The last time I heard a perfect rendition
of a contemporary music piece live is something that don’t come to my mind so
easily. In fact I have to get back to a violin solo for a Cage work I heard more
than ten years ago in a small venue near the Garibaldi Railway Station of
Milano held by a couple of then friends of mine. I was really satisfied by the
music and in a way disappointed by some members of the audience who told the
young performer something as “you gave me pleasure [with the music]”.
The concept of having pleasure from music as it
were sex is an idea many listeners of music here in my country shared with me
in the past years, even implicitly. I don’t like it, but that’s it: after all,
music can also be sensuality – I remember a beautiful bellydancer during an old
performance by Ibrahim Maalouf, that I’ll go to see next week, that I really
enjoyed, but as far as music I think the best praise you can give a musician is
still the old fashioned “you moved me into another dimension”.
After all, music is something you need in order
to furnish time – as we furnish space with paintings sometimes – but, far from
being a mere embellishment, in the art of music you can find the seeds of every
revolution since when you listen to a piece of art you’re outside the
capitalistic mechanisms of “do ut des”, as old Romans would have said, and this
happens even if you have payed a ticket. In my own country some politicians 20
years ago said “You cannot eat with culture” and this became a mantra then, and
now is a reality.
But let’s go to today event, that was held at
Adi Desing Museum as it happened last week with the John Cage performance.
Actually, I was skeptical for today’s four hours of Morton Feldman’s For Philip
Guston since all the things you can find in my
review of the past weekend concert. But after the start of the performance
I had to change my mind quickly and easily. The performance was very similar to
some old recordings I found out last sunday after I’ve been told of this gig.
And this is because the musicians, a nice trio
composed by Sara Baldini (flutes), Veronique Delcambre (piano and celesta) and
Jean-Louis Maton (percussions) plus Frank Gizycki at coreographies and dance,
were very conscious of the music they were going to play. Inspired by Philip
Guston paintings, in which figures and/or textures emerge slowly from the colors
imprinted on the canvas, Feldman’s music slowly reveals itsel to the listener.
Small melodic cells made of few notes, an inner
and suggested dialogue between the instruments: Feldman painted the music with
nice and gentle gestures, influenced by the most intriguing visual artists of
his time as it happened also for the Rothko Chapel composition. These late
works, as the one we’re reviewing, have this quality of letting the thoughts
flow from your head after a sequence of few notes, and it is in my opinion
music for meditation.
Gizycki’s dance was at the beginning a little
bit too much descriptive, but after quite some time the music kind of took him
over as if it was suggesting to him to become more keen on marking time or
playing with the equilibrium, as it happens with Butoh dance for instance.
Unluckily the festival is over, but next week I’ll attend an exhibition by Arto
Lindsay and another by Ibrahim Maalouf, so I won’t let my readers dry as far as
reviews of live music.
With the end of the summer one hopes for
more live appointments and in a city like Milano there is plenty of occasions
if you’re a classic or pop/trap music lover. There’s also an intriguing JazzMi
Festival that features live performances of Ibrahim Maalouf – I got tickets for
him so you’ll read a review as soon as I get there – and of unreachable, if you
live outside the town and need to take a train ride late at night, concerts by
the likes of a trio led by Hamid Drake, another trio with Andrew Cyrille and
William Parker, plus a Halloween exhibition of the Sun Ra Arkestra at around
10.30 pm.
Obviously I will not attend such venues, and
I’m really sad about that, but the God of music, if any, decided to leave me
the opportunity to follow, for some saturday afternoons, a beautiful and
intriguing marathon of contemporary music live performances titled “Back to New
York: Downtown Music Sketches”. This way, this saturday I had the opportunity to
attend to a performance by pianist Franco Venturini and dancer Giacomo De Luca,
centered around three beautiful pieces by John Cage: The Seasons, Ophelia and In A Landscape.
We don’t need to introduce the multi-faceted
figure of John Cage with more or less quick prefaces, also because here in my
country the Milanese publishing company Shake
Edizioni Underground is issuing all the writings by the Maestro – the
second volume is just ready to be printed and it will be presented to the
audience next Tuesday. If you’re curious about the piano performer, Franco
Venturini, you can find an incisive bio at the following link.
More interesting is the performance in itself,
inspired by the longtime collaboration between Cage and Merce Cunningham, one
of the most important dancers and coreographers of the last century. Between
the creators of the postmodern dance, Cunningham was a long time friend of Cage,
sharing his concerns about formal rules in the art world. Also
contemporaneously both started studying the possibilities of chance and I-Ching
in particular, events that led to pieces like Sixteen Dances for Soloist and
Company of Three (1951) where the nine emotions (or rasas) of the Indian
aesthetic were presented in an order determined by chance.
