status - you might even argue that the "sax + strings" format has
replaced the nineteenth century idea of the concerto. Stan Getz always
considered 1961's Focus as his finest work, and Art Pepper's
Wintermoon, dating from twenty years later, is one of the late
altoist's most genuinely touching documents. After Bird with Strings,
Cannonball with Strings and even Evan Parker with Strings (or was
it Strings with Evan Parker?), here comes David S. Ware with
Strings. Well, sort of. It's perhaps not surprising that Ware, having
turned in a monumental re-reading of one of jazz's iconic compositions,
Rollins' "Freedom Suite", should also wish to stake out a piece of
territory in this corner of the canon (we'll even forgive the fact
that many of the "strings" are synthesized, played by Matthew Shipp
on a Korg Triton) - the problem is simply that he leaves most of the
work to his sparring partners, violist Mat Maneri, bassist William
Parker and drummer Guillermo Brown, plus violinist Daniel Roumain.
Ware is credited as composer throughout, but his horn is curiously
absent on the album's meatiest tracks, "Sufic Passages" and "THREADS"
(caps his idea, not mine), and seems oddly placed in the mix on the
opening elegiac "Ananda Rotation". "Sufic Passages" in particular
is crying out for a strong tenor sax solo; Maneri and Roumain's gypsy
arabesques can hardly compete against Shipp's jangly synth and Parker
and Brown's stodgy, incessant 4/4 groove. The title track itself is
a distressingly pale white-note affair that sounds like some rejected
manuscript by one of those professionally miserable composers from
the Baltic republics, and the ensuing "Carousel of Lightness" is also
all background and no foreground. This velvety soundworld used to
sound just fine on mid 1970s ECM productions, but in 2003 coming from
a musician as upfront and dynamic as Ware has been for over two decades,
it's nothing less than an alarming sign of creative fatigue. Ware
only plays on 13 of the album's 44 minutes, and even the two brief
sax and percussion tracks, "Weave I" and "Weave II" come across as
strangely inconsequential fillers. What little real weight there is
on this album comes from Mat Maneri's viola - there's no finer instrument
nor musician for music as melancholy is this - which even Shipp's
soggy synth patches can't drown out. But compared to Maneri's sublime
Sustain, or Shipp's stellar New Orbit, both also on
Thirsty Ear, Threads is thin fare indeed. —DW
Jazz
& Improv Roundup
Sun Ra
PIANO RECITAL
Leo GY 21
Golden Years is a sub-label of Leo Records on which Leo Feigin periodically
re-releases choice morsels of the Leo back catalogue (notably his
beloved Russians), and it's a shame he didn't call upon the services
of a distinguished Ra scholar or two to provide liner notes for this
set, which was recorded at Venice's Teatro La Fenice on November 24th
1977. Solo Ra sets are indeed thin on the ground, but the discography
in John Szwed's "Space Is The Place" lists two others from the same
year, both on Improvising Artists, which might have made for an interesting
comparison with this set. The recording engineer is not credited,
which is probably just as well considering the sound quality is about
as flat and wooden as many of the early Saturn releases, but musically
it's a treat. Apart from some tasty stride piano in "Blues" and "Honeysuckle
Rose", one of several hair-raising covers - recontextualisations might
be a more appropriate word - notably "Take The A Train" (Matthew Shipp
eat ya heart out), it's intriguing to see how major Ra compositions
such as "Love In Outer Space" and "Friendly Galaxy" are scaled down
to fit under two hands, not to mention fists and elbows. Needless
to say, Ra enthusiasts the world over will be swooping in on this
