| JUNE
News 2005 |
Reviews
by Clifford Allen, Nate Dorward, Stephen Griffith, Walter Horn,
Vid Jeraj, Massimo Ricci, Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg, Wayne Spencer,
Dan Warburton:
|
|
Akio
Suzuki
Taku Sugimoto
On Mode: George Crumb
/ John Cage / Morton Feldman / Iannis Xenakis
In print: Jazz In
Search Of Itself
On Creative Sources: Fages,
Costa Monteiro, Barberan / Pocket Progressive / Wade Matthews
/ Akiyama, Kahn, Kawasaki / Kinoshita, Okura, Ezaki / Stefan
Keune / Davies, Hayward, Eckhardt, Capece
On Clean Feed: Jumala
Quintet / Charles Gayle / James Finn
POST ROCK: David Sylvian
JAZZ: Orchestrova
/ Ribot, Grimes, Campbell, Taylor / Scott Rosenberg / Eugene
Chadbourne / Respect Sextet / Mezei Szilard
IMPROV: Brötzmann
& Bennink / Chen & Beresford / Civil War / Grubbs &
Veliotis / Weston, Edwards & Sanders / Louis Moholo-Moholo
& Roger Smith / Benat Achiary
CONTEMPORARY: John
Zorn / Eliane Radigue / Kasper Toeplitz / Rick Cox / Jim Fox
/ Kyle Gann
ELECTRONICA: Elliott
Sharp & Merzbow / Lawrence English / Daniel Menche / Sébastien
Roux / Nicolas Collins / JARL
Last month
|
RESONANCES
Catalogue + CD
Les Musées de la Ville de Paris
ISBN-2-87900-875-1 ISSN 1272-2103 12€
If
you're in Paris now or coming here in the foreseeable future, a visit
to Russian émigré sculptor Ossip Zadkine's
former loft on the rue d'Assas near the Jardin du Luxembourg is certainly
worth considering. And while you're there, pick up one of these souvenir
catalogues for last year's Résonances exhibition –
now unfortunately over – in which Japanese sound artist Akio
Suzuki was invited to contribute two site-specific installations and
map out a special sound walk around the Montparnasse district. A review
of the exhibition appeared in The Wire #249 (November 2004), and is
reprinted here with the kind permission of Tony Herrington:
 "At
first impression there might not seem to be much in common between
sculptor Ossip Zadkine (1890 – 1967) and Japanese sound artist
Akio Suzuki (born in Pyongyang, 1941), but just as music was a recurring
influence on Zadkine – he sculpted no fewer than nine versions
of Orpheus – the deceptive simplicity of Suzuki's work is as
much about space and light as it is about sound. "Come and see,"
wrote Zadkine, inviting a friend to the studio on rue d'Assas he moved
into in 1928, now the museum bearing his name: "You'll understand
how a man's life can be changed by a dovecote, by a tree." Or
by a piece of bamboo: Akio Suzuki's "From one bamboo" and
"Bamboo Harp" occupy a bright, spacious room in the museum's
secluded gardens. Visitors are encouraged to pick up and put down
(gently) the 25 irregular bamboo cylinders on their concrete plinths
to discover their individual sonic identities. "It is very important
that each segment is different," Suzuki comments: "People
are different, one from another; each comes with his/her imagination
and sensibility. Everyone becomes a musician." A basic human
gesture – what could be more commonplace than just picking something
up and putting it down again? – becomes a rich aural adventure,
and the space soon fills with the delicate clatter of wood on stone.
Suzuki's second contribution to the Résonances exhibition
is in the form of a soundwalk or oto-date, the third such
event he has been invited to curate in France, after similar outings
in Enghien and Strasbourg. Oto-date roughly translates as
"open air sound ceremony" – so the distinctive forlorn
echoes of the Métro and the crisp, metallic chatter of Montparnasse's
bustling cafés are, sadly, excluded – and the map provided
by the museum retraces Suzuki's exploration of the district around
Zadkine's studio. Walkers are invited to head southwards, skirt the
Montparnasse cemetery (appropriately, Zadkine's last resting place)
and cross the Jardin Atlantique, a rooftop garden built above the
platforms of the Gare Montparnasse, eventually ending up in the narrow
streets between Saint Sulpice and the Jardin du Luxembourg. Along
the way fifteen specific listening points are identified, a pair of
ears in a circle painted on the pavement to indicate the precise location
of the listening point and orientation the listener is to adopt. Though
several of these are time-specific – the schoolyard on rue Joseph
Bara is best appreciated at playtime – and others light-specific
– the Place des 3 Martyrs seems to have been included for the
spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower it affords at night time (during
the day it's a particularly noisy traffic intersection), Suzuki has
found some extraordinary spots, from the Jardin Atlantique's surreal
sound window opening from leafy tranquillity and birdsong onto the
roaring trains and blaring loudspeakers of the station below, to the
traffic island between rue Falguière and rue Armand Moisant,
where a magical acoustic reveals itself, the resonance of the crossroads
and a nearby playground amplified and focused by adjacent high-walled
buildings. Suzuki himself, however, would be the first to recognise
that some of the most memorable experiences in life occur along the
way, between the oto-date, in those fleeting moments that
only chance can throw your way: a concierge sweeping dry leaves across
the yard of the Musée Zadkine, a furious cavalcade of police
cars in the Avenue du Maine road tunnel, a cat yawning and stretching
on the gravel path of the Musée Bourdelle. And, "a song
wrapped in dusty gas rises towards me from the street [..] the hot,
heavy breathing of thousands of cars, fleeing, colliding, a mighty
exodus." Not Akio Suzuki's words, but those of Ossip Zadkine,
on his first visit to Tokyo in 1959."
Accompanying the book, with its fine explanatory essay by Catherine
Grout (in French) and splendid collection of photographs documenting
the exhibition and the oto-date, is a CD featuring Suzuki performing
on a stone flute (shades of the great Watazumido), a glass harmonica,
plus his own inventions, the Analapos and the "D'un seul bambou"
installation itself. These were recorded at the Nuit Blanche at the
Musée Zadkine that took place on October 2nd 2004, by Eric
La Casa, who also took his mics out in the streets to record Suzuki's
oto-date in situ. One can think of no finer sound artist
for the job – La Casa's extraordinary ear (and his extraordinary
mics!) catch the essence of the place perfectly (having walked the
circuit several times and recorded it myself, I can vouch for his
pinpoint accuracy) and his editing and mastering are simply faultless.
Whether you saw the exhibition or not, I strongly encourage you to
get hold of this if you can – this is the real sound of Paris!
