| JULY
News 2005 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Nate Dorward, Nicholas Rice, Massimo Ricci, Jean-Michel
Van Schouwburg, Dan Warburton:
|
|
Editorial
On NotTwo: Vandermark 5 ALCHEMIA
In Concert in Paris: Eliane
Radigue / Aguirre & Fink / Curtis & Karis / Guionnet,
Denzler & Charmetant / Krieger, Licht & Barnes / Min
Xiao Fen & Yumiko Tanaka / Tetuzi Akiyama & Eric Cordier
Peter Wright
On ErstLive: Keith
Rowe / Sachiko M / Toshimaru Nakamura / Otomo Yoshihide
Best of British: Graham
Collier / Alan Skidmore / John Surman
In Concert in New York: Ligeti / Kurtag / Carter
/ Dallapiccola / Harbison / Dutilleux / Boulez / MacMillan
JAZZ & IMPROV: Bergman,
Coxhill & Hession / Bailey & Parker / Leimgruber, Demierre
& Phillips / Sclavis & Montera / Sound on Survival /
Braxton & Bauder / Jon Rose / Nickendes Perlgras
Okkyung Lee / Soegaard
& Poulsen / Wadada Leo Smith / Mats Gustafsson / Barberan,
Garcia, Fages, Costa Monteiro / EKG / Fefer & Few
CONTEMPORARY: David
Behrman / Robert Normandeau /
ELECTRONICA: Morceaux
de Machines / Thomas Köner / Punck / Peter Wright / Peter
Rehberg
Last month
|
Truth is, as they say, stranger than fiction.. I opened the issue
of PT that appeared bright and early on the morning of April 1st this
year with an April Fools' story about
an imaginary label called Pisces (remember in French they say poisson
d'avril) and some utterly implausible releases supposedly available
for free download. Or at least I thought they were utterly
implausible – it turns out that Sunny Murray and Henry Grimes
did play together in a gallery in February (when, you'll recall,
Grimes was in town for the Sons d'Hiver concert reviewed here), as
I found out when I received this angry mail from the redoubtable Margaret
Davis, Grimes' partner and business manager: "I would like an
immediate explanation and full contact information for your 'main
man' Olivier Flétan. We did not authorize anyone to record,
let alone release, the Henry Grimes & Sunny Murray duets that
took place in the gallery in Paris last February (I don't know what
'L'Ecailler' is, since that wasn't the name of the gallery). No one
made a contract with Henry Grimes (or me on his behalf), and the 'exciting
new label Pisces' did not pay Henry his fee and has absolutely no
right to have dealings with Henry's music." When I pointed out
to Margaret that the whole story was a big hoax hahaha she wasn't
the least bit amused.. OK so I wasn't expecting everyone to know that
"flétan" means "halibut" and "écailler"
is an oyster seller, but I thought she might have spotted
a few of the other Pisces releases as the utter spoofs they so obviously
were. She would if she'd read the whole issue of Paris Transatlantic
that featured the reviews of Mr Grimes' music, but, hey, it's the
Internet, and you're free to surf and click on what takes your fancy
and leave the rest behind. But if you don't like what you read in
these pages, do me a favour and do that, OK? Just close the Web page
and do something else with your time, instead of playing Sheriff and
threatening the send in the lawyers to "find this person and
put him out of business immediately.." For those of you who don't
understand French, bonne lecture means happy reading.—DW
ALCHEMIA
Not Two MW 750-2 12xCD
Recorded
over five days, from March 15th – 19th 2004 in the club of the
same name in Cracow, Poland, Alchemia documents the entirety
of the Vandermark 5's residency in that fair city, and provides much
more than a snapshot of one of the hardest working groups in contemporary
jazz at the height of its powers. In addition to 21 Vandermark originals,
including three new pieces, "Camera", "That Was Now"
and "Pieces Of The Past", the programme featured no fewer
than 10 Rahsaan Roland Kirk compositions, two pieces by Sonny Rollins
("The Bridge" and Part Two of "The Freedom Suite")
and works by Don Cherry ("There Is The Bomb"), Archie Shepp
("Wherever June Bugs Go") and, to celebrate his 75th birthday,
Cecil Taylor ("Conquistador, Part 2"). As well as Ken Vandermark
(reeds), the band includes Dave Rempis (saxophones), Jeb Bishop (trombone),
Kent Kessler (bass) and Tim Daisy (drums), in other words the V5 line-up
as it has been since 2001 (Bishop has since left the group, apparently
to be replaced by Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello).
In a recent review for PT, Stephen
Griffith, a KV fan if ever there was one, wondered "whether the
world really needs a12-disc Vandermark 5 live set.." Were that
to be rephrased as: "Is there a market for a 12-disc Vandermark
5 live set?" the answer would be a resounding yes, since producer
Marek Winiarski recently confirmed he'd already shifted over 250 boxes
in the States alone – out of an edition of 1000, which is no
mean undertaking for a small, fledgling label. If one counts these
12 discs as just one element of the V5 discography and includes compilations,
the group has released 14 albums over the past nine years, making
it one of the best-documented outfits in jazz today. Following the
development of the V5 on disc from 1997's Single Piece Flow
to last year's Elements of Style is a fascinating exercise,
and, if album sales and critical acclaim are anything to go by, one
that many jazz fans (Mr Griffith included) have undertaken with great
relish. As such, Alchemia is something that any self-respecting
Vandermark fan can't really afford to be without, even if the idea
of shelling out something in the region of $100 ($90 I believe if
you order it direct from Not Two's Website at nottwo.com) might not
appeal at first.
OK, OK, so much for the Not Two promo publicity spin. Stephen Griffith's
musing raises another important question: could this be the beginning
of a trend? It's not inconceivable that similar small labels could
follow suit and release for public consumption equally huge box sets
documenting literally hundreds of concerts, especially if they adopt
the cheaper CDR format. These days (to quote Morrissey, stop me if
you've heard this one before) anyone with an Mbox or portable DAT
recorder and a laptop with some editing and mastering software can
print and release a superb quality live recording with attractive
packaging and liners to boot for next to nothing. A casual glance
at the hundreds of discs reviewed at this site over the past few years
will reveal many of them to be just that (though not all are CDRs,
of course). But allow me if you will to quote from Ned Rothenberg's
interview with Sasha Burov: "I have thousands of tapes of gigs,
good gigs, that I don't need to release. I have a very different attitude
towards making CDs from some of my friends, people like Evan [Parker],
or Elliott [Sharp]. Their attitude is albums come out, people know
them for a little while, and then it's over. Like they were magazines.
Not like each one is perfect, it's just so people know what you're
doing. Nowadays everything can be recorded in so much higher quality
– this isn't like Charlie Parker recorded by Dean Benedetti
in the bathroom – and everybody has a digital tape recorder.
We're drowning in material, and drowning in musicians, and everything
is being packaged, repackaged. How many times are you going to put
out Kind of Blue?"
 Is
the "record-as-document" idea the way to go? It seems fair
to assume that if today's technology had been around in the 1950s
and 1960s we'd now have literally thousands of hours more Miles, Monk,
Coltrane, Dolphy (the list goes on..) to listen to, which is great
if you're a diehard fan, but even the most assiduous collector still
only has 24 hours in a day. I was asked why so few of the records
I selected for my totally self-indulgent Top 40 a couple of years
ago date from the past five years, and the simple answer to that is
that I haven't had the time – and, if things carry on the way
they are now, probably never will have – to listen to new albums
more than a handful of times before the next new disc gets popped
into the machine. I've had great fun listening to Alchemia,
and can proudly report I've given each of the 12 discs my undivided
attention at least three times – but is that really enough?
The advantage of a huge set like this is that one can at least approach
it in different ways. It's enlightening to chart the progress of the
new Vandermark compositions over the five evenings – "Camera"
appears no fewer than five times, "That Was Now" four times
and "Pieces Of The Past" twice – listen to how the
band gradually warm to the material, gaining assurance with each successive
performance. Adopting another tack, you could extract a whole album
or double album of V5 covers, those famous "free jazz classics",
one of which could be entirely given over to the Rahsaan Roland Kirk
material (for those who didn't net the Free Kings bonus CD
with the first 1500 copies of Elements of Style). And we
haven't even mentioned the last two discs of the set, which document
a couple of lively jam sessions held by the V5 with locals Marcin
and Bartlomiej Oles sitting in.. Very few people will have the time
to play the whole set back to back, but if you do you'll appreciate
the difference between the first and last days, and how the group
responds to ever more enthusiastic crowds as the week progresses.
There's much to recommend Alchemia: the recordings are uniformly
excellent (though had I been mixing them I might have been tempted
to add just a smidgeon of reverb..), the liner notes, apart from a
few typos, informative (well, the Vandermark interview at least –
'fraid my Polish isn't up to tackling Maciej Karlowski's essay), and
the music, needless to say, superbly played. I am, however, reminded
of a remark made by Vandermark's former Flying Luttenbachers boss
Weasel Walter on a Bagatellen thread discussing this very box ("bless
his funny little Midwestern work ethic.."): Alchemia
is, like it or not, another example of contemporary culture's information
overload, perfect perhaps for people who pay to have 200 channels
of Cable TV and only ever watch two of them, or who download zillions
of megabytes of music and video only to have them languish unheard
and unwatched in hard drives. I sincerely hope that anyone who invests
in this document can find more time to spend with it than I have (so
far): but I do have a sneaking suspicion that it won't be long before
another equally enormous box set comes along to claim everybody's
attention.—DW
Eliane
Radigue
PSI 847
Rue de Hauteville, Paris
22nd May 2005
 Had
anyone wanted to wipe out a sizeable percentage of the French capital's
new music personalities, a strategically placed explosive device in
the large, bare and slightly dilapidated ground floor space off a
quiet street in the Xème arrondissement would have done just
fine. They'd gathered there on a sunny Sunday afternoon to attend
a private concert – invitations were circulated by email and
spread like wildfire – organised by architect and new music
enthusiast Stéphane Roux, which was originally to have begun
with a work for cello (Mark Wastell) and electronics by Hervé
Boghossian, by way of a prelude to a rare performance of an even rarer
work, Eliane Radigue's PSI 847, last heard in New York City's
Kitchen back in 1973. A review of that concert by then Village Voice
critic Tom Johnson was tacked up on the studio wall (and Johnson,
as it turned out, was in the audience again today, having moved to
Paris twenty years ago), and, like Radigue's music, it hadn't aged
a bit. As it turned out, the premiere of Boghossian's piece had to
be postponed, which was unfortunate but did serve to underline the
uniqueness of Radigue's 80-minute tape composition, whose original
reel-to-reel analogue tapes were mixed with extraordinary precision
by Lionel Marchetti – another great pair of ears – and
diffused in quadrophony to four speakers meticulously placed in the
corners of the room.
Describing Radigue's music is about as pointless as describing a Rothko
("well, umm, there's this big red patch and this big brown patch
next to it.."): it seems alarmingly simple but is meticulously
constructed ("all done by hand," the composer smiled modestly
as she acknowledged the applause at the end of the work, "like
knitting, really..") and, as Johnson astutely pointed out in
his original write-up, remains strikingly intimate despite its imposing
scale and lack of live performers – interesting comparisons
could be made with the music of Phill Niblock. Radigue was evidently
delighted with the rapturous reception the work received, but admitted
that if she were to redo the work today "it would probably end
up not quite as long.." Adding, with just a hint of cheekiness
in her smile, "but I'm not going to do it again!" A DAT
recorder was in evidence.. dare we hope that this magnificent and
little known work might soon surface on CD? Watch this space –
an interview with Mme Radigue is coming soon.
