A
warm welcome this month to our new Brussels correspondent (!) Jean
Michel Van Schouwburg, whose writing will no doubt be familiar to
readers of Improjazz and whose own poésie sonore is
well worth checking out to boot (Orynx, on Inaudible –
Inaudible 003). Also clocking in with his first – and I hope
not last – feature for PT is Sasha Burov, who has graciously
allowed me to butcher his enormous interview with Downtown sax hero
Ned Rothenberg (actually,
Ned had a hack at it too). If there is any overriding theme to it
all this time round it's probably the idea of making a comeback, either
in the form of a welcome return to the fray – Stephen Griffith's
piece on Dennis González –
or a long overdue reissue, realised – the MIO catalogue –
or yearned for – Clifford Allen's plea to re-release Ed Curran's
1967 Savoy outing Elysa.
The review of the Ecoute exhibition
at Paris' Pompidou Centre should perhaps be read alongside my piece
on the much larger (and much better) Sons & Lumières
upstairs, which features in this month's edition of The Wire magazine
(#250). Well worth making a yuletide trip to Paris to see, if you
ask me. But if you can't afford to do that, here are reviews of no
fewer than 40 albums you might want to fill your – or someone
else's – Christmas stocking with. Bonne lecture.—DW
Ed Curran Quartet
ELYSA
Savoy MG-12191, 1967
Whatever one’s opinion of the often
cantankerous, occasionally visionary trumpeter-composer Bill Dixon,
the fact that he worked as A&R man for Savoy in the latter half
of the 1960s resulted in two things: surprisingly few Dixon sessions
(one and a half, in fact, culled from his private tapes) and a wealth
of supremely underground jazzmen given what was in some cases their
only chance to record as a leader, much less a sideman. Drummer Robert
F. Pozar, multi-instrumentalist Marc Levin, and saxophonists Marzette
Watts and Ed Curran all led sessions for Savoy under Dixon’s
tutelage and despite the Dixon stamp, all retain a strong degree of
individuality. Though Watts’s session is probably the most infamous,
both for its rarity and its intensity, altoist / clarinetist Ed Curran
cuts a far different path – equally intense post-Ornette free
bop that the saxophonist states in the liners to be “[from]
the first musician-composer to record who has been influenced entirely
by the jazz of the Sixties.” Out of context, this statement
may smack of derivativeness – and possibly hubris – but
the idea of aligning one’s influences solely with one’s
contemporaries is a rare and important statement. After all, Archie
Shepp was placed as much (if not more) with Hawkins and Webster than
he was with Rollins or Coleman, and Arthur Jones with Johnny Hodges
rather than Eric Dolphy. But stating the importance of one’s
peers or "scene" is to give credence to experience and environment,
something they call the "jazz life."
Curran is joined on these eight original compositions by two stalwarts
of the Savoy avant-garde stable, drummer Robert Pozar and Marc Levin,
heard here on cornet, flugelhorn and mellophone, as well as Japanese
bassist Kyoshi Takunaga. “Cire,” the opener, is an off-kilter
boppish tune at the outset, and Curran’s solo shows him to be
a disciple not just of Dolphy, but of Eric's children as well –
Sonny Simmons stands out as a model for Curran’s alto improvising,
all fast runs of bent notes (one might call it an "Eastern"
flavor) and wild leaps that somehow always come back to quoting the
theme, however obtuse and unexpected the quote might be. Like Simmons,
the exuberance is tempered a bit, and a melancholy air more befitting
a dirge pervades both the compositions and the improvisations –
literally so in the apocalyptic clarinet ballad, “Looking Back,”
and in spirit on tunes like “Mid Tempo,” where the gruffness
in the saxophonist's tone reveals a clear connecting line between
Ayler and Dolphy. As for Curran’s cohorts, Levin is in particularly
fine form, his blurred walls of sound on cornet and mellophone warping
Dixon (with whom he studied) and Don Ayler into washes of color at
breakneck tempos, and yet poised and restrained on slower numbers.
Only a handful of trumpeters have ever channeled the improvisational
language of players like Albert Ayler into brass, but Levin is one
of them, as his solo on “Lady A” proves, taking simple
singsong phrases and blurring them into pure sound. Thankfully, Savoy
had the foresight to hire someone with as much honest desire to see
young musicians record, for one person’s "also-ran"
is another’s window into a very important period in American
improvised music. Understanding the importance of one’s colleagues
was not just Ed Curran’s astuteness, but Bill Dixon’s
as well.—CA
Philippe Besombes
LIBRA
MIO 008
Flamen Dialis
SYMPTOME – DEI
MIO 014
 It
all started innocently enough when I opened the mailbox and found
a package from Israel containing Philippe Besombes' Libra
and Flamen Dialis' Symptome-Dei. The former was original,
if uneven, the latter 95% plain awful, but as I'm always delighted
when people go to the trouble of sending me music I don't know from
odd corners of the globe, especially albums recorded in my country
of adoption, the least I can do in exchange is pen a review. The following
brief text duly appeared in The Wire #247: "Israel-based MIO
has reissued two rare slabs of French avant prog, the 1975 OST to
the Groupe Pattern film Libra by Philippe Besombes, who abandoned
studies in Chemistry to custom-build electronic instruments from material
"salvaged" from his faculty labs and ended up with a honorary
mention on Steven Stapleton's Nurse List, and the impossibly obscure
Symptome-Dei by Flamen Dialis, recorded in rural Brittany
in 1978. Besombes' work is an entertaining and accomplished period
piece full of spooky vocals, gloomy organ clusters, prepared pianos,
sitars, blasts of free jazz and also some inevitable and hideous sub-ELP
guitar blues freakout not attributed to Besombes which he does his
best to scribble all over. Exactly what you'd expect from someone
who used to hang out with both Xenakis and Jean-Michel Jarre, and
well worth the price of admission for "La Ville" alone,
a cunning montage of Lalo Schifrin thriller groove and concrète
information overload. Fast forward three years, and while Alain Pacadis
and other jeunes hommes chic in Paris were digging Dolls
and Pistols, out in the shadow of the dolmens of Finistère,
Didier Le Gallic (who's since disappeared without trace) and seven
others were invoking the spirits of the ancient Roman cult of Jupiter
– hence Flamen Dialis – with an assortment of instruments
including bombardons, Celtic flutes and de rigueur Mellotrons
that even then were sounding as dated as the Latin of the group's
name. Symptome-Dei's heady cocktail of faux-troubadour virgin
vocals, horrible parping synths, cheesy chromatic scales, harmonicas
and vibraphones was dedicated "to all extra-terrestrials known
and unknown", and the group's one and only single "Découverte
/ Autre Chose", also included, certainly belongs in outer space
with its throbbing queasy modal synth licks and deliciously out of
sync drums."
I rather thought that would be the end of it, to be honest (well,
admettons, the Flamen Dialis piece isn't exactly complimentary),
but to my surprise I got a message from Mio head honcho Meidad Zaharia
and his indefatigable publicist Mark Jung saying they'd be in Paris
in the autumn and would like to meet up.. to give me more discs. The
thought of my seriously-challenged living room shelves collapsing
altogether under the weight of more Celtic crud like Symptome-Dei
wasn't exactly appealing, but when Mark called on a cell phone and
asked to be guided step by step to the door of my building I didn't
really have much choice in the matter. I tried to head them off by
meeting them in the street, but they dragged me back into my apartment
and helped finish off a bottle of Burgundy before the inevitable ceremonial
handover of CDs: two more Besombes, Mosaic's Ultimatum, Flutes
Libres and Captain Tarthopom by Jean Cohen-Solal, the
eponymous outing by Begnagrad and Birgé / Gorgé / Shiroc's
Defense De / La Nuit du Phoque / June Sessions. (These were
later joined by Danny Ben Israel's Bullshit 3 1/4 and The
Platina's The Girl With The Flaxen Hair.) And you know what?
They're fuckin' awesome.
Mosaic
ULTIMATUM
MIO 029
 I
should perhaps qualify that enthusiastic expletive. It's often the
case that the most representational examples of a particular period
or genre in music history are not the ones everyone ends up knowing.
Listening exclusively to Mozart and Haydn, wonderful though they are,
won't give you much of a handle on what Charles Rosen is on about
in The Classical Style; there's more to Romantic opera than
Verdi and Wagner, and bebop didn't conveniently die out when Charlie
Parker did. Take progressive rock, for instance (and that must be
one of the most spectacularly stupid monikers ever dreamt up) –
if you find yourself having to teach a class in the subject one day
and need just one album to illustrate the instrumental aspect of the
genre, you could do no better than Ultimatum, recorded in
a studio just south of Paris in 1978 by the group Mosaic (the brothers
Brebion – Hubert and Yves – on drums and keyboards respectively,
with Jean-Yves Escoffier on guitar and synths and Philippe Lemongne
on bass and synths). All the prog trademark elements are there: the
earnest and never-resolving augmented triads and self-consciously
clever polyrhythmic riffing of the so-called Canterbury school (not
to mention The Mothers of Invention), in yer face guitar embroidery
à la Holdsworth / Beck, skittery showcase drumming
(Wyatt, Bruford, Vander..), not too many vocals to speak of (does
"Le torero d'alu I,II,III, IV" actually count as a song?
As far as the bawling on "Mercenaire" goes, the less said
the better..) but what there are come straight outta Henry Cow. There
are also the obligatory doses of silliness (the garbled phone messages
of "Rue Tabaga") and weirdness (the queasy strings of "Souvenirs,
souvenirs"), and to top it all off – Meidad Zaharia has
that obsessive record collector's passion for ultra-rare and preferably
unreleased material – lots of bonuses: three tracks recorded
as a demo in 1977, with a certain Valentin Bontchev on violin (very
good he is too), one live take and a home studio job called "Spoutnik"
from 1976. Unless you're a real prog nut, it's highly unlikely you'll
have heard Ultimatum – it was released in an edition
of 500 and only 200 copies of the three-track demo Cuvée 77
were made, on cassette only – but Bontchev's solo on "Bonjour
Docteur" (forget Ponty and Lockwood!) is one of several reasons
why you should.