—DW
Taku
Sugimoto
PRINCIPIA SUGIMATICA
A Bruit Secret ABS 11
MUSIC FOR CYMBAL
Cut 012
Anyone
who's followed the career of Taku Sugimoto from the florid lyricism
of Flagments of Paradise, with its Loren Connors-like melancholy
strains, through the ever more sparse guitar duo releases with Kevin
Drumm, Annette Krebs and Burkhard Stangl to the austerity of Futatsu
with Radu Malfatti can't have failed to notice that the further Sugimoto
advances the fewer notes he plays. Interesting parallels could be
drawn with the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, in which case Sugimoto's
"Hum", which calls for nothing more than amp buzz, could
be the equivalent of Beckett's infamous "Breath", a "play"
that many Beckett-watchers took to be the point of no return in the
author's career. Of course it wasn't: Beckett continued to produce
a substantial body of work after "Breath", and similarly,
since "Hum", Sugimoto has launched himself into an extensive
series of compositions using a notational system of his own, which
he calls (Bertrand Russell must be smiling in the hereafter) Principia
Sugimatica.
 The Principia
doesn't specify what to play in terms of precise pitches, though it
would be relatively easy for the notation to include this information.
Actual sounding musical events are either long notes (semibreves),
which are allowed to decay, or short ones, which are not allowed to
resonate. The former are represented in the notation by "°",
the latter by a simple dot, "." Duration is specified in
minutes ("m") or seconds ("s"), and subdivided
by the use of the slash "/". Events or groups of events
can be repeated, singly or in groups, which is indicated by the multiplication
sign "*". To take a straightforward example, then: ".
1m/3" indicates that a duration of one minute is to be divided
into three equal units (of 20 seconds), each beginning with a short
sound. Whether the sound is to be the same each time isn't specified,
though that's the approach Sugimoto adopts on the Principia Sugimatica
album. To thicken the plot slightly, ".1m/center" requires
the performer to "put a dot in the center of one minute,"
which, as the composer admits, "is not easy. What I am aiming
at is that, if the duration of the single dot is 0.4 seconds, it is
played at 0.2 seconds before 00'30". Thus, "1m(30s .30/1)"
is not completely equal to ".1m/center".." Fair enough.
If this is beginning to look confusing, you might be reassured to
know that you're not alone. Even producer Michel Henritzi seems to
have overlooked a couple of typos – misplaced slashes –
in the title of the first piece on the album, which reads: ".1m/3
.1m/4 .1m/4cen . 1/m4 .1/m3" (it should, of course, be ".1m/3
.1m/4 .1m/4cen . 1m/4 .1m/3"). What this amounts to is a symmetrical
five-minute piece whose first and last minutes each consist of three
regularly spaced dots every twenty seconds, the piece's second and
fourth minutes each consisting of four dots, one every fifteen seconds,
and a central third minute whose four dots occur in the middle of
each fifteen-second sub-unit (at roughly 2'07.5", 2'22.5",
2'37.5" and 2'52.5"). My own approach to this notation,
were I performing the piece, would be to prepare a conventionally-notated
performing score (as David Tudor did with some of Morton Feldman's
graphic pieces – see John Holzaepfel's splendid essay "Painting
by Numbers" in The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts
(Routledge, 2002) – by the time you have worked out what "3m
(1m (20s . 10s/1 . 15s/1 .15s/1)*3) 3m (1m (15s. 15s/1 .10s/1 .20s/1)*3)."
means (and don't forget that dot right at the end!) the piece is nearly
over.
Sugimoto builds more flexibility into the system by his concepts of
"aug" and "dim" – the score / title of the
final piece on the album reads as follows:
1m
° 1maug5/1*9 (left)
1m ° 100secdim5/1*12 (center)
1m ° 1m/1*12 (right)
Which
means that on the left channel, after a minute's silence, the first
semibreve is sounded at 1'00", the second at 2'05" (1m +
5s), the third at 3'15" and so on, while the semibreves in the
centre of mix become gradually more frequent and those on the right
channel appear regularly on the minute. Once more, anyone with a smattering
of normal music notation capable of reading a 4/4 bar at quarter note
60 could notate the entire thirteen-minute composition without any
difficulty whatsoever. I suppose one advantage of Sugimoto's notation
would be that he could send you an entire score by SMS on a mobile
phone, but performing it would still probably involve quite a bit
of preliminary transcription.
So much for the notation – what does the music sound like? Well,
if I might be permitted a flight of fancy, assuming that a simple
hyphen "-" represents a second's silence, the first piece
on the album is as follows:
. -------------------. -------------------. -------------------. --------------.
--------------. --------------. ---------------------. --------------.
--------------. --------------. -------. --------------. --------------.
--------------. --------------. -------------------. -------------------.
-------------------
As
each of those dots lasts, Sugimoto estimates, not a whole second but
only about four tenths of a second, there are in fact no more than
7.2 seconds of music in the entire five-minute piece. This, along
with the fact that each of the dots corresponds to the same sound
(Toshimaru Nakamura's mixing, editing and mastering is absolutely
meticulous, certainly in the first piece – there seems to be
greater rhythmic flexibility in the final three-channel composition
quoted above) means that it's a pretty extreme experience. What you
get out of it as a listener depends to a large extent then on where
and when you choose to listen, as 97.6% of what you'll hear when you
press play on track one will be the sounds surrounding you. If Sugimoto
had chosen to keep the same rhythmic notation but vary the pitch and
timbre of each dot and semibreve, it would be possible to experience
the work as a melodic line (albeit a very fragmented one), which is
how I approached his work with Radu Malfatti, both on the album Futatsu
and in concert (reviewed in The Wire). But since he's
gone to great pains to assure that each note is identical, such a
linear pitch-focussed listening is no longer possible. Nor, unless
one listens with stopwatch in hand or eyes glued to the track time
display on the CD player, is it possible to perceive the larger symmetrical
structure of the pieces, unless they're sufficiently short to be grasped
as a whole (this is true of track six on the album, which clocks in
at just one minute and whose seven discrete events can be heard as
a hocketing dialogue around a central sustained tone).
 In its
concern for austere mathematical beauty apparently for its own sake,
Principia Sugimatica recalls some of Tom Johnson's more radical
compositional stratagems (Music for 88, The Chord Catalogue),
and like Johnson's work, it is relatively easy to understand and admire,
but hard to love (I've had my copy of The Chord Catalogue for
four years and never managed to play it through all the way once).
But the same compositional method system applied to another sound
source can yield surprising and beautiful results. As percussionist
Jason Kahn related in his recent interview with PT, one of his recent
projects was to commission Sugimoto to write a piece for cymbal. He
sent Sugimoto a selection of soundfiles showing what different sounds
his cymbal (amplified and mounted on a floor tom) could produce, and
the composer responded several months later with a score. "It's
70 minutes long and everything is timed," commented Kahn. "I'm
free to choose which sounds on the cymbal I play, but I have to adhere
to the dynamic and rhythmic indications." Don't – no, on
second thoughts do! – do as I did and crank up the volume in
anticipation of another selection of eternal pianissimos – when
Kahn's thudding roll comes in at the three minute mark (that presumably
means the score begins with "3m"!) your ears will thrill.