The performance we attended this afternoon
started with recordings of Cunningham’s voice diffused through an old analogic
tape recorder, positioned over a metal box in which a transparent plastic bag
was containing the music sheet for the performance. The most interesting part
of it, to tell the truth, were the ones where the two, pianist and dancer, were
percussing or crawling the strings of the piano because the chance generating
the sounds was cagean in all its effects.
If I have to find out a defect in the piano
performance, I would find two. The first one: too much emotion and melancholic
coat in part of the performance, the one where the piano arpeggioed a music
that, more than Cage, was resembling the one by a sentimental composer. The
second one: too much will and power in the overall performance, as if the
composer was Beethoven and not Cage. Unluckily the pianist were dealing with
music composed by a Zen composer, that means surprise for the listener, not
deep emotion by the performer.
At a certain point I remember vividly I was
bored by the arpeggios, but at a certain point I was shaked by some attack, and
so I thought “mmmh ... dynamics, you know what to do, right?”, but even if
Venturini knows his work better than Thom Yorke – The Smile is a futile
project, badly orchestrated and cooked worse – for sure the effect was that of
a Romantic piece of music, full of drama and sense of resistance to a fall,
which is far from the feelings Cage wanted to transmit to the audience through
music.
As far as the dancer, I can’t criticize it
since I’m training as an actor since a couple of years and if it weren’t for my
feet – I broke the left in the last months – I would have trained myself yet
into the contemporary dance world not to become a dancer myself but to know
better what to do with my own body onstage, so the only thing I can say is that
I couldn’t find so much postmodernism in De Luca, whose attitude is overtly
sentimental as the one by the pianist. The circles he was drawing in the air
with his own body after playing with small compass over a blue book is an
example of what I’m saying.
I can’t tell who influenced who, but the mix
between the two performers is as far as results interesting enough if you want
to see two artists interacting together with a common goal, but unsatisfying as
far as an attempt to take Cage and Cunningham attitude back to us. I know it is
a way long discussion in the world of classical music, the diatribe between
conservatorship and will to innovate, but as far as myself I want to point out
that first you have to undestand what you’re handling and only after that you
can do something new if this is your path to glory.
Frankly, this afternoon I missed the part in
which the performers were elaborating all the spurs coming from the music
sheet, the possible old recordings of the pieces, the videos if any of
Cunningham performing with Cage, in order to give us something more contemporary
than the music and the dance of 70 years before; as far as it seems, they
passed over all of it with no that much grace and gave to the audience an essay
about their sensitivity, and what is wrong to me is that your sensitivity need
always to grow and face with what you’re handling, instead of being like a
tank.
In Italian and other languages, differently
from French and English, the terms to indicate a musician ‘playing’ are
different from that of an activity implying a game. Same with acting. This, in
a way, is a distortion. Misha Mengelberg is a musician that, as Cecil Talyor
would have put it, “can play”. But Mengelberg is a serious musician or one of
those who love to come back to childhood as each one of us should?
During a concert in Italy, at the beginning of
the new millennium, Mengelberg was, at a certain moment, singing like a child,
almost out of tune – or indifferent to tune. You can find an interview about
that performance at
the following link – even if unluckily for you the interview it’s in
Italian, but it’s only because I don’t want to be perceived as disrespectful.
Fact is that, Misha Mengelberg believed in
music as John Cage believed in it. Music has a childish quality in itself, that
is the sound of freedom. If Lou Reed said once that listening to music is like
to be in your mother’s womb, with the drums mimicking your mother’s heartbeat,
for centuries in the western world the rules of music were almost at the point
of destroying the mother and the children, suffocating them with rules.
Do you remember Chopin’s Nocturnes? I own a
beautiful double CD with Maurizio Pollini playing that incredible music. But
for Chopin’s contemporaries, that music was really only shit. Because it was
music for piano, and the piano was the instrument where women were performing
music at home. So, how some culturally evolved men were supposed to loose their
time with things more suited for women?
Things are different nowadays, but even if
concerts for piano solo are held in my city in prestigious theatres, there is a
sacred quality with (classical) music that makes people like John Cage and
Misha Mengelberg wanting to play with it, to disrupt that facade, that mask,
and go deeper to the heart of both the musician and the listener.
More prosaically, as I wrote four years ago one
week after Misha Mengelberg died aged 81, our pianist was born in Ukranie in
1935, son of the Dutch conductor Karel Mengelberg. His family moved to the
Netherlands in the late 1930s and the young Mengelberg started taking piano
lessons at the age of five. Subsequently he studied architecture briefly before
entering the Royal Conservatory at the Hague.
