Mixing electronic sounds with analog gestures
isn’t always an easy output. One think about the many releases by labels such
as Matthew Shipp’s Thirsty Ear and Manfred Eicher’s ECM and not all the releases
are completely satisfying. Sometimes the electronic sounds are too much
grounded by the beats, sometimes the beats instead of becoming a propulsion
weaken the improvised part. That’s why when an album such as the one we’re
reviewing come out, I am sometimes a little bit skeptical as far as my
approach.
But in this case the result is surprisingly
good. The merit has to be divided by both the musicians involved, so we’re
going to introduce them to you the reader. Born in San Francisco in 1943, and
subsequently residing first in New York then in France, where, in Provence, he
founded the CEPI (European Center for Improvisation), Barre Phillips is
considered as the first bass player to go solo. In 1968, after a first part of
a career in which he played with the likes of Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Giuffre,
Archie Shepp, Lee Konitz and Marion Brown he recorded the first improvisation
for solo bass.
Born in Budapest in 1954, Gyorgy Kurtag Jr, son
of the famous composer, completed his composition studies at the Franz Liszt
Academy of Music, and subsequently he joined IRCAM, an association founded by
Pierre Boulez in Paris where he worked as a composer and as a computer music
director. Involved in collaborative composition since 1999, he also led during
his life the trio of imprivisers Spions and the prog rock trio Sc.art.
In approaching this project Kurtag Jr thought
about his wide palette as a tool to building up rooms for his mate where he
could improvise, but the synergy, after Phillips worked for quite some years to
a series of bass solo records – this is his first collaboration on an album
since years – is at high levels. Obviously is not the first collaboration by
the two musicians: they indeed started working together on 2014, and for a
lucky mistake.
A director who was preparing a film on Phillips
in 2013 wanted to include a performance of him accompanied by Kurtag Sr, but
Phillips himself, who saw the son playing at a festival quite some time before,
misundertood the director and prepared himself to play with Kurtag Jr, as
finally happened. “The first image that comes to me to characterise the way I
play with Barre is architectural”, stated Kurtag Jr as reported by the CD liner
notes.
“I am dealing with a musician whose playing and
phrasing changes constantly and in the most unpredictably ways possible”.
That’s where the concept of ‘building a room’ for Phillips comes from. The
album is introduced by two short one minute and a half pieces of almost
complete electronic sounds. Beyond and The Under Zone are, this way, an
introduction to this intimate world of sounds.
Tension rises, but the listening process
requires a certain amount of closeness to experience all the nuances of the
electronic inputs. In Two by Two and Across the Aisle, the bass becomes more preeminent
and the electronic gestures stronger. There is no melody or harmony, only an
atmosphere of suspension, almost of elevation. The arco traces some hints of
bitterness or electricity, in a climax that gives life to a series of sensation
the listener is required to listen to inside himself.
Finally with the fourth fragment it seem
that small percussions are circling the bass, who becomes again preeminent with
small decise gestures more and more paroxistic, but with a use of the pauses
and silence that let Phillips’ fantasy free to percuss also the single strings
and then come back to the arcoed notes while the electronic sounds overflow.
Algobench is another brief interlocution that leads to Chosen Spindle, where
the coordinates are emotionally and spatially that of the two other longer
pieces, just to let space to a series of episodes of almost three minutes each.
The electronic sounds at this point become more
descriptive, they hint at a melody, at a kind of minuet, while since Extended
Circumstances the arcoed notes come back with a small, minimal electronic
environment around them. Like wounds into the night, they’re free to leave the
foreground to a haunted far away melody from the past before coming back at the
closest part.
Bunch is one of the most abstract moment of the
album, with the bass as a skeleton and the electronics as a stairway to the
bottom of the conscience. Sharpen Your Eyes has a rhythmic and primitive
quality, while Ruptured Air is reminiscent of the desert and the blues. Finally,
Stand Alone and its coda Forest Shouts are the compositions most similar to a
dialogue between analogic and electronic sounds, the most similar to an
improvised dialogue, concluding with scattered bass pizzicato notes.
Organic and complete as far as relationship
between improvisation and composition, this album is possibly one of the best
outputs of this 2022. I had the opportunity to listen to it only few times
since when it entered my house but it’s one of the most accomplished attempts
listened this year to unite the worlds of improvised music and electronic
composition. And it’s also evident and clear how much Kurtag Jr and Phillips
had their own amusement in creating this work of art.
I was really excited last Sunday since I heard
rumours about Riley in person attending a performance of some of his works for
orchestra and improvisors for an amount of two hours and a half at San Vito’s
Church in Milan. None of this happened: a bunch of musicians instead, partly
taken from the Cantelli Orchestra and partly students and beginners, performed
an half an hour version of Riley’s famous composition In C. I was not disappointed,
but I have to make some notes.
Terry Riley is a composer I discussed reviewing
one of his last discographical outputs here.
Born in 1936, father of the so called ‘minimalism’ with La Monte Young, Marian
Zazeela and Steve Reich, he studied at the San Francisco College and then at
Berkley. During the first half of the Sixties he toured Europe with various
musicians playing improvised music. Then he started studying Indian music and
philosophy under the master Pandit Pran Nath.
In C is one of his most famous works. It all
starts from a pulsation in C from the piano or electronic impulse, and develops
with various musicians responsible of a music that can be defined ‘psychedelic’
in the wider sense of the word. Every musician plays few notes or a figure,
adding layers on layers trying to avoid every defined form of chant or melody
creating instead a multi-layered musical sensation.