Begnagrad
BEGNAGRAD
MIO 006
 I
like to think of myself as enthusiastically pro-European, but I'll
be honest and say that the only things that have come my way from
Slovenia are a handful of Laibach albums (which I never play), the
first outings on Luka Zagoricnik's wonderful L'innomable label (which
I play a lot) and a bottle of ferocious plum brandy that wasn't around
long enough for me to learn how to pronounce let alone remember its
name, though I recall it did induce a state of euphoria bordering
on insanity. From the sound of it, the members of Begnagrad –
Bratko Bibic (accordion), Bogo Pecnikar (clarinet, saxophones), Nino
de Gleria (bass, mandolin), Aleš Rendla (drums), Boris Romih
(percussion, other instruments) – know the beverage well. If
you're a fan of Ivo Papasov and his Bulgarian Wedding Band, or of
the more rhythmically adventurous edges of klezmer that have popped
up in recent times, this one's for you. From the opening "Drinking
One" (imagine David Krakauer jamming with Fishbone), it's clear
we're in for an exhausting sweaty ride, as the boys abandon clarinets
and accordions in favour of lunatic scat freakouts, hoots, toots,
snores, gargles and raspberries that explode from nowhere as easily
as the ferociously complex sevens and elevens. When this came out
back in 1982, Chris Cutler's Rock In Opposition cartel had more or
less run out of steam, "otherwise Begnagrad would have been invited
to join", Cutler comments in the huge and hugely informative
accompanying essay. That the group could do the business live is demonstrated
by the album's live tracks and the bonus video footage, 20 minutes
of a concert in Ljubljana in 1983 (with Zoran Kanduc on drums). When
it's all over you need a drink as much as the band members. Wish I
could remember what that plum brandy was called.
Philippe Besombes
CESI EST CELA
MIO 010
POLE
MIO 009
 Anyway,
back to Besombes. I rather fancy one of the reasons the good people
at The Wire accepted a review of Libra was because I told
them Monsieur Besombes was one of those names that figured on the
"legendary" list that included Nurse With Wound's first
album. (You know the one.) The Nurse list continues to exercise a
curious fascination over people, many of whom weren't even born when
Chance Meeting first came out, and seems to have acquired
a mythic status all of its own, like a kind of secret Rosetta Stone,
a gateway into an alternative, obscure and – because Steve Stapleton
likes it – wondrous musical universe. True, there are some weird
and wild things in there – isn't it about time someone reissued
Radu Malfatti and Stephan Wittwer's stuff on FMP, if only to remind
us how Malfatti could (presumably still can) play the ass off his
trombone? – but the list also includes some pretty standard
fare mainstream stuff, including an unhealthily large dose of prog
rock. (By the way, the famously enigmatic text "Categories strain,
crack and sometimes break, under their burden – step out of
the space provided..." isn't all that original either, being,
as PT's own poetry whiz Nate Dorward points out, lifted more or less
texto from arch-Conservative T.S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton":
"Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
/ Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision,
will not stay in place, / Will not stay still.") Anyway, thanks
in no small part to the Nurse list and the dedicated championship
of the likes of Julian Cope and the Ultima Thule people, while almost
every platter of krautrock, however dodgy, has been lovingly dug up
and pored over, a lot of comparable French product has slipped off
the radar. When it comes to something as indigestible as Flamen Dialis,
that's probably just as well, but there are some real gems buried
in the muck if you snout around a bit. The Besombes album that Stapleton
was apparently familiar with went by the name of Ceci est Cela,
even though the composer insists he always intended it to be called
simply Besombes – see the album cover – hence
the rather strange deliberate misspelling on the MIO reissue: Cesi
est Cela. Financing his more experimental work by producing crossover
electronic rock for French TV (he was the first composer to release
work on KOKA music's "library music" label, which has become
a staple of the advertising industry), Besombes continued to work
on what Divox released as Ceci est Cela during 1976. Listening
to "Pawa 1", with its slightly voyeuristic collages of spoken
voices set over a queasy Moog backdrop, it's easy to see what attracted
young Mr Stapleton, whose own use of delay and echo has never been
(nor has it sought to be) all that subtle. At its best, this music
is the true middle ground between Xenakis and Jean-Michel Jarre –
at its worst, it's terrible. Quite why he chose to include "Princesse
Lola", an absolutely hideous disco monstrosity, is beyond my
comprehension, though at least it's buried as a ghost track 0 (put
CD in machine, press play and then track rewind and you'll find 3'36"
of vertiginous retching horror, to quote William Burroughs out of
context). More interesting by far are the MIO-obligatory bonus tracks,
which are fascinating constructions, even if often fatally flawed.
"Traversée" is wonderful until it drifts off into
cod plainchant and hippy collage, and "Trio" falls so far
in love with its Scott Of The Antarctic polar windstorm and ticking
clocks that it loses sight of any coherent structure, but "L'or
des fous 2" is a real horror flick.
 If your
Besombes budget can only stretch to one of these reissues, I'd go
straight for Cesi est Cela, no hesitation. Pôle
– nothing to do with Stefan Betke, younguns – is a more
straight ahead Autobahn-like (make that Autoroute)
affair – there's even a shot of Besombes and his playing partner
on this date, Jean-Louis Rizet, driving along a stretch of motorway.
The opening "Haute Pression" chugs along in time-honoured
ELP hungadungahundadunga 12/8 time, complete with "impressive"
drum fills and aimless modal doodlings. What's more, Rizet really
is wearing one of those straggly sheepskin coats – ever seen
Jacques Tati's Traffic? Remember the hippies by the canal?
yes, like that – and smoking a pipe. No shit. The dreamy
flute stuff on "Evelyse" is pretty enough – if Werner
Herzog had been French he might have called on Besombes and Rizet
to score his pictures instead of Popol Vuh – but the musique
concrète cut ups of church bells on "Armature double"
are pretty toe curling. "Rock à Montauban" at least
shows that these guys had a sense of humour and weren't above making
fun of themselves. Would that some of today's po-faced laptoppers
had the same attitude; somehow I can't imagine Christian Fennesz turning
out such gonzo nonsense. Anyway, you may be interested to know that
Besombes is still very active, and that his specially created CDs
of music designed to send babies and children to sleep are selling
like hot cakes – though as Raymond Scott was traumatic enough
for my six year old, I think I'll stick to Harry Potter.
Jean Cohen-Solal
FLUTES LIBRES / CAPTAIN TARTHOPOM
MIO 025
 Flautist
Jean Cohen-Solal was born in 1946, which means he was 25 when Flutes
Libres was released (was the label really called Daphy? how quaint).
This is a real tour de force of multitracking: though there
are other musicians involved, most of the arrangements consist of
overdubbed flutes, with Cohen-Solal often using electronic effects
on his solo line – he's got a mean distortion pedal in there
somewhere. Asaf Carmali's 24 bit remastering job is spectacular, with
every twang of Serge Franklin's sitar and thwack of Marc Chantereau's
tabla on "Raga du Matin" crystal clear. After the thoroughly
accessible three opening tracks, the final "Quelqu'un" is
a masterly and evocative tone poem. It's a shame the cover art shows
Cohen-Solal decked out in Stars and Stripes suit and trousers –
betcha no French musician would dress up like that today – as
there's something quintessentially French about the closing track's
elegant mixture of musique concrète and Debussyesque
lyricism. Sure, it's not exactly musique spectrale, but it's
not as far away from Tristan Murail as you might think.
By the time Cohen-Solal ventured back into the studio to record Captain
Tarthopom two years later, the mysterious veiled sonorities of
"Quelqu'un" had been replaced by the direct and unmistakable
peal of church bells, depiction replacing allusion. It doesn't start
out well, but the opening title track's gauche, clunky counterpoint
and wooden drumming is mercifully short-lived: "Ludions"
grooves effortlessly in 5/4 time (although structurally the piece
unravels in the middle), and even the stentorian buzz of the synth
bass can't stop the funk on "Ab Hoc Et Ab Hac". What does
kill it is the reprise of Bach's first Prelude – yep, that
one: Ave bloody Maria again. The faux baroque mood continues on "Intime
Panique", until a spastic Sun Ra-like Farfisa organ comes sneaking
in to pee all over the place. Instead of carrying on to Saturn and
going for all out flute freakout – like Mister Ra did to memorable
effect at the Fondation Maeght gigs – the track dries up, though
Bach's back on "Memoires d'un Ventricule", until a militaristic
binary groove kicks in, behind which scary organ clusters frame overdubbed
volleys of key clicks and breathy flutters. The track is such an amazing
mishmash of styles and techniques that it's really impossible to figure
out which way it's going, so I won't spoil the surprise by telling
you how it ends. "Fossette Surprise" ("surprise dimple")
ends proceedings on a lighter note. For all its greater concentration
on innovation, Captain Tarthopom hasn't aged as well as Flutes
Libres, despite the latter's cod Indianisms, but both albums
are highly entertaining and perfect illustrations of the musical world
as it was back in early 70s France. Oh, and watch out for the ghost
track..
Birgé / Gorgé
/ Shiroc
DEFENSE DE
MIO 026/7 (CD / DVD)
 Perhaps
the most extraordinary of these reissues is défense de,
the first album released on GRRR records back in 1975 by Jean-Jacques
Birgé and Francis Gorgé, before they went on to team
up with Bernard Vitet to form Un Drame Musical Instantané (whose
own first album Trop d'adrenaline nuit was reissued back
in 2001, you'll recall).
Birgé's instrumental arsenal includes synthesizer, various
wind and percussion instruments and stylophone (wow! remember stylophones,
kids?), while Gorgé sticks to guitar, percussion and birdcalls.
The third member of the trio was percussionist Shiroc – whose
identity is known to Birgé but has never been divulged: all
we learn is he's now a music teacher somewhere in the south of France
– and during the sessions, which took place in the apartment
of Sébastien Bernard (later the leading light behind Sun Records),
Antoine Duvernet and Jean-Louis Bucchi stopped by to contribute some
tenor saxophone and electric piano respectively. MIO's reissue includes
not only the four released tracks, "Crever", "La Bulle
Opprimante", "Le Réveil" and "Pourrait
être brutal", but four alternate and previously unreleased
pieces, "Surtravail I" and "II" and two alternate
takes of "Pourrait être brutal". Trying to describe
this music and where it comes from is well-nigh impossible, but let's
say that if CBS had sacked Miles Davis and Tony Williams and recorded
In A Silent Way with Sun Ra, Don Van Vliet and Bill Bruford
instead, it might have turned out something like "La Bulle Opprimante".
Birgé's weird doodlings often recall (again) Ra – put
that down to the Moog – but whereas even the wildest Arkestra
outings usually orbited back towards Great Black Music in one form
or another, Birgé / Gorgé / Shiroc's music has absolutely
nothing to do with jazz – that influence made itself more manifest
when they teamed up with Vitet. Défense de is one
of those rare and utterly wonderful UFO albums, a blast of total freedom
that sounds as fresh and wild now as it did then – and how many
albums recorded in 1975 can you say that of?