Influenced by Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington
and the above mentioned John Cage, Mengelberg in 1964 participated to a session
of music with, among the others, drummer Han Bennink – who will become one of
his lifetime collaborators – and multireedist Eric Dolphy, for the record of
the latter titled “Last Date”. It’s like the perfect joining link between the
US and Europe, as far as improvised music.
As many of his peers and colleagues, Mengelberg
recorded a huge variety of live performances. The one we refer in this review
is a solo performance at piano coming from a cassette labeled as “17-18-4-88
berlijn solo”, but in fact it has been established that the record comes from a
solo performance in 1987. The music is different from the assertions of the US
free jazz and avant garde music from the 1960s and 1970s, you can smell
something coming from Fluxus or european avant art and theatre. At the
beginning.
The record is divided in four parts, two
parts per set for a couple of sets, to be accurate, from 15 to 23 minutes each.
At the beginning we can hear the piano has been prepared as Cage would do, but
the music, spanning from the lower to the medium registries, becomes after a
brief introduction a little excited just to come back to what it seems to be an
attempt to create assertions who are interrupted, hammered, deconstructed.
Finally the hummed monologue becomes like
pearls whose fall resonates on the floor, then the perpared part of the piano
comes in the foreground, with the strings hummed and dragged, then again we
hear a small melody reminiscing some baroque music, just before an attempt to
deconstruct the melody itself, just like Marc Ribot does sometimes with his
guitar – it would be interesting to track how the two banks of the ocean have
influenced each other and how.
At about minute 8 Mengelberg tries to mix some
assertive chords with more subtle excursions on the keyboard, then for quite a
while silence fill the room just before a come back to this mix of melody and
humming, giving us that feeling possibly Roland Barthes was referring to in his
La Chambre Claire when talking about the “punctus”. We go on with many
permutations until the end of the first part of the section, not without some
nice occasions to hear Mengelberg pressing, pushing and crushing, so to speak,
his keys.
Second part of the first section opens with a
series of violent strumming on the lower registry of the piano, like we’re
accustomed to listen to in Diamanda Galàs playing in her beautiful but haunting
Defixiones, but instead of adding a raucous and grasping voice, at a certain
point we hear another deconstructed melody – in fact it seems like a mix
between a blues and a classical tune, which is no surprise since as a
muisicologist pointed out in a recent number of the magazine Musica Jazz,
Thelonious Monk himself was keen on taking inspiration from classical music for
the blues pieces he wrote.
Obviously Mengelberg music isn’t devoid of more
intimate, reflexive moments, but if the influence of Monk in these moments is
clear and goes well beyond the quotation, which is present anyway, straight to
the feeling of that music, one wonders, at a certain point, if it’s true that
there are differences between the Western and the Eastern banks of the
Atlantic, since the elements put to cook together seem to be almost the same.
We’re at almost half of the second part and a
deconstructed ragtime appears, magnificently interspersed with a strumming on
the medium and upper registries. As far as it seems, the music of Mengelberg
from the beginning of this album hits us because of the ability of his creator
to put together different styles and different emotional temperatures giving us
the feeling that something almost new is coming from that clash.
After a brief applause, the last ten minutes of
this section are dedicated again to the music of Monk, but it’s a Monk that we
still know revisited by Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron, and so it’s a Monk who
lives of different interpretations, as his music would have gone well far
beyond his creator’s death. Strumming on prepared chords occupy a consistent
part of this section of the record, just before coming back to a deconstructed
melody.
If the first set was equally divided into
‘decostructing Baroque’ and ‘deconstructing Monk’, the second set sees
Mengelberg engaging in an attempt to put his hands on the living matter of
classical music interspersed with more modern experimentations, using a similar
‘method’ to the one described above – that’s why we don’t describe it almost
second-by-second as we did before.
My advice today is to listen carefully to these
sets, available through
Bandcamp, because if it is true that on a first level the European Avant
Garde music from the 1970s on is more keen on playing with the sound matter and
how it has been hystorically defined, while the US Avant Garde is more keen on
creating new shapes and forms – think about Braxton and Mitchell, at a deeper
level you will find in fact similar concept in both – aren’t Mal Waldron and
Steve Lacy from the US?
And if there are different temperatures and
general architectural concepts to differentiate the two currents, on a deeper
level the bricks are the same, even if layered differently. I won’t loose time
in affirming that, being mostly African-American the music coming from the US,
it is more keen on illustrating how to survive in an hostile environment
finding out the inner strenght to survive, while the European musicians find
themselves more at ease with playing with culture and ideal constructions
putting them out of context in order to see what they can become.