Marcelo
Aguirre / Michael Jon Fink
Charles Curtis / Aleck Karis
Instants Chavirés, May 27th 2005
Though
Michael Jon Fink is perhaps best known to readers of these pages as
a pianist, having penned and performed several hauntingly beautiful
Feldman-inflected (but unashamedly tonal) compositions for California's
Cold Blue label, he's just as adept at tone painting with a guitar
in his hands. Accompanied by percussionist Marcelo Aguirre, sitting
behind an impressive array of gongs and cymbals, Fink's guitar playing
was discreet but highly nuanced – Jorg Maria Zeyer's work with
Perlonex came to mind – in a 40-minute set of delicate improvisations
that was warmly received by the public, though several diehard improv
heads propping up the bar at the Instants Chavirés (which is
usually where you find me) were heard to mutter "New Age"
under their breath, as if it was some vile expletive.
Dirty word it might be round these parts, but "New Age"
could certainly describe  Charles
Curtis's Music For Awhile, an elegant but decidedly soft
3" CD with Henry Grant and Peter Imig released a couple of years
ago on Beaurivage. For his appearance at the Instants, however, Curtis
– back on his customary cello – was joined by pianist
Aleck Karis for a performance of Morton Feldman's Patterns In
A Chromatic Field. Performances of fully notated contemporary
music are rare events at the Instants, a venue that usually concentrates
on supporting the outer reaches of improvised music, so audience expectations
were high (and the bar area deserted for 80 minutes), and Curtis and
Karis certainly didn't disappoint. Those familiar with the other available
recording of this particular Feldman work, by Rohan de Saram and Marianne
Schroeder on hatART, will have been immediately surprised by the decidedly
sprightly pace of Curtis's reading, but on further enquiry it turned
out he was following the composer's metronome markings to the letter.
Just because the works of Feldman's final period are long doesn't
mean they're necessarily slow. Far from it. The virtuosity of these
two performers was simply breathtaking – and happily their recording
of the work is available on Tzadik (TZ 8002) and strongly recommended
– Curtis's cello playing was utterly immaculate in terms of
intonation, rhythmic accuracy and especially attack. I know of no
other string player capable of beginning a bow more smoothly or change
bow direction more imperceptibly: let's hope someone can prevail upon
him to release his version of Terry Jennings's Piece for Cello
and Saxophone (mentioned, you will recall, in our feature a while
back on Alan Licht).
Jean-Luc
Guionnet / Bertrand Denzler / Thomas Charmetant
Ulrich Krieger / Alan Licht / Tim Barnes
Instants Chavirés, June 1st 2005
When the French five-piece free improv outfit Hubbub formed five years
ago, the difference in approach between the group's two saxophonists
Jean-Luc Guionnet (alto) and Bertrand Denzler (tenor) was clearly
audible – check out Hubbub's debut album Ub/Abu on
For4Ears – but over the years Guionnet and Denzler have worked
together with frequency (most recently on the Creative Sources outing
Vasistas with Taku Unami
and Kazushige Kinoshita) and have now become a formidable post-reductionist
double act. Joined by cellist Thomas Charmetant for an impressive
and not undramatic 40-minute set played in near total darkness, the
contrast between their music and the second half of the evening featuring
Text Of Light subset Ulrich Krieger (saxophones and electronics),
 Alan Licht
(guitar) and Tim Barnes (percussion and electronics) couldn't have
been more pronounced. While Barnes has revealed himself to be quite
at home in lowercase improv, having signed a number of fine releases
recently (with, amongst others, Mark Wastell and Tetuzi Akiyama),
and Krieger has appeared on several austere outings with the Zeitkratzer
ensemble of which he's an active member, Licht spells his minimalism
with a capital M, and his scorching drones are far removed from micro-improv's
near-empty soundscape. Several notable local alt.guitar heroes turned
up, presumably expecting the guitarist to deliver the kind of exuberant
feedback that graced his work with Rudolph Grey and the Blue Humans,
and they might have been disappointed to see him sitting back in typically
relaxed fashion (though the wall of sound he managed to build was
nonetheless rock solid for it). Spurred on by Licht's rugged drones,
Krieger and Barnes went somewhat over the top with gutbucket blasts
of raucous baritone sax and crashing timpani that would have been
better suited to one of the larger venues the musicians usually play
with Text Of Light. Once more the IC barflies groaned, but the larger-than-usual
public lapped it up.
Min
Xiao-Fen / Yumiko Tanaka
Tetuzi Akiyama / Eric Cordier
Instants Chavirés June 3rd 2005
 Teaming
up pipa virtuoso Min Xiao-Fen and gudayu-shamisen master Yumiko Tanaka
was an inspired move. While their duo improvisations were a pure delight,
one of those refreshingly simple and cliché-free experiences
typical of first time collaborations (well, sometimes..), their individual
offerings were startlingly different. Min Xiao-Fen, now resident in
New York, chose to play a cover of Monk's "Ask Me Now",
which was as pretty and quintessentially Downtown PoMo as one might
expect (whatever became of Hal Willner, I wonder?), while Tanaka opted
for traditional Japanese theatre, complete with dramatic guttural
vocals, and ending with a comical pidgin flourish: "Finish!"
Both women are consummate masters of their instruments, and happily
recordings exist of their fine work: check out Min Xiao-Fen's work
with John Zorn and Derek Bailey, and Yumiko Tanaka's outstanding solo
Tayutauta
on IMJ, reviewed in these pages a while back.
Next up was another Japanese string bender, Tetuzi Akiyama, joined
by local hurdy-gurdy man Eric Cordier for what was their second public
outing together (parts of the first, recorded a year and a half ago
at Les Voûtes, appeared on a recent Kokeko compilation album
well worth hunting down). The set certainly had its moments, but the
notoriously self-critical Cordier didn't look exactly satisfied, probably
Akiyama remained very much in his post-Fahey noodling mode, preferring
to engage with the hurdy-gurdy in the pitch / melody domain (which
presents something of a problem for Cordier, whose work is less concerned
with notes and more with texture). Perhaps Akiyama was saving something
in reserve for the evening's third set, a brief solo outing featuring
selections from his highly acclaimed Don't
Forget To Boogie album on Idea. The incessant blues licks
and thunderous power chords certainly thrilled the ears of the IC
regulars, many of whom had their fingers jammed tightly in their ears
(though the fragile Ms Tanaka, sitting at the back of the room, didn't,
and visibly loved every minute of it). Now that the Idea LP has become
a much sought after out of print collector's item, interested punters
should instead get hold of Akiyama's new Headz CD Route 13 To
The Gates Of Hell, which also features a live set of Boogie material,
but there's no real substitute for experiencing it live. Rock on!—DW
photo of Min by Jack Vartoogian
 Peter
Wright's music is projected skywards – through his soundscapes
of shattering feedback drones or layers of bowed guitars one gets
in touch with the basics of listening in a series of communicating
waiting rooms that constantly appear and disappear, reminding us that
human experience should not be measured in terms of so-called spiritual
values but by our ability to detect and reproduce colours in sounds
or physical vibrations. Born in New Zealand, today based in London,
Wright developed his strong musical personality in Christchurch, where
he formed a multitude of bands to explore the ideas he would eventually
fuse to mould his own magnificent work. Among these projects, many
of them immortalized on cassettes for the kRkRkRk label, Bent Gastropod
Omnibus and In Vitro contain the seed of the trademark Peter Wright
sound: peculiarly-tuned chiming guitars, introspection, ambience and
effects perfectly mixed with warped pop influences, plus a sort of
acoustic darkness gradually replacing the music's noisy genesis. Another
band, Leonard Nimoy, which Wright described as a Michael Gira-influenced
performance group to deeply shock audiences, better represented the
more violent aspects of Wright's early output. Coitus started out
as an Industrial conception, yet Wright was already charting out a
path towards what he calls "minimal, drifting instrumental music"
on the cassette releases "Man In Blue Box" and "Man
In Glass Cage", whose re-reworked material would later see the
light as Automaton on Wright's own Apoplexy label. These
and many other bands prepared the ground for the last decade, in which
Wright's skilful complexity affirmed itself with a vengeance. Since
the 90s he has released a sizeable body of work under his own name,
alone or with collaborators such as David Khan or Uton (the Birdsongs
For Sewers CD with the latter, on Digitalis, contains some Wright's
best recent music) while keeping some of his unfinished/previously
discarded work for his side project, Polio, where he recycles and
digitally manipulates the most disparate sonic sources in a "diseased
distillation" he calls "a reflection on my own association
and subsequent dependence on technology". "Collapse",
on Polio (Freedom From), brings together several Wright specialities:
an almost imperceptible prayer consisting of phantom harmonic sibilance
set against a backdrop of subsonic apprehension that progressively
makes way for an avalanche of scraped and bowed electric guitars,
ruling out any prospect of a tranquil existence. "Microtone"
is the rumbling outcome of a work on microphone feedback whose continuously
morphing shapes have devastating effects on the equilibrium. On other
outings under his own name, Radioplay and Syncopate (both
on Apoplexy), Wright includes shortwaves in his search for new horizons.
If other recordings like Soyuz and Gemini (also
on Apoplexy) are gripping in their dejected beauty, one of the highlights
of the whole Polio project is "Sandblaster", which opens
the Concrete album (on Humbug) – listening to its silence,
static frequencies, penetrating feedback loops, pulsating tremors
and vacant lights is like looking at a distant city at night from
a hilltop. Our deepest thoughts are carved in the grainy stone of
lost memories.
The economy of means with which Wright produces such gorgeous immobile
awareness is inversely proportional to the under-the-radar proliferation
of his limited-quantity editions that, for the most part, sell out
almost immediately. A comprehensive discography can be found on his
Distant Bombs website (www.mcharg.clara.net) and several of these
discs deserve a spot in the sunlight. For starters, the aforementioned
Automaton (Apoplexy) marks a decisive trait d'union
between the "Industrial" influences ("A Stone Blanket")
and a shamanic flow of electricity that finds its force in spirals
of unquiet twirls bathed in rusty agitation where voices as evil spirits
("Screaming Skulls") and pre-explosion piano monotony ("Terminus
II") surround the listener with menace. It's fractured, low-budget
musique concrète, but its effect on the nervous system
is often quite destabilizing. Duna (on Last Visible Dog)
alternates bagpipe-sounding strata of chordal dissonance and tense
vibration of adjacent tones with the furiously distorted, 31-minute
long "Without A Second Thought He Turned His Back To The People
And Painted The Wall", while The Broken Kawai (Pseudoarcana)
cross-pollinates pure noise experimentation with a spicy acousmatic
sauce – source sounds include bicycle parts and clarinet –
with impressive oleaginous patches extending ad infinitum over multi-frequency
feedback, drones finally succumbing to nervous silence. The final
"Roulette" bears the sacral character of a church organ's
reverberating overtones, and yet it's just a fantastic overlapping
of guitar infinity, a work whose detailed sounds and immaculate wholeness
put it in a class by itself among Wright's many marvels. Red Lion
(Tour Edition) is a collection of gradual detours to contagious
droning bliss in which Wright smothers the flames of a perennial anguish
with reverberating zinging strings and the environmental consonance
of faraway planes. This is one of Wright's strongest works, along
with his two releases on Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, A Tiny Camp
In The Wilderness and Catch A Spear As It Flies, the
latter featuring characteristically enthralling murals of relentless
guitar vibration and found sounds in a music that releases its enormous
harmonic power little by little, in a slowly uncoiling ceremonial.