The score features only about 50 musical
figures in the order they have to be performed. When these fragments will be
played, from which instrument, for how much time are up to the musicians
themselves. The musicians involved in Sunday’s performance under the direction
of Alessandro Calcagnile were a xylophone, a violin, a flute, three clarinets,
and a vibraphone. All musicians were equally trained during a common workshop.
The performance was really interesting
but, as far as the handling of the sonorous fragments, some of them were only a
hint to a melody or a phrase, others were too much defined in comprarison at
least to a classic recording released by Columbia in 1968, as far as I can
remember. The too much defined phrases broke that sensation or feeling of
trance induced by the rest of the music, but I have to admit it is difficult to
choose what phrases to play, how and when during performances like these.
Obviously the environment played a distinctive
role in the rendition of the music. Being in a church with that peculiar sound
and natural amplification is of help for all music, but for this kind of music
in particular. The audience has responded warmly so, net of the next important
future performance of the review Milano Suona Contemporanea (Wednesday Sept. 23,
flutist Birgit Nolte on musics by Karlheinz Stockhausen), this was one of the
most intriguing performances of contemporary music in Milano this autumn.
“They want to be the agents, not the
victims of history. [...] It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the
ego to its ultimate – confusion between him who worships and that which is
woshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man”
(Philip K.
Dick “Man in the High Castle”)
I can’t think of a better introduction to this
post but Philip K. Dick words. In effect, when I think about the japanese avant
garde musicians, it comes to my mind the hell of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with
those burning and deformed bodies. It is as if artists, starting with Tatsumi
Ijikata and Kazuo Ohno and their butoh dance, had incorporated those images
into themselves giving them the life and the voice of their outburst moments,
as if those burning and deformed bodies wanted to say something human during
their extreme suffering, and not despite of it.
More prosaically, if you want to start to
explore the world of the avant garde japanese jazz from the 1960s, a good
starting point is Teruto Soejima’s book Free Jazz in Japan: A Personal
History,issued in English in 2014 by
Public Bath Press. Pivotal figure of those years, Soejima describes with anecdotes
and photographs those magic years, starting from 1969 up to 1979. After that
time, he assures us, music has drastically changed from free jazz avant garde
to free pop avant garde. A genre he doesn’t like that much.
If we want to start and explore those years,
the first figure to investigate is drummer Masahiko Togashi. He started
playing as a mature musician in duo with saxophonist Sadao Watanabe at the end
of the Sixties, after the baptism of fire of the post-bop record with the Four
Unit by pianist Masahiko Sato, with whom he will collaborate also in the
future; in albums like Speed and Space, recorded in Tokyo in 1969 you’ll find
initial scattered percussions as in the AEOC albums – that have gave life to
their career only few years after Togashi’s – in order to create an atmosphere
of recollection, then with a piece like Panorama piano and tenor gain the
foreground creating an incandescent and dramatic atmosphere.
This expressive urge is typical of Japanese
free jazz, and in this it goes even far beyond the original African American
free jazz. Togashi’s style on drums recall that of Max Roach playing with Cecil
Taylor on one side, and Sunny Murray’s on the other hand: coloristic, full of
nuances, cymbals, plates, but it’s also very accurate, net and fast. After a
few listenings, Togashi will gain his own authority in your head and all the
possible comparisons will give space to a musician that has something to say
for sure.
Masayuki Takayanagi (1932-1991) was onstage since the end of the
Fifties. Initially ostracized after he described the world of (cool) jazz as “a
bunch of losers”, after he descovered free playing from the end of the Sixties
he became an active sonic terrorist. He worked to various projects and
collaborated also to various records of Kaoru Abe – we’ll talk about him later
– in various duo records.
April is The Cruellest Month, recorded in 1975
by Bernard Stollman for ESP Disk, sees a trio (Takayanagi plus flutes, reeds
and drums) is an extraordinary climax, from sounds scattered here and there to
a pure wall of sound. Andy Beta on Pitchfork defined Takayanagi as the missing
link between Ayler, Merzbow and the Acid Mother Temple, but in fact he was a
musician capable of shifting from the Fifties cool jazz to the experiments with
feedbacks and all the range of sounds an electric amplified guitar can create,
also beating her with a violin arco or with metal parts, that led to
comparisons with Jimi Hendrix and Sonny Sharrock. During the 1990s he toured
with John Zorn and became famous outside of Japan also.
Trumpeter Itaru Oki, born in Kobe in 1941,
started his career as a koto player since that was the instrument mastered by
his mother. During the Fifties he switched to trumpet, starting playing in
university bands. He studied the style of Kenny Dorham, Fumio Nanri and Sadao
Watanabe, and from the Sixties onward he started playing with the group ESSG
led by Masahiko Sato.
In 1974 he started living in Paris, where he
played with expat fellow Takashi Kato and with Art Farmer, Maynard Ferguson and,
above all, Steve Lacy, having bassist Alan Silva as a trait d’union with
European and US free musicians. With Lacy he recorded the beautiful The Wire,
where Lacy is in a way infected by Japanese urge to communicate.
But in records like Mirage (1977) by the Itaru
Oki Trio you can perceive the diversity of style Oki approached during his
career, even if elaborated in a personal way. Less burning and dense in
comparison with the rest of the material exposed in this post, Oki’s mastery is
undeniable and admirable. The record has its place somewhere in between the
Blue Note albums of almost-free-jazz the label issued during the past decade
(the Sixties), a sound still vivid during Oki’s career if you think that Sam
Rivers’ Dimensions and Extentions, recorded in 1967, was released only the same
year of Mirage.
Bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa (1931-1998)
was a pivotal figure in the development of Japanese free jazz. In particular
we’ll remember a live session with drummer Elvin Jones, during Coltrane tour in
Japan in 1966. A pioneer in solo bass performances – he started working on it
during the same period as Barre Phillips – in 1969, even if these works will be
documented only many years after.
He started working to collaborate with Kaoru
Abe at a certain point during his career, and apart from various duo
performances as those recorded into the album Duo 75 Nord, the two musicians
will release a record with guitarist Derek Bailey and trumpeter Toshinori
Kondo, titled Aida’s Call and recorded six month before Abe’s departure.
The album start with a guitar non idiomatic
chord sequence, with the alto moaning just to create a nice contrast. After few
minutes, the electrified trumpet of Kondo enters, now surrounding the other
players, now in the background and now in the foreground. Then finally
Yoshizawa produces a huge drone with the arco on the strings. Then at a certain
point he starts producing scattered few notes in contrast with those moments in
which he dominates. Music makes himself now more excited, now more relaxing,
but after a good third of the album the four explode literally on disturbing
but exalting tones. The Man From S.L.A.P.P.Y. is finally another
speaking-in-tongues approach to music, recalling Albert Ayler but more
mockingly. Last Spear Core get back to the more harsh moments of the second
piece from this album.
But if you have to name one musician that
possibly is well known to the public even outside Japan, even on a niche as
free improv, multi-instrumentalist Kaoru Abe (1949-1978) is cerainly
that name. More similar to the cliché of the tormented genius, that people all
around the world understand very well in order to take the art away from their
common life so not to mix too much themselves with it, nonetheless Abe’s
geniality is genuine since him being self-thought on alto, clarinet and
harmonica.
For sure his music, developed since when he was
thrown away from school at the age of 17 up to that entire year, until 1968,
has something sincere to say as all the other musicians involved in this
article, but his life, tragically ended after an overdose of meds, stand up for
himself and still continues to fascinate people all over the world, for the
reasons I have express here above.
In order to represent his art, I have chosen
his duet album with Yoshizawa, Duo 75 Nord, on one hand because it represent
his style at his peak, but also because in a way it removes him from the
clichés of the solo-romantic-performances he risks to be traped in. The
dialogue with his peer Yoshizawa here is varied and shows all the eclecticity of
the two musicians. On the other hand, Yoshizawa is more than an accompanist,
but a high-ranking comprimary, through his arcoes, plugged and plucked notes,
and Cage-like silent moments.
Born in Tokyo in 1942, pianist Yosuke
Yamashita passed through classical composition. During the Seventies he
founded his own trio with Akira Sakata (alto) and Takeo Moriyama (drums) in
1969. First European tours were a success. During the Eighties he gave life to
another trio with Cecil McBee and Pheroan akLaff. He is finally famous also for
his scores for films, like Dr. Akagi and Exstasy of the Angels.
Chiasma, third live album from the original
Yosuke Yamashita Trio, is a clear example of how incredible is this combo.
Since Ornette piano-less bands, that revolutionized the music giving the horns
more harmonic freedom, this is the first time we hear a bass-less ensemble, and
the result is that piano had to transform itself in a three-pointed instrument,
harmonically, melodically and rhythmically. The result is almost a fiery
tarantella, as you can hear in some passages by the AEOC with Muhal Richard
Abrahms on piano recorded few years after this record.
We kind of saved the best for last with drummer
Yoshisaburo ‘Sabu’ Toyozumi, the only non-US musician to enter, in 1971,
in the AACM of Chicago; he has been one of the most important Japanese free
jazz drummers. Perfect link between Japan and the United States, he imported
into his native land such important musicians as Derek Bailey, Misha
Mengelberg, and Sunny Murray.
A disciple of the late Watatsumido, shakuhachi
player and zen master, Toyozumi declared more than once to have been helped by
nature to give life to his own style. Water Weed, released in 1975, on one hand
fortified the tradition of the ‘records from a drummer’ typical of the US free
jazz, on the other had with its typical beginning full of sparse percussions it
is the perfect liaison between the East and the West. Pointillistic as much as
coloristic, Toyozumi is able to paint a wider landscape with its instrument, an
ideal ground for his partners in order to express themselves.
As I wrote at the beginning, with the end of
the Seventies the first wave of Japanese free jazz ends, leaving space to a
more poppish approach to the music or to an even more experimental approach, as
you can hear through the records of Keiji Haino or Otomo Yoshihide. But this is
another story, and it will be narrated another time. Here after, some albums
for you to listen in order to approach more correctly Japanese free jazz from
the Sixties and Seventies.
“I believe, as Lenin said, that this
revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms of life” – Michail Gorbachev
I don’t think the ex USSR leader was talking
about the “chaos” of free improvisation, but it’s nice to think that, if he
would appreciate this kind of music and style, for sure he would to quote
himself in order to represent how a peculiar sound and idea of composition and
improvisation could give shape to a “new life”, or at least to a “new
consciousness”.
The hard fact was, instead, that “jazz was
considered to be third-rate entertainment, [but this way] it was not an object
to be criticized as literature and classical music were” (jazz critic Alexey
Batashev). Misinterpreted as “a style of expression only to spread cheap
illusions” (musician Alexey S. Kozlov), jazz musicians were this way
paradoxically free to express themselves with no control from the authorities.