OK, by now you'll have twigged the idea of this MIO thing well enough
to know that Meidad Zaharia and his boys aren't just going to stop
there. Défense de occupies the first of two discs
here, the second being a DVD. In recent years Jean-Jacques Birgé
has been acclaimed for his work as a film maker, notably for his contribution
to Sarajevo, a street under siege, which won him a British
Academy Award for Film and TV Arts, but the story of his career as
a director starts back in 1974 with a wild 16mm short film called
La Nuit du Phoque that he made as a student at film school
with Bernard Mollerat. It is this priceless document of early 70s
avant-garderie that Zaharia has had lovingly restored and released
on the DVD. Birgé was a classic product of 1968, though he
was only 15 at the time – flyposting revolutionary tracts (hence
perhaps the opening scene of the film), growing pot on his balcony,
namechecking We're Only In It For The Money, the Grateful
Dead, Buñuel and Easy Rider. As a student at IDHEC,
the French National Film School, he met the absurdly creative and
openly homosexual Mollerat, who later committed suicide aged just
24; in La Nuit du Phoque ("The Night of the Seal")
they "decided to try everything imaginable"; the 41 minutes
are packed to the brim with wild and utterly incomprehensible visual
and textual shifts, including special effects, graphic but sensual
love scenes, a hilarious Busby Berkeley-style "revolutionary
ballet", a superb avant-garde gay cabaret number sung by Philippe
Danton – imagine a cross between Rocky Horror and the Trout
Mask era Magic Band – and any number of absurd cameos (I particularly
like the surprise appearance of Sir Isaac Newton, who scares the shit
out of some kids playing in a local park). As a period piece La
Nuit du Phoque is unbeatable, and it alone would make an impressive
bonus. But this time Zaharia has really outdone himself: the DVD also
contains a further four and a half hours (!) of hitherto
unreleased music, including 208 minutes recorded chez Birgé
between June 11th and 27th 1975, a fifteen minute live set from La
Villette recorded in October 1975 (featuring some paint stripping
alto sax work from Birgé) and a 47 minute live radio session
from early 1976, on which the trio is joined by Gilles Rollet on additional
percussion.
If this long-winded effort whets your appetite but you can't decide
which one(s) of these platters to invest in, you could do no worse
than get hold of the MIO Records Sampler #1 ($5 + postage
or free with three MIO CDs), which contains excerpts from all the
albums discussed above, and what's more – here's the rub –
they're not just thrown in as a grab bag of bits and pieces, but actually
mixed together to form a wonderfully coherent and highly enjoyable
span of music (yep, even Flamen Dialis sounds good!). And, because
this is MIO, that's not all you get: the CD also includes no fewer
than 20 extra tracks in mp3 format. Go to: http://miorecords.com
—DW
Paul Dunmall Quartet
LOVE WARMTH AND COMPASSION
FMRCD 155 i0804
Paul Dunmall Octet
BRIDGING
Clean Feed CF 017
Paul Dunmall & the Moksha Big Band
I WISH YOU PEACE
Cuneiform Rune 203
Of the few saxophonists have followed in the
footsteps of the great John Coltrane and adapted his language into
a personal and original approach (though inexperienced listeners might
wonder how these guys are able to fly so close to the Sun Trane without
burning their wings and plunging into the copycat sea), Sam Rivers,
who began researching modes independently of Coltrane, and David Murray
are now reasonably well-known. The same can't yet be said for Worcestershire’s
Paul Dunmall, but these three fine discs are as good a place to start
as any. Dunmall's vast recorded output looks a bit intimidating, but
the man himself is quiet, modest and sincere, with plenty of earthy
common sense, and considers himself as a traditional member
of the improvised music community (this by way of excuse for not being
an "advanced" player à la Doneda, Dörner
or Butcher, though he has recently recorded with harpist Rhodri Davies).
Even so, Dunmall's work is not easy to pin down at first hearing.
Like his fine paintings and woodcuts and his Duns Limited Edition
CDRs (39 releases in four years!), his cottage industry focuses on
a genuine "folklore imaginaire" whose fabric is woven by
the curious guitarisms of Phil Gibbs, the fondness of both musicians
for woodwinds, shawms, flutes, drones, handmade and ethnic instruments,
autoharp – and a deep spirituality. Whatever Dunmall and his
cohorts do, they commit to the dictum of improvising freely with no
prior discussion about the unfolding of the performance.
 Although
a hard blower with the likes of volcanic drummer Tony Bianco, the
collective quartet Mujician, or his trio with Mark Sanders and John
Adams, Dunmall, on soprano and bagpipes, is in a gentler mode on Love,
Warmth and Compassion. Dropping alto and baritone some years
ago in order to concentrate on soprano and tenor, his voice on the
smaller horn has reached a state of grace – it's astonishingly
clear, lyrical and subtle. Love is an extraordinary interplay
of four pals playing like one man. Gibbs comps intelligently and contributes
some fine solo work after the leader's intense outburst in "Compassion".
Percussionist Hamid Drake is at his most sensitive and responsive,
the quality recording showing off his soulful polyrhythms to great
advantage, while Paul Rogers, when not taking the lead voice with
his bowed work, is the perfect bass partner. As an improvising bassist,
few match Rogers’ lyricism, physicality, accuracy and invention.
Performing on instruments built specially for him by Nîmes-based
luthier Alain Leduc, his six and seven-string bass work is a
central pillar on these three discs. The fourth and final track "Before
Stonehenge" recalls the Duns label drone improv, with Drake's
hand-played frame drums, Rogers' arco work and Dunmall's bagpipes.
One of the many shared passions in the two Pauls' lifelong friendship
is a love of Indian music, and Dunmall's soprano goes with Rogers'
new custom-built instruments like the voice and sarangi in Northern
Indian vocal music.
 Both
Rogers and Dunmall are members of Mujician with pianist Keith Tippett
and percussionist Tony Levin, and this quartet forms the core of both
Dunmall's Octet and the Moksha Big Band, but contrarily to the free-for-all
strategy of Mujician, Bridging and I Wish You Peace are
well-planned affairs. The Octet outing, an hour-long a live recording
from Lisbon‘s Jazz Em Agosto festival, reworks The Great
Divide, the suite complete with cues, tempos, thematic devices,
horn ensemble voicings and cued solos previously issued on Cuneiform
(Rune 142). Each section of the work focuses on one of the Octet's
members, and Dunmall's arrangements explore the diverse instrumental
combinations within the ensemble: Gethin Liddington’s hard swinging
trumpet is strongly backed by Tippett’s provocative comping,
Paul Rutherford’s trombone gently harms the bourgeoisie with
the bowed metal of Levin and the bowed bass of Rogers, and Simon Picard,
one of the most underrated tenor players on the planet, blows full
steam throughout (check out his 2001 Emanem outing Utoma with
Bianco, Dunmall and Picard for a real journey into interstellar space).
By way of an encore, "Wind" features the Mujician quartet
chasin’ the Duns, as it were.
 I
Wish You Peace, a BBC recording of the Moksha Big Band, features,
in addition to the members of the Octet, John Adams and Phil Gibbs
on guitars, David Prizeman on trumpet, Hilary Jeffrey and Chris Bridges
on trombones, Howard Cottle on tenor sax and Mark Sanders on drums.
The work has four sections, the first of which is a wonderful 13-minute
tenor solo that builds from tampura and autoharp to an intense climax,
evolving organically through different emotional states without ever
running short of energy and inspiration. The second section begins
with an a cappella trombone trio, a cooling interlude after such intense
blowing, and is followed by a swinging showcase for the tenors of
Picard and Cottle and Liddington’s trumpet with the Mujician
rhythm section, with Tippett's piano a regular roller coaster ride.
A quieter interlude with the looser Prizeman and Gibbs's autoharp
leads into the third section (the CD index numbers unfortunately don't
follow suit), with a three-way discussion featuring Adams, Sanders
and Dunmall. The last section (track three 19'05") begins with
Rogers' arco seven-string bass with its sympathetic strings plus the
tampura introducing the drone-like "Moksha Trio" with Gibbs
and Dunmall on soprano, while Tippett plucks intelligently inside
the piano. The winds enter and the intensity increases until a second
fantastic climax is reached, with Dunmall's ecstatic tenor at its
most ferocious. The music takes off with a spontaneity that belies
the fact that all individual and collective interventions and changes
of material are finely calculated (hats off too to the conductor,
Brian Irvine). No easy task with a large band and limited rehearsal
time, but few do it better than Paul Dunmall. Listen well to the depth,
intensity and humanity of his music, and you will be rewarded more
than you expect.—JMVS
Jason Kahn / Günter
Müller
BLINKS
For4Ears 1552
Jason Kahn / Jason Lescalleet
RED ROOM
Chloë 006
John Hudak / Jason Kahn / Bruce Tovsky
FOR THE TIME BEING
Cut 011
 Both
Jason Kahn and Günter Müller started out as percussionists,
and over the course of a couple of decades have gradually replaced
their kits piece by piece with various items of electronic gadgetry;
on Blinks Müller lists his instrumentation as "iPod,
MiniDisc, electronics and selected percussion", while Kahn goes
all the way: "Powerbook". The intriguing question with eai
practitioners who have drifted into the genre with a background in
another "traditional" instrument is to what extent that
instrument – e.g. its propensity for harmony as opposed to melody,
the physical aspect of its playing technique – influences the
direction of new work on laptops and the like. Vestiges of classical
guitar technique haunt Keith Rowe, for example, who still tends to
use the right hand to excite the strings of his table guitar and the
left to apply the transformations; rich splashes of guitar colour
guitar are also audible in Christian Fennesz's laptop work –
compare to the hard tech crunch of (former DJ) Peter "Pita"
Rehberg's. Put another way, could you tell Kahn and Müller were
percussionists just from listening to Blinks? The idea of
pulse is certainly present: tides of regular and not so regular repeating
rhythmic units are in constant ebb and flow throughout, and the distinctive
timbre of bowed and struck metal is usually somewhere in the texture
if you take the trouble to peel away the layers of superimposed hums,
drones, buzzes and ticks. What makes these nine blinks (there's a
tenth track from the same session, available only on the Wire Tapper
12 2CD compilation available with issue 250 of that publication –
how 'bout that for advertising?) so enjoyable is that they consciously
set out to say all they have to say in about the length of a 12"
single. The longest track on offer here lasts 7'21" and the shortest
clocks in at 4'22", which makes a welcome change from eai's normal
20-minute sprawl. Unlike the short durations of the pieces on Kahn's
recent Rossbin outing Songs for Nicholas Ross, which Kahn
happily referred to as "snapshots" in his recent
PT interview, each blink lasts long enough for the musicians and
listeners alike to follow the evolution of material from point A to
point B. Not so much snapshots as home movies, as it were. And very
beautiful ones too: Blinks is, along with Brackwater
(Korber, Nakamura, Otomo, erikm), the strongest release this
year on Müller's For4Ears imprint.