On the same level is Desolation, Beauty, Violence (Digitalis),
composed on a 12-string Danelectro plus "minimal effects and
field recordings"; the fixed vibrational purr of the astounding
"Adrift at 30,000 ft" manages to be down-to-earth and celestially
radiant at one and the same time. "Kashmir" translates the
sound of the Danelectro into myriad sitars, while "Evening at
Ben Ohay" is one of the most intense static compositions you're
likely to hear. Maybe the most involuntarily "devotional"
record by Peter, Desolation, Beauty, Violence could be the
perfect starting point to penetrate the tortuous, sublime underworld
of this gifted, hyperactive yet still virtually unknown master painter.—MR
Keith
Rowe / Sachiko M / Toshimaru Nakamura / Otomo Yoshihide
ErstLive 005 3CD
 Erstwhile's
indefatigable boss Jon Abbey has taken full advantage of the excellent
live recordings made at the last two AMPLIFY festivals, firstly by
releasing the 7CD + DVD box documenting the Tokyo edition of AMPLIFY
(reviewed in these pages
a year and a half ago) and secondly by launching the ErstLive imprint
with its elegant slimline jewel boxes, the first four of which you
can also read about here. ErstLive
005, like its predecessors, was recorded at the German edition of
AMPLIFY (shared between Cologne and Berlin) in May 2004, but in terms
of scope and scale it's in another ballpark altogether. The concert
that took place in Berlin's Backfabrik on May 14th featured Keith
Rowe (guitar and electronics), Sachiko M (sinewaves, contact microphone
on object), Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing board) and Otomo Yoshihide
(turntables and electric guitar) – between them they've appeared
on no fewer than 15 Erstwhile releases, not including the AMPLIFY
box and this 3CD set – and was unique in that it lasted four
hours.
Non-stop performances of music lasting over two hours are, of course,
rare occurrences. I can think offhand of three that I've attended,
none all the way through – (opera of course is excluded, since
its division into acts allows plenty of time for punters to stretch
their legs and stuff themselves with smoked salmon sandwiches, or
whatever fine fare opera houses serve up in the entr'actes these days..
I haven't been to the opera for nearly two decades and can't say I
miss it): Morton Feldman's Second String Quartet at the Reform
Club in London, and two four-hour concerts at the Instants Chavirés,
the first an apocalyptic one-man show by Keiji Haino (who else), the
other by Phéromone, the French EAI trio of Pascal Battus, Eric
Cordier and Jean-Luc Guionnet. My experiences with the Feldman, and
how I eventually skulked out of the concert, have been documented
elsewhere ; the Instants Chavirés on the evening of the
Haino concert was packed to capacity and unbearably hot, and (unlike
Wire editor Chris Bohn, who came over specially for the event
from London and stood patiently throughout at the back of the room
with a beatific smile on his face) I was forced for various reasons
related to drug addiction to step out of the club on numerous occasions;
as for the Phéromone concert, I arrived at what I thought was
show time – 8.30pm – to find that they'd already been
playing for two hours. Not exactly a great track record on my part.
Nor did I attend the most celebrated marathon new music concert of
recent times, the 24-hour concert by MIMEO staged as part of 2000's
Musique Action festival in Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy. The event and the
reactions of both the participants and the public was painstakingly
and lovingly documented in the Bruit Blanc fanzine published by Patrick
Boeuf and the Peace Warriors team (go to: http://fennec.ouvaton.org/pro_bruitblanc/bruitblanc.html)
and also reviewed in The Wire by none other than Jon Abbey.
The whole shebang was recorded by Jean-Marc Foussat, and at one point
there were plans to release parts of it on several different labels,
but those seem to have fallen by the wayside, which makes Abbey's
decision to release the entirety of the 2004 Backfabrik concert as
bold as it is welcome – not that the music played by these four
is very similar to the twelve-man maelstrom of MIMEO: the world of
improvised music has changed a lot since 2000.
 True
to form, I didn't (couldn't) go to either of the German legs of AMPLIFY
last year, but PT's roving correspondent Wayne Spencer did, and his
long and not uncontroversial review of the festival led to some heated
debate on Bagatellen.com. This was what he wrote about the Backfabrik
concert:
"The set began with a silence into which music from another part
of the complex percolated. Soon, however, the quartet emerged from
its repose to develop the sound that would fill the next three hours
and 55 minutes. Summarising a performance of this length in a few
words requires egregious simplification and excision; nonetheless,
I think it is not too inaccurate to suggest that a defining characteristic
of the music that unfolded over the course of an evening that started
in weak sunshine and ended in a deep gloom illuminated by just three
lights and the table-top lamps in front of each performer was the
strong sense of a field uniting the individual players into a collective
presence, a common musical space bound together not just by devices
such as the shimmering ground provided by Sachiko M and Nakamura alone
or with other members of the group, but also by the evident locus
of attention and expectation uniting the quartet and the ways in which
new strands of sound were woven together with existing contributions
so as to emphasise the emergent shared fabric as well as the novel
components. At the heart of the group’s matrix was the shifting
ground arising at any given time from some combination of sine waves,
mixing-board pulsations, buzzes, the sound of a fan playing on guitar
strings, or other extended, drone-like components. Introduced into
this space was a diversity of elements, ranging from the sounds of
distressed wire and metal to electronic white noise or gentle clicks
and crackles, with events initially fading in and out of the background
swells in relatively brief episodes. Over time, the density of the
music increased, as Yoshihide and Rowe began to engage in a more active
and sustained dialogue on electric guitar/turntables and tabletop
guitar respectively, utilizing a multiplicity of small sounds and
more occasional violent interjections. This in turn was succeeded
by a pronounced emphasis of the horizontal, consisting first of dense,
massive drones flecked by high-pitched waves and later by quieter
drones accompanied by intermittent percussive touches. The session
concluded with a long period of shimmering reverberations and sine
waves commingled with streaks of white noise, crackles and restrained
percussion that was superficially subdued yet strongly present in
the midnight air. It was a powerful conclusion to a superb collaborative
performance."
 The
heated debate between the journalist and the festival organiser mentioned
above centred on Spencer's concluding broadside (the whole debate
is still available for consultation at Bagatellen
if you're curious, though if you have the time to spare, I would seriously
recommend you spent it listening to the music instead) – after
all, Jon Abbey would surely find little to complain about in the preceding
paragraph, which is a fair and accurate description of the music as
it comes across on these three superbly recorded discs. Hats off once
again to Christoph Amann. It all starts in the gloom, to be sure,
as distant footsteps break a tense silence, but anyone expecting an
extended version of Good Morning, Good Night, last year's
ultra-austere Erstwhile double featuring Sachiko, Otomo and Nakamura,
will be pleasantly surprised. This is music of enormous variety, depth
and colour – don't be put off by Rowe's Joseph Albers-inspired
cover art – and perfectly accessible, able to work its charms
in many diverse listening situations, either through headphones with
total concentration, or played at normal to loud volume while you
continue with other daily activities (like writing PT album reviews,
for example..). It's not as boisterous and crunchy as Rowe's duo with
Burkhard Beins on ErstLive 001, but there are plenty of wonderful
surprises, from the flurry of activity that kicks off disc 2 to the
awesome pitch-centred drone that takes over 34 minutes later. And
it gets better – once the two-hour mark is passed, the performers
really hit their stride and establish a real rhythm. Not rhythm as
in boom boom boom, of course, but a sense of space, pace and poise
that gives the lie to the tired old clichés (many of which
were probably written by me) that this kind of music is terminally
slow and empty.
I keep thinking about those concerts I walked out of, or missed altogether.
Would I have enjoyed them as much as I enjoy this, if I'd stayed the
course? Would I enjoy hearing a recording of them? The Feldman I've
since grown to love (amazingly that quartet has been recorded twice,
but never live), the Haino probably not – though his drum machine
work was certainly fun – and the jury's still out on the Phéromone.
(I would, however, heartily recommend their Corpus Hermeticum release
Disparlure..) At Backfabrik, the public – there were
some 70 people there, according to Abbey – was free to come
and go, but apart from those footsteps remained mercifully quiet,
spellbound no doubt. And, to quote another desperately tired old cliché,
"thanks to this recording now you can be there too!" Not
me speaking this time, but Otomo: "[T]he boundary between listening
to this CD and playing this music is totally dissolved, and there
is only a difference of time and space where the sounds are heard."
For her part, Sachiko is typically minimal and to the point: "Four
hours for four musicians. In there, just sounds that appear and disappear.
The only meaningful thing was the reality and the fact that I definitely
existed within it. That's enough. It was such a luxurious and marvelous
time." It still is, every time you hit the Play button.—DW
photo of Sachiko M courtesy Wayne Spencer / Otomo Yoshihide and
Toshi Nakamura courtesy Yuko Zama
Graham
Collier
WORKPOINTS
Cuneiform Rune 213-214 2CD
Alan
Skidmore
ONCE UPON A TIME
Vocalion CDSML 8406
John
Surman
JOHN SURMAN
Vocalion CDSML 8402
John
Surman
WAY BACK WHEN
Cuneiform Rune 200
Now
that jazz has become something of a "world music", the argument
for the integrity of British jazz may now seem rather sectarian, but
during the 1950s and 60s, despite – or maybe because of –
the lack of American expatriate jazz musicians in the UK (union laws
being one-for-one and rather hermetic: for every American wanting
to work in the UK, there had to be one British jazzman in the States),
British jazz and improvised music was brimming with vitality and value.
For sure, when UK hardbop was in its prime in the late 50s and early
60s, there were constant comparisons to American jazzmen – Tubby
Hayes, Ronnie Scott, Joe Harriott and Dizzy Reece were recorded as
token Europeans by some American labels and described as "the
English Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, or Miles", but
each was, of course, profoundly unique and owed only the fact that
they were improvising on changes (or modes) to American jazz.
It is certainly true that innovations in contemporary composition
and improvisation during the 1960s had an extraordinary effect on
both the structural and improvisational direction of jazz
in England, and by the latter part of the decade, the bands led by
reedmen Scott, Hayes, John Surman, bassist Graham Collier and drummer
John Stevens were at the forefront of European improvised music. The
"Old Place" (Ronnie Scott's original club, which he donated
to the young musicians after he moved locations) and The Little Theatre
were hubs of activity in London at the time, presenting the new British
jazz and improvisation in programs directed by the musicians themselves.
Comparisons might be made with the later "loft scene" in
the States, the major difference being that in Britain major record
companies were interested in recording the country's jazz vanguard,
moreover in programs of music that were surprisingly little watered-down.
Between 1967 and 1974 Deram, Argo, CBS, RCA-Victor, Philips, EMI,
Fontana, Polydor and Island released some of the most avant-garde
music in the UK (and possibly in Europe) by Surman, Hayes, Harriott,
Collier, Tony Oxley, Evan Parker, the Brotherhood of Breath, Keith
Tippett, Ray Russell, and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble.
A few groups in particular were veritable breeding grounds for avant-garde
musicians in England – Collier, pianists Keith Tippett, Mike
Westbrook and South African expatriate Chris McGregor ran the principal
workshops (though Scott’s house band also boasted Surman, Oxley,
David Holland and pianist Gordon Beck among its soloists). Collier’s
band, though it might be the most obscure of the list, is, along with
McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath probably arguably the ensemble
with the longest-lived vitality and relevance. Whereas Westbrook,
after a strong early showing with Marching Song and Love
Songs for Deram, embraced jazz-rock and cloying program music
by the early 70s, Collier’s music – rather like a free
version of early Charles Mingus – continued to embrace long-form
pan-tonal compositional frameworks, angular and dissonant yet with
a natural, even-toed penchant for measuring and tempering that freedom
that frameworks provide. He has also maintained a constancy of direction
throughout a career that is still going strong to this day.