one pretty quickly, so the limited edition (1500) will probably go
fast. You've been warned. —DW
Thomas Lehn / Raymond Strid
HERE THERE
Fylkingen FYSP 1005 7"
Martin Klapper / Martin Küchen
IRREGULAR Fylkingen
FYSP 1006 7"
It's nice to see the odd chunky 7" single now and again, especially
in these days of the 3" CD, those pesky little things that slip down
the backs of your shelves and disappear without trace. The music on
these two offerings from the Swedish Fylkingen label, managed and
run by Sören Runolf and Martin Küchen, seems perfectly adapted to
the medium: aphoristic, scattered earfuls of sonic dust blend perfectly
with the background whoosh and crackle of vinyl. German analogue synth
whiz Thomas Lehn in his element working with percussionists - one
thinks of his excellent duo collaborations with Gerry Hemingway and
Paul Lovens, not to mention the ebullient Roger Turner in Konk Pack
- and these two six-minute sonic postcards from Malmö with Raymond
Strid behind the kit are well up to scratch. On Irregular (which
plays at 33 1/3 rpm, as opposed to the 45 of Here There - didn't
take me long to find that out), Küchen's baritone sax honks and splatters
along with Martin Klapper's arsenal of toys and gadgets most agreeably
- it's certainly not as dangerous as the harpoon gun sketched on the
back cover might have you think. What might be fun would be to put
all four of these guys together for a full-length album session. In
the meantime, go to: www.fylkingen.se —DW
Various Artists
FREE ZONE APPLEBY 2002
Psi 03.02 2CD
As summer draws to a close, the attractive English market town of
Appleby, on the edge of the Lake District, plays host to a jazz festival
curated by Neil Ferber, described here by Evan Parker as "every musicians'
dream promoter". On July 28th last year Parker arrived with a busload
of Britain's Best improvisers - bassist John Edwards, violinists Sylvia
Hallett and Phil Wachsmann, cellist Marcio Mattos, flautist Neil Metcalfe,
clarinettist John Rangecroft and percussionist Mark Sanders, and this
double CD on Parker's own psi imprint documents proceedings. Of the
152 minutes of music, only one track (sixteen minutes) features all
eight musicians; for the rest of the time the octet subdivides into
smaller units - there are three quartet tracks, three duos, two trios
and solos by Edwards and Hallett (by Parker too if you count the opening
thirteen second gong bang as a track - he bills it as such). This
is British improv at its best - mature and accomplished, both technically
and emotionally, consensual rather than conflictual; one senses that
we're far away from the din of the city (though perhaps that's just
the fresh timbres of the lively woodwind work from Metcalfe and Rangecroft),
in just the quiet and attentive environment needed to produce and
appreciate sensitive, top-notch improvised music. —DW
Peter Kowald / Miya Masaoka / Gino Robair
ILLUMINATIONS (SEVERAL VIEWS)
Rastascan BRD 049
Despite the fact that he died suddenly last year, recordings featuring
Peter Kowald have carried on appearing at a steady rate of knots,
as testimony - not that any were needed - of the late bassist's indefatigable
energy and appetite for new encounters in improvised music. Illuminations
was recorded in California during Kowald's exhaustive 2000 US tour,
and features him with locals Masaoka on koto and Robair on percussion.
It's a set of no fewer than sixteen tracks, only two of which go beyond
the four-minute mark, vignettes rather than haiku, in which Kowald
aficionados will have no difficulty recognising the bassist's hallmark
tricks of the trade, from the frenetic scrabbling with the frog of
the bow near the bridge to the guttural faux-Tuvan drones of his vocalising.