Because, in fact, in both cases the nucleus is
an attempt to say something different from the mass thinking, the thinking of
Power, in order to establish a new, spiritual order, that of freedom. And if
Don Cherry encouraged Peter Brotzmann to go ahead with his music, we cannot let
records like this unlistened, because their story is, mostly, our own story. A
history of freedom, an attempt to a better life for each one, the search for
new forms of music and life.
I’ve been in the Monumental Cemetery zone in
Milan many times in the past. I love to take pictures of the statues in the
cemetery with my camera. I have experimented with natural, harsh light, so I
suppose sooner or later I’ll came back with a simple direct flash in order to
obtain a different effect. But yesterday night I’ve gone to the Fabbrica Del
Vapore which is near the Cemetery, in order to see one of the cornerstones of
improvised music, Alvin Curran.
Alvin Curran was in the 1960s one of the founders
of the group Musica Elettronica Viva, that hosted musicians and composers as
Frederick Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, Steve Lacy, Allan Bryant, Carol
Plantamura, Ivan Vandor and John Fetteplace during his various decades of
activity. MEV was one of the very first groups of musicians to experiment with
the sound of synthesizers, giving life to what, in the following years, would
have been called “electro acoustic improvisation”.
Friends of John Cage with whom MEV played a
composition titled Solo For Voice 2, where Plantamura voice was trasfigurated
by a Moog synthesizer, the group featured many collaborations with master
improvisors – there’s a beautiful record from 1976 titled Time Zones featuring
Teitelbaum and Anthony Braxton. But the main point with EAI is that it helped
widen the concept of composition.
Preparing a piano is, per se, a compositional
gesture, as an example. And this is what I have seen first yesterday night as I
entered the room where the concert of Alvin Curran with his longtime collaborator
Walter Prati would have been played. Curran had at his own disposition a
prepared piano (with cardboards, a small plastic bottle half full of water, a
ligther, etc.) and a keyboard previously programmed with many sounds (human
voices in English and Japanese languages, the sound of many different musical
instruments as trumpet and saxophone, natural sounds like water falling, but
also many manipulated sounds).
On the other hand, Walter Prati had a couple of
laptops and a small electric viola enriched with a couple of pedals and an
arco. Even if the concert was presented as a celebration of a recent CD
published by the duo and titled Community Garden, disposable both physically
and on many streaming platforms, the music the people filling the room with me
listened to yesterday was completely new. The musicians themselves, in fact,
didn’t knew what they were creating. So, the listener was attending to the
music on the same side of the musician.
The more analogic sounds of the prepared piano
were interspersed with samples, electronic sounds, manipulated sounds, the
electric viola (both pinched and arcoed), giving life to a multilayered effect
from whom emerged some curious moments like the sensation of attending to a
music blob and more melancholic reminiscences of Ellington blues. But it is
really difficult to describe every moment of the music, and maybe it’s also
pointless.
We can say to our readers that all
dynamics of sound and silence, of flux and interruptions, and the sonic ranges
have been experimented with success. Creating a music is not only a matter of
playing, but also of listening and halting, sometimes, as Prati stated at the
initial little speech before the concert. As far as me, I can obviously saying
this was the most intense and interesting concert I attended this year, between
the ones I wrote a review for this blog.
Community Garden has been for sure an
intriguing live performance. The prepared piano, historically meaning the
attempt to deconstruct bourgeois music as part of the values of one small but
imposing part of society, the idea that composing doesn’t mean only to write
down a bunch of notes on a piece of paper but creating an environment for
creativity, the mix of sound and noise as part of a sound environment, the
blurring of the line between the conscious will of the musician and his
unconscious or physical response to the partners, is all we heard and saw
yesterday night.
It is important to testify these little moment
of creativity and deconstruction (and reconstruction) of our ideals of what
music is, because we all are living in a very conservative period, where music
is mostly entertainment or a mere wallpaper for different environments, while
in fact the sound world is a recall to our first environment and, this way, an
important tool to create a new, collective meaning to life. And so I’m grateful
to Curran and Prati for sharing with us their thoughts and feelings under the
shape of beautiful music. Don’t miss them, if they’re around to play.
In "Art/Sciences, Allianges",
Xenakis formulates the link between the arts, and between art and
science, already affirmed in his own works: he uses the compositional
methods of Metastasis in order to realize the shells of the Phillips
Pavillion. 'Allianges' in French means alloy, but it is to be
interpreted more as 'synthesis', than in the sense of a perfect
fusion between parts. The base of this fusion is Pithagorean math,
with his implied links between arithmetics, astronomy, geometry and
music. In the following articles collected in "Musiques
Formelles" the word 'formalization' is substituted with
'axiomatization'. An entirely 'axiomatic' composition in the opus of
Xenakis is Nomos Alpha. Examples of 'axiomatics' developed by the
composer is the 'reticulum theory', on whose base has been realized
the first part of Jonchaies, and the 'vectorial spaces'.