 "Tempered
freedom" might be the catchphrase of British jazz during this
period, and Collier’s approach seems to be one of the more successful
in this regard. Before beginning his Mosaic label in 1973 on which
he has recorded prolifically, Collier recorded four records for Deram
(Deep Dark Blue Centre, 1967), Fontana (Down Another
Road, 1969 and Songs for my Father, 1970) and Philips
(Mosaics, 1971). Recorded live in Southampton on a lengthy
UK tour in 1968, disc one of Cuneiform’s Workpoints
catches Collier between two recording dates with a twelve-piece ensemble
that looks back on the tightly-arranged ‘avant-garde cool’
of the Deram session with new, much more unbridled eyes that would
capture not only the sounds and colors but also the canvases used
on his next several sides. The tour was sponsored by the Arts Council
of Great Britain, which commissioned the four-part suite that makes
up most of the disc (Collier was the first jazzman to receive a grant
from the Council). The bassist is joined by a number of regulars in
his bands as well as a few faces who would make their only Collier
appearance here: trumpeters Harry Beckett and Kenny Wheeler, reedmen
Dave Aaron and Karl Jenkins (later of the Soft Machine), drummer John
Marshall and trombonist Mike Gibbs (a noted composer and bandleader
in his own right) are holdovers from the initial recording, and are
joined by Surman, trumpeter Henry Lowther, vibraphonist Frank Ricotti,
and trombonists John Mumford and Chris Smith.
Starting off the set is an eighteen-minute reading of one of Collier’s
most intriguing compositions, “Deep Dark Blue Centre,”
which replaces the furry reading on the Deram session with a downright
woolly one here. The tune itself is modal, the binding glue a fast
waltz with Collier and Marshall reminiscent of Reggie Workman and
Elvin Jones, and the written horn arrangement a knotty atonal melody
reminiscent of Gil Evans at his most surly. Though the thrust lies
in the free-time solos and duets that make up the non-thematic sections,
I suspect the piece is written in a version of the AABACA format,
with the A being the pastoral dirge that leads into the fast B theme,
and the C being the free sections. Following the first free interlude,
Gibbs, Aaron, Collier and Marshall slowly march the tune up to the
theme again before Surman and Mumford take off on a thick hardbop
sparring contest, the rhythm section holding an urgent tempo as Ricotti
dances around them before the piece breaks down once again into contrapuntal,
free-time solos and duets. Ricotti is a revelation here on what might
be his first recorded appearance; he glides over and under the ensemble,
a glassy sprite with echoes of Karl Berger’s ephemeral tone
and hyperactive-child improvisations. He is given a significant amount
of room to stretch in the title suite, for the final movement is dedicated
to the rhythm section – and Ricotti makes full use of the bulkhead
seating. The vibraphonist recorded one date for CBS as a leader with
guitarist Chris Spedding (the wonderful Our Point of View,
reissued by Columbia) in 1969, and worked in Harry Beckett’s
S&R Power Station in the early 70s, appearing on Beckett’s
Themes for Fega (RCA-Victor, 1971).
The title track is based once again on signposts, though they are
significantly less tight than on the opener; its opening bass line
echoes the one that anchors “Deep Dark Blue Center” at
the outset, quickly shifting into what sounds like eleven (let it
never be said that Collier prefers standard time signatures). “Workpoints,”
though, is necessarily freer, the title coming from Lawrence Durrell’s
term for thematic roots that anchor his writing, allowing for pretty
much anything to happen between those signposts. The thematic material
in Collier’s suite is loose as well, a simple horn arrangement
quickly fading into an alto-vibes duet, before Surman and Jenkins
join in for a fiery baritone duel, soon served up in an Afro-Latin
rhythmic stew, with Ricotti switching to bongos (and other band members
playing chekere and timbales, if my ears don’t deceive). This
arrangement in particular also echoes the suite that makes up half
of Surman’s own self-titled debut – the backing of baritone
by multiple percussionists with occasional brass-section is uncannily
similar. Rhythm is something that Collier began to make powerful use
of in his pieces around this point, not only in the odd time signatures
and superimposed rhythms that find their way into much of his work,
but, as on “Workpoints,” in the even more apparent percussive
underpinning – traps augmented by vibes, bongos, cowbell and
shakers flesh out the tonal colors of his brass and reed writing.
Collier also knows how to use Beckett’s talents – the
trumpeter appears on most, if not all, Collier releases from his 1967
debut well into the 70s. Here, part two of “Workpoints”
brings Beckett into the fore over a static rhythm, with Lowther contributing
his own fire and Wheeler his terse, muted brilliance. Beckett, though,
contains so much poise and lyricism that he cuts through the ensemble
with what seems like little effort – though he has possibly
never shone as brightly with Collier as he did on Down Another
Road, as the piece “Danish Blue” will attest.
Seven and a half years after “Workpoints” was recorded,
Collier brought a pared-down ensemble to Middleheim, Belgium for a
performance of his “Darius” (see Darius, Mosaic
Records, 1974) suite and four other pieces. Joined by Beckett, drummer
John “Chick” Webb, pianist Roger Dean, guitarist Ed Speight
and saxophonist Art Themen, this set, despite rather serious shortcomings
in the recording department, including a few abrupt fade-outs and
fade-ins, offers a view of where Collier went with the groundwork
laid by the previous set. “Little Ben,” the opener, is
given somewhat to jazz-rock tendencies, made significantly more apparent
by Speight’s rather bombastic proggy guitar solo, a far cry
from the subtle work of Philip Lee on Deep Dark Blue Centre
and Songs for my Father. Beckett follows with one of his
slices of fragmented poetry, and Themen contributes a delectably out
tenor statement. “Under the Pier” is a somewhat cloying
blues-rock number that probably would have benefited from a Jack Bruce
vocal, but in this incarnation it doesn’t really carry the weight
it could in another context. Most of the space of this concert is
reserved for “Darius,” a rather open suite that continues
the process laid down in “Workpoints,” though it is significantly
more grounded rhythmically and harmonically than the earlier work
and not given so readily to free group improvisation. The third movement
offers the most driving music of the set, and not coincidentally,
some of the most open. Here and in the fourth movement, Dean is given
quite a bit of harmonic wandering room, which frees Beckett and Themen
to take very liberated solos and prods Speight into his most sensitive
of the set. The Middleheim concert might not show Collier at his most
formidable, but it does give a clearer idea of where he took freedom
and how it was incorporated into a delicately balanced oeuvre of arrangement
and sonic liberation.
 Graham
Collier’s band was as much a proving ground for up-and-coming
saxophonists as it was for horn men and arrangers; tenor saxophonists
Tony Roberts, Stan Sulzman, Alan Skidmore and Alan Wakeman made strong
showings on Collier’s first few dates, Skidmore lighting more
than a few fires on 1970’s Songs for my Father. Comparable
to Sam Rivers and Joe Henderson in his powerful, biting tone and free-bop
leanings, Skid’s formidable technique and visceral presence
made him a frequent choice for the tenor chair in a number of bands
in this period. A member of the reed section in the Brotherhood of
Breath in the early 70s and joining John Surman on numerous occasions
(notably the Surman-Osborne-Skidmore trio of the late 70s), he made
two highly regarded sessions as a leader for Decca Nova and Philips
in 1969 and 1970. Once Upon a Time (Decca Nova, reissued
by Vocalion) teams the tenorist up with pianist John Taylor, Brotherhood
bassist and Ogun Records founder Harry Miller, percussionist Tony
Oxley and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler for a romp through three stand-alone
pieces and a sidelong suite. Surprisingly, the record starts off with
a pastoral theme written by Surman for the leader’s young daughter
Alice, providing the album with its title. The piece is a loosely-swinging
hardbop ballad, a terse ascending theme from the horns leading into
a typically pinched and brassy Wheeler solo (sometimes one wishes
Manfred Schoof had been vacationing in England in those days), Skidmore’s
statement a brief near-boil that oddly lays off his usual fireworks,
segueing easily into a relaxed Taylor filigree before the theme returns.
It’s an inauspicious start, but what follows is even stranger:
Oxley’s “Magaera”, a call for the horns leading
into free counterpoint that was revisited the next year on the drummer’s
Four Compositions for Sextet (CBS, with Wheeler, Evan Parker,
Paul Rutherford, Derek Bailey and Jeff Clyne). The grab bag continues
with an exuberant, Hayes-Scott number by John Taylor, “The Yolk,”
featuring a more characteristic heel-digging hardbop solo by the leader.
Unfortunately, Skid’s buzzing harmonics segue into a rather
limpid Wheeler statement, the trumpeter urged ahead by Oxley and Miller
to a brief quarter-chorus of excitement before Taylor and Oxley (still
in Tony Williams mode) take back the reins. The second half of the
record is a suite comprised of Canadian baritonist-composer John Warren’s
moody “Old San Juan” (see 1970’s Tales of the
Algonquin with Surman, also reissued by Vocalion, for more of
Warren’s genius), the percussive “Free for Al” and
Surman’s “Image”. Taken as a whole the three pieces
comprise enough slinky rhythm, Birtwistlesque arranging and virile
soloing (not counting Wheeler) to make the record worthwhile, but
barely a year later, Skid would record TCB for Philips with
Taylor, Surman, Osborne, trombonist Malcolm Griffiths, bassist Chris
Laurence and drummer Tony Levin, a storming yet cohesive set that
far surpasses this debut’s tentativeness.
 Following
recordings with Mike Westbrook and an obscure 1966 session with pianist
Peter Lemer that was later released by ESP (Local Colour,
with tenorman George Khan and Coliseum drummer Jon Hiseman), John
Surman went into the Deram studios in 1968 to record his self-titled
debut – released in the US by London as Anglo-Sax –
which, like the Skidmore, relies mostly on the strength of a colorful
and unruly sidelong suite to carry the record. Whether it was the
influence of the record company or the fact that Sonny Rollins had
a 1968 residency at Ronnie Scott’s (Surman played in the backing
band), the first half of this record is taken up with West Indian
calypso themes, joyous and perfectly edited for airplay. Surman, Osborne,
Harry Miller, pianist Russ Henderson, drummer Stirling Betancourt
and percussionist Errol Phillip glide through four pieces including
Rollins’ “Don’t Stop the Carnival” and the
eminently engaging “Obeah Wedding.” Despite the fact that
the first half of the record is lambasted by many a Surman fan, “Obeah”
offers brilliant and humorous solos by Osborne and the leader, and
one hasn’t lived until one has heard the baritone saxophonist
tear through a goofy island tune. Yet the meat of John Surman
is to be found on the “Incantation – Episode –
Dance” suite that takes up the remainder of the date. Surman
is joined by trombonists Malcolm Griffiths and Paul Rutherford, Beckett
and Wheeler, drummer Alan Jackson, bassist David Holland and a host
of percussionists for a dense, colorful foray. The opening salvo features
Surman at his most unbridled, Jackson and Holland providing strong
dialogue and support, which segues into a measured written brass theme
and a slowly additive collective improvisation starting with a fine
Wheeler-Holland duo. “Dance” is an intense, wonderfully
rhythmic and beautifully arranged piece, featuring Surman floating
over an expanded percussion section (Jackson, Henderson, Betancourt
and Phillip), Rutherford making his vocal Stockhausen-tailgate contribution
in a heady dialogue with the leader. Though he would follow this with
another two stunning slabs for Deram, How Many Clouds Can You
See? (1970) and the aforementioned date with Warren, the youthful
exuberance and airy rhythmic play that grace much of his debut would
be replaced with dense, complex and emotionally weighty material –
exuberant and powerful, but not quite as innocent as he was here.