Even if the price to pay when you play an
almost illegal music, coming from the Western civilization and the Capitalism –
where Western Communists saw in this kind of music a way for the black culture
to free itself and its oppressed from the chains of racism, see Carles and
Comolli book Free Jazz Black Power (1971) – is to become almost irrelevant and
condemned also to become almost a clandestine, the passion of so many, mostly
unsung heroes as the ones you’ll find in this post, stand up and speak for
itself.
The first Soviet jazz musician was Valentin
Parnov. He came back to the USSR from Paris with his own band in 1928, during a
period where in the U.S. people like Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver took
this style of music to its peak. Jazz had a spread over the country, but,
opposed, had to merely survive until the end of WWII. After, jazz was just
tolerated and mostly exploited. In 1948 Zhdanov banned all new cultural forms.
The media carried anti-jazz campaigns, jazz
musicians had to play underground and the listeners had to play their records
secretly. Finally in 1962 during a period of relaxation from the Cold War, the
Benny Goodman Orchestra and others could tour the country. In the same year, a
jazz magazine was printed, the very first one, and a jazz festival was held in
Moscow. The first seeds were planted.
In more recent times Leo Feigin, an expat from
Russia with a great passion for jazz, founded Leo Records in 1979. His purpose
was since the beginning to document free jazz coming from his own country, with
the help of many friends who, on vacation in Russia, attended clandestine
concerts then came back into the UK after having recorded them on tape.
Obviously in order to create hype around his fellow Russian musicians, Feigin
had to issue lots of good material from the most renowned contemporary
improvisers from the U.S. and the Europe.
The result was a label that still nowadays is
considered as one of the best way to approach improvised music from the
Seventies to the present times. Now it’s time to talk about some of the most
interesting musicians coming from the USSR in the field of experimental jazz.
If only few are famous nowadays, thanks to their presence in different
festivals or contexts, or thanks to some good reissues, they’re all creators of
high quality music and they need your attention.
Let’s start with the Ganelin Trio. In
his website, critic Piero Scaruffi describe their music as “a gross exercize in
mis-interpreting Cecil Taylor, as if played by a circus ensemble affected by
deep neurosis but with the skills of classical musicians”. More prosaically,
the trio led by pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin show an exquisite mastery in their
instruments and are able to create wild textures and more intimate moments of
music.
Coming in the U.K. television in 1984, when
Glasnost (“transparency”) still had to dominate the public debate, they created
furious reactions, both positive and negative. The trio formed itself in 1971,
and they featured also saxophonist Vladimir Chekasin and drummer Vladimir
Tarasov. Their music is able to bursts into wild improvisation but is also keen
on more reflexive moments.
Another musician of value, this time born in
Detroit but from Ukrainian immigrants, is poet, multi-reedist, composer Keshavan
Maslak. An accomplised improvisor, having been played with the likes of
Charles Moffett, Ray Anderson and David Murray, before moving to New York City
and playing in the famous RivBea studios, he partecipated actively to the
artistic life of the city, frequenting the music of Philip Glass, Rhys Chatham
and Laurie Anderson.
Try to give a spin to records like Buddha’s
Hand (Circle, 1971), where he’s accompanied by Mark Miller on bass and Sadiq
Abdu Shahid on drums, and you’ll find the same tensions that animated the best
music coming from the New York environment not only during the Seventies but
also in the William Parker era. In fact, this music is coherently in line with
the musician’s attendancies of the period.
A completely different character, but not less
valid, even if his path to music led him near the land of the kitsch even if
his music has solid basis, is Sergeij Kuryiokhin. After he played piano
and keyboards in Leningrad, he became, thanks to many collaborations who help
him deepen his musical vision, one of the pivotal figure in the music business
of his time.
His music can be described as a strange mélange
between John Zorn (jazz and metal played together), Don Cherry’s Theatre of
Eternal Music, and Willem Breuker Kollektief all together, but with a visual
idea – you have to see him playing live, the records are, in this case,
completely unfaithful – coming more from circuses and the military fanfares
than from the avant garde (unless you’re able to distinguish between the two,
which is very hard in this case).
Now, it’s the time to introduce possibly the
most famous band from Tuva, with a well known singer/vocal agitator, Sainkho
Namtchylak: the Tri-O. Very much appreciated thanks to an US tour,
that led the trio plus vocals to become very famous, the Tri-O mix free jazz
with vocal experiments varying from Cathy Berberian to Diamanda Galàs, even if
Namtchylak is an universe on its own and her raucous, sometimes scattered
sometimes dense vocals need to be apreciated without any comparison.
Women in Russian free jazz are not an
exception, and so here we have a couple more. The first is violinist Valentina
Goncharova whose experiments with music are more keen on industrial and
ambient music – somebody would also say ‘new age’ before it became a swear word
– and for its difference with what you heard before – if you’re checking music
while reading, something I would higly recommend – is one of the very first
you’ll want to listen to, even if raucous saxophones are excluded from her
music scores.
Goncharova had a delightful three CD (one
double and one single) reissued recently and available through label Shukai, so
if you are keen on, let’s say just to get unbalanced a little, Pauline Oliveros
experiments with ambiental sounds and drones, this is the right place, even if
a little more melodic, to start. Born in Ukraine in 1953 she moved to Leningrad
at the age of 16, studying there classic violin and composition, but in 1970
she had a revelation in seeing playing live the Ganelin Trio.
At that point she started to experiment with a
modified electric violin built by her husband Igor Zubkov, an engineer. This
way she started experiment with electroacoustic music, recording household
objects with contact microphones. Her music is an example of what you can
obtain when you like to play with things and consider life an occasion to
experiment in the wider sense of the word.