Patrons of Baltimore's High Zero festival, which would get my vote
for the most ambitious and exciting free music festival in the United
States, will know that the Red Room is one of that city's better-known
new music performing spaces, and it was there that Kahn, American
by birth but now resident in Switzerland, and Jason Lescalleet, who
knows lives somewhere out in the wilds of Maine if memory serves me
right, recorded these four tracks two months before the Blinks
session with Müller, on March 8th 2003. For the occasion Kahn
returned to world of analogue, using percussion and a Doepfer analogue
synthesizer, probably as a gesture of solidarity towards Lescalleet,
who's always tended to favour low budget equipment. Here he's credited
on tapes and Casio SK-1, which, if you'll allow me the luxury of quoting
a snippet from http://www.vintagesynth.org/index2.html, is "the
cheapest sampler in the world. Followed by the SK-5, the second cheapest
in the world." (Yep, Lescalleet's got one of those babies too.
Anyway, back to the geek tech shit..) "Its strength is sampling
and its weakness is just about everything else. It's monophonic and
has just four-note polyphony. The sampling is 8-bit PCM, 9.38kHz,
giving about 1.4 seconds. It's so gritty. Also, its memory clears
when turned off. Obviously it's designed as a cheap toy for consumers.
This is the sort of sampler-toy you end up belching into with your
friends and play burp-songs for a laugh! The keyboard uses mini plastic
keys. It lacks MIDI, lacks effects, edit-ability, memory, and filtering.
However there are 13 envelope shapes that can affect your sample somewhat.
There is also portamento, vibrato, and chord accompaniment with the
chord selector system. If you gotta make some lo-fi cheese samples
then you might want to try the SK-1, after all it is very cheap."
Ya can almost hear the spotty little nerds sniggering, can't ya? But
make no mistake, this is the perfect equipment for Lescalleet, who's
proved on several fine releases (Mattresslessness,
on Kahn's Cut imprint, various incarnations of Due
Process, and the awesome Forlorn Green with Greg Kelley
on Erstwhile) that fine, even great, music can be made with modest
means. There's not a cheesy burp in sight here, while Kahn, at his
most Eliane Radigue-like – several recent releases of his, including
the splendid Miramar on Sirr, have reminded me of the French
composer – wallpapers the Red Room with rich, deep tones. Warm
ones, too – as Chloë's Mike Bullock writes in his brief
but eloquent liners, the space is "suffused both with body heat
and the heat rising from the sounds." Lescalleet's sharp-as-a-tack-but-no-bullshit
mastering draws us into the heat; in addition to the music, the sounds
of the audience and noises from outside the venue (notably a passing
police car) form part of the listening experience. Lester Bangs once
quipped that "Hell is like Baltimore" – that might
explain the red bit – but I sure wish I'd been there when this
was recorded. Who wants to end up in Heaven anyway? William Blake
was right.
 For
The Time Being is, strictly speaking, more of a John Hudak than
a Kahn outing, bringing together two performances recorded in New
York, one at Michael J. Schumacher's Diapason Gallery as part of the
installation "Winter" (featuring Hudak and Kahn on laptops)
and the other, three months later, at the Performing Garage as part
of the Roulette Festival of Mixology, in which Hudak is joined by
multimedia artist Bruce Tovsky, both on guitars and Max/MSP processing
this time. The first track is more of what we've seen above, but cold
this time – huge chilly banks of sound shifting slowly like
snowdrifts (forgive the wintry imagery, but it's very much l'air
du temps for Hudak right now – and the sound sources for
the installation include recordings of falling snow) – while
the second steps back somewhat into the world of live electronic minimalism,
an unashamedly C / B flat major universe of constantly changing irregular
additive / subtractive process (David Behrman's work comes to mind).
Though quite different in terms of surface and language – the
former dense and woolly, the latter filigree and wispy – both
pieces require active listener participation to reveal their charms.
Curiously, press reaction to the second piece has been sharply divided,
which is a sure sign that the artists are on to something: Frans de
Waard (Vital Weekly) and Nirav Soni (Bagatellen) found it didn't sustain
their interest, while AMG's François Couture described it as
"dynamic and attention-grabbing". As always, the truth probably
lies somewhere in between, though I tend to side with Couture on this
one. Depends if your kind of minimalism is the static (Young, Niblock,
Radigue..) or the note-spinning variety (Reich, Riley, Glass..). What's
clear though is that Jason Kahn likes both, having chosen to release
them on his own excellent Cut imprint.—DW
THE HARRY PARTCH COLLECTION
Vols.1 & 2
New World 80621-2 (Vol.1) 80622-2 (Vol.2)
 The
reappearance of two CDs that originally came out on CRI in 1997, themselves
reissues (in part) of recordings that had only been available on rare
vinyl, is certainly good news, though diehard Partch fans will probably
already have the earlier releases. In any case, we can all now rejoice
in the knowledge that almost all the composer's major works are available,
lovingly remastered and packaged and accompanied by scholarly yet
eminently readable essays by the likes of Innova's Philip Blackburn
or Partch biographer Bob Gilmore, who contributes the splendid liners
here. Aficionados of microtonal music, especially Partch's, are well-known
for their fanatical devotion to the subject and about as tolerant
of dissenting opinion as Pro-Life activists and Animal Liberation
Front guerrillas, so this might not be the right time to express a
certain scepticism with regard to the theory underpinning Partch's
oeuvre. I don't want my granny's coffin digging up or my kid kidnapped
by the Maneri mafia, thanks. But putting aside the question as to
whether or not the Adapted Viola, Adapted Guitar and Kithara are truly
capable of pitching Partch's 43-note scale with sufficient accuracy
to render audible the theory Gilmore discusses in his excellent Perspectives
of New Music articles – "On Harry Partch's Seventeen Lyrics
by Li Po" (1992) and "Changing the Metaphor" (1995)
– let's just say that Partch's music sounds like nothing else
on the planet. And Tom Waits owes him a fucking fortune in royalties.
Ain't no Swordfishtrombones without Harry – and Swordfishtrombones
is the foundation stone on which the last two decades of Waits' work
rests. But that's another story.
Bob Gilmore's fabulous biography of Partch (Yale University Press,
1998) makes for a fascinating read. Frustrated at every turn by lack
of interest in and / or funding of his work, the continued existence
of his instruments, not to mention Partch himself, was often called
into question, and yet, notwithstanding the setbacks, the composer
was able to complete several large-scale works. But like Hugo Wolf
half a century before him, who dreamt feverishly of outwagnering Wagner,
Partch's real strength lay in the mastery of the short form, especially
the song (at least Partch got round to writing The Bewitched
and Delusion of the Fury – Wolf died disillusioned
and half-mad without ever writing his magnum opus). The "intoning
voice" of the Eleven Intrusions – similar in concept
to but far more natural in sound than Schoenberg's sprechstimme
– has a real feel for the speech rhythms of the text. Partch's
setting of Willard Motley's "The Street" paints a picture
of urban America as stark and moving as Edward Hopper: "Darkness
behind the school where you smarten up, you come out with a pride
and go look at all the good clothes in the shop windows and the swell
cars whizzing past to Michigan Boulevard and start figuring out how
you can get all these things." That "get" is a master
stroke, and Partch's setting knows it and shows it; not for him the
heady symbolist claptrap of air from another planet – a hitchhiker's
inscription on a railing at Barstow, California says as much if not
more of the human condition.
 Partch's
music is as simultaneously avant-garde and timeless as the texts he
chose to set (with the possible exception of the rather dated splashes
of Rimbaud in Even Wild Horses): though harmonically and
timbrally far out, it remains rhythmically rooted in the earth, with
its fondness for Afro- and Latin American rhythms and simple strophic
structures. That said, the rhythmic intricacies are by no means easy
to pull off, but the music swings naturally and swings hard in the
kind of odd number multiples more often associated with Balkan and
Bulgarian folk. It manages to achieve, with absolutely no fuss whatsoever,
something that has eluded almost all mainstream contemporary composers
since the death of Debussy: new music that is not only accessible
but genuinely moving without ever compromising its strict modernist
agenda. The supreme irony is that it seems destined to remain unperformed,
since the instruments it was conceived for are as rare as they are
fragile. These superb recordings, many of which date from the years
when the music was written, may be as close as you ever come to Harry
Partch's music – treasure them.—DW
ECOUTE
Centre Pompidou, Paris
"What relationship do people have to
their sound environments these days? What does sound material consist
of in the digital era? To what manipulations is it susceptible? What
forms do its scoring and performance take? What connections does it
make with the plastic arts? These are the questions that this exhibition
invites the public to ask," runs the catalogue. Not any public,
though: the exhibition Ecoute ("Listen", in homage to Max
Neuhaus's work of the same name) is presented on the ground floor
of the Pompidou Centre in an area set aside for children, and is therefore
specifically targeted at them. Or so it ought to be, for one might
be excused for coming to the conclusion that Ecoute's curators are
old enough to have forgotten how long the attention span of young
kids is – either that or they have none of their own. Inviting
Berlin-based Rolf Julius to submit austere sculptures that visually
illustrate sound by means of coloured pigment scattered on inverted
loudspeakers is laudible enough (or would be if Julius's delicate
sounds weren't almost totally swamped by the noise emanating from
adjacent sound sculptures by Peter Vogel), but expecting small kids
NOT to stick their fingers into the brightly coloured powder and scatter
it around the gallery floor is as dumb as it is perverse. The gallery
attendant charged with keeping an eye on the Julius pieces deserves
a special bonus. Fortunately for him, the youngsters are more enthralled
with Vogel's assemblies of brightly coloured photoelectric cells,
which trigger all manner of annoying bleeps and tweets when cast into
shadow. The mechanism behind it all is no doubt ingenious but hardly
excuses the toyshop banality of the resulting sounds. Equally clever
is Douglas Edric Stanley's "hypertable", over and on whose
surface spectators are invited to run their hands, thereby setting
off combinations of sounds specially composed for the installation
by Julien Hô Kim, though after twenty minutes of patient stroking
and rubbing I was no wiser as to how my movements were being translated
into light and sound, let alone what movement triggered what particular
sound. At least in the Vogel pieces the relation between cause and
effect was clear – though sonically uninteresting.
 The
rest of the exhibition, like another sound art exhibition put on up
the road at La Villette's Cité de la Musique earlier this year
(which, apart from the David Toop concert that inaugurated it, was
a total waste of time and space), seemed to be little more than an
excuse for filling up the gallery with expensive state of the art
hardware, much of which seemed, embarrassingly, to be out of order.
The "multimedia space" featured a couple of cute CD-ROMs
and some follow-the-bouncing-ball graphic scores, including Ligeti's
"Artikulation" and Cage's "Aria" (bring on the
usual suspects), but Antoine Denize's "Ecouter-voir" installation,
though billed as interactive was most definitely inactive, as a forlorn
ten-year-old squiggling a mouse in vain in the darkness soon discovered.
