Back in the USSR: free jazz and the era of the Glasnost/Perestrojka

“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:

The Free Jazz Scene in The Former USSR: Between Vilnius and Arkhangelsk

Red & Hot: The Fate of New Jazz in Russia

Golden Years of Soviet Jazz

 

 

From Francis Bacon to Free Improvisation (and beyond)

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Francis Bacon, Three Studies of the Male Back, 1970

I started Gilles Deleuze's "The Logic of Sensation" this winter, and when I read the pages related to the concept of "histeresis", and its application to modern painting - the blurring of the boundaries between object and subject, the use of color as rhythmic pattern - by the French philosopher, I found out that what he put on the table was in fact embracing many of the artistic tides developed since the second half of the 20^th century. Deleuze's book is about Francis Bacon's painting, but, as many of the philosophers writings, it tries to be inclusive and to track a sort of 'minor' history of the most vital artistic statements of the time, and back. But, far from what Gilles Deleuze embodies in his text - Francis Bacon, Vincent Van Gogh, Eadweard Muybridge, Diego Velasquez, Paul Cézanne, as long as Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust literary masterpieces -, I was thinking first and foremost about Antonin Artaud - on which Deleuze himsepf came back in many of his essays, from The Logic of Sense to A Thousand Plateaus - and performance arts, from Vito Acconci to Marina Abramovic. And, obviously, to music.

I was listening to Roscoe Mitchell's No Side Effect (RogueArt, 2006) in those days. So in a certain way improvised music (Albert Ayler, the AACM) was implied in surrounding the impressions Deleuze's book gave me, but, in my effort to articulate a more extended analysis, I have to imply also Demetrio Stratos' and Sainkho Namtchylak's studies on voice, that are related to some techniques many post-bop horn players developed, starting with John Coltrane. Maybe the proper field for this study would probably be European contemporary music, with Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen as examples of what was then called 'post-serialism', and the so-called 'Industrial music' - this definition in Europe doesn't include music related to heavy metal, but forms of music developed first as accompaniment for performances, and then risen to a proper authonomy with Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten and Maurizio Bianchi -, and the Sound Art, as a matter of how the sound can influence the perception of the space. 

In this article I want to give some tools that can be useful for a first approach with a discussion on how the French philosopher's essay fits with music, and to what extent, skimming through genres and styles. Deleuze was very influent in the 1960s here in Europe and then in South America, where he still is. David Toop in his Ocean of Sound talks diffusely about Deleuze's concept of 'rhizome' - a root without a proper original branch, metaphor for a way of thinking without relating reality to a unique and univocal meaning - as a strategy to reach a 'nomadic' way - a way not based on given, i.e. 'sedentary', structure of language, of signifying - to approach creation; that's what Sun Ra's and other jazzmen were doing: issuing their own records on their own labels, and so avoiding artistic compromises, and then giving some of their artefacts to some major or independent labels. That's what the avant-garde pianist did, as an example, with Space is the place, issued on Impulse!, or with Nuclear War, published on Mark Stewart's On-U Sound.

Francis Bacon Study for the Head of George Dyer

Hysteresis, so. It's difficult to undesrtand it correctly if you are not aware of some cornerstones of the structuralism. In particular it would be interesting to focus on Jacques Lacan's seminars about psychoanalisis and the concept of 'hysteria', that he, as structuralist, considers as the refusal to apply the language of Power to the body, as the proper feeling of the hysteric subject. And this, because power refuses to give desire his proper place in the world of language and in the word of the Law. As far as desire, for Lacan, "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second." Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need." So desire can never be satisfied, as Slavoj Žižek says: "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."

A good part of the Deleuze's thinking is based on the opposition between power and desire. The concept of power is taken from Hegel and seen as something - the dialectics - that comes from, and produces, dissociation - thesis versus antithesis. "Petrolio", a novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini, or his Salò movie, are good literary translations of that concept. Desire is all that remains when the structures of the speech as a form of power on reality - the presumption to give order to reality with words - collapse. Again, Pasolini's 'Teorema' is a good picture of that idea. At the center of the paintings of Bacon there is a work of removal, an ethic work that leads precisely to abandon power for desire. Bacon take away the figure, the shape and the filling is blurring, so there are no more specified subjects - man and animal, subject and object, figure and environment, and so on.