The koto not surprisingly adds a touch of orientalism, and Robair
busies himself with his extended kit in fine style. It's all very
earnest and no doubt well-intentioned, well-crafted and nicely recorded
and mixed, but unless you're a rabid Kowald completist you can probably
afford to pass it by. Robair and Misaoka are much more exciting on
their outing Guerrilla Mosaics with John Butcher. —DW
Gary Lucas / Jozef van Wissem
DIPLOPIA
BV Haast 0103
Imagine if John Dowland got beamed up à la Star Trek and
transferred to the Mississippi Delta ca. 1920 - this is the kind of
blues he might have ended up writing / playing. Diplopia combines
the renaissance lute of Jozef van Wissem with the inimitable twang
of a National Steel, played by ex-Beefheart sideman Gary Lucas, for
a brief set of nine pieces, three of which are based on the early
17th century lute repertoire that van Wissem specializes in. It's
a leisurely collection, the only urgency provided by van Wissem's
occasional accompanying percussion - his foot, presumably - and an
eminently listenable (if not exactly envelope-pushing) one. Watch
out too for a forthcoming collaboration between van Wissem and the
ubiquitous Tetuzi Akiyama. —DW
Contemporary
Roundup
Arne Nordheim
DODEKA
Rune Grammofon RCD2030
Before all things Norwegian mysteriously became hip three or four
years ago (I suspect the Wire magazine had something to do with it),
Arne Nordheim's music was hard to get hold of, but we can now rejoice
that he's been ceremoniously rediscovered as the Grand Old Man of
Norwegian New Music, and much of the rare back catalogue is now in
print once again. As Rune Grammofon is now part of the ECM umbrella
brand, you can be sure that the sound quality is tiptop; the Kim Hiorthøy
graphics are cool, too, but not as frosty as the music - Dodeka
is, as its title implies, a collection of twelve three-minute
pieces of electronic music that will have the hairs tingling in your
nose. Finely crafted, if a little too reverbed in places (but since
when was that a problem for ECM?), they're strong proof that Nordheim
is still a creative force to be reckoned with. And if they manage
to wean some punters away from the slew of releases by the grossly
overhyped Supersilent, even better. — DW
Ekkehard Ehlers
POLITIK BRAUCHT KEINEN FEIND
Staubgold 41
Staubgold isn't normally classified as a contemporary classical
label, but these three compositions by Ekkehard Ehlers certainly qualify
as such (despite the accompanying collection of black and white photos
apparently taken at some sort of party or clubspace). All three use
the composer's by now familiar technique of looping instrumental samples
into closed - claustrophobic, even - systems. Ehlers' earlier works
revealed a fondness for samples sourced in late 19th / early 20th
century instrumental music, which lent a certain historically charged
angst to the proceedings; the same morose but far from unemotional
climate prevails here in the compositions "Mäander" and "Blind", both
dating from 2001 and sourced in the dark, woody tones of, respectively,
bass clarinet and cello. The album is rounded out by the inclusion
of "Woolf Phrase", originally written as a ballet score for the William
Forsythe Company, whose wan, forlorn viol-consort strings recall Basinski's
Disintegration Loops, and standing further back in the shadows,
Eno's "Variations on the Pachelbel Canon". The album title translates
as "Politics needs no enemies", but a little bit of the friction associated
with mixed media performance wouldn't go amiss here. — DW
Electronica
Roundup
(the) Dropp Ensemble
THE EMPIRE BUILDERS
Longbox LBT029
Originally created as music to accompany a performance of the play
of the same name by Boris Vian - though you don't need to be familiar
with that minor masterpiece to appreciate this album - (the) Dropp
Ensemble is the brainchild of Chicago-based Adam Sonderberg and Sam
Dellaria. In these three utterly exquisite pieces they call upon the
services of a community of like-minded spirits scattered throughout
the world (Marshall McLuhan would be justly proud), including Wolfgang
Fuchs, Steven Hess, Eric La Casa, Aram Shelton, Brendan Walls and
Alexander Wallner, to produce music of intense - if austere - beauty.
Vast, near-empty sonic spaces resonate with meticulously treated field
recordings, occasional tiny fragments of percussion and muffled thuds
and rumblings. It's compelling stuff, and at a time when so-called
lowercase / laminal / field-recording based electronic work is being
released at a positively alarming rate of knots, it stands head and
shoulders above the competition. Quite what the hard-living author
of "I Spit On Your Grave" would have made of it I don't know, but
this one's certainly assured of a place on this year's Best Of lists
here at Paris Transatlantic. — DW
Howard Stelzer / Jason Talbot
SONGS
Intransitive INT 021
Mike Bullock, in his liner notes, is probably right to dwell on
the album title, but doesn't come to any firm conclusion whether these
eight tracks of acerbic tape and turntable improvisation actually
constitute "songs" or not. Strictu sensu, they don't, but I
guess since Rene Magritte's famous pipe you can call things what you
want (I have a composer friend who wrote a piece for six musicians
and called it "Quintet"). Voice Crack fans will probably amuse themselves
trying to work out which pieces of everyday electronics these two
Bostonians have chosen to crack; it's not an easy listen but an intriguing
and ultimately rewarding one. — JB
Copyright 2003 by Paris Transatlantic
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