A shame, as it promised "an acoustic journey through great cities
of the world, their surroundings scanned, sampled and recomposed by
musicians such as Pierre Henry." More suspicious was the Sonic
Object installation, which consisted of nothing more than ringtones
specially composed for a Nokia mobile phone by local sound artists
and free improvisers. Well, as it's still not sure whether the Intermittent
de Spectacle status will be around in a few years time, I suppose
you can't blame them for accepting the commission. Elsewhere, Parisian
music critic Maxime Guitton had handpicked a selection of electronic
music from a wide range of composers and sound artists, including
Thomas Köner, Deathprod, Biosphere, Bernard Parmegiani and any
number of names familiar to Wire readers, but as these works were
to be presented exclusively on a set on seven iPods (firmly fixed
to the wall), it's rumoured that outstanding hassles over publishing
rights with the Centre Pompidou's legal department seem to have considerably
shortened the list of featured composers. So it goes when art and
big business dance hand in hand. It all comes across as something
of an induction ceremony, dragging and clicking gullible sensory-experience-hungry
kids into the world of High Capitalism without their realising it,
but I remain convinced that the average pre-teen child with a modicum
of intelligence and curiosity can learn more about sound, space, light
and texture with a plastic bucket and spade in a sandpit.—DW
JAZZ
Dennis González NY Quartet
NY MIDNIGHT SUITE
Clean Feed 020CD
Dennis González’s Inspiration Band
NILE RIVER SUITE
Daagnim CD9
One of the more heartening
events of recent years has been the return of Dennis González
to the world of improvised music. Dennis burst onto the recording
scene in 1979 with a series of LPs on his Dallas based Daagnim label
but began receiving more extensive critical acclaim in the 80’s
with a string of releases on Silkheart. Stefan marked a
particular high point of his collaborative relationship with multi-reedist
John Purcell, who never sounded better than on this. Debenge-Debenge
gave an intriguing glimpse into the melding of regional influences
that González incorporated in a double quartet known as New
Dallasorleanssippi, featuring the talents of Charles Brackeen, Kidd
Jordan, the late Malachi Favors and Alvin Fielder. Subsequent associations
in the early 90s with the likes of Carlos Ward, Paul Plimley, Paul
Rogers, Louis Moholo, Nels Cline, Andrew Cyrille, Elton Dean and
Keith Tippett showed the range of González’s musical
interests as well as the level of respect that he’d attained.
Then it stopped. In 1994 González
removed himself from the musical scene for a variety of personal
reasons. Since performers of this type don’t register on the
radar of the mainstream media, or the likes of Ken Burns for that
matter, it was left for us paltry fans to wonder what ever happened.
Fortunately this exile was of short duration; he formed a group
“Yells at Eels” with his sons, Stefan (yes, that one)
on drums and Aaron on bass, which gradually added old associates
such as reedists Tim Green and Douglas Ewart. In 2002 he formed
the New Southern Quintet with Green, tenor saxist Andrew Lamb, Favors
and Fielder and recorded Old Time Revival. González
was back in the game.
These discs were recorded in a two-day
burst of hyper-creativity on November 22 and 23 last year in New
York. The NY Quartet had been formed to take part in Dave Douglas’s
Trumpet Festival at the Tonic in August 2003 and featured tenor
saxist Ellery Eskelin, bassist Mark Helias and drummer Mike Thompson
(a late but fortunate addition since the regularly scheduled drummer
didn’t make it for the show). They played a set of songs that
Yells at Eels had developed shortly before the festival, and the
concert was to have been recorded until technical problems arose
and this recording date was scheduled instead. González put
the Suite together the night before the session in his hotel room,
listening to the sounds of the city. The newness gives the performance
a spontaneity that is a tribute to the players as well as González’s
unique ability to come up with interesting well-suited motifs for
the individuals at hand to run with and develop in a free-flowing
but well-grounded manner. While everybody is in top form, special
mention should go to the playing of the leader. There's a hint of
Don Cherry here and a little Bobby Bradford there in his soloing,
until you realize that his playing is a unique amalgamation of numerous
influences from many genres. Those familiar with Eskelin’s
playing only on his Hatology releases should become acquainted with
how well he contributes to other peoples’ songs. Helias’s
playing continues on the high plateau that it attained over a quarter
of a century years ago, but the real surprise is Thompson. Branching
out from his regular gig in Roy Campbell Jr.’s band, his drum
kit here includes fragments of cymbals. That might seem gimmicky,
but his playing effectively incorporates these unusual items into
the overall sound. The Suite convincingly portrays the bustle of
New York at midnight as witnessed by a solitary visitor in a lonely
hotel room. Three additional songs round out a very satisfying listening
experience.
While in New York for this session,
González decided to take advantage of the players available
for another project, one that involved the well-documented return
to recording of bassist Henry Grimes following an absence of 36
years. Thompson stayed on board for the Nile River Suite,
the remainder of the group consisting of downtown stalwarts Roy
Campbell Jr. on trumpet, flugelhorn and flute and multi-woodwind
player Sabir Mateen. As with the previous session, the compositions
were unseen by any of the players prior to the rehearsal. Whether
due to the change of personnel or to the compositions, this is a
thoroughly different entity from NY Midnight Suite, despite
the sessions occurring on successive days. From the opening notes
of “Lyons in Lyon”, written for González as a
tribute to Jimmy Lyons and based upon his “Jump Up”,
through the concluding notes of “Hymn for the Ashes of Saturday”,
Grimes’ contributions never flag, and he gives a very worthy
performance both buttressing the songs and soloing with admirable
facility. Mateen’s clarinet and flute playing brings some
instrumental variety to the mix, while Campbell suffers somewhat
in comparison to González’s distinctive voice. For
that reason, NY Midnight Suite gets the slight nod between
the two. But anyone not acquainted with the music of Dennis González
is strongly advised to remedy that situation with either of these.—SG
Michael Jefry Stevens /
Michael Rabinowitz
PLAY
Drimala DR 04-347-03
Continuing the Drimala label's exploration
of the art of the duo, Play finds former Mosaic Sextet bandmembers
Michael Jefry Stevens (piano) and Michael Rabinowitz (bassoon) together
in the studio for the first time in nearly ten years, though you'd
never guess. The interplay between the two is impressive, almost telepathic
from the outset, as proceedings kick off in style with the opening
"Sibling Rivalry". A strong lyrical vein runs through the
music, and "jazz" somehow just doesn't seem to be the right
word to describe it, firstly because the bassoon is hardly a standard
jazz instrument (give yourself a test and see how many jazz bassoonists
you can name once you've mentioned Rabinowitz and, of course, Karen
Borca) and secondly because Stevens' piano stylings owe as much to
Debussy, Bartók and Stravinsky as they do to any post-War jazz
pianist you'd care to name. If left to his own devices too often,
Stevens can tend to drift into rather manneristic repetition, transposing
figures over and over again in the same direction, which is why I
prefer him in larger ensembles (check out Aercine, on Drimala,
where he's joined by Mark Feldman, Harvey Sorgen, Steve Rust and Herb
Robertson), but with Rabinowitz around to keep him in check, this
happens comparatively rarely.—DW
Mop
MOP
Chief Inspector CHIN200408
Chief Inspector is, as French jazz labels
go, the best news in the past couple of years, and Mop could well
be their strongest outing to date. It's a trio consisting of Bettina
Kee on piano, Jean-Philippe Morel on bass and Emiliano Turi on drums,
and although they don't look very friendly in the inner sleeve photograph,
in which Morel and Turi stand dourly behind Ms Kee like bodyguards
protecting a Mafia princess, they can play their asses off. The least
convincing moments occur when Kee scrabbles around inside the instrument
(there's also a toy piano in there somewhere, and, if I'm not mistaken,
an alarm clock) – she should leave the inside piano stuff to
Sophie Agnel and Fred Blondy and instead concentrate on what she does
best: muscular but highly pitch-sensitive work at the keyboard itself.
There's a whole history of jazz piano in there, from Paul Bley to
Matthew Shipp – the early Shipp, before he started
buggering around with second rate hiphoppers – and Kee also
signs all but two of the album's twelve tracks (two are co-written
with Turi), revealing her composition chops to be equally impressive.
Morel and Turi form a supple yet powerful rhythm section (Dresser
and Black come to mind), and the bassist in particular turns in a
couple of strong sinewy solos that had me reaching for the Henry Grimes
back catalogue. The recording, made at La Muse En Circuit, is superb
– one can only regret Bernard Stollman didn't have access to
this kind of technology when he took Bley and his boys into the studio
back in the 60s – and well worth checking out, especially if
you're one of those hardboiled sceptics who turn up their noses at
the mention of French jazz.—DW
Raphe Malik Quartet
LAST SET: LIVE AT THE 1369 JAZZ CLUB
Boxholder BXH 042
Recorded live in a small club in Cambridge
MA on September 13th 1984 (very well recorded too, for the most part),
this album is a snapshot of trumpeter Raphé Malik's working
trio of the time, with William Parker on bass and the unsung Syd Smart
on drums, augmented for the occasion by Malik's old chum "Reverend"
Frank Wright on tenor saxophone – and incomprehensible abstract
blues vocalising. Malik is, as ever, razor sharp, turning his ideas
inside out, methodically and passionately – not hard to see
why he was co-opted into Cecil Taylor's outfits – Parker is
a powerhouse of energy, a master of arrhythmic swing (shame he's turned
in such stolid and unadventurous stuff on Thirsty Ear of late), and
Smart's pure freebop really cooks – shades of Denis Charles
and Edward Blackwell. Wright's playing is rough and rubbery, but somehow
lacks the finesse of the other three. Those who round on him accusing
him of not being able to play – ha! how many times have you
heard that one? – might find fuel for their argument here. On
the closing blues "Chaser" his contribution is pretty basic,
and while his solo on "Companions #2" is more adventurous,
it's nowhere near as electrifying as his mid 70s work with Center
Of The World. "Sad C" is competent, impressive at times,
but hardly essential listening like Malik's
Looking East twofer on Boxholder a while back.