In comparison to the cloud of rich harmonics that the cymbal produces,
Sugimoto's own guitar tones on Principia sound somewhat anaemic, and
Music for Cymbal also brings dynamics into play: the aforementioned
roll beginning at 3'00" diminuendos over four minutes (I'm reminded
of the famous opening of Stockhausen's "Klavierstücke IX")
– and that's not as easy to pull off as it sounds. Kahn's attention
to detail throughout the 72-minute span of music is exemplary. Sugimoto
completists (I suppose they must exist – I only hope for their
sake they live in a very quiet neck of the woods) will want to check
out both these albums, but if you value the sounding result more than
the process behind it, Music for Cymbal is the one to go
for.—DW
George
Crumb
MAKROKOSMOS I & II
Mode 142
 "Makrokosmos",
George Crumb's "24 fantasy pieces after the Zodiac" –
the homage to Schumann is clear – is, as Steven Bruns notes
in his accompanying essay, performed quite frequently these days.
And understandably so, as they're eminently accessible, quotations
of Beethoven and Chopin and poetic extra-musical programme notwithstanding,
using a musical language sufficiently close to the composer's role
models – Bartók, Debussy, Messiaen – so as not
to send uninitiated concertgoers screaming for emergency exits. Margaret
Leng Tan performs the two twelve-movement cycles (each of which is
subdivided into three groups of four pieces, each piece dedicated
to someone born under the corresponding sign of the Zodiac) with exemplary
precision. Even the "Cadenza Apocalittica" in Book II, with
its lusty cries of "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and the Dies Irae
doodles of the ensuing "Prophecy of Nostradamus", which
can all too easily come off as bombastic and over the top, work remarkably
well. Alex Nowitz's wobbly theremin-like whistling (what? couldn't
Maggie handle that herself?) is a bit hard to take though, and the
whispered Latin plus whole-tone-overload of the closing "Agnus
Dei" rather trite, but it's too easy to be blasé and snipe
at Crumb. His meticulous sketches are proof that an approach to set
theory as rigorous and uncompromising as Babbitt's can coexist perfectly
well with a deep affection for the unashamedly tonal and heartfelt
romanticism of bygone days.
John
Cage
44 HARMONIES / CHEAP IMITATION
Mode 144/5 2CD
Cage's "44 Harmonies" were originally written to form part
of the sprawling bicentennial commission "Apartment House 1776",
and take as their starting point late 18th century anthems and hymn
tunes by William Billings, Jacob French, Andrew Law, James Lyon and
the wonderfully-named Supply Belcher. Cage's compositional –
or rather decompositional – method was to remove certain tones
and extend others, and as James Pritchett points out in the (excellent
as always for Mode) liners, he was delighted with the result. "You
can recognise it as 18th century music, but it's suddenly brilliant
in a new way. It is because each sound vibrates from itself, not from
a theory," he commented. Irvine Arditti's arrangement of the
Harmonies for his quartet forges a direct and clear link between this
work and the earlier "String Quartet in Four Parts" (1950):
both pieces explore pure yet totally non-functional diatonicism with
refreshing openness and astonishing clarity – and no vibrato.
As always the Arditti Quartet's reading is spotless, as is Irvine
Arditti's own version of "Cheap Imitation", perhaps Cage's
most beautiful homage to his beloved Satie. Taking the vocal line
of the latter's "Socrate" – a highly influential if
pale, often tedious, piece – and systematically transposing
it up and down, note by note or bar by bar, Cage managed to retain
the phrasing and rhythmic shape of Satie while producing something
very much his own. Arditti's wan, flat tone is perfect – the
second movement sounds as if it was recorded on one of those mass-produced
half size Chinese fiddles they used to give to school kids, and the
strange phantom glissandi of the third movement's col legno is
as haunting as Cage's endlessly unravelling strands of melody.
Morton
Feldman
COMPOSING BY NUMBERS / THE GRAPHIC SCORES 1950 – 67
Mode 146
 This
ninth volume of Mode's Feldman Edition brings together 13 of the 17
works the composer notated using graph instead of normal manuscript
paper (between 1950's "Projection I" and 1967's "In
Search of An Orchestration", though Feldman temporarily abandoned
his graphic notation after 1953's "Intersection IV" and
only returned to it five years later with "Ixion"), performed
with customary aplomb by the Amsterdam-based Barton Workshop under
the baton of Jos Zwaanenburg and their music director James Fulkerson,
who also provides the perceptive liner notes. Feldman collectors had
better get their credit cards ready, as the disc includes the first
recordings of three ensemble works: "Intersection I", "Marginal
Intersection" and "In Search of An Orchestration".
(1961's "Out of 'Last Pieces'" is also billed as a first,
though my Feldman database http://www.cnvill.demon.co.uk/mfrecs.pdf
lists another recording of the work conducted by Leonard Bernstein
as part of Sony's Bernstein Century edition.)
1951 was quite a prolific year for Feldman – he composed no
fewer than 14 works, of which "Intersection I" and "Marginal
Intersection" call for the largest forces – but while his
graphic scores for chamber line-ups are no longer surprising to our
ears, having been performed and recorded relatively frequently (five
commercially available versions exist of "Projection I"
and there are several readings of the later works in the "Projections"
series, even including another by the same ensemble), the same compositional
techniques used with a full ensemble lead to a rather thick, chromatically
saturated texture at odds with the quasi-Webernian sparsity of the
chamber pieces. The music is uncompromising, and, though recognisably
Feldman, not always attractive. It's surprising, though, that "Marginal
Intersection" hasn't been released before, as it's remarkably
colourful, if atypical. In addition to the instrumental ensemble,
in which percussion features quite prominently, the piece calls for
two oscillators – one senses the influence of Varèse
somewhere in the background, though the once more rather claggy pitch
world is far removed from his razor-sharp set theory. In contrast,
notes in Frank Denyer's version of "Intersection II" sound
so good I'm tempted to wonder if Denyer, a talented and woefully underestimated
composer in his own right, didn't prepare his own performing version
of the score (à la David Tudor, as mentioned in the
review above) prior to the recording session. His muscular bravura
in "Intersections III" also gives the lie to the idea that
Feldman's music must, of necessity, be slow, quiet and fragile. A
comparison of the two solo cello works, "Projection I" (1950)
and "Intersection IV", dating from three years later, both
splendidly performed by Taco Kooistra, reveals how sophisticated Feldman's
graph paper notation had become by the time he abandoned it later
in 1953. When he returned to the medium at the end of the decade,
the results were deceptively complex, and strikingly beautiful. Compared
to the rather muddy textures of "Intersection I", "Out
of 'Last Pieces'" and "The Straits of Magellan", both
written in 1961, positively shimmer – and I thought the Turfan
Ensemble's reading of the latter on Mode 103 couldn't be equalled
– and it's wonderful to finally hear "In Search of An Orchestration".