In order to describe the music of Romani Valentina
Ponomareva, instead, Italian critic Stefano Liuzzo bothered the names of
Mercedes Sosa, Chavela Vargas and Oum Kulthum. Truth is, after a period passed
with the interesting Trio Romen (Ponomareva, Igraf Ioshka and Georgi Kvif), she
released a sensational album titled Fortune Teller where classic jazz, scat,
and improvised music, blend together.
In other occasions Ponomareva also loved to act
poems and to collaborate with her beloved composer Sofia Gubaidulina. Less keen
on the canon of ‘classic’ free jazz than her colleague Namtchylak – at least at
the beginning of her career – Ponomareva loves also to communicate and not only
to release tensions in which to have a mirror.
If you my reader are more interested in classic
improvised music, another name I can mention is that of Anatoly Vapirov.
Born in Ukraine in 1947, he studied at the conservatory clarinet and saxophone,
subsequently, apart from his work as a teacher in Leningrad Conservatory, he
toured extensively over the world.
During his last years he lived in Bulgaria, but
he didn’t cut the relationship with Russia and became one of the leading
figures in Russian Jazz. An interesting work from him is the 1983 album
Invocations, where both Ponomareva on vocals and Sergey Kuryokhin on piano and
percussions are present. The three Invocations (of Spirit, of Fire and of
Water) are spatialised during the recording in a very peculiar way.
Many people nowadays would apply the same
recording techniques in order not to let people comprehend how much inadequate
they are as musicians – echoes and effects makes the ambient full of sound and
meaning even if you’re not able to play, I say so because I experimented myself
once, more than 20 years ago – but in this record it is as if Vapirov and
friends musicians are trying to expand their consciousness.
Somewhere in between the Art Ensemble of
Chicago – as far as their climaxes on smaller and then bigger percussions – and
the Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra – for their use of recorded music,
mostly classical, as a background for their compositions – are the Jazz
Group Arkhangelsk, while Vladimir Chekasin can be taken for a
follower of the big bands with free jazz elements tradition.
Finally the duo Homo Liber, documented
by Leo Records in an album from 1989 titled Document – New Music From Russia,
features pianist and multi-instrumentalist Yuri Yukechev and
saxophonist/flutist Vladimir Tolkachev. One of the most peculiar projects in
this post, they mix something that seem to be minimalism or electronic
experiments with analog equipment.
I hope this voyage in the realms of
Russian free jazz will be interesting for you as it was for me, that’s the
reason the post don’t end here but continues with videos of live performances
by some of the musicians involved in my writing and with a couple of
interesting articles I found out on the net:
Sometimes you’re uneasy or unfamiliar, at least
at the beginning, with what comes out of your stereo or during a concert
onstage, and sometimes this unfamiliarity or this sort of uneasiness is good
for you. Terry Riley said once that when we’re at ease with music, it is
because we project something about ourselves in it, and this is not completely
good. I’m paraphrasing, but this is also what I think.
Not that this Chirps, recorded live in 1985 in
Berlin at the Haus am Waldsee, is a particularly difficult record to handle.
Not at all, if you still know the music of the two masters involved in this
album. Steve Lacy started the most vital part of his career as a sideman for
Thelonious Monk, and he transposed that ‘hip’ language, so angular, peculiar
and full of spaces between the notes, on his own instrument, the soprano
saxophone.
After all, soprano is one of the most difficult
horns to play. Being a straight reed instrument, it doesn’t warm or round the
microtones every instrument carry with itself. So, instead of try and hide the
mistakes, Lacy started to exacerbate them. His peculiar way of playing soprano
starts from that point. An italian follower of Lacy, the mourned Gianni Mimmo,
once explained that to an AAJ interviewer.
And Roscoe Mitchell once said to me he was try
and build new curved sopranos in order to have some more enjoyable and able to
be mastered instruments. Strangely enough, but undoubtedly, from Monk another
road lead to the soprano. This other path passes through John Coltrane and his
tritones, his almost binaural sound.
An idea that had a further development thanks
to Evan Parker. Parker is not a simple musician to handle, you cannot put him
in a box quickly, because he passed through various phases and his sound and
techniques have evolved during the passing of time forming a wider palette. So
before listening to this particular record I thought I would listen to two
different way of playing soprano and their attempt to mix together in a way or
another.
Obviously the album is different from what I
thought at the beginning: Parker and Lacy try to come close the one to the
other. If Lacy initially seems to be the more keen on his usual style, the one
we have described before in this post, Parker demonstrates a great ability to
dialogue and fold his techniques in order to create the best music in order to
accompany his partner.
Only at the end of Full Scale, the album
first track, Parker explodes in something that can be related to his binaural
outbursts sculpted into the void, with Lacy following him. For the rest the
relationship between full (of sound) and void are fiercely lacy-esque. What
changes between this record and others outputs – I think particularly of a 1986
release of Lacy and Potts – is that Parker share a similar idea of time and
recollection.
If you’ll listen to the second track,
Relations, you’ll hear the usual Lacy’s angularities interspersed with Parker
attempts to create a more fragmented sound, something unusual since Lacy looks
often for less abrasive, more grandiloquent partners in order to create a
contrast and have some propulsion for his own statements.
It seem to me, this way, that this music is
really one of the best attempts, even more than Lacy supported by another
partner, pianist Mal Waldron, to be loyal to Monk heritage, not literally but
as a matter of spirit. The final four minutes of Twittering present another
dialogue where some phrases are taken from one instrumentalist to the other in
order to build variations and diversities yet in a perspective of unity.