If it is possible to compare exactly
composition and theory in Xenakis, it's because the idea of
formalization, of 'mechanism', has a practical goal. There is an
independence of theory from composition, as in hindustani music "a
book of theory cannot be distinguished from a book of religious
teachings and [...] the purely theoretical instructions the musician
obtains are almost exclusively aesthetical, not technical [...] since
he finds a practical instruction among an active musician"
[Derek Bailey: Improvisation and practice in music, Da Capo Press,
1993]. A reference to an improvised style of music helps us to hint
at the distance between this world and the one of Xenakis ("The
expression aleatory music today means improvised music. Using this
way the word 'alea', that in scientifical terms implies casuality,
means making an abuse, and it reflects a counterfeiting and
sentimental attitude" [Iannis Xenakis, "Ad Libitum",
in The World of Music, vol. 9, no. 1, 1967]) and to have a clue on
John Cage ("he introduced a new freedom in music, and its
realitazion, as it happened in painting with Jackson Pollock"
[Iannis Xenakis, "Su John Cage", 1993, in "Universi
del Suono", Ricordi, 2003]).
Xenakis developed first of all a
compositional method, the 'stochastic theory' – the use of function
of distribution of probability in order to compose instrumental
music, then the theory of games, the symbolic logic, the groups
theory, the reticula theory, the stochastic dynamic synthesis –
the use of functions of distribution of possibilities applied to the
synthesis of sound, the theory of arborescence, the theory of
brownian movements, the theory of cellular robots, and finally the
UPIC system (Poliagogic Unit of CEMAMu), a technological invention.
It's now time to look closer to some
compositions, in order to verify how theory and compositional
practice intertwine. Metastasis, whose title means 'after the
stasis', it's a composition for orchestra of 61 instruments: 12
winds, 7 percussions played by 3 musicians, 46 strings, and it's long
about 9 minutes. It ain't a stochastic composition, but a piece based
on the idea of continuity and discontinuity, something of interest
for Parmenides and, after, Albert Einstein – the relationship
between matter and energy: if you modify one of the two variables,
you act also on the other, and at the same time the composition is
influenced by Olivier Messiaen and his theory of rhythms. In 1954
Xenakis was still studying composition with him.
The ideas of rhythms and of
continuity/discontinuity help Xenakis to put together the linear
perception of the music with a relativistic vision of time. It all
starts from the sounds of nature, about whom Xenakis wrote in his
writings about stochastic music. The aim of the composer is to "blow
up the frames of representation" [Makis Solomos, Apollo e
Dioniso, gli scritti di Xenakis, in "Universi del suono",
Ricordi, 2003] so to obtain that the events you listen are not evoked
or represented, but burst in through music. We're not that far from
Antonin Artaud's 'Theatre of Cruelty'. If in Pléiades-Mélanges, as
an example, at a certain point we can hear a group of percussions
that hint to something that can remember the shuffling of horses,
while the ones coming immediately before can evoke some war drums,
their value is never descriptive, exactly as it occurs in baroque
music.
"The textures act directly,
without passing through language, through representation, through
codification: they provoke a physical shock. Their violence is a
mean to divert the listening from the research of a 'meaning' [...].
There's no need to look for a reality outside the perceptible".
[Ibid.]There's no duality, in Xenakis, between nature and culture:
nature is the only thing that exists, and if there is tension,
conflict, it is because "composing is a fight [...] a fight to
produce something interesting". From there it comes the hint to
the inner time, and the interest of the composer for the evolution of
human perception, starting from the study of the perception of the
time in prehistoric societies and the attention on Jean Piaget's
experiences on the development of that perception in children. The
time itself is nothing more than a surface phenomenon of a deeper
reality, the movement ('déplacement'), what Xenakis try to reproduce
with his music.
Strings open Metastasis in unison,
before they part in 46 different segments, one for each instrument.
Intensity, register and density are the variables on which the score
lingers, taking the place of progressive linearity of traditional
scores, included serial scores. First and third movement of the
composition doesn't have a theme or a motif, relying entirely on the
force of the idea of time. The second movement, instead, has a
melodic element played by the strings, and conceived following the
dodecaphonic method of Schonberg and elaborated using the Fibonacci
series, a technique that Bartòk used for some of his own themes. The
score has been written on a cartesian diagram, then translated
tri-dimentionally into the structrure of the Phillips Pavillion.