Not that Morton Feldman had to search all that far: his mastery of
instrumentation is evident throughout this fine disc.
Iannis
Xenakis
LA LEGENDE D'EER
Mode 148
 "Music
is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex
forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which
men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding
the right answer or the best one," wrote Iannis Xenakis in his
introductory notes to the performance of his sound-light Diatope
installation at the Pompidou Centre in 1978, for which he composed
the seven-channel tape work La Légende d'Eer (after
Plato). A few years ago, thanks to the no doubt well-intentioned but
somewhat suspect attentions of DJ Spooky (amongst others), Xenakis's
music became, for a short while, radically hip, with a whole generation
of noiseniks jumping into the back catalogue and claiming it as their
own heritage, resulting in Asphodel's opportunist and decidedly dodgy
– in terms of both content and ideology – repackaging
and remixing of Persepolis (of which the less said the better,
lest I get any more gratuitously offensive email from Zbigniew Karkowski,
who "curated" that project). But in their undoubtedly sincere
enthusiasm for the composer's work and its impenetrable, uncompromising
soundworld (hardly surprising he should compare it to a boulder),
they overlooked a crucial detail: Xenakis was first and foremost an
architect, and the formal aspects of huge sprawling electronic works
like Persepolis and La Légende d'Eer were
worked out in meticulous detail and are as solid as a Gothic cathedral.
This extraordinary sonic universe of thumb pianos, Jew's harps, Japanese
drums and bricks banged and rubbed against each other is as impressive
as it is expressive, and impossible to ignore – it's most definitely
not background music, and its power to disturb can't be removed
just by turning the volume down – but what makes the 47-minute
span of music so effective is the composer's unerring precision in
combining these "concrete" elements with his own computer-assisted
electronic music in a superbly proportioned and aesthetically satisfying
formal design. As always there's plenty of additional information
to be had, both in the accompanying booklet and on the DVD version
(which includes Bruno Rastoin's striking archive photographs of the
original Diatope multimedia extravaganza, and an entertaining if rather
woolly chat between Xenakis and Harry Halbreich), but it's the music
that matters most – when the Spookys, Karkowskis (and Warburtons)
of this world are no more than footnotes in dusty back issues of old
magazines, this extraordinary work will still be out there, blowing
the hearts and minds of a whole new generation of musicians and non-musicians
alike.—DW
Larry
Kart
JAZZ IN SEARCH OF ITSELF
Yale University Press
ISBN 0-30010-420-0 2004
 I have
to admit that reading the introduction to Larry Kart’s new anthology
of jazz reviews, interviews and essays only added to the prior apprehension
I had about the book, a mood induced by the title of the work. Certainly
the ponderousness of the idea of a particular art subspecies looking
hither and yon for itself wasn’t dampened by the introduction,
with its opaque quotations from Ortega y Gasset and various proclamations
to the effect that “jazz is a meaning-making activity; its acts
ask to be read, and have even come to be at various times and places
hungered for.” Thinking of my duty to read the tome, I once,
calling upon Isiah Berlin, even issued a silent prayer. “Please,”
I petitioned, “even if Kart is no hedgehog (knowing one big
thing) let him at least be a fox (who knows many little—perhaps
occasionally interesting things)!”
I needn’t have worried. Jazz in Search of Itself is
not only interesting and fun to read, it’s perceptive, thoughtful,
and evenhanded. Best of all, it’s chock full of careful dissections
of age-old puzzles. Kart, who has worked for both the Chicago Tribune
and Downbeat, is a sympathetic interviewer and critic,
but no pushover: he’s willing to point out failings even in
his biggest heroes. The ellipticality of Wayne Shorter and what might
be called the rhythm-centricity of Warne Marsh are two examples of
shortcomings he finds in a couple of his avowed gods. He can admit
when he may have overstated a bit, too: both a 1978 overly-psychologistic
piece on Cecil Taylor and a 1983 critique of Bill Evans, in which
Kart basically accuses the pianist of the occasional manufacture of
pure treacle, were subjected to recent reassessment. His deepest preferences
seem to be for saxophonists and singers, with the most fervent tributes
directed toward Lee Konitz, Ornette Coleman, Shorter, Billie Holiday,
and Sarah Vaughan. But Kart also has ample sympathy and understanding
for composers, pianists, and trumpeters. Several of his pieces lovingly
describe how he got the bug himself, telling of his youthful encounters
with the new music in his hometown Chicago; others, like his review
of Count Basie’s autobiography, Good Morning Blues,
are moving and elegant.
To his credit, Kart is not embarrassed by his descriptions of being
blown away at some of the many gigs he’s attended—whether
or not the player doing the blowing is currently supposed to be a
top-notch artist. For example, in a 1982 piece on Oscar Peterson,
he tells us that “Overdrive [is the pianist’s] most effective
gear….[H]is music begins to make sense only when he wheels his
screeching keyboard right to the edge of a cliff.” But unlike
many contemporary heavy-breathers on the music-writing scene, several
of Kart’s essays provide considerable evidence of a depth of
understanding of music's complexities. His careful discussion of the
similarities and differences between Lennie Tristano and Bach is a
case in point, and certainly one can tell how hard he has thought
about the issues surrounding Tristano’s use of tape manipulation
on some of the pianist’s recordings:
"The process whereby Tristano speeded up the tapes of his piano
playing on “Line Up” and “East Thirty-Second”
to match the prerecorded (and also fiddled with) bass and drum work
of Peter Ind and Jeff Morton inspired a fair amount of controversy
at the time, and while it died away when “C Minor Complex”
made clear again what ought to have been obvious from the first—that
Tristano could execute at the speed of [those tunes] without electronic
assistance—perhaps his justification for what he did (“the
result sounded good to me”) ought be taken literally. That is,
by recording bass-register piano lines and speeding up the tapes until
the pitch of the piano lines was raised on octave, Tristano not only
made the lines move faster, but he also made a new sound. The lower
in register a note on the piano is, the more slowly it “speaks”
and the less rapidly it decays. By forcing that effect upwards, Tristano
altered the attack-decay relationship of each note—adding a
tremendously propulsive, Chu Berry-like buzz or whoosh to tones that
couldn’t possibly have had that effect, that sound, if they
actually had been played in the piano’s middle register."
As illuminating and riveting as many of his one-off pieces are, however,
the centerpiece of his Jazz in Search of Itself is constituted
by the seven related pieces that make up the section of the book Kart
calls “The Neo Con Game.” Here, the author delves deeply
into some of the thorniest questions in the history of music criticism.