My final advice is not to be disappointed by
the shortness of the album (only 41 minutes and 31 seconds) because this kind
of dialogues need time to develop themselves; on the other hand it would be
easy for such navigated improvisers to try and amaze the audience with longer
performances emptying all the pockets with tricks and techniques. The
interesting thing about this record is, instead, that the musician kind of want
you to take your time and enjoy the music, leaving you with the opportunity to
listen to it again more than once. You’ll want more for sure.
As Marc Ribot, author of a project around
Albert Ayler music titled Spiritual Unity in 2005 with fellows Chad Taylor on
drums, Roy Campbell on trumpet and former Ayler’s bass player Henry Grimes,
said in an old interview for an online jazz magazine, listening to Ayler’s
music on record is like to hear a strange human sacrifice happening in the room
next to yours.
Obviously he was referring to some of his
favorite Ayler records like Spiritual Unity, recorded in 1964 by a trio
featuring Ayler on tenor saxophone, Gary Peacock on bass and Sunny Murray on
drums, who has this haunted quality: in particular the drums are dusty enough
to seem coming from another world, the world of spirits, and the saxophone honks
and squeals during the solos in a way that gives the listener this idea of
suffering, at less until you don’t become confident with this sound and idea of
music.
Last decades were great in order to know better
Ayler’s music: ESP rereleased all of his back catalogue, including many of
Albert Ayler masterpieces like the one sided Bells, in 2004 a 10 discs boxset
titled Holy Ghost was released by Revenant, comprising music not published
until that year coming from 1962-1970, amongst which the incredible performance
held at the John Coltrane funeral march.
In addition to these, saxophonist Peter
Brotzmann reissued in another boxset all the recordings by his Die Like a Dog
Quartet in 2007, an hommage to the incredible life and death of Ayler narrated
musically by Brotz with Toshinori Kondo on trumpet, William Parker on bass and
Hamid Drake on drums. Something delightful for all the Ayler fans scattered
into the world. Unluckily all this material is limited editions, and in 2022
they’re quite unavailable for the masses.
Imagine my joy when I found out this 4CD boxset
titled Revelations was issued this year by the label Elemental: I had to grab a
copy myself, and I did. All around the web but also on paper you’ll find a
division of Ayler career in two parts: the early years and the Impulse!,
commercial years of rock fusion. Nothing more false. To tell the truth, there
are three periods in Ayler music: the first formative years, full of changes in
his style, a period comprised between the release of Spiritual Unity and the
first live albums on Impulse!, where Ayler’s music passed from that haunted
quality we talked about to a more innodic shape, and then another third period
in which he tried new music as he always did.
In this last period, Ayler tried to reimmerse
himself in his first rhythm and blues roots, mixing them with electric guitars
but also with pipes, Mary Mariah – his wife – voice, and different musicians
behind them. In the concerts you’ll find in this box recorded during the Nuits
de la Fondation Maeght, featuring for the first time ALL the music played by
the quartet the first night and the quintet enlarged thanks to the presence of
pianist Call Cobbs, old pioneer of Ayler’s first days, it is as if Ayler was
trying to summarise all his different periods in order to gain momentum for a
new adventure.
Obviously all the criticism for Mary Parker
appereances on records, and the guitars completely absent from these live
performances, fade away in front of such compact, spiritual driven, epiphanic
material. From the beginning of Music is The Healing Force of the Universe,
taken from the Impulse! same-titled album, the sacred fire of the performance
is clear, as clear is the direction of music, that of the ‘classic’, which
means ‘innovative’, Ayler free music. But this four CDs are full of surprises:
Mary Maria plays soprano saxophone, and she’s a not completely refined player
as his husband, but anyway able to impress.
On the other hand the rhythm section,
comprising Steve Tintweiss on bass and Allen Blairman on drums, is a synthesys
of every rhythm section Ayler had in the past, suitable for the present shape
of Ayler’s music. You’ll hear also Albert Ayler imitating the sound of his sax
with the voice, in a strange scat that anticipates more elaborated forms of
avant garde singing in the next decades, and classic tunes as Spirits Rejoice
(the famous ‘Marseilleise’), Spirits, Ghosts, and the more recents Holy Family,
Zion Hill and Love Cry in new suits.
Differently from other boxes issued in these
last years, as Eric Dolphy’s Musical Prophet 3 CD boxset or the flamboyant 4 CD
boxset Sun Ra – Egypt 1971, this box is a little bit more expensive. But the
price worth not only because it was remastered completely from the original
sources for the first time, but also because of a beautiful booklet of 100
pages full of essays, notes, photos, and testimonies by peers, mostly modern,
like John Zorn and Bill Laswell.
Ayler was a true innovator, and also, maybe, a
tormented soul, we don’t know clearly even after many years, but his music is
here for us to stay after all these decades as something talking to our souls
and ears, and it is full of ideas for younger players. Those who will listen to
it carefully during time will be captured for life.
Rob Mazurek is for sure one of the emerging
instrumentalists and composers of contemporary jazz music, but not only. Famous
at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of 2000s for his collaborations
with musicians related to post-rock as Tortoise or Jim O’Rourke, after a while
Mazurek started becoming involved in improvised combos like the Chicago
Underground Duo and Trio, with fellow drummer Chad Taylor and guitarist Jeff
Parker.