And again, movement in Bacon is always double, systolic and diastolic at the same time. An abject athleticism - from latin 'ab-jectus', something that remains beyond the sub-jectus, which is the subject - leading from the figurative pattern that imprisons the figure into being only in this movement - the sink, the mirror - and filled to the figure - the body as Plexus / spasm, hysterical scene: escape through any body prostheses: syringes, umbrellas, mouth / scream ... -. Extraction and isolation, as opposed to the intelligible narrative relations of classical figurativeness. The butchered meat, the zone of indiscernibility between man and animal. The bones will rise from the flesh, as the flesh descended from the bones. Acrobatics of the flesh, an extension of athletics in the body. Face, head, cry escapes the body through the mouth, like blood from a severed artery. Spiritual movement.

Place created by those forms of art is similar to the anthropologist Victor Turner concept of 'liminarity' in his 'Rite of passage', and a good picture of it can be considered the way a Tibetan singer uses his throat in order to produce a double sound, positioning his tounge and glottis as if he is passing from 'l' letter to 'm' letter. This is a 'middle' position, but one that produces a double sound. Hysteresis, so, is the 'rhythmic' eye. The eye becomes ear: it feels time, as does the ear when you listen to music. And so becomes 'schizophrenic', says Deleuze, but not in the usual sense of dissociation. Schizophrenia as music is, because music disembodied bodies, the place (not the concept) of vanishing lines that cross the bodies themselves, but that are consistent elsewhere, hysterized through the introduction of color. How can we not recognize in that description the timbre, old fetish of improvisers, but also the use of a certain layering of sound even in analog and digital electronics, or in some contemporary composers, as in Karlheinz Stockhausen or Iannis Xenakis? How about electronic music, be it Miles Davis electrified trumpet, or the first contemporary composers in producing music through ring modulators?

The body draws on its new organs, like Antonin Artaud had predicted in 'Pour en finir avec le jujement de dieu'. It's a metaphor for multiculturalism, in the sense of the crossing of two different cultures, that usually produces something completely new: the 'african-american' music isn't a mere adding of two cultural forms of art: it is a totally new music. The 'hysterized eye' ceases to perceive the figures arranged in space according to a scan or narrative perspective, and through the articulation of three elements - material structure / set position / area and contour as the unfocused limit of both - creates a structure of rhythm / feeling. The body is thus the zone of indiscernibility between subject and object, between sentient and heard. Pure affection. The feeling acts as an agent deformating the body, and creates a gap in which it is organized through a sequence, a spasmic passage from a level to the other. 

So let's go back to music, to the rhythm given through the use of color. It's something similar to the dyplophonies used in Tibetan singing, or to the resonances of certain Arab, Middle or Eastern instruments - qanun, sitar -. But the same is with the way a musician like Roscoe Mitchell sometimes uses triplophonies on his horns. Same with Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, their use of tritones: they aren't a mere addition of a sound to another, but a new form of vibration. And the same is with the bass lines Henry Grimes give shape as a matter of texturizing different colors, different layers of sound.

Surely, if we think about avant garde jazz, its roots aren't in Western philosophy, but in a practice that is more confident with other concepts, like sound as vibration, as an example. Quoting Sufism and his mysticism can be a better idea. But since the 19th Century European thinkers - e.g. Schopenhauer or Nietzsche were both enthousiasts readers of the Bhagavad Gita- were looking at the Eastern World as a new model, less related to the division between reason - the self-consciousness as the result of the ego seeing himself - and the irrational - all that can't be explained with scientific measures. Psychology and anthropology - Carl G. Jung ideas on Symbols and Collective Unconscious, as Victor Turner idea of Experience - are more related to an Olistic approach to the human mind than Freud's idea of the Ego and Hegel's concept of dialectics. A more fluid approach to things, and a reflection of that knowledge parameters change can be seen in Antonin Artaud's 'The theater and its double', or in Jerzy Grotowski's Toward a poor theater; the same is with Francis Bacon and, to some extent, Jackson Pollock's paintings, and music after the middle of the last century. 