Perhaps I can rephrase them this way: “What is (or would be)
wrong with somebody writing (or playing) music like Mozart’s
(or Miles Davis’s) today? If the composer/performer is highly
skilled and the original forms have intrinsic value, mustn’t
the latter-day replicas also be valuable? Why should Stravinsky’s
or Hindemith’s neo-classicism be considered a step forward –
if indeed it should – while the Wynton/Branford Marsalis approach
to jazz over the past 20 years is derided as little more than a sort
of facile mimicry?" While I can hardly do justice to Kart’s
extremely discerning commentary in a review, I think it will be illustrative
to provide a couple of excerpts. Before doing so, however, I want
to point out that Kart’s critique of the “neo-cons”
is far less polemical than it could be. His earliest piece on Wynton,
“Marsalis at Twenty-One” [1983] is sympathetic and hopeful—Kart
obviously believes that the trumpeter’s astonishing gifts might,
over time, result in a jazz titan. Kart can’t be criticized
for being a partisan avant-gardist, in any case. While an avid admirer
of Coleman’s harmonic advances, Evan Parker’s circular-breathing
chops, and Roscoe Mitchell’s affinities with the fifteenth-century
contrapuntalist Guillaume Dufay (!), Kart clearly prefers Konitz and
Stan Getz to Cecil Taylor, and never even mentions Sun Ra, Anthony
Braxton, or Derek Bailey in the book. In fact, though he devotes an
essay to Frank Zappa, a piece on prosody makes it abundantly clear
that Kart has much more affinity for Cole Porter than for either Lennon
or Dylan. Each page of the book reestablishes how deep the author’s
roots are in swing and bop. However, as the Marsalises’ fame
and influence increase over time, one can almost see Kart shaking
his head in discouragement. Branford, he says, “seems to be
playing at jazz instead of just playing it—as though his involvement
with the music were based on a paradoxical need to fend off its emotional
demands.” Again, he chides, “What Coltrane left behind
was not a ‘hip’ style, but a drive toward ecstatic transcendence.”
And, by the mid-eighties, Kart is willing to judge that “the
effect of [Wynton’s] music is oddly and disappointingly bland.”
He concludes that “there would seem to be something illusory
in the hope that solid ground can be found in the jazz styles of the
mid-1960s (particularly the music of the Miles Davis Quintet)—which
is where most of today’s would-be neoclassicists plant their
flags—for that music was always unstable, an art of emotional
and technical brinkmanship.” Kart is nearly as hard on David
Murray, of whom he says that the turn towards orthodoxy after experimental
early work seems a sign of conscious guile, an “eagerness to
gratify his and his audience’s desires to experience in the
present a way of playing jazz that a short while ago seemed to belong
only to the past.” The final nail in the neo-con coffin comes
in a contemporary summing-up in which Wynton Marsalis is made to be
nothing so much as a modern-day Paul Whiteman, “not in terms
of the kinds of music they made but of the cultural roles they filled....the
tuxedoed Whiteman, wielding his baton like Toscanini [and] Marsalis,
the articulate whiz kid, equally at home with Miles Davis and Haydn
and foe of rap and hip-hop.” It’s a devastating critique.
Kart devotes one graceful piece to Jack Kerouac’s relationship
to jazz—his use of it both as subject matter and as inspiration
for prose style. Unsurprisingly, the essay is as fertile as those
on the musicians Kart discusses:
"[I]t is the sound of men like [Brew] Moore and [Allen] Eager,
not the heated brilliance of Charlie Parker or the adamant strength
of Thelonious Monk, that he managed to capture....‘These are
men!’ wrote William Carlos Williams of Bunk Johnson’s
band, and he certainly was right, as he would have been if he had
said that of Louis Armstrong or Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter or Thelonious
Monk. But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager and
Brew Moore—and in the music of Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Teschemacher,
for that matter—a sense of loss in the act of achievement, the
pathos of being doubly outside. That is an essential part of their
story; and when he was on his game, Jack Kerouac knew that it was
an essential part of his story too."
To conclude, Jazz in Search of Itself is a very satisfying
book. Although most of the pieces are short—none more than three
or four pages—not a single one is without some valuable kernel
that can be reflected on at length. How is it possible to pack so
much thought and feeling into these little essays? Well, it’s
a bit like Arnett Cobb’s solo on “Just a Closer Walk With
Thee.” As Kart explains, Cobb "began a chorus with a seemingly
simple two-note phrase, which might be rendered onomatopoetically
as ‘Yah-duh.’ Now I suppose you had to be there to hear
what that ‘‘Yah-duh’ did, but let me assure you
that within its apparent simplicity there was more musical meaning
than words could exhaust. Aside from the way he attacked the first
note, creating a catapulting sense of swing, there was the way its
relative density—its heavy, centered sound—contrasted
with the grainier, more oblique tonal texture of the second note.
The effect of this might be compared to a gymnast’s second,
more easeful bounce on a trampoline....The creation and control of
such effects, in which the abstract and emotional aspects of jazz
become one thing, is what Cobb’s music is all about. And if
the principles at work in that ‘Yah-duh,’ which lasted
no more than a second, are expanded to cover an entire performance,
it is easy to imagine just how richly varied this master’s language
can be."—WH
Ferran
Fages / Alfredo Costa Monteiro / Ruth Barberán
ISTMO
Creative Sources CS 023
 This
follow-up to last year's Atolón on Rossbin, recorded
live just a month after that splendid piece of work, features Ferran
Fages (acoustic turntable), Alfredo Costa Monteiro (accordion) and
trumpeter Ruth Barberán in two more slabs of (not so) soft
noise entitled "fehyst" and "ikhto" – seems
like the good folks at Creative Sources are on a mission to outdo
Autechre for strange album and track titles. All three musicians are
regular visitors to Ernesto Rodrigues' label – it's Costa Monteiro's
fourth outing on CS, Barberán's third and Fages' second –
and one only has to dip back into the austere palindromes of I Treni
Inerti's Ura, recorded just a year before this, to appreciate
how far they've moved away from the discreet introspection of reductionism.
Barberán's solution to the problem of being compared to a whole
slew of lowercase trumpet poppers and ploppers – Axel Dörner,
Greg Kelley, Franz Hautzinger, Masafumi Ezaki and Matt Davis (formerly
of I Treni) – is to take the instrument back to its caveman
basics, raw horny blasts replacing the now-standard vocabulary of
hisses and gurgles (though there are still plenty of those too). Costa
Monteiro's accordion playing is as weird as it was on his CS solo
Rumeur, but he's not averse to using the old squeezebox in
a more conventional manner to lay down some ugly, reedy minor ninth
drones. Meanwhile Fages' so-called acoustic turntable, which treats
the venerable machine as a kind of amplified circular saw, spits out
the kind of noise that wouldn't be out of place in an iron foundry.