 To
my ears, electric jazz with rock-based rhythm (okay, "fusion")
has sounded more natural and, consequently, more invigorating coming
from English musicians than in the American counterpart, primarily
because there was a significant amount of cross-pollination between
improvisers and rock musicians that did not occur when American jazz
musicians "plugged in" and played Fillmore. Marshall and
the aforementioned Collier sideman Karl Jenkins played in the Soft
Machine, the UK’s psych-rock/free-fusion hybrid; Keith Tippett
briefly joined King Crimson; Harry Beckett played with ex-Cream bassist
Jack Bruce; Gary Windo sat in on an early incarnation of Gong –
essentially, it was a natural cross-fertilization, though the Soft
Machine/King Crimson/Keith Tippett arm was probably the most obvious
and most fruitful relationship. Before heading to Belgium in late
1969 to work with bassist Barre Phillips and drummer Stu Martin in
a trio – The Trio, to be precise – Surman met up with
Mike Osborne, John Taylor, John Marshall and bassist Brian Odgers
to record a session in London that remained in the can until a bootlegged
"test pressing" showed up several years ago in collectors’
markets. Cuneiform has released this as Way Back When, a
crucial puzzle-piece in Surman’s discography that shows him
at the close of the 60s equally interested in electric jazz forms
as he was (and is) free improvisation and orchestral arrangement.
The title suite (re-recorded with John McLaughlin as “Glancing
Backwards” for 1971’s Where Fortune Smiles, released
on Dawn) is a jazz-rock masterpiece, Surman’s soprano and Taylor’s
electric piano blending for a clarion call that leads into a visceral,
acrid soprano solo, supported by edgy blocks of rhythm from Marshall
and Odgers’ droning electric bass, Taylor providing distracted,
ethereal comping and providing an atmospheric texture to a tune that
is, in its other incarnation, rather dense. Though the first half
offers a quartet with soprano – contributing to its sparseness,
perhaps – Surman switches to baritone and is joined by Osborne’s
alto for John Warren’s “Owlshead” and the leader’s
“Out and About,” the former a nicely funky tune that somehow
circumvents rock trappings to offer an elegant alto solo, one of the
better Osborne solos on record. I’ve always been fond of Taylor’s
electric piano, which sounds at times quizzically spacey and yet equally
gives a solid weight to the proceedings – sometimes even to
greater effect than his acoustic piano work.
Jazz
in Britain during this period was undergoing as much surging change
as the music did in the US a few years earlier (even throwing rock
into the mix) – yet, interestingly, those architects of the
music like Ronnie Scott and John Dankworth embraced and fostered the
innovations of the avant-garde, donating practice space and opportunities
for work, paving the way for a period of attention that might not
have occurred otherwise. Granted, this ‘renaissance’ around
1970 was preceded and followed by as many hurdles as the music has
faced anywhere else, but thankfully these watershed recordings and
the environment they represent are once again seeing the light of
day.—CA
In
concert in New York, Part 1
Over
the past few months, New York has played host to a remarkable range
of contemporary music events, some of them strictly classical, others
bordering on folk, rock or jazz. There has also been a good balance
between the “retro” tendency and performances dedicated
to “the high priests of modernism”, rumors of whose demise
have been greatly exaggerated. It's sometimes difficult to separate
one camp from the other, though – György Ligeti being a
case in point. Jonathan Nott and Pierre-Laurent Aimard gave two concerts
with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra (Avery Fisher Hall, May 6th/8th)
which distinguished the ultra-modernist Ligeti of the 1960s from the
Ligeti of the later 1970s and beyond (who defines himself as being
neither modernist nor post-modernist, but an independent voice free
of the radical strictures of the avant-garde yet sufficiently personal
not to be swamped by the “world music heritage”). In the
first program, the Bambergers gave a confident reading of Lontano
(1967), although not always with the textural detail Nott was
indicating with his fingers, and Aimard produced a stunning rendition
of six of the Études for piano (1985-1994), including
a fantastic roar in the minor ninth bass scale which concludes the
turbulent Automne à Varsovie. His readings have gained
considerably in character since his recording of the first fourteen
for Sony a decade or so ago: nowadays he rounds out a flawless technique
with a rough jazzy touch and clockwork phrasing which provokes comparisons
with the player piano works of Conlon Nancarrow (who Ligeti once hailed
as the greatest composer in the world). The second program followed
a similar model: again, Nott conducted an account of an early micropolyphonic
work, Atmosphères (1961), which in its intricacy would
have been better suited to his collaborations with the Berlin Philharmonic,
while Aimard followed with another brilliant half dozen Études.
The Bambergers realized their full potential when they rejoined Aimard
for the last two Beethoven concerti, and the chemistry between Aimard
and Nott made one look forward to a recording – of the Ligeti
Piano Concerto, perhaps?
There was more Ligeti earlier in the year when James Levine joined
the Met
Chamber Ensemble for two substantial concerts at Carnegie Hall (Zankel
Hall, February 13th/27th). One does not normally associate Levine
with contemporary chamber music, still less when he has long-term
commitments at the Met Opera and the Boston Symphony, so it was something
of a surprise to see him conduct his own ensemble in fine performances
of the Chamber Concerto (1970) along with music by György
Kurtág, John Harbison, Elliott Carter and Luigi Dallapiccola.
The Dallapiccola was a beautiful miniature entitled Piccola musica
notturna, originally written for orchestra in 1954 but rearranged
in 1961 as a homage to Queen’s College in New York, where he
taught for a period. Although the piece betrays the influence of serialism,
the cells Dallapiccola uses are less than twelve notes long, emphasizing
certain pitches and intervals and giving it a more traditional center
of reference. By contrast, Luimen (1997), the short Carter
work which followed it in the concert, entirely abandons harmonic
convention for a spiky dialogue between six soloists (trumpet, trombone,
harp, mandolin, guitar and vibraphone), including a separate jazz
cadenza for guitar entitled, appropriately enough, “Shard”
(Carter has not mellowed much with old age). “Luimen”
is an archaic Dutch word meaning “whimsical moods”, and
the work is correspondingly entertaining and eccentric. In the later
concert, Levine tackled the Chamber Concerto, preceded by
Harbison’s piano quartet November 19, 1828 (a homage
to Schubert, written in 1988) and Kurtág’s Hommage
à R. Sch. (a homage to Schumann, completed in 1990). This
juxtaposition illustrated the contrast which Nott and Aimard also
pinpointed between the avant-garde Hungarian music of the 60s and
early 70s and the more “retro” movement that followed
it. The Chamber Concerto has much in common with the Carter
and the Dallapiccola: constructed from cells of less than twelve tones,
it combines formal unity with Ligeti-like eccentricity. Clusters and
polyrhythms, clocks and clouds – these techniques and images
predominate here as elsewhere in his output. The Kurtág, by
contrast, looks backwards to Schumann, but not in the neo-Expressionist
or neo-Romantic vein that Harbison adopts for his Schubert homage.
Like Ligeti’s nod to Brahms in the Horn Trio, Hommage
à R. Sch. incorporates many features of the other composer’s
musical language without impeding Kurtág’s unmistakable
modernity. Like Kurtág, Harbison is keen on quoting Schubert’s
style and even bases whole sections of November 19, 1828
on unfinished pieces by Schubert (including a fugue he was writing
on the day of his death, which gives the piece its title), but he
is often more interested in pastiche than parody: as in the third
movement of Berio’s Sinfonia, a direct quote can last
for well over a few minutes, providing that it is appropriately ornamented
and developed. But Harbison avoids the sentimentality which often
characterizes the neo-Romantic approach, and the result is convincing,
if a little naïve by comparison with Kurtág’s dark
scoring – a late Schumann combination of clarinet, viola and
piano, with a muffled bass drum note as a humorous farewell.
Similar contrasts persisted in concerts of music by Boulez, Ferneyhough,
Dutilleux and MacMillan. Boulez and Dutilleux have been two of France’s
chief representatives on the international concert scene for over
half a century, and though their styles could not be more different
outwardly, Dutilleux has recently spoken of warmer relations between
them. On the evidence of these three recent events, it would seem
that Boulez, the darling of the avant-garde, is looking to the more
distant past for inspiration, while Dutilleux, the successor to Ravel,
Poulenc and Honegger, has been incorporating some of the innovations
of the post-war years into his formerly deeply conservative oeuvre.
His Mystère de l’instant (1985-9) opens with
a dark sequence of complex modal chords, which mutate into cross-rhythms
and conclude on a bare octave, punctuated by a gong (one is reminded
at times of the Ligeti Chamber Concerto). The textures then
become sparer, with a high plainsong chant in the strings and a single
dissonant line deep in the cellos, recalling Bartók. Finally,
a chord that could have come from Alban Berg’s Lulu
precedes a series of glissandi effects and fortissimo string clusters
that Penderecki would be proud of. All this is accomplished with remarkable
speed: although there is nothing revolutionary about the composition,
its focus shifts constantly to capture “the mystery of the instant”,
and its dramatic unity and impact are consequently novel. Alan Gilbert’s
performance with the New York Philharmonic (Avery Fisher Hall, June
4th) was exactly comme il faut: rhythm and phrasing were
impeccable, and the balance never obscured the multiplying lines or
destroyed the frequent moments of silence. He was also fortunate in
having an excellent cimbalom player: the work is scored for strings,
percussion and cimbalom, and the unpredictable dialogue between the
three sections accounts for much of the work’s dramatic intrigue.
In similar vein, Daniel Barenboim achieved a level of clarity in Boulez’s
orchestral transcription of his early Notations that has
perhaps only been surpassed by the composer himself. When lines were
submerged, they always reappeared during crucial silences when many
others faded into the background or disappeared. Although the Chicago
Symphony struggled at times with the acoustic (the performance was
held in Carnegie Hall on May 15th), they delivered a performance of
virtuosity and passion in a work that in reality suits few venues
around the world (one of Boulez’s perennial sources of complaint).
Barenboim sounds more Germanic than ever these days, and the bellowing
exchanges between the sections of the orchestra were delivered with
an almost Wagnerian clout. Mitsuko Uchida, by contrast, spun a delicate
performance of the original Douze Notations in Stern Hall
on April 27th. The contrast between the original and the transcription
is analogous to the contrast between Dutilleux’s post-war reminiscences
of pre-war music and his adoption of techniques by the post-war avant-garde:
Boulez’s 1945 composition, while daring by pre-war standards,
is in reality a febrile synthesis which predates his later voice.
As so often in Uchida’s playing, the softer colors were perfect
but the brighter ones were absent, which was frustrating given the
extrovert nature of the piece. After passages of ferocious difficulty,
Uchida also occasionally lost her concentration – only for a
split second on each occasion, but enough to unbalance the pointillist
phrasing which these miniatures require. This was not, however, the
case with Ensemble 21’s extraordinary rendition of Brian Ferneyhough’s
Carceri d’invenzione (1986) at the Miller Theatre on
April 22nd. Joined by a line-up of distinguished soloists, this crack
new music outfit literally breezed through a work that is reckoned
by some to be the most difficult music ever written for a chamber
group. Guest flautist Mario Caroli (described by Salvatore Sciarrino
as the “Paganini of the flute” – for once, no overexaggeration)
was sensational: supremely confident in “Carceri d’Invenzione
II”, he delivered a deeply moving performance of the slower
final “Mnemosyne”, a solo odyssey which proves Ferneyhough’s
claim that he does not innovate in order to experiment, but to compose
good music. Good music, given the virtues of this cycle, would be
an understatement. Ferneyhough not only manages to explore the outer
edges of instrumental sonority with fiendish syncopations and silences
almost too short to render, but also creates the ever-shifting patterns
of sound which characterize the elusive unity and caprice of great
art. By contrast, James MacMillan’s Third Symphony
(2003) was a dud. Conflicts between East and West were programmatically
embodied by characterless parodies of Japanese music and Shostakovich,
and unfortunately the only interesting section of this 35-minute work
was a fusion of both of these elements at the climax, a one-minute
orgy which seemed determined to outdo The Rite of Spring
– while simultaneously pastiching it. Despite MacMillan’s
interest in fruitful effects such as microtones, he only rarely acquires
the formal control to translate that interest into an ever-evolving
sense of surprise – something Ferneyhough achieves regularly.