A shamanic workshop: Sainkho Namtchylak Feat. Arto Lindsay

Music Workshop 2011

Milano, May 31, 2011

Triennale di Milano, Teatro dell'Arte

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Even if you're not cynic, it's nevertheless difficult to pull apart how you have to be tough if you want to strive your goals in the music business today, and try to share your own personal achievements with a large audience. While tonight two veterans of experimental languages like Sainkho Namtchylak and Arto Lindsay are playing in an almost full theater near the center of the city, in a quiet and cool place like the Triennale Museum and its surrounding and almost natural environment, lots of musicians are harshly strieving for places to play in and people to play with. Those last six months were demanding for experimental music (and beyond) hard-ons. Milano will surely be a better place in September, when the MITO Festival will bring us a series of events related to Haiti music and culture, and the likes of Diamanda Galàs, Louaka Kanza, Omar Souleiman, Christian Fennesz.

But since January, people here had the possibility to see only a bunch of important happenings: bassist Joelle Léandre playing with poet and performer Nanni Balestrini, Peter Brotzmann accompanied by Steve Lacy's devotee and fellow Gianni Mimmo, with friends Xabier Iriondo on guitar and self- built instruments and Cristiano Calcagnile on drums, plus the Organic project led by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, veteran of the AACM Association. Only the last one was promoted by a theater, being the others settled in a couple of self-administered social structures, Cox 18 and Torchiera. As far as going 'underground', a good mention is for Attila Favarelli, a musician that since the beginning of this month is organizing in The Lift, his private recording studio, public exhibitions of young French composer Kassel Jaeger and Echtzeitmusik's duo Mat Pogo/Ignaz Schick, and for O' - Artoteca, a place devoted to both installation/performances/contemporary art and electronic music.

Far away from matters related to scheduling, on 31 May at La Triennale di Milano, Sainkho Namtchylak and Arto Lindsay shared with the audience the result of a two-day workshop in which they gave shape to an amazing mix of tuva/tibetan deep throath singing, lullabies and no-wave slights, or, better said, clouds of coal and sound. It's impossible not to recognize the distinctiveness of this couple of prime movers in their own fields, and breathing the result of two creators of musical nuances working together is always a wave of freshness in the middle of that part of today's cultural scenery that fixed quest and personality as the most important values.

Two different sets: a solo performance by Namtchylak, that you can see as a good introduction to her last output Cyberia, a record related to oytulaask chants and shamanic experience that takes the stock of the singer's multi-faceted vocal technique, spanning from open melody through improvised singing; and the duo with Lindsay's nervous but well balanced mix of rapid slashes and distorted and surrounding effetcs. If the firts part of the concert is remarkable because you won't find elsewhere a singer able to combine multi-tones chant with the wide spectrum range she's gifted, the second part is the real surprise. Guitar plunges vocal textures, opening then to lead us into a dark, misty and surrounding environment.

And even if Lindsay and Namtchylak together were playing what seemed to be a bunch of eccentric, vaguely melancholic and noisy ballads, the twos showed a coherence of inspiration and of result. Lindsay accompanied with nervous but fluid movements his playing, while Namtchylak mastery with more structured song forms, combined with her ability to improvise, gave her the possibility to weave a texture around which her partner worked more with his characteristic sound dynamics, from minimal gestures to loud fillings.

It's a matter of fact that music is also a playing field in which moods and colors loose the tracks we usually relate to common and everyday feelings and sensations just to elevate themselves, and you as a listener, to a wider range of emotions and suggestions. This is a big part of shamanic cultures, not that apart from their most direct social function: broadening the stream, opening to a meditative emotional setting in which the number and the value of hues and shades increase and overtake the boundaries of directness, just to take time and place in which to experience a much open perspective. That's what people in the audience tonight took part of, and this is a good reason to push forward with that and all related musical occurrences.

See Also:

My photo gallery

Arto Lindsay official website

Sainkho Namtchylak official website