Pithoprakta ('acts of probability') is
born from the idea of developing musically a sound matter using the
applications of Boltzmann and Maxwell and the Newton calculation of
temperature and pressure of gas. The composition is conceived as a
modulation from order to disorder, realized through a 'swarming of
molecules' whose parameters submitted to the calculation of
probabilities are density and degrees of order, whose diagram has
been realized thinking about gaussian distribution of the height. The
two compositions are the result of a reflection towards the problem
of how to realize a musical work making tabula rasa of the previous
compositional methods. "To compose is to fight" said
Xenakis, "a fight for the existence. A fight to be. When instead
I imitate the past, I do nothing in reality, so I don't exist. [...]
The difference is the proof of existence, of knowledge, is
participation to the things in the world". [Bàlint Andràs
Varga, "Conversations with Iannis Xenakis, Faber & Faber,
1996]
Krzysztof Penderecki: Canticum Canticorun Salomonis (1970/73) [16.52]
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Cinque Sintesi Radiofoniche from “Musica Futurista – The Art of noises” (1980) [13.08]
Harry Partch: Time of Fun Together from “Delusion of the Fury” (1969) [8.08]
Joan La Barbara and John Cage: Sonnekus from “Singing Through” (1990) [17.08]
Morton Feldman: The Rothko Chapel (1971) [23.47]
To listen to the podcast, go to Podomatic and search for 'completecommunion'. To send me material to be featured on the podcast, email me at galasi.g [at] virgilio.it, or gianpaolo.galasi [at] gmail.com
“The eye looks, mind deciphers, hands attack,
ear informs”. This
is one of the methodological indications the New York City-born pianist Cecil
Taylor gave the listeners through the liner notes to his 1966 milestone “Unit Structures”. Since his first 1956
recordings with his own band, and next year appearance at the Newport Jazz
Festival, the pianist stands up in his own right as one of the pivotal figures
of last century contemporary music.
“I immediately felt that I would be able to
figure out my own universe from his propositions: they were really brilliant;
his way to develop monumental improvisations from little melodic cells was
gifted with so much structural strength […] I sincerely think that Cecil Taylor
is one of the great geniuses of our times as the creator of a real synthesis,
as Anthony Braxton, between jazz and Western tradition” [Marilyn Crispell interviewed by
Stéphane Ollivier, Jazz Magazine, Dec. 2009]
Born in
1929 and active in R&B and swing bands before giving life to his first
quartet featuring soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, bassist Buell Neidlinger and
drummer Denis Charles, whose concerts at the Five Spot Café in 1957 have been
taken as Ornette Coleman’s two years later as the beginning of the ‘free jazz’
movement, in 1964 Cecil Taylor also created with his alter ego trumpeter Bill
Dixon the Jazz Composers Guild.
Andrew Cyrille
“Playing with Taylor I began to be liberated from thinking
about chords. I'd been imitating John Coltrane unsuccessfully and because of
that I was really chord conscious.” [Archie Shepp, from the liner notes of 1964
Impulse! Record “Four for Trane”]. If
one listens to the ‘Involution/Evolution’
movement of Alms/Tiegarten (Spree)
recorded with a large ensemble in Berlin,
more than a relationship with Iannis Xenakis music can be found. Not by chance,
since Taylor’s
way to relate music to architecture is something he has in common with the
Greek born composer.
In 1961
Impulse! Records issued Gil Evans’ Into
the Hot, a record split between the two pianists bands and visions. For the
first time, Taylor
left off traditional notation and started to develop his own modus operandi.
With a band featuring Archie Shepp and Jimmy Lyons on reeds, Ted Curson on trumpet,
Roswell Rudd on trombone, Henry Grimes on bass and Sonny Murray on drums, on
rehearsals Taylor was repeating the lines for the musicians, so to prevent “western notation blocks total absorption in
the ‘action’ playing”. [from Unit
Structures liner notes]
In the few
years following ‘Pots’ and the other
compositions for the album, Taylor developed the rhythmic aspect of the music
thanks to drummers as Sunny Murray and Andrew Cyrille. Conscious of the
developments in Cage’s piano music, Taylor
imagined another way to step away from ‘classical’ culture. As in A.B.
Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop
Business: “[talking about David
Tudor, Cage’s main collaborator on piano] He's
so detached he ain't even there. Like,
he would never get emotionally involved in it; […] it's a mental exercise in
which the body is there as an attribute to complement that exercise. The body is in no way supposed to get involved in it.”
John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Barbara Dilley
Cecil
Taylor developed a music based on physical experience of playing, whose basis
are “regular and irregular” rhythms.
Rejecting the “transformed symbols thru
conductor” of the Western modern and contemporary music practice, Taylor practiced both the
reintegration of “all body’s limbs” and the “ultimate
communion” between human beings. Also a dancer, Taylor was conscious that
from the limbs all body movements emanate; "At
the controlled body center, motors become knowledge at once felt, memory which
has identified sensory images resulting social response." It’s the
same idea underlining Indian classical music and its philosophical premises,
Shivaism, as many other non-Western cultures and music practices.