Still, Frank Wright completists will be jumping for joy. If one of
them could tell me what he's rapping on about, I'd be grateful.—DW
Otomo Yoshihide New Jazz
Quintet
TAILS OUT
DIW 946
While it’s unclear whether the cover
photo of the rear end of a donkey is supposed to be a pun in dubious
taste on the word ass or an invitation to pin the tail on the aforementioned
beast, there’s little doubt that Tails Out is the strongest
ONJQ outing since its 2001 debut Flutter on Tzadik, from
the noble arching theme of Charlie Haden's "Song for Che"
to the closing title track which, discreetly enhanced by Kumiko Takara’s
vibes and Sachiko M's sinewaves, gently collapses in on itself like
an overripe peach. The guitarist’s choice of playing partners
is as fresh and surprising as his songbook: the ecstatic sax front
line of Kenta Tsugami and Naruyoshi Kikuchi – the latter since
replaced by Alfred Harth – might recall Noah Howard and Frank
Wright, but the rhythm section of bassist Hiroaki Mizutani and drummer
(and trumpeter) Yasuhiro Yoshigaki sounds like nobody else in the
business. Otomo, for his part, is more interested in feedback and
vicious snarling wah pedal – imagine a cross between Pete Cosey
and Rudolph Grey – than he is in the impenetrable harmolodic
guitar clefs of James Blood Ulmer’s “Moons Shine”
[sic]. He makes no attempt to disguise his influences as a composer
either, from the sweaty electric Miles groove of "Reducing Agent”
to the circle-of-fifths Mingus swoon of "Solvent Waltz".
The reading of Mingus’ own "Orange Was The Color Of Her
Dress, Then Blue Silk" is as straight as it is exquisite and
heartfelt, following a particularly raucous and joyful version of
"Strawberry Fields Forever", with Yoshigaki’s trumpet
blasting merrily away behind the horns in vintage Art Ensemble testifying.
The Mingus ballad slips gently into "Tails Out", on which
the music floats free from its harmonic and rhythmic moorings –
Yoshigaki's cymbals and light dusty snare recall Tony Williams' Silent
Way timekeeping – until it’s sucked into a black hole
as a reversed soundfile, to emerge phoenix-like thirty seconds later.—DW
eRikm / Günter Müller
/ Toshimaru Nakamura
WHY NOT BECHAMEL
For4Ears CD 1553
Nowadays probably the most surprising thing
about new eai albums are their titles, which often have apparently
nothing to do with the music. Maybe Why Not Bechamel is an
anagram of something, but the cover art (string? wire? spaghetti?
who knows) doesn't provide much of a clue. About sixty years ago composers
were suddenly smitten with the idea that they were some kind of scientific
researchers (we can blame Varèse for this), and started calling
pieces things like "Nexus 16" and "ST/4-1,080262".
Toshi Nakamura's tendency to call things "nimb#" –
"nimb" of course referring to his no-input mixing board
– continues the tradition, and perhaps he could have persuaded
his two partners here, eRikm (on 3k.pad 8 system – how about
that for techy gobbledigook?) and Günter Müller (MiniDiscs,
iPod, percussion and electronics) to come up with something more,
erm, technical than "keburu", "kabel" and "cable"
as track titles. I mention this because each of the three tracks is
glorious proof that eai – yes, dear readers, I might as well
embrace the term because it looks like it's here to stay – has
finally attained a kind of Mozart-like perfection. In a review for
The Wire a year or so back I compared Nakamura's Cubic to
Steve Reich, and there's something of the "Music As A Gradual
Process" aesthetic here too (damned if there isn't even a bit
of phasing in the central track too). "Once the process it set
up and loaded it runs by itself," Reich wrote, and there's something
of that here – for whatever reason Müller, Nakamura and,
well, does he have an official surname? "m" I suppose (make
that lowercase too so we don't confuse the Marseille-based turntablist-that-was
with Sachiko or the geezer in the James Bond films) are quite happy
to let the music roll inexorably on. It also seems that the tracks
have been "reorganized" (aka remixed), 1 and 3 by m and
2 by Müller, presumably to further streamline them and eliminate
surface irregularities and imperfections. My problem is I rather like
a few surface irregularities and imperfections – give me Beethoven
over Mozart every time – there's something annoying about Why
Not Bechamel. It's too damn good.—DW
Adelheid Sieuw / Jan Huib
Nas
THE LITTLE GREEN BITE CRASHED
Inaudible 002
This collection of nine brief duets for flute
/ bass flute (Sieuw) and guitar (Nas), recorded back in 2001 but just
seeing the light of day now, is as fresh and direct as its hand painted
golden cornfield cover art. Both Brussels-based musicians (husband
and wife) reveal a wide knowledge of the repertoire of their respective
instruments – and I don't just mean improv repertoire: Sieuw's
bass flute work, which was awarded a prize at the Panufnik Music Days
in 2001, is as close to classical shakuhachi as it is to Brian Ferneyhough's
"Mnemosyne", and Nas, a graduate of the Conservatory in
Antwerp, performed as a soloist with the new music ensembles Zeiklang
and the Nieuw Belgisch Kamerorkest before turning his attention to
free music. Not surprisingly then their music casts its net wide for
influences and references, from the gentle rustle of the opening "Frontal"
to the flamenco-on-downers of "Watch the tree", from the
energetic scrabble of "Learning to swim" to the lazy bottlenecking
of "Behind every corner". On "Traffic lights won't
work" Nas manages to sound like a cross between Jean Sébastien
Mariage and Eugene Chadbourne, and if that sounds improbable how about
the dream gig pairing of Watazumido and John Russell on "Where
is my cruise-control?" Inaudible? Not a bit. Irresistible, more
like.—DW
Paul Lytton & Jeffrey
Morgan
TERRA INCOGNITA
Konnex KCD 5128
Recorded in 2003 in Cologne's Loft, this duo
evokes the questing spirit of Paul Lytton's duo with Evan Parker from
1969 to 1976, one of early free improvisation's major and radical
performing units. With the frontier between noise and musical sounds
abolished, listeners will find the same volatility, unstable equilibrium
and tangential conversation in this, Lytton's first recording with
American expat altoist Morgan. Too many seem to think that Paul Lytton's
work can't exist outside his lifetime partnership with Evan Parker,
taking it for granted he'll continue to replicate the polyrhythmic
juggling act that has driven the trio with Parker and Guy forward
since 1983. On learning that Lytton has teamed up with Morgan, New
Orthodoxy improv rationalists could be forgiven for expecting a truly
regressive expressionist free jazz mess. Morgan is after all a terrible
alto sax wailer; you only have to hear his Sign of The Raven
(Uton15), another Loft recording made in 1998 with drummer Mark Sanders
and bassist Peter Jacquemyn, or his Dial Log with redux/noise
icon Keith Rowe on Matchless.. But Terra Incognita, also
the title of a half-hour duo improvisation followed by two shorter
pieces, reveals Lytton to be first and foremost a 100% authentic écriture
automatique sound poet. He has no problem resisting his playing
partner's tendency to blow reed and mouthpiece white-hot. And he does
it without a drum kit – there's a snare drum and a few cymbals,
but the rest is just contact-miked wires and objects played with spoons,
toothbrushes, forks and bows, the wires sometimes bent with the help
of bass drum foot pedals. With one foot lowering the pitch of a string,
one hand scratching a wire and the other outlining a rhythmic figure
evaporating in surreal metallic sounds – sounds I've never heard
in more than a thousand albums of improv that have passed through
my hands – Lytton's lo-fi electronics and percussion leave plenty
of room for us to appreciate Morgan's multiphonics and air-column
squeezes. And what a clever sax player he is, spontaneous too. Avoiding
obvious quasi-conversational exchanges, both men reinforce their own
sonic idiosyncrasies in astute improv ping-pong behaviour that creates
unsuspected tension, softening the exchanges and slowing down the
music's unfolding. Lytton becomes delightfully erratic when Morgan
saturates his mouthpiece; excited at the wonderful poetry of his partner's
surrealist noise calligraphic embroidery, Morgan casts strange metallic
amalgams out of his alto sax, and Lytton once or twice has to refuse
his pleas for more agitated gestures at the end of "Moth Wing
Attachment". I've rarely heard more speaking noise practitioners
than this consummate drummer and fire-eating reedman, and my listening
time was well spent, without wondering if it was ten, twenty or forty
minutes. I hope yours will be too.—JMVS
Uncle Woody Sullender
NOTHING IS CERTAIN BUT DEATH
Deadceo dceo 006
Woody Sullender – goodness knows where
the "Uncle" bit comes from but if it manages to fool some
of the dumb hick redneck idiots who've just re-elected George Wanker
Bush into buying the album, all the better – is a Chicago based
banjo player, which means you can just hear Sheriff Eugene Chadbourne
whining something about this town ain't big enough for the both of
us. Well, my fellow Americans (I don't know why the hell I said that,
because I'm English, even though AMG's François Couture doesn't
seem to think so.. but I digress) if I have to choose between the
two duelling banjos, I'm afraid I'll have to side with Dr Chad. Despite
the guest appearances from Fred Lonberg-Holm, Jason Soliday and Carol
Genetti, and the fact that on "Sallie Goodman Breakdown"
Sullender actually invents a whole new genre (call it country noise),
the best thing about this album is its title – and the name
of the label too, come to think of it. Admit it folks, as musical
instruments go, the banjo is, despite its noble African heritage,
rather limited. Unless you hook it up to all kinds of effects pedals
and fuck it up altogether with electronics, which is what Uncle Woody
ends up doing, the only way to get any note to sustain for long enough
to sketch out a coherent harmonic movement is to strum frantically
away, which can if you're lucky fool people into thinking it's the
last twenty seconds of Ligeti's Continuum (Woody nearly gets away
with it on "Groundhog in the Courtyard") but more often
than not unfortunately sounds like, yep you guessed, Eugene Chadbourne.
Oh well at least Woody hasn't tried his hand at covering Johnny Paycheck
songs. Yet.—DW
brpobr
aRtonal aRR 07
brpobr (no, I can't pronounce it either)
is a trio consisting of Bernhard Breuer on drums and guitarists Fabian
Pollack and Michael Bruckner, and it's also the name of their debut
album. Unlike the dozens of austere lowercase outings that have been
recorded at Christoph Amann's studio in Vienna, this one's quite active,
kicking off with "life", an energetic workout that Noël
Akchoté compares favourably to early SME but on which to my
mind Breuer sounds more like Mark Saunders. It's probably not surprising
that the eclectic Akchoté likes these lads, as their music
goes in about as many directions as his does, from the gloomy clangs
of the detuned guitars on "as" to the Loren Connors noodling
of "by now" (the five track titles spell "life as we
see it by now" – shades of SSSD's "home is where my
hard disc was"..). It does make the album as a whole rather hard
to pin down, though; while the guitarists often seem quite content
to hit that long looming note and let it float, drummer Breuer seems
to be just itching to get busy. His insistent tapping and banging
sound remarkably like Reynols' Miguel Tomasín at times (hey,
there's praise for you), which is fine on "life" but makes
"we see" a rather unsettling experience. Still, I look forward
to seeing where these cats go from here. And if I figure out what
the name means, or how to say it, I'll let you know.—DW
Babardah
BABARDAH
Abzu 002
Wow, what with Mop and Brpobr, we've certainly
come up with some band names this month. A quartet this time, Babardah
is Piotr Michalowski on saxophones and bass clarinet, Mike Khoury
on violin, James Ilgenfritz on bass and Sarah Weaver on trombone,
and the nine tracks, entitled "Peliczaple", "Nyicnyac",
"Rathi", "Krvilak", "Tauton", "Rostador",
"Raparossi", "Giuggio" and "Galumfuja"
(does anyone out there remember the old BBC series Call My Bluff?