Charles Dutoit’s interpretation in Stern Hall on April 12th
was beautifully balanced but rather too Gallic to convey the aggressiveness
that any performance of this work is so desperately going to need,
and the Philadelphia Orchestra looked distinctly uninterested.—NR
Borah
Bergman / Lol Coxhill / Paul Hession
ACTS OF LOVE
Mutable 17519-2
 Much
has been made of pianist Borah Bergman's phenomenal technique –
the true emancipation of the left hand from its traditional accompanimental
role, and all that – but his distinctive harmonic concept has
received little attention. Like Misha Mengelberg, he combines predominantly
tonal intervals (major and minor thirds, often in recognisable triads
and sevenths) with strategically placed adjacent semitones to create
a rich yet slightly acidic harmonic field. Previous outings with volcanic
free jazz blowers like Roscoe Mitchell and Peter Brötzmann have
tended to ride roughshod over the bittersweet melancholy of the 72
year old Brooklyn maestro's playing, but in Lol Coxhill and Paul Hession
he's found the perfect playing partners. Coxhill, like Bergman, is
stylistically impossible to pigeonhole – anyone still unfamiliar
with the extraordinary range of his music should check out the Emanem
retrospective compilation Spectral Soprano at once –
and wilfully independent (aka bloody minded) to boot: like Steve Lacy
he often gives the impression he's following his own agenda with scant
regard to what's going on around him, until a sudden turn-on-a-dime
melodic twist reveals he was right there all along. He and
Bergman display a remarkable awareness of each other's playing, especially
in the pitch domain, where Coxhill's serpentine elegance gently unfolds
Bergman's harmonic origami while Hession's immaculate brushwork deftly
underpins the structure. Hession, as Brian Morton commented recently
in The Wire (he also provided the notes to this disc), "just
gets better every time I hear him" – but he also knows
just when to lay off and let the melodic and harmonic logic of his
playing partners direct the flow. Even the most exuberant tracks,
notably the fifth, full of Bergman's forearm volleys and Coxhill's
raucous squawks, remain light, the musical energy flying free rather
than burning a fiery hole in the floor. Despite its distinctly uninspiring
cover and generic track titles, Acts Of Love is definitely
one of the most exciting and beautiful improv releases of the year.—DW
Derek
Bailey / Evan Parker
THE LONDON CONCERT
psi.05.01
 Considering
this long overdue reissue of Incus 16 in the light of the subsequent
split between Derek Bailey and Evan Parker might be a tempting proposition,
and Parker's brief footnote in the liners perhaps invites listeners
to do just that ("When I resigned as a director of Incus Records
in 1987, I took with me the tapes and the rights in all my recordings
for that label. Since we had recorded two duo albums, we agreed to
take one each."), but The London Concert still stands
as perhaps the most impressive collaboration between these two towering
figures of European Improvised Music. Now that almost every single
release that comes our way from Messrs Parker and Bailey is hailed
as a major piece of work, even if it isn't, it's all too easy to forget
how utterly unprecedented and dangerous this music must have sounded
when it burst forth 30 years ago into the hallowed auditorium of London's
Wigmore Hall, a venue traditionally associated with polite (accomplished
yet boring) recitals of genteel lieder and fusty chamber music. Martin
Davidson's splendid recording restores the concert to its original
length, apart from some "theatrics" at the beginning of
each half of the concert, and the CD contains four previously unreleased
tracks, including the opening "First Half Solo", just over
four minutes of unaccompanied Bailey, and an astonishing demonstration
of his mastery of the volume pedal easily on a par with the celebrated
solo outing Lot 74.
When I was a kid, the people who lived across the street had an ageing
and slightly diseased Border Collie called Shep that would stand behind
the front door and bark itself hoarse every time its owners went out.
My father, driven to distraction by the incessant yapping, threatened
on many occasions to soak a sponge in gravy and slip it through the
letterbox. He never did, but I often wondered what a dog choking to
death on a meaty sponge might sound like. I think I now have an idea.
Back in 1975 Evan Parker's soprano and tenor had yet to go their separate
ways, the former towards the now-legendary circular breathing extravaganzas,
the latter back to its gruff roots in Coltrane-era free jazz. Play
this back to back with recent outings like the Leimgruber / Demierre
/ Phillips reviewed below or Stefan Keune's Sunday
Sundaes on Creative Sources, and it's no exaggeration to
say Parker was three decades ahead of his time. The London Concert
is quite simply indispensable (ha, how many times have you heard that?),
and even if the music weren't so astounding it'd be worth the price
of admission for the photo of Bailey and Parker standing patiently
in a queue at a London bus stop.—DW
Urs
Leimgruber / Jacques Demierre / Barre Phillips
LDP – COLOGNE
psi.05.03
 This wonderfully
knotty and invigorating set of improvisations was recorded in Cologne's
Loft in November 2003. Leimgruber is a ruggedly individualistic and
sadly under-recorded soprano and tenor saxophonist whose tough, sinewy
playing frequently reveals its origins in high octane free jazz –
as does Barre Phillips' bass playing (it's not hard to see why this
set appealed to psi boss Evan Parker, who came across the trio when
they performed in Parthenay, France, last year). Pianist Demierre
is as fond of heavy preparation as he is of huge splattering clusters,
and his playing, notably on "The Rugged Cross", is truly
volcanic, pushing Leimgruber's prodigious technique to its limits
with some high register screaming that wouldn't be out of place in
Arthur Doyle's Alabama. Anyone who thinks you need a rack of effects
pedals and serious amplification to push the music way over the top
can think again. That said, there's plenty of quiet intricate interplay
on offer too, but the tension remains consistently high. It's an outstanding
set, and one that contrasts nicely, in terms of instrumentation, with
the Bergman / Coxhill / Hession outing reviewed above.—DW
Louis
Sclavis / Jean-Marc Montera
ROMAN
FMP CD 127
 Caesar
adsum iam forte Brutus aderat. Caesar sic in omnibus, Brutus sic inat?
Homo sapiens non urinat in ventum.. Nah, forget it, Roman
here means "novel" in French ("novel" as in "work
of fiction", not the adjective). Which is why the thirteen tracks
are called "chapters", not that there's any discernible
overriding narrative structure to the 64-minute span of music. It
must be a nouveau roman, then. There are no recurring motives
that could be described as characters – though it could be argued
that the instruments themselves, Louis Sclavis' soprano sax, clarinet
and bass clarinet, Jean-Marc Montera's guitar, table guitar and bank
of electronic effects, have distinct personalities – but there's
plenty of drama and no lack of emotion, so it's probably not a Robbe-Grillet
novel then. Sclavis is an intriguing figure in French jazz and improvised
music: too committed to the leftfield to sell out and serve up the
tepid trash the mainstream French festival circuit gobbles up, but
technically outstanding and much sought after outside France by musicians
(Fred Frith) and labels (ECM) alike, he's managed to remain outside,
or aloof from, the French improv scene too – probably quite
simply because he's too expensive (can't say I blame him). Montera
too is a rugged individualist who's just as at home in the rough and
ragged fringes of free rock – collaborators include Jean-François
Pauvros, Chris Cutler, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo – as Sclavis
is with mainstream figures like Henri Texier. John Corbett in his
liners compares the pair en passant to Steve Lacy and Derek
Bailey, which is quite a shrewd move (I'd be curious to know what
Sclavis makes of it, though), summing up his hypothesis in the concluding
lines: "Difference doesn't need to be incommensurable. Neither
does it have to be negated. It can be celebrated, cultivated, gold-plated."
Unlike Lacy and Bailey though, who could make outstanding music together
by simply sticking to their individual guns – is there any duo
album in improv more perversely soloistic than Outcome (Potlatch)?
– Sclavis and Montera do spend a lot of time actively trying
to follow each other's moves, rather than just playing together. There
are many splendid passages – Sclavis is particularly impressive
on soprano – but also, inevitably perhaps in a novel, a few
stretches where the attention wanders slightly. Perhaps if the text
had been sent to an editor prior to publication a few paragraphs or
even a chapter or two could have been redpenned out without seriously
detracting from the plot, but after barely half a dozen spins it's
probably too early to say. So let me re-read and get back to you.—DW
Sound
On Survival
LIVE
Henceforth 101
 Hot
on the heels of American Roadwork
comes another superb offering from Marco Eneidi, Lisle Ellis and Peter
Valsamis, and a fine way it is too to inaugurate Bonnie Wright's new
Henceforth label (offerings are forthcoming from Gunda Gottschalk,
Ute Volker and Peter Jacquemyn). Whereas American Roadwork was
a studio date recorded in CIMP's Spirit Room, Live is very
much that, two sets recorded five days apart in May last year in Amherst
and Philadelphia. Eneidi's awesome alto chops are once more very much
in evidence – I like to think his former teacher Jimmy Lyons
would be proud of his exuberant post-bop yelps: the lineage back to
Bird via Lyons and Dolphy couldn't be clearer – and bassist
Ellis and drummer Valsamis are just as impressive, and on this form
would give Dominic Duval and Jay Rosen a run for their money as free
jazz's most agile rhythm section. Both Eneidi and Ellis are prolix
players, but even so one gets the impression that not one of their
thousands, maybe millions, of notes is out of place. Less convincing
is Ellis's use of electronics, not because it's incompetent or poorly
executed (it isn't: Ellis has been making good use of his software
in recent years), simply because it sounds rather out of place on
what is essentially a bop rollercoaster.—DW
Anthony
Braxton/Matt Bauder
2 + 2 COMPOSITIONS
482 Music 482-1034
 Braxton
continues to make waves in the jazz community: his recent appearance
onstage at Victoriaville with Wolf Eyes had excited fans bouncing
emails back and forth for days, and his recent monumental eight-CD
set of standards released in two installments by Leo Records has been
getting lots of buzz too. It’d be a pity then if this more modestly
scaled disc from 482 Music got lost in the shuffle. As with many recent
Braxton releases, it finds him in dialogue with some of the young
players who’ve flocked to him at Wesleyan University, in this
case tenor saxophonist/clarinettist Matt Bauder, bassist Aaron Siegel
and drummer Zach Wallace (who perform as a trio under the name Memorize
the Sky). You know something’s up from the opening moments of
Bauder’s “Scaffolding”: it’s very quiet music,
making use of drones and minimalist repetitions, advancing so slowly
and patiently it’s like a leisurely walk around a sculpture
that pauses to take in the view from each side. It’s rather
like hearing the gentle clarinet/percussion soundscapes of Scott Fields’
Christangelfox (a previous 482 Music release) filtered through
the contemporary electroacoustic improv aesthetic. The rest of the
album is a bit more identifiably Braxtonish, though it has a feathery
lightness of touch that’s unusual in his work. All the pieces
work from visual scores containing little or no actual notation. Bauder’s
“Dots,” for instance, is a rather Cagean piece involving
a lightly dotted page and a transparent sheet of lines that the musicians
lay over it to convert it into notes on staff, a gently pointillist
musical space which the players can stretch out or compress at will.