Unit Structures, first Cecil Taylor Lp for Blue Note, recorded
in 1966 at Rudy Van Gelder studios in New
Jersey, and his first fully accomplished work, saw
the application of his creator’s “form is
possibility” program as rhythms, pitches, shapes and contents “arises through the individual experiences
of the performers, their personal history as contained in memory.” [Matthew
Goodheart, Freedom and Individuality in the music of Cecil Taylor]
Cecil
Taylor Unit is at that point in time composed by trumpeter Eddie Gale Stevens,
Jr., altoist Jimmy Lyons and multireedist Ken Mc Intyre, bassists Henry Grimes
and Alan Silva, and Andrew Cyrille on drums. The following Lp Conquistador! was recorded in October
the same year always at Van Gelder’s studios and issued by Blue Note; here
Jimmy Lyons’ alto sax is finally placed side by side with Bill Dixon’s trumpet
on a record. Actually collaborating with the pianist since 1951, and involved
during his career in projects involving many of Taylor closest partners such as
Archie Shepp, drummer Tony Oxley and bassist William Parker, in 1966 Dixon was
also issuing for RCA Victor his first accomplished masterpiece Intents And Purposes, starting the
recording sessions four days later Conquistadors!’s
.
Bill Dixon in Italy, 1980
His wide
intervals, not implying a specific key or mode while relying on timbre and
tone-colors – Dixon was also a painter, as many album covers can directly testify
– were the perfect counter altar for Taylor’s dense cluster, percussive
figures. And while the two basses (Silva’s bowed lines, Grimes lower registers)
generate contrasting parts instead of dictating a pulse whose sense is
suggested through contractions more than using a ‘rhythm section’, Andrew
Cyrille’s textures and Jimmy Lyons rooted in bop melodic phrases are completion
for a music that through the following decades is still at his creative peak.
This is
highly exemplified by a series of astounding, beautiful records that, since the
1970s, Taylor released for labels such as Arista/Freedom
and New World in the US,
Black Saint in Italy and FMP
in Germany.
While attaining a wider popularity through the praise of the critics, a concert
for Jimmy Carter on the White House Lawn, and then a Guggenheim and a McArthur
fellowships through 1973 to 1974, the albums Cecil Taylor issued in this period
are highly explicative of his musical practice.
Some
notable releases are 3 Phasis (New
World, 1979), featuring again Jimmy Lyons, Raphé Malik on trumpet, Ramsey Ameen
on violin, Sirone on bass and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums, the two-Lp set Historic Concerts recorded at the
Columbia University in 1979 with Max Roach and released in 1984 by Black Saint,
Alms/Tiegarten (Spree) recorded in
Berlin in 1988 and released on FMP featuring the Cecil Taylor European
Orchestra – Enrico Rava on trumpet, Hannes Bauer and Walter Wierbos on
trombones, Louis Sclavis and Peter Brotzmann on reeds, Tristan Honsiger on
cello, Peter Kowald and William Parker on bass and Han Bennink on drums amongst
the others – while the solo practice is widely witnessed through records as Silent Tongues (Arista/Freedom, 1974),
recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival and exemplifying perfectly Taylor’s
percussive approach to piano, once described as a Santeria’s altar, and 1987 For Olim on Black Saint, that is one of
his most lyrical statements.
William Parker
While
containing a dedication to Julian Beck, For
Olim – Olim being an Aztec hieroglyph meaning movement, motion, earthquake
– as 2004 Algonquin, issued by Bridge
and featuring Mat Maneri on viola, suggests a direct connection with ancient
cultures and rituals. Joseph L. Enderson, follower of C.G. Jung and author of
one chapter of his mentor’s The Man and
His Symbols, talks of the Algonquin archetype of Red Horn, a semi-divine
character usually associated with a thunder bird as the main figure of some rites
at the end of which the beginner was becoming a fully responsible human being. Archetypes
are predictable patterns of inner conditioning that lead to essential changes
and shows between individual development and the ancient initiation rites.
In the
1990s, Taylor activity sees the preponderance of the Feel Trio with long time
associated bassist William Parker and drummer Tony Oxley, beautifully
documented in the 2 T’s for a lovely T 12
Cd FMP box set, without dismissing his larger ensembles and solo performances.
Matthew Goodheart issued a beautiful essay on how the music of Cecil Taylor is
going to develop through rehearsals. But it is also possible to listen directly
to Taylor’s own
words on documentaries such as 1981 Imaging
the Sound, directed by Ron Mann and digitally restored in 2007, or Chris
Felver Allthe Notes, released on DVD in 2006.