It's a music of texture rather than substance, surface instead of
structure, and listening to it is rather like dribbling your ear down
a stucco wall: not exactly pleasant but it sure leaves an impressive
scar.—DW
Rochetti
/ Fhievel / Sigurtà
POCKET PROGRESSIVE
Creative Sources CS 024
 For
those wondering where reductionism could go after the extreme near-nothingness
of three or four years back, here's one possible direction –
soft noise. As if the tiny sounds made by musicians in between those
all-too-rare notes were all that remained, a strange assemblage of
mildly disturbing rustles and crackles, as the focus shifts from the
musicians themselves to the world around them, with an increased use
of field recordings. There are some dogs woofing and sniffing somewhere
in the background at the beginning of the first of these two tracks
(total duration just over 34 minutes), but the accompanying photography
is ugly urban high rise – let's hope this wasn't where the music
was recorded – and if you can imagine what it might sound like
to contact mic a rat and record it scurrying around inside a metal
dustbin full of sweet wrappers, paperclips and those polystyrene worm
things they use to protect electrical appliances in transit, you'll
have an idea of the music. The performers are Claudio Rochetti (turntable,
small percussion, radio), Luca Sigurtà (cymbals, objects and
toys) and Fhievel (electronics and field recordings), and the name
they've chosen for the album is quite a good one, at least the "pocket"
bit of it, since most of the music on offer here sounds as if it was
recorded by tiny microphones hidden inside a plastic anorak. Whether
or not "progressive" is an appropriate epithet is open to
question – tiny sounds have, after all, been around for some
time already (Morphogenesis, anyone?) – but the other possible
way out of reductionism, the one favoured by Messrs Malfatti and Sugimoto,
leads even further into silence, and if there's one thing Pocket
Progressive isn't, it's silent.—DW
Wade
Matthews
ASPIRATIONS AND INSPIRATIONS
Creative Sources CS 026
 The
first word that comes to mind is "attack", even if this
nightmarish volley of grenades lobbed our way by Wade Matthews turns
out to be, as he explains in the booklet, an intricate circuit of
unimaginable pipe dreams that materialize incredibly right in our
ear holes. Close miking guarantees fantastic detail in every perceivable
nuance of Matthews' bass clarinet and alto flute, generating mesmerizing
patterns of circular breathing and percussive tongue clucking that
sound like a one-man shamanic tabla / flute duo. Extended techniques
raise the curtain on an otherwise invisible world of gremlins and
gizmos dancing through a forest of unfathomable harmonics. Horse-like
whinnies and tiny shards of regular timbre spring out of the alembics
every once in a while to remind us we're not listening to some deranged
plumbing system, while growling mixtures of voice and venomous insufflations
will have you wondering what possible use there is for the synthesizer
anymore. Matthews is an artist whose palette contains so many colours
that describing it as "kaleidoscopic" sounds almost offensive.—MR
Tetuzi
Akiyama/Jason Kahn/Utah Kawasaki
AILACK
Creative Sources CS 027
 Taking
its name from the venue in Tokyo where it was recorded, this is a
live document of an improvised set where there's almost no difference
between sound and ambience, such is the natural flow of sonic events
characterizing this ménage à trois, the second
outing (after 2000's Luwa on Rossbin) featuring Akiyama (tape-delayed
guitar), Kahn (analogue synth and percussion) and Kawasaki (dismantled
Roland synth, cell phone). Those expecting a predominantly static
panorama might be occasionally disoriented by this unassuming box
of tricks, which, if carefully opened, reveals an intriguing collection
of tiny sonic gadgets that the late Roger Sutherland would surely
have approved of. Magnetic particles and continuous electric humming
mingle with barely audible investigations into instability, and guitar
noise, disturbed oscillations and outside car engines are transformed
into condensed blurring identities, the perfect representation of
an egoless approach which works perfectly in this context.—MR
Kazushige
Kinoshita / Masahiko Okura / Masafumi Ezaki
KENON
Creative Sources CS 028
 For those
of you who haven't seen him perform, Kazushige Kinoshita plays laptop
violin. No, not a violin hooked up to an iBook, I mean he actually
lays the instrument on his lap and plays it horizontally, holding
the bow with both hands, placing it on the string(s) and applying
pressure until the slightest friction produces sound, a quasi-indeterminate
collection of irregular clinks and plinks rather reminiscent of a
Geiger counter: you never know when the next clunk is coming, nor
how loud it might be. He's joined here by Masahiko Okura and Masafumi
Ezaki, who are more interested in using their instruments –
respectively alto saxophone and trumpet – as draughty tubes
and metallic percussion (though anyone familiar with their work in
other projects such as Gnu or Hose will know that they can indeed
play the horns perfectly well). Curiously enough, for all its moment-to-moment
unpredictability, the music on Kenon is relatively surprise-free
once the ear attunes to its microworld of snaps, crackles and pops
(plus the odd raspberry). It's concentrated, but not especially intense,
quite busy doing nothing, swirling round and round like tiny eddies
of dust trapped at the end of a blind alleyway.—DW
Stefan
Keune
SUNDAY SUNDAES
Creative Sources CS 030
 It
is impossible not to be immediately floored by the technical command
and the overwhelming repertoire of special FX that Stefan Keune brings
to the table with this collection of scaled-down invitations to solo
sax paradise. A captive nightingale undergoing electroshock therapy
singing Xenakis ("Reedcycling"), Keune, rips pages from
Alfred 23 Harth's book of schizophonics ("Palate", "The
mole") and chews them into a pulp of his own in search of sinuous
epileptic martyrdom. There is not a single dull moment; with its acute
multiphonics, wrinkled harmonics and lyrical monkey business, Sunday
Sundaes is in a class of its own among the many marvels of Ernesto
Rodrigues' label, revealing Keune as one of the most resourceful loonies
on the current scene.—MR
Rhodri
Davies / Robin Hayward / Julia Eckhardt / Lucio Capece
AMBER
Creative Sources cs031
 The
two tracks on Amber are derived from studio quartet recordings
made in Berlin 2004 by radical Welsh harpist Rhodri Davies, Berlin-based
English tuba player Robin Hayward, Julia Eckhardt, a violist working
of Berlin and Brussels who has played improvised and composed new
music over the last decade in a number ensembles including Q-O2 and
Incidental Music and Lucio Capece, an Argentinean reeds player now
living in Berlin who plays bass clarinet and soprano saxophone both
solo and in various groups. This is improvised music from that realm
of extended techniques in which string instruments are scraped, rattled
and knocked, brass and reeds yield arrays of hisses and plops, and
everyone avoids the notes of the chromatic scale like the horrible
plague they are. At its best, it is labile and engrossing, featuring
both subtle changes in shifting layers and more abrupt discontinuities
as the four players answer or build upon each other’s contributions.
However, it is not free of nervous post-reductionist fidgeting and
hermetic droning, both of which too often lead the music into somewhat
monotonous terrain, but readers tolerant of drone and repetition will
not be discouraged.—WS
Jumala
Quintet
TURTLE CROSSING
Clean Feed
Charles Gayle
SHOUT!