Frank Muir and Denis Norden would have had a ball with this lot) were
recorded in the slightly less exotically named (but culturally significant)
city of Ann Arbor, Michigan in April 2004. Mike Khoury is also the
éminence grise behind Entropy Records (whose reissue of
Griot Galaxy's Live at the DIA was one of last year's indisputable
highlights.. woe betide you if you didn't get your copy), which might
go some way to explaining the free jazz inflections of much of Babardah's
music. Khoury in particular sounds well-versed in the Leroy Jenkins
back catalogue, and there's a terse, spunky attitude to Michalowski
and Weaver's blowing beautifully backed up by Ilgenfritz's bass, which
in a blind test I would probably have guessed as Sirone (assuming
the violinist was Jenkins etc. etc. – remind me never
to agree to do a real blind test). This is direct, open and strong
free music, just the ticket if, like me, you want to restore your
faith in the good people of the United States of America.—DW
Phô
THIS IS HANDIWORK
Humbug 040
Take 5lb beef bones with marrow, 5lb oxtails,
1lb flank steak, 2 large onions (unpeeled, halved and studded with
8 cloves), 3 shallots (unpeeled), 1 2oz piece of ginger (unpeeled),
8 star anise, 1 cinnamon stick, 4 parsnips (cut in two-inch chunks),
2 ts salt, 1lb beef sirloin, 2 thinly sliced scallions (spring onions
if you're from this side of the pond),1 tb chopped cilantro (aka coriander),
2 onions (thinly sliced), 1/4 cup hot chili sauce, 1lb rice noodles
(1/4-inch wide or banh pho), 1/2 cup Nuoc mam (Vietnamese fish sauce),
freshly ground black pepper, 2 cups fresh bean sprouts, 2 fresh chili
peppers (sliced), 2 limes cut in wedges, 1 bunch of fresh mint, 1
bunch regular basil. Soak bone overnight in cold water. Place bones,
oxtails and flank steak in a large stock pot. Add water to cover and
bring to a boil. Cook 10 minutes, drain and rinse pot and bones. Return
bones to pot, add 6 quarts water and bring to a boil. Skim surface
of scum and fat. Stir bones at bottom from time to time. Add 3 more
quarts water, bring to a boil again and skim scum. Lower heat and
let simmer. Char clove-studded onions, shallots, and ginger under
a broiler until they release their fragrant odors (you can tell this
was written by an American, can't you?). Tie charred vegetables, star
anise, and cinnamon stick in a thick, dampened cheesecloth. Put it
in stock with parsnips and salt. Simmer for 1 hour. Remove flank steak
and continue simmering broth, uncovered pot, for 4-5 hours. Add more
water if level goes below bones. Meanwhile, slice beef sirloin against
grain into paper-thin slices, about 2-by-2 inches. Slice flank steak
the same way. Set aside. In a small bowl, combine scallions, cilantro,
and half the sliced onions. Place remaining onions in another bowl
and mix in hot chili sauce. Soak rice noodles in warm water for 30
minutes. Drain and set aside. When broth is ready, discard bones.
Strain broth through a colander lined with a double layer of damp
cheesecloth into a clean pot. Add fish sauce and bring to a boil.
Reduce heat to simmer. In another pot, bring 4 quarts of water to
a boil. Add noodles and drain immediately. Do not overcook noodles.
Divide among 4 large soup bowls. Top noodles with sliced meats. Bring
broth to a rolling boil, then ladle into soup bowls. Garnish with
scallions mixture and black pepper. Serve the onions in hot chili
sauce and remaining ingredients on the side to add as desired. Also,
you can add Hoisin sauce as a dip. Serves 4. While you're eating you
may like to listen to the album by the group of the same name, consisting
of Morten Olsen and Nicolas Field on drums, Bjornar Habbestad on flutes
and electronics, and John Hegre guesting on guitar. Or maybe not,
as it's a regular brain fry of noisy splatter bang improv, tough,
loud and about as subtle as the album's cover art, which shows a pig
with some sort of butt plug inserted. If it's supposed to be a radical
animal rights kinda pro vegetarian statement, maybe someone should
tell these guys that phô is made with beef, not pork.—DW
John Butcher
CAVERN WITH NIGHTLIFE
Weight of Wax WOW 01
Having wound down and subsequently wound
up his Acta label – though several Actas are screaming out for
reissue (A New Distance, News from the Shed..) –
John Butcher has gone ahead and.. started up another one, Weight of
Wax. One can't help thinking the name was chosen for the thrill of
seeing the abbreviation "WOW" on the spine of the disc,
and much of the music on WOW 01 certainly elicits that exclamation.
Cavern with Nightlife brings together material recorded on
two occasions during a tour of Japan in November 2002; four solo tracks
("Ideoplast", "Ashfall", "Mustard Bath"
and "Ejecta") recorded in the extraordinarily resonant acoustic
of the Oya Stone Museum, a 20,000 square metre space 60 metres underground,
and a 19 minute duet "Practical Luxury" with the no input
mixing board of Toshimaru Nakamura in the warmer and more intimate
surroundings of SuperDeluxe in Tokyo. The solo tracks are, as might
be expected, preoccupied – obsessed might be a more appropriate
word – with the acoustics of the space. Like other notable albums
recorded in seriously reverberant environments – Carlos Zingaro's
Solo on In Situ comes to mind – the music needs time
to breathe (Phil Minton and Roger Turner would be well advised to
turn down a gig here) and maps out the acoustics of the chilly museum
to perfection. Butcher is, after all, a dab hand at getting the venue
on his side, be it a sweaty club or a draughty church. That said,
for Brian Morton to describe "Mustard Bath" as "one
of the most remarkable saxophone pieces ever recorded" (in the
last Wire) is, well, pushing it a bit – it's the singing in
the shower effect: the piercing trills and squeaking barks of Butcher's
soprano sax, mighty impressive though they are, would sound pinched
and flat if he'd recorded them in, say, SuperDeluxe. Which brings
us neatly to "Practical Luxury", Butcher's first and so
far only duo with Toshi Nakamura, though one imagines the two have
crossed paths on several occasions in Erstwhile-related events. Familiar
as I am with certain reservations expressed by the saxophonist in
person about the phenomenon of lowercase improv and its practitioners,
Nakamura being one of the most important, I'll admit that on opening
the envelope I went straight for this one. Now, after listening to
it about a dozen times, I still can't decide if it works or not. Slow
moving it is, but hardly static; Nakamura is, by his own standards,
quite active, and his dangerous explorations right at the cliff edge
of feedback give the music a bite and intensity often lacking in the
genre. Even so, Butcher sounds more like he's researching the sax
as opposed to playing it (and if you want to talk extended techniques,
today's splutterers and flutterers have still got a hell of a way
to go before they match him), complementing Nakamura rather than engaging
with him. (It's not just a question of acoustic vs. electronic instruments,
either, as his duos with Steve Beresford – see below –
make abundantly clear.) But such are the unwritten rules of today's
improvised music – don't you dare say it's non-idiomatic
– and John Butcher understands them as well as anybody.
"Practical Luxury" is intriguing, and will have you coming
back for more, but I have a sneaking suspicion that in years to come
I'll be more likely to return to his other solo albums – Thirteen
Friendly Numbers, Fixations and Invisible
Ear.—DW
Low Resistance Group
LOW RESISTANCE GROUP
Paradisc PACD 012
Michael Rodgers is right: it's a great
start to an album. Performances of improvised music very often begin
– and almost invariably end – with a whimper, rather than
a bang; very few pieces start mid sentence, as it were. (Scott Walker's
"Patriot" comes to mind, though that's not improv.) Low
Resistance Group is a trio featuring Anthony Guerra (guitar and electronics),
Paul Hood (GP3 record player, amplified objects and mixing desk) and
Joel Stern (field recordings, contact mics, electronics), and these
six tracks were recorded in London in 2002, one of them at Resonance
FM. Hood, as both broadcaster on ResFM and performer in his own right,
is an enthusiastic bridgehead of Japanese improvised music, hence
the release of this album on Kyoto-based Paradisc (plus of course
Hood's own appearance on Meeting At Off Site Vol.3 on IMJ),
while Guerra and Stern have since returned down under after a relatively
brief but fruitful stay in the British capital – their joint
outing Stitch on Impermanent is well worth hunting out, as are Stern's
other field recording / improv collaborations with Matt Davis (Small
Industry on L'innomable) and Michael Northam (Wormwood,
Ground Fault). The music of Low Resistance Group is a superb and convincing
résumé of several trends in contemporary improv: the
aforementioned incorporation of sound material recorded in the outside
world and used as raw material for live transformation (Luc Ferrari's
description of DJ Olive and eRikm as "les nouveaux concrets"
applies just as well to Stern), an increasing reliance on contact
microphones to reveal the secrets of surfaces and objects (not exactly
new – Hugh Davies's pioneering work comes to mind – but
certainly l'air du temps) and an openness to diatonic harmony
and a readiness to accept the influence of folk, pop and rock as willingly
as early European improv incorporated – and ultimately subverted
– jazz. Certainly the most convincing outing of its kind since
last year's Open
on Erstwhile, with Mark Wastell, Phil Durrant and Matt Davis,
this is a beautifully recorded and superbly mixed album, instantly
captivating yet rich in detail, and worth getting hold of this side
of Christmas.—DW
Steve Beresford
I SHALL BECOME A BAT
Qbico 18 (LP)
I'll never forget day I bought my copy of
Steve Beresford's The Bath Of Surprise, originally an LP
on David "Flying Lizard" Cunningham's Piano label (Piano
003), but happily recently reissued on CD on Amoebic thanks to the
good auspices of one Otomo Yoshihide. As a miserable 18-year-old undergraduate
away from home for the first time, two things kept me going through
my first term at Cambridge. One was Garon Records, on King Street,
the other the Cricketers Arms across the park in the district known
as The Kite, and I still wonder which one of those two venerable institutions
saw more of my first grant cheque (yeees, youngsters, back
then they used to pay you to go to college). The
impact of Beresford's title track, on which he "plays" bath
water, nailbrush, body, whistles, tubes, reeds and balloons (and presumably
invited Cunningham into his bathroom to record the event), on a cold,
rainy November afternoon as I sat facing an overflowing ashtray and
a mindnumbingly dull exercise in Palestrina-style four-part counterpoint
was cataclysmic. Beresford was, without doubt, as certifiably insane
as my life at the time, and instantly became something of a hero.