“I was young when I met Cecil Taylor: 24 years!
[…] For me, he was an intellectual as much important as James Baldwin. He
opened my eyes on the meaning of black music: our music was something more than
dance, vaudeville music, our music had a history, it was coming out of slavery,
from struggle.”
[Archie Shepp with Samuel Thiebaut]
Bibliography
Nat Hentoff Jazz Is, New York: Random House, 1976
Amiri Imamu Baraka Black Music, New York: Apollo, 1968
Stunning Braxton's debut record as a leader is one of the milestones in defining and developing avant-garde AACM language and aesthetics, like its predecessor, 'Muhal' Richard Abrams' Levels and Degrees of Light, and second Braxton double For Alto. Along with Roscoe Mitchell's Sound, these albums signed an era with their intense expanding improvisation's palette and exploring new compositional territories, related to textures of sound and individual expression.
Multi-instrumentalism, the use of symbolic notation systems so to give improvisation and composition equal stress and new shapes, the relevance given to sound itself and its modulation along with silence, little instruments (bells, whistles, bottles), these seminal performances will influence improvised music for more than 30 years, and their inputs will give shape to a wider range of electroacoustic styles that will go beyond jazz. After all, Braxton's music is wide aware of avant-garde proper language: his interest in Cage's and Stockhausen's music will be developed in his parterships with the likes of Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum and Wolf Eyes. Leroy Jenkins and Leo Smith have developed, spannig their careers, the intuitions this record witnesses, related to a new way of exploring their musical heritage (blues, r'n'b, gospel, above all). Muhal Richard Abrams is perfectly at ease with his debussian / impressionistic style, here at his rough and pointillistic, both energic and abstract peak.
Personnel: Anthony Braxton (alto & soprano saxophones, clarinet, flute, musette, accordian, bells, snare drum, mixer); Leroy Jenkins (violin, viola, harmonica, bass drum, recorder, cymbals, slide whistle); Leo Smith (trumpet mellophone, xylophone, bottles, kazoo); Muhal Richard Abrams (piano, cello, alto clarinet).
Tracks: 1. (840m) -Realize-44M-44M, 2. N-M488-44M-Z, 3. The Bell
Arrivo di corsa sotto la pioggia e quasi alla fine della serata. Colpa delle abitudini milanesi, leggi 22.10 sul flyer e pensi, non prima delle 23, e invece; ma dal compilare due righe, in attesa di scrivere qualcosa sul lavoro di Balestrini come gli ho promesso, e sulle interviste alla Léandre che prossimamente verranno pubblicate in lingua inglese (da una casa editrice israeliana, se non ho capito male), come mi anticipa lei, non potevo esimermi. La mia prima volta al Cox, spazio di autogestione. Ogni luogo che produce cultura, (istituzioni comprese, e non si dica che è ideologia) dovrebbe essere luogo di soggettivà e militanza, cioè capace di operare scelte in campo artistico e di produrre l’inaudito, il nuovo, possibilmente a partire da un incontro. Non si dà miracolo, diceva Annah Arendt, cioè creazione, nella relazione oggettuale e nelle convenzioni.
“Oui, j’aime ce désordre, ce riche désordre, ce chaos meme qui me donne du fil à retordre, des sons à malaxer, des cordes à tirailler. Il y a là un travail immense de liberté, donc de responsabilité. Vaste sujet! Quelle arrogance, n’est-ce pas?” (Joelle Léandre). Nanni e la sua compagna sono già sul palco, finiscono di recitare una poesia e scendono. Sale Joelle, introduce un suo arrangiamento di The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Spring di John Cage (e Joyce) per contrabbasso e voce; sale di nuovo l’uomo, che recita Tre Studi per un Autoritratto di Francis Bacon (non può essere un caso), mentre lei, la musicista, suona come ho sentito nei suoi dischi, ovvero splendidamente.
Descrivere la sua musica? Per favore, non scherziamo: ci pensa Gilles Deleuze, citato da Franck Médioni in un libro-intervista con la bassista (A Voix Basse, Editions MF, 2009), quello di cui vi rendo conto all’inizio di questo scritto. “Créer, c’est résister”. Con quella virgola in mezzo, quasi una invocazione. Non ho foto, nulla con me se non un baconiano ricordo di una serata passata troppo in fretta. Ah no, ho l’autografo della Léandre (“FOR G. PAOLO, PEACE + LOVE, JOELLE LEANDRE”, e un cuoricino) sul suo disco in duo con Steve Lacy (One More Time, Leo Records, 2005), che girava nel mio stereo, le due e cinquantuno di notte, mentre compilavo queste righe. E una promessa da mantenere a Balestrini.