Braxton’s two compositions (324B and 327C) are part of his new
"Falling River Musics" sequence of graphic scores. One of
the few explicit directions Braxton gives for their interpretation
is “sound rather than pitch”. Rather than the feast of
scribbly, gritty nonidiomatic improv those directions might suggest,
the results are airy structures made up out of twists and crumbs of
melody – the musical equivalent of a sketch made out of countless
faint, suggestive pencil-strokes. This is certainly the calmest and
most relaxing Anthony Braxton album I’ve ever heard –
and that's meant as praise, not criticism – a music where every
gesture however small seems perfectly rounded in itself. It remains
to be seen whether it represents a major change of direction for Braxton,
or whether its aesthetic owes more to his playing partners; in either
case it’s an extraordinary document, and worth hunting down.—ND
Jon
Rose
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
HD CD 005
Recorded
during Jon Rose's Paris residency in 2002 in one 45'22'' take, Double
Indemnity features the Double "Twin Siamese" Violin
invented by Dr Johannes Rosenberg, an instrument, now in the permanent
collection of the Rosenberg Museum, that consists of two violins bound
together by the neck. The ten strings, whose pitches are fixed by
moving tuning pegs, are held by the two regular bridges and the violin
is played tabletop with two bows. The disc, accompanied by very interesting
essays of Dr Willy Orwig ("The Genetic Tendency in Violin Music")
and Dr Joseph K. Rosenberg, another member of this famous Austro-German
dynasty of musicians, violinists, scholars and researchers, is dedicated
to the Blazek Twins, two Siamese twin sisters who had a Music-Hall
act in the early decades of the 20th century – hence the pictures
of the Blazeks on the CD box. Violin virtuoso Jon Rose creates frantic
and eerie harmonies which recall Hugo Zemp's early 70s recordings
of Solomon Island Pan Pipes on Le Chant du Monde, while his pizzicato
work, on the other hand, sounds as otherworldly as Korean string music
(check out the ajaeng / bowed zither on Social and Folk Korean
Music, recorded by John Levy on Lyrichord). This fine recording
stands along with Willem Breuker's Lunchconcert for barrelorgans
as one of the strangest and funniest music you could hear.—JMVS
Nickendes
Perlgras
MEAT HAT
Konnex KCD 5143
Knowing
that Michael Thieke has released two fine discs on Creative Sources,
I suspected another redux-minimal CD, but, surprisingly, the music
on Meat Hat is very much in free jazz territory, West Coast-style.
Fifty years after Jimmy Giuffre recorded Tangents in Jazz with
Jack Sheldon, Ralph Pena and Artie Anton, Nickende Perlgras follow
a similar spirit and uses distinctly Giuffre-esque instrumentation:
Thieke, on clarinet, alto clarinet and saxophone, is joined by Michael
Anderson on trumpet and Eric Schaefer on drums. Schaefer has even
penned the evocative "Für Jimmy Giuffre" and Thieke
the intriguing groovelike "Hurrah die butter ist schon wieder
alle". The West Coast feel speeds up slightly on "An analysis
of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces",
a collective effort that recalls Giuffre's own "Abstract"
with Shelly Manne and Shorty Rogers (on The Three & The Two
on Contemporary). The lack of bass forces the musicians to play
in a tighter communion, their precision with themes, cues and solos
balanced by the natural spontaneity of the music. Those rediscovering
acoustic jazz via John Zorn’ s Masada or the sorely missed Michael
Moore's Clusone 3 should check this out.—JMVS
Okkyung
Lee
NIHM
Tzadik 7715
 "Special
thanks to John Zorn for (simply) being who he is," writes cellist
Okkyung Lee. And, cynics might add, for signing the cheque.. Nihm
is, after all, quintessentially Tzadik product, a typically Downtown
(as was) mixture of atmospheric, wistful improv ("On A Windy
Day", "Anything You Say, Anything You (Don't) Say"),
Balkan-inflected post-klez post-Masada ("That Undeniable Empty
Feeling", "Returning Point") with the odd splash of
insanity ("Deep Blue Knot") cobbed in for good measure.
The performances are naturally as impressive as the line-up –
Tim Barnes and John Hollenbeck on percussion, Trevor Dunn on bass,
Doug Wieselman on clarinets, Shelley Burgon on harp, Sylvie Courvoisier
on piano and Ikue Mori on electronics join Lee in ten cunningly sequenced
and exquisitely recorded pieces. Notching up bonus Zornie points,
the eternally shining gold booklet comes complete with a quotation
not from Mickey Spillane, but from Raymond Chandler: "The French
have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and
they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little." Which,
if read aloud while listening to the hauntingly beautiful "Sky"
could bring a tear to the eye of the hardest hardboiled private eye.
Or music journalist.—DW
Fredrik
Soegaard / Hasse Poulsen
…AND WE ALSO CAUGHT A FISH
Leo CD LR 436
 The
(so far) only gig I played with Hasse Poulsen (along with Edward Perraud
on drums and Scott Rosenberg, whose idea it was) was compared by one
enthusiastic punter in the audience to Amon Düül's Psychedelic
Underground, of all things. That surprised me at the time, but
it's true that there is a psychedelic streak to the Danish guitarist's
playing in groups such as Sound Of Choice, 49° Nord and Das Kapital
– psychedelic as in colourful.. but rambling (Deleuze freaks
would probably call it "rhizomatic"). This outing with Fredrik
Soegaard (you ought to know that the archive prints from the Danish
National Library of Science and Medicine in the inner sleeve are more
interesting to look at than Poulsen's rather bland photograph used
for the cover) is curiously similar to Jean-François Pauvros
and Makoto Kawabata's Extrême Onction on Fractal (so
it won't come as any surprise to learn that the bloke who compared
our set to Amon Düül was none other than Fractal's Jérôme
Génin). Awash with special effects – Soegaard uses MIDI
Fractal (no puns intended, Jérôme!) and an Eventide 3000
– it also recalls the pioneering work of the granddaddy of looped
guitar, Robert Fripp, and like his vintage Frippertronics albums manages,
paradoxically, to be at one and the same time spaced out and claustrophobic.—DW
Wadada
Leo Smith / Walter Quintus / Katya Quintus /
Miroslav Tadic / Mark Nauseef
SNAKISH
Leo CD LR 435
 Leo
Feigin's wildly enthusiastic press release blurbs are always fun to
read, but his description of Snakish as one of the all time
best releases on his label will surely raise a few eyebrows. Not because
it's somewhat atypical in a catalogue largely devoted to free jazz
(the Ganelin Trio, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Braxton Leos have attained
classic status, but recent outings featuring Frank Gratkowski and
Wally Shoup are just as worthy of attention), but because it's such
an elusive piece of work. Wadada Leo Smith's trumpet is as mellifluous
as ever, but exactly how it fits into the strange, amorphous soundworld
created by Katya Quintus (voice), Walter Quintus (laptop and electronics),
Miroslav Tadic (guitars) and Mark Nauseef (percussion and electronics)
isn't always all that clear. None of the 14 pieces on the album is
very long – all but four clock in under four minutes –
and one wishes that the musicians could have developed several of
them further. The overriding impression on listening to the album
all the way through is one of curiosity and wonder tinged with mild
frustration: the music is seductive and works very well with a wide
palette of sounds, but once the final "Coiling" has slunk
off into the undergrowth one has great difficulty recalling any of
Snakish's actual themes and structures. Time will tell whether
Feigin's claims for the album are borne out; in the meantime it would
be great to hear more from the same group.—DW
Mats
Gustafsson
SLIDE
Fireworks FER 1054
 A few
years ago Mats Gustafsson surprised everyone – or at least those
hardcore improv punters who'd got used to his repertoire of spits,
splutters, barks and yelps – by teaming up with David Grubbs
(on harmonium) on Apertura, a whole album of continuous pianissimo
circular-breathing drone on Grubbs's Blue Chopsticks label. Nowadays
Mats is best known for his ball-breaking muscular gangsta jazz with
groups like The Thing, which makes Slide all the more surprising.
The album consists of a single composition, "Slide Perspectives",
on which Gustafsson plays a slide saxophone (it sounds to all intents
and purposes like a cross between a clarinet and a swanee whistle
– no wonder it never caught on), which he toots more or less
every second while raising the pitch gradually by microtonal increments.
After 19'20" the whole register of the instrument – just
over a couple of octaves – has been covered, and, surprise,
during the rest of the piece Gustafsson moves back downwards until
we're back to where we started. That's it. Though it's fun listening
to the harmonic afterglow reverberating in the performance space,
the novelty soon wears off. If you enjoy arid acoustic research outings
like Pietro Grossi's Battimenti, this is probably for you,
but if you're coming to Gustafsson's huge discography for the first
time, there are better places to start.—DW
Ruth
Barberán / Margarida Garcia / Ferran Fages / Alfredo Costa
Monteiro
OCTANTE
L'innomable
Damn, and here I was all ready to go with a super new term to describe
a whole new genre of improvised music: "soft noise".. OK
so I nicked it from Eric Cordier – it's how he described his
duo with Tetuzi Akiyama – but it applied quite nicely to some
of the stuff that was coming out about a couple of years of ago, including
Tetuzi's Résophonie album on ABS, and the first few
releases by Cremaster, the duo of Ferran Fages and Alfredo Costa Monteiro.
Problem is, Octante, which also features Fages and Costa
Monteiro (on, respectively, feedback mixing board and pickups and
accordion) along with trumpeter Ruth Barberán and electric
bassist Margarida Garcia isn't soft. In fact it's pretty
loud and decidedly nasty in places. The Iberian peninsular improvisers
have now gone way beyond the old lowercase lingua franca puffs
and spurts into the kind of abrasive noise that wouldn't be at all
out of place at the No Fun festival. This quartet has more in common
with Wolf Eyes and Femail than it does with Filament or Broken Consort.
The only thing that identifies their work as "improv" as
opposed to "noise" is that there remain patches of stillness,
windows in the structure that still allow rays of light – aka
extraneous sound – to penetrate. Octante, rather than
the recent Creative Sources outing Istmo, is the real successor
to last year's excellent Atolon on Rossbin – or rather
precursor, as it was in fact recorded earlier, in July 2003.
Come to think of it, Atolon wasn't exactly soft either. Time
to rethink the lexicon, redraw the map. In the meantime, check this
out.—DW
EKG
NO SIGN
Sedimental SEDCD 041
 The adjective
austere has had a pretty heavy possing here over the past
few years (a quick click on PT's nifty homepage search engine –
try it, kids! – reveals it's appeared in no fewer than 46 reviews
on the site), but if ever an album truly deserved to be described
as such, it's this one. For their second full-length outing after
Object 2 on
Locust, released in 2003 but recorded earlier, EKG – Kyle Bruckmann
(oboe, English horn, electronics) and Ernst Karel (trumpet and electronics)
– return to the frozen Arctic of slow, lumbering analog drone,
a hostile environment in which high-speed chattery, splattery old
school improv is as unwelcome as user friendly clicks'n'cuts. Few
explorers who venture in return to tell the tale – Werner Dafeldecker
comes to mind, as does Boris Hauf (both recorded with Bruckmann in
Vienna a couple of years ago and we're still waiting for the results
to defrost) – the only way to survive is don protective clothes
and head out into the blizzard, slowly marking out a path through
the white, wind-blasted wasteland. Don't expect a hot shower and a
warm bed at the end of the day, either. There is a sort of "Last
Post" loneliness to Karel's trumpet on "Days", or maybe
it's just my imagination. Or frostbite. I've heard that they send
bright young rising star yuppies off on survival holidays into the
wilds of Siberia to build rafts using nothing more than a Swiss Army
knife, sail down black rivers, eat tree bark and wrestle with grizzly
bears. Next time they organise one No Sign should be required
listening, on permanent loop. This is great stuff.—DW
Avram
Fefer/Bobby Few
KINDRED SPIRITS
Boxholder BXH 048
Avram
Fefer/Bobby Few
HEAVENLY PLACES
Boxholder BXH 049
These
two albums come at the sax/piano format from complementary directions.