Clean Feed
Freely
improvised music in the US, especially in the post-Coltrane climate,
has locked into a tradition of "outsider" improvisers that
rivals any in the annals of jazz mythology, and it seems to take its
cue from saxophonists. Albert Ayler is of course the Father (rather
than Holy Ghost) in this scenario, his music approaching something
otherworldly because it is so worldly, thematic material predating
even New Orleans jazz and solos built from backwoods grotesques as
much as an Ornette/Coltrane tradition. Following in these footsteps
are such notables as Arthur Doyle, Charles Gayle, reed-playing brothers
Phill Musra and Michael Cosmic, Paul Flaherty, Turkish-Bostonian drummer
Huseyin Ertunc, and pianist Lowell Davidson. It is not only the fact
that their music falls outside the jazz tradition for often being
completely improvised, but that their personas have a very "out"
quality to them: Doyle was imprisoned in France for many years after
a stint on the American loft jazz scene, and has since returned to
music playing piano and singing more than blasting post-post-Aylerisms;
Gayle and Flaherty have been street musicians and Gayle was, for a
time, homeless; Davidson’s one ESP album belies little about
his life as a chemistry grad student who began experimenting with
psychoactive drugs and applied color theory to both his piano keys
and the parts of the brain these keys were to activate. Flaherty and
the Boston triumvirate of Musra, Cosmic and Ertunc sought self-production
and distribution as a means to release their art (Flaherty has since
been recorded by a number of labels), with mysterious drawings and
paintings gracing their covers and adding to the mystique.
 Geography
has been central to some musicians’ obscurity, out of the New
York limelight. Connecticut-based altoist Flaherty has, for most of
his recordings, sought to make music in duo format, usually with drummer
Randy Colbourne (more recently with drummer Chris Corsano), and this
2000 quintet meeting is thus a far cry from such utterly dense, breakneck
sparring contests. Joined by multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, trombonist
Steve Swell, drummer Laurence Cook and bassist John Voigt for five
collective compositions, Turtle Crossing expounds upon and
draws out the ebb and flow of Flaherty’s duets, supplanting
them with the constant give-and-take of a full band with varying improvisational
pedigrees and aesthetics. Swell, who also appears on Clean Feed’s
very first release The Implicate Order, is a contemporary
Rudd-Moncur hybrid, melding perfectly the expressive tailgate of a
Dixieland trombonist with the fleet facility of post-J.J. Johnson
hardbop stylists. McPhee’s searing tenor, microcosmic soprano
and bubbly cornet spurts make for an interesting conversational palette
as well, and all three are girded by enormously strong rhythmic support
– Voigt and Cook are the rhythm section on-call for many Northeast
avant-garde recordings.
There is a belief – often one I share – that much of the
template for post-Coltrane open improvisation falls either into the
dense, caterwauling juggernauts of Frank Wright, Doyle et al. or the
more open, "sound-and-space" aesthetic of the AACM. The
music of the Jumala Quintet sits somewhere in between these poles,
taking its cue from the New York Art Quartet and possibly pre-marching
band Ayler, in an ebb and flow of solos, duets, trios, up to an occasional
full band statement (such as when McPhee’s bluesy tenor moves
the band to fall in line to a darkly languorous theme on the album
opener). Following a highly melodic Cook solo, the band breaks into
a trading of hushed gestures, chirps and breaths for the title track,
a symphony of hissing out of which build plodding, chunky mile markers
of rhythm and a fine and squirrelly series of solos (Flaherty’s
rather perverse) – McPhee even turning the proceedings into
a walk. It is quite rare that, even in a leaderless ensemble, there
appears to be no improvisational ego rising to the top, but a balanced
string of solos and collective statements from five world-class improvisers.
It takes just such an ensemble to show that energy and fire in free
improvisation come from allowing the music to breathe and thus live.
 Tenor
saxophonist Charles Gayle often presents a rather thorny self-portrait.
A generation older than most of his cohorts on the contemporary New
York improvisational stage, Gayle (born in 1939) grew up in Buffalo
playing piano and is self-taught on tenor, alto and bass clarinet.
Upon moving to New York City in the late 60s, one would half expect
the Trane-Ayler disciple to have quickly found a home in the loft
jazz community (he did, after all, play some notable gigs early on
and is rumored to have recorded for ESP, possibly with bassist Sirone,
who's heard here and on several other Gayle recordings) – but
this was not to be the case. He spent the 70s and 80s homeless, playing
under the streets of New York for small change. His semi-meteoric
rise after being "discovered" by the Knitting Factory is
well-documented in the notebooks, and Shout!, featuring Sirone
and drummer Gerald Cleaver, is a return to and refinement of form,
following piano- and theatre-heavy digressions of the past several
years.
Gayle’s recordings have often featured some of the most high-energy,
multiphonics-driven free jazz of the past thirty years – on
recordings like Touchin’ on Trane (FMP) and, especially,
Consecration (Black Saint), this reaches almost unparalleled
density in which the wide-open spaces of Ayler are completely filled
in. On Shout!, his improvisations are significantly opened
up, displaying all the intervallic leaps and bent notes that characterize
a "typical" Gayle tenor performance, but this time applied
to a laid-back, loosely swinging and highly melodic approach to free-blues
tenor playing. Sirone and Cleaver offer constantly variable rhythmic
interplay, keeping a pan-rhythmic medium tempo across five openly
improvised Gayle numbers and two standards (a third, “I Can’t
Get Started,” is a feature for Shepp-like fractured solo piano).
“I Remember You” starts off the set, only loosely resembling
the thematic material but nevertheless providing a harmonic framework
to disassemble (i.e. keep them on their toes). “What’s
New,” the Haggart-Burke warhorse, is trotted out for a reading
almost as spirited as that given by Cecil Taylor, Jimmy Lyons and
Sunny Murray in 1962 – and it should be noted that the tune’s
original moniker was “I’m Free.” These two pieces
are separated by a Sirone-Cleaver mean machine, “Glory Dance,”
which could – in the most abstract of ways – be Gayle’s
“Boody,” with more Newk than Trane being touched on here.