A couple of years later I watched, awestruck, as he climbed into a
grand piano on a warm summer night somewhere near Tring in rural Hertfordshire,
where Alterations, his group with David Toop, Peter Cusack and Terry
Day, opened for (I think) Kip Hanrahan. Or was it Charlie Haden's
Liberation Music Orchestra? Can't remember and don't care –
the Alterations gig was what I'd come for.
Though I've since discovered several activities just as futile, frustrating
and time-consuming as late 16th century counterpoint and given up
smoking, I'm happy to report that I Shall Become A Bat is
as instantly enjoyable (if not as immediately surprising – I've
heard plenty of stuff weirder than this) as The Bath Of Surprise
was 23 (gulp) years ago. It looks as good as it sounds too, adorned
with one of Marcel Duchamp's Rotorelief pieces (a clear precursor
of Op Art, back in 1935!). Though it might be tempting to perch above
your turntable as it plays, spacing out to the groovy images man,
you'd better watch out: the music is about as far from tune in turn
up and trip out as you're likely to get. Side one features four duets
recorded in April 2003 by Beresford (on "electronics and objects"
and I think we'd better leave it at that.. an exhaustive inventory
of the man's arsenal of toys and gadgets would probably end up longer
than the rest of this review, and might even be more interesting)
and John Butcher (on tenor and soprano saxes, of course) at Finsbury
Park's "legendary" Red Rose. It's a classic slab of great
British improv to file away with other notable recent excursions in
the genre (Lunge's Strong
Language, Phil Minton's duo outings with Roger Turner..),
fast moving, hilariously inventive and technically impressive. Butcher
can, as we've seen above, take the time to explore the nuances of
extended techniques while he goes the distance with the likes of Toshi
Nakamura, but somehow he seems to be in his element here, as Beresford's
constantly surprising changes of direction and instrumentation force
him to use every ounce of musical intelligence.
Side B is taken up with an extended duo, the album's title track,
recorded back (back!) in 2000, when Mark Wastell and Rhodri Davies
organised and taped a whole series of improv concerts in St Michael
and All Angels Church, West London, where on August 23rd that year,
Beresford was joined by Richard Sanderson. The pace of the music might
have slowed somewhat from speedy sax to leisurely laptop, but the
invention level is just as high, and the ear just as acute. The range
of sounds on offer is wide and fantastic, from gloomy drones (did
someone give these guys the keys to All Angels' organ loft too?) to
snatches of birdsong to toy guitar Metal licks to what sounds like
those annoying grainy beeps you pick up in your Walkman when someone's
trying to use a mobile phone next to you. Sanderson's work here, as
in Ticklish with Phil Durrant and Kev Hopper, flirts deliciously with
the fringes of soft techno in much the way that Beresford used to
play fast and loose with doowop and dub reggae, but the overall sonority
of the music remains firmly in the eai scheme of things. It's eai
with a twinkle in the eye, though. The extraordinary freshness of
Steve Beresford's music a quarter of a century on from when he first
started scaring the shit out of the likes of Braxton and Leo Smith
at Derek Bailey's Company Weeks is a joy to listen to. Unlike many
big names in improv, including (arguably) Bailey himself, Beresford
has not, to paraphrase Ned Rothenberg in this month's feature interview,
"created an idiom out of what he's not going to do." Nor
has his musical language ever atrophied into a goody bag of sure-fire
"tricks", as Paul Lovens calls them. Any young improviser
in the British capital will tell you how committed Beresford is in
his support for the London scene, and that same infectious enthusiasm
spills out into everything he does, from slopping the bathwater all
over David Cunningham's Uher to hooting and squealing along with John
Butcher in the Red Rose. Great stuff.—DW
Fred Van Hove
SPRAAK & ROLL
Wimpro CD 030304 2CD
Like Dan and the Steve Beresford LP above,
I remember all too well buying my first Fred Van Hove vinyl during
the antwerpse King Kong fest, and ever since that lost Monday
– Verloren Maandag – whatever solo piano (or
organ) recordings of Van Hove that are released invariably end up
in my collection. Thirty years after the Vogel solos and the SAJ vinyls,
the Nuscope and Potlatch labels each issued one in 1998. Flux,
the Potlatch offering, was a double CD containing two extended live
recordings, and the second of these two CDs likewise contains one
long improvisation, "Roll-Over" (46'30"). The rest
of that disc and the first CD Spraak concentrates on shorter
studio pieces superbly recorded by Michaël W. Huon in Brussels
in August and September 2003. Spraak is Flemish for speech,
hence the lips on the cardboard Wimpro gatefold. And that's what Fred's
piano playing is about: letting the instrument speak. The shorter
cuts speak better, perhaps, telling stories and concentrating ideas
and meanings that could be extended and stretched into hour-long concerts.
Like the strand of blond hair on the Roll side of the disc,
the three "Roll" outings stretch ideas into the long form.
Van Hove is a true master of his own idiosyncratic kind of form, one
as far from academic composition as it is from scholarly jazz. Spraak
& Roll moves and speaks for itself. Genuinely expressive,
movingly brilliant, deeply felt, truly living.—JMVS
ELECTRONIC
Collections of Colonies
of Bees
CUSTOMER
Polyvinyl PRC 077
 For
their latest outing, which also comes in an LP version – a
composite of the electronic tracks on the US and Japanese CD releases
– CCB's Jon Mueller and Chris Rosenau have teamed up with
former Pele playing partner Jon Minor and Jim Schoenecker (who themselves
perform as a duo called Dartanjal.. are you taking notes on this?
questions will follow) to produce ten tracks of their habitually
elegant postcountryglitchbillyindiepop, nine of which are entitled
"Fun", which is what they'll probably end up having when
it comes to the grisly business of collecting royalties. The endearingly
generic packaging (see above) credits Mueller on "things"
– hilarious! – but his trademark splatter'n'scratch
percussion is in evidence, and, along with tasty guitar licks courtesy
Rosenau and Minor, is beautifully deconstructed and reconfigured
by computers in one of the freshest and most satisfying releases
of the year. Make no mistake: if this one had come out with Jim
O'Rourke's or Dave Grubbs' or Christian Fennesz's name on it, you'd
be seeing it on a number of 2004 Top Ten lists. The final track,
by the way, is entitled "Funeral", but don't be fooled:
these lads are very much alive and kicking. Said it before, I'll
say it again: buy now or cry later.—DW
Michael J. Schumacher
STORIES
Quecksilber 8
Stories continues where last year's
excellent double CD on XI, Room
Pieces, and the 2002 Sedimental outing Four Stills left
off, exploring Michael J. Schumacher's exquisite real time computer
manipulated samples. Those familiar with these albums – and
if you're not you damn well ought to be – will recognise the
ornate drone world of "Still" (2004), the latest in a series
of works bearing the title. What might be harder to take for fans
coming to Schumacher's work via La Monte Young (the two have worked
together off and on since 1989) is the shattered surface of "Two,
Three and Four Part Inventions". Sourced in a wide range of samples
courtesy of an impressive list of guest collaborators (Tim Barnes,
Charles Curtis, Donald Miller, Peter Zummo, and many more), Schumacher's
work sounds rather like those wonderful potty early recordings of
Cage's graphic scores. More Atlas Eclipticalis than Well
Tuned Piano, for sure. Compared to "Still" it's a rather
frosty piece, easy to respect but hard to love. Much of Schumacher's
work is geared to the installation projects and extended live concerts
that he curates at his Diapason Gallery – see Julian Cowley's
splendid feature on the place in The Wire (#248) –
and one might be forgiven for assuming that some of this music might
be easier to approach in situ. But bear with it: "Room
Pieces New York" works its charms, constructing a curious logic
that links Björk-like gasps (Rebecca Moore, I assume) and disembodied
speech fragments with delicate feedback scribblings and distant yet
ever-present hums and buzzes. And "Pulse" is perfectly accessible,
if a little on the long side, with its Debussyesque waves of MIDI
piano.—DW
Audible
3
AUDIBLE 3
Aud3-001
Quite why New Zealand has produced so much
drone-based music – of such consistently high quality –
is a mystery, but here's some more: Auckland-based Audible 3, aka
Paul Winstanley, John Kennedy and Marc Chesterman (one should also
mention Omit's Clinton Williams, who recorded sounds specially for
the group to use) specialise in slow moving but rhythmically identifiable
eai, the kind of stuff that might be branded as "ambient"
if the pulses were a little more regular and upfront and the melodic
profile higher. "Transition Place" wouldn't be out of place
on an em:t compilation, whereas the opening "Crater", with
its integration of strange abstract samples into a predominantly stable
harmonic context of has more in common with Michael Schumacher (see
elsewhere this issue). Sometimes lugubrious ("Worm"), sometimes
playful ("All Saints" – any Eno connection, I wonder?
– seems to be trying to break out into a beat) but constantly
atmospheric and accessible, it's is a well-crafted and enjoyable debut.—DW
Stephan Mathieu
ON TAPE
Hapna H18
In welcoming silence over recent years, improvised
music has opened a window onto the world beyond the performing space
itself, and improvisers have not surprisingly become increasingly
interested not only in the ambient sound of their venues but also,
through the use of ever more affordable technology, recordings of
the world outside, effectively removing that thick glass panel that
used to separate the recording engineer from the performing musician.
The career of Stephan Mathieu, originally from Saarbrücken in
Germany, illustrates the evolution well. Originally an improvising
drummer, Mathieu moved over to working with computers in the late
1990s, releasing notable work on Ritornell, Fällt, Staalplaat
and Orthlorng Musork. This 32 minute recording was made live at a
concert recorded in Stockholm’s Fylkingen in February this year
in which Mathieu presented a work based on recordings sent to him
by Andreas and Johan Berthling and Tomas Hallonsten, aka Tape, and
saxophonist Magnus Granberg. While his previous electronic work, including
his notable collaboration with Ekkehard Ehlers on Heroin,
often sought – consciously or otherwise – to disguise
the acoustic origins of his source sounds through heavy processing,
On Tape is touchingly direct, building its textures through
simple superposition rather than complex processing. Mathieu layers
Granberg’s sustained saxophone tones into a subtly shifting
minor sixth drone and accompanies them with tiny flurries of percussion,
delicate metallic ricochets – think Michael Zerang meets Burkhard
Beins – and his incorporation of field recordings from insect
buzzes to birdsong and children’s voices blurs the distinction
between live and pre-recorded, raw and untreated, acoustic and electronic
in the same way that Hapna’s typically elegant cover photography
plays on the ambiguity between inside and outside.—DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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