Kindred Spirits is a soft-spoken batch of Monk, Mingus and
Ellington tunes, while Heavenly Places offers tumultuous
free-jazz improvisations; two originals by Fefer turn up on both discs,
as if to knit the whole project together. When free-jazzers play “in
the tradition” the results can be awkward or just pleasantly
offbeat, but both these guys have impeccable jazz chops, and perform
tunes like “Ask Me Now” and “Come Sunday”
with thorough understanding. Kindred Spirits is often uncannily
close in sound and approach to a Lacy/Waldron duet, even though Fefer
mostly plays tenor here (getting a loamy sound halfway between Ricky
Ford and David Murray). It’s a very calm album, gratifyingly
unsentimental despite the ballad-heavy program but curiously irony-free:
indeed, it’s peculiarly disconcerting to hear Mingus without
the lurching excess or Monk delivered so unaffectedly.
Heavenly Places reveals a different side to these players.
Fefer’s tone is harder and sometimes pained, especially on the
title-track, a tribute to the late Oliver Johnson and Wilber Morris.
He also turns out to be one of the few free-jazz saxophonists whose
range of timbral manipulations is as imaginative as those of a specialist
free-improviser like John Butcher. Few’s stoical Mal Waldron
side is still present on the title-track, while on the freely-improvised
“Happy Hour” he unleashes a whirling two-handed rhapsody
at the keyboard, like some exotic late-Romantic chromatic fantasist.
Where the other album seems ultimately a little too becalmed –
despite Few’s glittering, show-stopper solo work –
Heavenly Places is more colourful and openended, a tumultuous
spiritual adventure resolved by the closing hymn “Kingdom Come.”
Feverfew, by the way, is an aromatic plant used by traditional healers
to soothe migraines and other ailments. I'm happy to prescribe these
two discs to those in need.—ND
David
Behrman
MY DEAR SIEGFRIED
Experimental Intermedia XI 129
 Sam
Behrman (David's father) and English "soldier-poet" Siegfried
Sassoon were long-distance friends, a fact duly celebrated in the
first CD of this double set. "My Dear Siegfried" (which
I politely suggest should first be approached through headphones while
carefully reading the texts) is a six-movement document of some of
the most dramatic moments and intense recollections by two profound
thinkers, under the guise of reciprocal letters or vivid remembrances
of childhood's inner discoveries. On the exquisite "My Father's
Grocery Store", religion-inspired repression, a sense of guilt
and prize fighting all obey a lucid compositional logic where Ralph
Samuelson's shakuhachi and Peter Zummo's gorgeous trombone inflections
complement Behrman's computerized systematisations and the readings
by Thomas Buckner, Eric Barsness and Maria Ludovici, resulting in
a beautifully controlled anarchy – one of this composer's trademarks.
The scary menace of the drones underlining the most anguished sections
of "Letter from S.N.Behrman" and "Letter from Siegfried
Sassoon", a one-week-span exchange of ideas and anxious fears
dating from the beginning of World War II, along with the masterful
use of dark and light seems to represent a parallel population of
spirits and primordial man-machines who (if they had only thought
it appropriate) might have influenced the choices of the powers that
be, yet preferred to remain imprisoned in their own immobile precariousness,
leaving humans to their fate. The evocative character of this important
composition never detracts from its penetrating deliquescence.
The second disc presents five tracks ranging from 1969's "A New
Team Takes Over", a tape piece using snippets of speech by members
of the Nixon Administration, to 2002's "Viewfinder", a sound
installation where a sensor linked to a camera changes pitches and
colours emitted by homemade synthesizers according to movements detected
in the room. Homemades are also the source for the static minimalism
of 1972's "Pools Of Phase Locked Loops", a corpulent mass
of electronic sound that recalls Charlemagne Palestine's work with
oscillators. While "Touch Tones" (1979) is little more than
an experiment with a computer and voltage controlled filters, this
disc's real masterpiece is "QSRL", a startling tone poem
from 1998 that finds Jon Gibson's sensual saxophone playing waiting
games with wonderful shifting harmonies that are typical Behrman –
think "Leapday Night". The oblique sweetness of Behrman's
music has always been its driving force and these two fine discs confirm
his unblemished greatness.—MR
Robert
Normandeau
PUZZLES
Empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0575 Audio DVD
A
professor in electroacoustic composition at Montreal University, Robert
Normandeau is also one of those composers whose music can sound like
a divertissement but, at times, becomes deeply revealing
if not disturbing. This duality is immediately evident when one compares
the first two tracks on this release: "Puzzle", a rhythmic
exercise scored for door sounds and vocal onomatopoeia, is lively,
almost funny, yet pretty flat as far as psychic impact goes. The following
"Eden", on the other hand, is a detailed architecture of
brilliant loops and almost (Steve) Reichian pulses, where female voices
and contrasting illuminations pave the way for an emphatic tonal affirmation
that remains forward looking while managing to avoid the obvious.
"Chorus", dedicated to the victims of 9/11, takes some of
the basic chant elements of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and entangles
them in liberal electrostatic vocal jargon in which immobility and
desperation intertwine, hopelessly waiting for non-existent peace.
"StrinGDberg", for multilayered hurdy-gurdy and cello, is
dramatically minimalist, but its instrumental peculiarities are so
incredibly deformed that I could have sworn a vocal source was present.
The majestic crescendo of its mechanical subdivision is gospel for
lovers of high-density powerful consonance. Closing the DVD, "Hamlet-Machine
With Actors" is, according to the composer, a tentative description
of the oppression that society exerts on man, the representation of
taboos and the end of art. It's a dark, thrilling piece where vocal
utterances, repeated laughter, lugubrious electronics and a clutter
of percussion fuse in a hellish mire, not too far removed from Art
Zoyd and Cassiber at their most stirring moments.—MR
Morceaux
de Machines
ESTRAPADE
No Type IMNT 0413
Noise as a musical genre is no longer the bastard child of Industrial,
and while many practitioners and aficionados still subscribe to its
no-pain-no-gain aesthetic, there's a whole basketful of young cats
out there who just wanna have fun. Think Lasse Marhaug, Maja Ratkje
– and Morceaux de Machines, the Québecois duo of A. Dontigny
and Erick d'Orion, aided and abetted here on four tracks by Diane
Labrosse, Martin Tétreault and the ubiquitous Otomo Yoshihide
(if a genie ever grants you three wishes you could really piss him
off by using one of them to ask for the complete Otomo discography..
the other two would be for a house big enough to store it and enough
time to listen to it all). Adding a healthy dose of 150plus BPM drum'n'bass'n'gabba
is a great idea – you'll be surprised how likeable even the
most vicious sonic knife attacks can be if there's a mighty backbeat
crunching along in the background (the wise old man of Noise, Masami
Akita, knows this only too well), but there's more to these nine tracks
than merciless hardcore. Dontigny and d'Orion have a huge arsenal
of sonic weaponry at their disposal, from mangled early Neubaten-style
metal, vertiginous turntablism (not so much plunderphonics as chunderphonics),
scything drones and all manner of digital clutter. The ultimate goal
might still be to end up with ears full of blood, but with Estrapade
you can dance yourself silly while the earwax melts. Let's hope these
chaps hook up with those Norwegians soon for some transatlantic aural
tag wrestling.—DW
Thomas
Köner
NUUK
MillePlateauxMedia MPM 003 CD/DVD
I've
been following the work of Permafrost overlord Thomas Köner
for 13 years now and have yet to find one of his immobile icy raptures
that fails to satisfy. Nuuk (originally released as part
of the Big Cat 4CD box Driftworks along with music by Pauline
Oliveros, Randy Raine-Reusch, Paul Schütze and Nijiumu) is a
series of immaculate slowly rolling cloud masses, whose rumbling subfrequencies
sing an impalpable hosanna to the eternal silence. From that mysterious
reticence, aggregates of submerged illusions and manipulations of
abnormal stasis invade the air, percolations of stationary uneasiness
Köner remodels into dark awareness by fusing them with the most
elemental parts of our environment. "Nuuk (night)" begins
with a low drone (incredibly similar to Klaus Wiese's Space,
the greatest drone record ever released, if you ask me), but were
I forced to choose just one track here, it would be "Nuuk (day)",
with its marmoreal currents of expressionless desolation throwing
feeble rays of hope, a glimpse of the future soon lost in virtual
landscapes of reminiscence.. Four of these seven tracks accompany
Köner's static imagery in a double sided (NTSC/PAL versions)
DVD included in the package; two stills – a peripheral urban
area and a seashore, both covered with snow – are shown at various
moments of the day; crepuscular snapshots and grey afternoons slowly
alternate without additional dynamics, perfect for the hollow depths
Köner reports from. When the music's over, absence weighs a little
more than before.—MR
Punck
NOWHERE CAMPFIRE TAPES
Aferecords Afe062 CD
Entitling one of your pieces "Tsunami Notes" and featuring
spoken text (on "Adriatico Lisergico" there's even the sound
of waves breaking on the seashore) certainly goes against the grain
of electronica's predominantly abstract non-programmatic agenda. In
context, the glistening chords and gently collapsing rumble of the
opening "Almost Anything" are heard more as doleful requiem
than gradually shifting microtonal clusters, and the eerie bleeps
behind the Chinese water torture of "Tsunami Notes" take
on a whole new meaning. The closing "Almost Nothing" –
the reference to Luc Ferrari's "Presque Rien N°.1",
which originated on the other side of the Adriatic, couldn't be clearer
– is a 26-minute tone poem complete with birds twittering merrily
away while some sporadic (re)construction work carries on in the foreground
and the occasional light aircraft drones by overhead. Whether it'll
sound as good once the images of devastated paradise beaches and bloated
rotting corpses has faded from our imagination is a moot point, but
the elegance of the production and the precision and beauty of Adriano
Zanni's music is undeniable.—DW
Peter
Wright
YELLOW HORIZON
Pseudoarcana PACD066
As
you'll have probably guessed on reading the retrospective above, Peter
Wright is one of the men who have redefined the concept of drone guitar.
Yellow Horizon continues where he left off on his recent
excellent Desolation, Beauty, Violence, and is conceived
for the same instrumentation, a 12-string Danelectro plus minimal
effects and field recordings. Dedicated to the beautiful losers (a
probable hint to a short-lived namesake project by Peter) these eight
jewels glow with the melancholy of tolling bells evoking distant childhood
memories. All the tracks gravitate around a few tonal centres, sometimes
just one, their muffled harmony a revealing suspension of gravity,
as Wright leaves out all trace of harshness to build chants, patterns
and blurred visuals whose purity is almost palpable. The somnolent
wave of aching grace of "Offa's Dyke" ends far too soon,
although in fact many minutes elapse while we're blissed away by the
brain-massaging angels of its guitar harmonics. Once more our man
confirms himself as one of the true greats and it's about time his
music reached a much wider audience, as its transcendental repetition
is a veritable blessing for today's tormented ears.—MR
Peter
Rehberg
FREMDKOERPER
Mosz 007
After two outings with DACM on Asphodel and Mego, Mego main man /
laptopper par excellence Peter "Pita" Rehberg continues
his work collaborating with dancers with this set of pieces written
for choreographer Chris Haring. Rehberg's music has come a long way
since 1995's Seven Tons For Free, and this album, like the
recent Get Off (Hapna) reveals
a solid working knowledge of the past history of electronic music,
while remaining true to his roots in the outer reaches of techno and
noise ("Scream"). There's often the hint of backbeat, and
plenty of crunchy glitch and booming drone ("1407"), but
also a welcome lightness of touch and ear for meticulous detail ("Never
Worry"). Though not as well rounded as Get Off –
the albums as a whole has more the feel of a sampler of favourite
moments from a larger work, rather than a complete work in itself
– Fremdkoerper is still a valuable addition to Rehberg's
already impressive discography.—DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
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