At the same time his love for electronic
composition and large ensembles gave shape to the Exploding Star Orchestra. But
his love for contemporary composers led Mazurek to pay hommage to, only to make
a name, Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris and his music in a solo performance held in
2015 at the S. Anna Arresi Festival “Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz” where he
played trumpet, piano and electronics alone in an intriguing and intimate
hommage to one of the greatest conducers of all times.
But this evening the little gallery Intermezzo
11 in Milano, instead of offering a live set by Mazurek opened up the doors to
an exhibition of sculptures made of fabric by Mazurek himself. In his own
words: “Amplitudes in space time continuum. Pieces of material. An arc equals hotizontal/latitude.
Another arc vertical/longitude. Pure color space. Layers. Amplitudes. Combining
and shapeshifting we realize a place in pure space.
Layers. Amplitudes in the astronomical sense.
These lines or arcs are not a boudary but demarcations in a pure space. As we
discover more and more galaxies the idea of boundaries become even more absurd.
We are beings on one on millions of planets in this pure space. Discovering my
own limitations through the medium of physical making, I try and conjure thoughts
of the infinite with these pieces that have no beginning nor ending.
It is these places between thought and the
action I am interested in”. As you can see by the photos accompanying this
post, the fabrics are a space between another space, where different lines and
shapes intertwine themselves without limits nor end. The same space between
them is a continuation of the works. This way, we are compelled to experience
visually – but almost tactily – this absence of boundaries Mazurek talks about
in his small writing.
In a way this fabric sculptures are not quite
dissimilar to his own music. If you listen to it carefully, in effect, you can
feel the same sense of continuity from one instrument to the other, both in
solo and in group performances. Being in between the thought and the action
means possibly that while you play, you are compelled to feel yourself and
transmit yourself under shape of music. This gives you this sensation of being
without borders because borders happens, even if under an illusion, because of
yourself being disrupted, forced to belong to the realm of thought totally, or
to that of action.
If you belong to the first realm, you are
closed into your own mind. If you act without the thought, you possibly do
mistakes, or something not related to yourself and what’s behind you at the
same time. Being in this place in between the twos is the only opportunity to
unite the two realms and ... flow. Flow as a person, or let the music flow if
you are a musician. In any case, don’t miss the opportunity to see this
exhibition while in Milano this week.
During these days I’m a little excited since on
September 18, 2022 Terry Riley will perform in a small church in Milano with an
ensemble of chosen musicians, and I have heard the concert will last 2 hours
and a half. So it came to my mind that this year I Dischi di Angelica, a label
devoted to document the most important concerts of the Angelica Festival, has
released an album of solo organ and voice by Riley himself, an important album
since it is devoted to a departured collaborator of the composer: the Italian
excellent cellist Stefano Scodanibbio.
Terry Riley started playing piano during the
1950s studying in various conservatories, and during the following decade he
toured in Europe with some jazz musicians. But even if Riley was keen on
improvising, he wasn’t keen on closing himself into a given format, and wanted
to experiment something different, something more. That’s why with his friend
La Monte Young he gave life to the first performances of what was called after
‘minimalism’: a music made of musical cells repeated through a phase shifting
in order that with the proceeding of the time the music itself would become
slightly different from what it was at first.
Later Riley took singing lessons with the
master of indian music Pandit Pran Nath, doing many tour with him at the voice
and tablas. In 1968 and 1969 Riley released through Columbia Records his most
famous albums, highly influentials not only in contemporary music, but also on
rock music, electronic music and a vast land of unclassified sonorous objects.
Riley was aware of the music around him, and as far as jazz he praised the
likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Gil Evans and Charles Mingus as the most
influential figures on his own music, even if indian music, that at least was
so important for Davis and Coltrane between many other genres, is clearly
audible between his many sonic roots.
Luckily enough we had the opportunity to hear
this Organum For Stefano on record, since I’m told that the real concert was
affected by a bad acoustics especially in the side aisles. But the recorded
performance is excellent, so the document of that particular night maintains
his crystalline purity, his moving intention and beauty. Organum, titled from
the instrument Riley played that night in the church, is partly a composition
and partly full of improvised parts.
Obviously if Terry Riley is so highly praised,
it is because his music has evolved during the years and not only he and his
friend La Monte Young had an important role in constructing the sound of some
of the very first pieces of the seminal band Velvet Underground and other
peculiar ‘rock’ bands, but differently from other mimimalist composers they
didn’t rest on their laurels, so to speak, but emerged as innovators even when
they had to abandon the musical shapes they forged.
The first 3 minutes movement is introduced by a
series of organ drones, evolving into a solemn melody. Something many lovers of
rock music from the Seventies would like to listen as an introduction to some
granitic riff of guitar (as The Who did in their Baba O’Riley). But it’s not
the case: the music evolves in the 8 minutes second movement, where Riley
accompanies the organ with the voice and we can clearly hear his Pran
Nath-influences. India is alive in this performance, and we can see it as in a
beautiful sonorous landscape depicted by the voice and the organ for us all.
Not having seen the sheet of this music I
cannot know for sure what part has been written and what have been improvised,
but I can guess that the melodic chant was the point of departure for the
successive sonorous manipulations. I imagine you the listener lost in this
beautiful song for a long time collaborator as Stefano Scodanibbio was, and so
I can believe that the people who will enjoy this album will lost themselves
into the depth of the feelings Riley has experienced while playing for his
friend.
It will be like that for all the third 8
minutes part, featuring some kind of fugue-like movement, while the fourth,
lasting 11 minutes, is full of reference to carnatic music and singing again.
This blending of different traditions, from east to west, is a characteristic
of many music from the Seventies. In a recent interview to Giampiero Cane, an
important and interesting Italian critic author of the seminal book Canto Nero,
Riley himself have told that in that period music was a tool to expand the
consciousness, while during the decades after it was all locked inside academia
or the media trends.
The 3 minutes of the fifth movement see the
organ dominate in a beautiful melancholic but again solemn hymn, while the last
7 minutes are a hint at the hystorical minimalism, with two different melodies,
composed both by few sonic cells but the second becoming here and there a
drone, are intertwining the one into the other. The effect is highly dramatic,
and it is the best closing for a farewell piece of music. Obviously the
textures implied here are of different consistencies, and this add to the music
another level of tension.
Don’t miss this record, and if you’re in Italy
don’t miss Terry Riley live on September 18, 2022 at the Churc of San Vito al
Giambellino, with the Orchestra Cantelli and the participants to Riley’s
workshop of collective improvisation. I imagine it will be a intriguing night
and another step into the career of a master musician in his own right.
Possibly this tuesday I’ll report you another concert, that of Rob Mazurek
again in Milan presenting a new project.
So many months have passed since I attended
some interesting concerts (you can find my reviews on this blog) and since
MITO, a review spanning through Turin and Milan this year is dedicated only to
classical music, I was about to ask myself if it would be not interesting to
open my writings to other types of music, as the montly magazine The Wire did
many years ago.
Luckily enough, this wednesdey I was into a
cinema to enjoy a horror movie, and there I found out a flyer of this new
review of classical contemporary music called Milano Suona Contemporanea.
There are many appointments, with music played by the New MADE Ensemble (Cage,
Feldman, Scelsi, Bussotti, amongst the others) and less known composers of the
contemporaneity, plus a spectacular exhibition by Terry Riley.
This afternoon I attended to the third
panel/concert, the one dedicated to Sylvano Bussotti, in this space near the
Railway Station of Lambrate, a borough of Milan described online as
multiethnical, proactive, full of young people and so on. Actually, I smelled a
bad scent all along the road from the Station to the site of Spazio Lambrate
where the concert happened, all the activities were closed in all the streets
and there were only a bunch of young guys waiting to enter into one youth
hostel.
Suburbs they call them. And they’re right. In a
way so, it’s interesting that people can come across from other parts of the
cities to attend to a concert of contemporary music in this ghostly
environment, but I advice you: I’m leaving behind me the ideal of music as a
can full of colours ready to enlighten everything around it. This doesn’t mean
I’m becoming an adult. I’m only becoming more angry.
On one hand, effectively, one wonders why
people devoted to such a niche genre like contemporary music need to be tossed
around the four angles of a modern metropolis in order to satiate their hunger
for good music. But it’s Milan nowadays that works this way, and I’m quite
happy not to live in a town where you count only if you can move a huge amount
of money. That said, let’s move on to music.
Sylvano Bussotti (1931-2021) is one of the
major composers, painters, poets, novelists, theatre directors of Italian
culture during the XX and XXI Century. He starts as a young guy to play violin,
then he switches to composition and studies at the Florence Conservatory. In
1956, after a period in which he is self-taught on composing, he becomes pupil
of Max Deutsch in Paris, where he starts to frequent Pierre Boulez, who invites
him to attend to the famous Darmstadt courses.
His first works are executed in Germany by
David Tudor, pianist devoted to John Cage because of a great and deep personal
friendship. Not only a composer, but also interested in costume designing for
opera, poems, novels, Bussotti goes through our last two centuries as one of
the pivotal figures in Italian musical culture.
The four pieces introduced by Luigi Esposito
(visual artist, performer, writer and musical critic who wrote an interesting
book about Bussotti in 2013) with the help of electronic slides (photos, music
sheets, etc.), were played by the New MADE Ensemble, an ensemble of musicians
in residence of the Centro Musica Contemporanea of Milan born in 2009 and
praised for their tours in South America and Japan where they bring pieces of
music as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.
This afternoon the Ensemble was a
quintet featuring Ilaria Torciani (soprano voice), Mauro Sironi (flutes),
Edoardo Lega (clarinet), Luca Maggioni (viola), and Rossella Spinosa (piano). The concert introduction was Un
Poema Del Tasso, for voice and piano, where Bussotti put in music some verses
by Torquato Tasso, a poet from the XIV Century we Italians have studied at
school since its importance.
First executed in 1991 but whose composition
began in 1957, the piece is crystalline both as a composition and in tonight
execution, giving the right introduction to the musical afternoon. In Memoriam
for viola, flute, piano and voice is, differently, a composition dedicated to
Cathy Berberian after her departure: we had the opportunity to approach a
richer texture, with the flute, the piano and the viola supporting the voice.
La Donna for flute, voice and clarinet, is a
piece where the spoken part, or, better said, the part acted by the voice is
interspersed with the parts played by the other three instruments: the music
sheets are becoming more complex, until the last piece, Solo (from La Passion
Selon Sade) for voice, piano, flutes, viola and clarinet where every musician
can choose what part of the sheet to play, according to the sound parameters
signed on the paper: every execution, this way, is completely different from
the others.
Visionary as every contemporary composer, Sylvano Bussotti deserves to
be deepened with new articles about his music in the future. For the moment I
want only to add that my impression after some hours have passed is to have
attended an interesting concert but that the musicians involved were too much
worried to reproduce or interpret the scores since their difficulties, I
suppose, and need to further develop their musical vision. Nothing that can not
be done in the future.