With these latest installments documenting the fast-becoming-overground
elements of the American improvisational underground, the myth of
the obscure has been replaced by the naked fire of truly sanguine
music. There are rewards concurrent with myth and hidden understanding,
which Flaherty and Gayle are eager to let bubble to the surface.—CA
James
Finn
PLAZA DE TOROS
Clean Feed CF 034
 After
just a handful of releases, the first of which was eloquently chronicled
by own Nate Dorward, tenor saxophonist James Finn has rapidly established
himself as a player to watch, or rather listen to. On the strength
of Plaza de Toros alone, his trio with bassist Dominic Duval
and drummer Warren Smith is one of the most exciting working units
in contemporary jazz. Recorded by Finn at his own studio (and very
well too – there's definition and depth and just the right tiny
dose of reverb), these nine tracks provide ample evidence of enormous
talent and great sensitivity: those who rail about free jazz being
nasty, brutish and never short enough can go eat their words. Not
that there's any lack of passion here – far from it: just check
out Finn's command of the stratospheric registers of his horn on the
title track and "El Tercio de Varas" – but there's
plenty of room in his compositions for intelligent craftsmanship and
deft interplay, both melodically and rhythmically. Finn studied, among
others, with the late and lamentably under-recorded Arthur Rhames,
and tapped in to the deep vein of Coltrane that ran through his work
(well documented on Rhames' double CD The Dynamic Duo with Rashied
Ali on Ayler). Like Rhames, and Trane before him, Finn likes to take
a musical motive and give it a monster workout, building huge spans
of music from tiny melodic cells, but he's equally at home taking
off into Aylerian flights of fancy. Dominic Duval's virtuoso plucking
and bowing has rarely been captured as well as it is here; the superb
recording picks up each nuance, and the interplay between bassist
and saxophonist, notably on "The Phantom Bull of Seville",
is quite exceptional (and given the string of fine performances Duval
has turned out with Joe McPhee, that's saying something). For his
part, Smith is a revelation, his busy brushwork counterpoint his partners
to perfection while never overwhelming them. The impeccable precision
and delicacy of John Stevens' work come to mind on several occasions.
Even if you refuse to accept that bullfighting isn't as elegant and
poetic as it is thrilling and dangerous you should treat yourself
to a seat in this particular Plaza de Toros at the earliest
opportunity.—DW
David
Sylvian
THE ONLY DAUGHTER
Samadhi Sound SS 005
 When
I was young and easy under the apple boughs a remix was a remix –
i.e. it worked directly with the individual tracks, subtly realigning
various elements of the mix (only occasionally replacing something
with completely new material) without ever losing sight of the original
song –yep, in those days, it was usually songs that got the
remix treatment. For old hands like me with Frankie Says T-shirts
still tucked away in the closet, the nine tracks on David Sylvian's
The Only Daughter aren't so much remixes of his earlier Blemish
album (which inaugurated the Samadhi Sound label a year or so ago
and was highly acclaimed, notably by my pals at The Wire,
probably because it featured contributions from avant stars Derek
Bailey and Christian Fennesz) as much as whole new readings, laptop
rhapsodies, with Sylvian's vocal tracks often the only point of reference
to the original song. (If indeed we can speak of "original"
in the context of Sylvian's recent work, which is very much a work
in progress of sorts, with various guest stars here and there contributing
elements which the songwriter weaves into a highly idiosyncratic patchwork
quilt.) Some are more successful than others: if you thought Ryoji
Ikeda could only do cold ultra-high-tech bleeps and beats, you'll
be blown away by his Takemitsu chops on the opening title track. The
other reading of "The Only Daughter", by Jan Bang and Erik
Honoré, is pretty, but nowhere near as bittersweet. The song
"Blemish" itself also gets two reworkings, one by Burnt
Friedman featuring some slinky clarinet from Hayden Chisholm, the
other a spookier, spikier affair courtesy of Akira Rabelais, making
his third appearance on Sylvian's label (after last year's Spellwauerinsherde
and the Harold Budd swansong remix "As Long As I Can Hold My
Breath"). Sweet Billy Pilgrim's take on "The Heart Knows
Better", despite a whole screenful of pulldown menus full of
cute sounds remains trapped by Sylvian's rather repetitive (for once)
song form, making the whole affair far more epic than it probably
should be. Similarly, where Fennesz's billowing magic clouds made
"A Fire In The Forest" a truly moving conclusion to the
original album, Readymade PC's tinkly music box dub steers dangerously
close to the twee. For his part, Yoshihiro Hanno can't avoid the presence
on the original "The Good Son" of Derek Bailey, but his
sampled twanging chords sit uneasily on Hanno's gooey sevenths and
ninths, and end up sounding not only incongruous but also out of tune.
After Friedman and Chisholm return to the fray with a curiously pinched
version of "Late Night Shopping" (or late night beep,
since for some reason the word "shopping" is mysteriously
censored as if it was an expletive), Tatsuhiko Asano turns "How
Little We Need To Be Happy" into Brian Wilson-meets-Dave Grusin-meets-Cornelius-meets-Quincy
Jones-meets-Trevor Horn epic quite at odds with its lyric. Maybe that's
the whole point of Sylvian's remix aesthetic: take the song into a
whole new world by completely changing the backdrop – and yet
there's a painful, at times too painful, intimacy to the songs on
Blemish (compared to the blissed-out peace and love of the
earlier Dead Bees On A Cake) that's somehow lost in translation
here.—DW
ROVA::ORKESTROVA
2003
ELECTRIC ASCENSION
Atavistic ALP 159 CD
 Coltrane's
Ascension has, like his A Love Supreme, long been
something of an unassailable summit in jazz history, but as any seasoned
mountaineer will tell you, there's no such thing as an unassailable
summit. A Love Supreme has after all already been scaled
by Branford Marsalis, and Nels Cline and Gregg Bendian released an
extraordinary version of Interstellar Space a while back,
so it was only a matter of time before somebody got round to tackling
Ascension. And what a spectacularly good job the Orkestrova
has made of it. Joining ROVA's core members – Bruce Ackley,
Steve Adams, Larry Ochs and Jon Raskin, on, respectively, soprano,
alto, tenor and baritone saxes – are Chris Brown on electronics,
Otomo Yoshihide on turntables and electronics, Ikue Mori on drum machines
and sampler, Nels Cline – the same – on electric guitar,
Fred Frith on bass, Don Robinson on drums and violinists Carla Kihlstedt
and Jenny Scheinman. Wait, Ascension with violins? Yes –
and it's a master stroke too: where the Coltrane original was a heaving,
turbulent horn-heavy affair, this version, recorded live for KFJC
FM in Los Altos CA on February 8th 2003, opens the windows on to a
landscape of bright colours and variegated textures that keeps the
music fresh and buoyant right through its heroic 64-minute span. The
individual and ensemble performances are simply inspired, from Ochs's
opening tenor broadside onwards, and the whole glorious edifice is
underpinned by Frith's marvellously spacious and melodic bass work,
which keeps the flame of the original tiny modal cell burning brightly
even in the wilder moments. These, when they come, are indeed noisy
and ebullient, but genuinely ecstatic rather than par-for-the-course
free jazz big band blowouts. Instead of jumping in and blasting the
place to pieces, it's as if the musicians are floating above, able
at all times to grasp the overall structure. The duo battle between
Raskin's baritone and Otomo's turntables builds with ferocious intensity
but remains a jeu de notes (Stravinsky), not a pitched battle,
and there's plenty of room for the koto-like pizzicatos and Robinson's
airy percussion work (what would Elvin have made of it, I wonder?)
and the inevitable ensemble tutti is all the more powerful for it.
I like to think that if Coltrane had lived long enough to incorporate
live electronics into his music, especially if performed by players
as talented as Ikue Mori and Otomo, he would have done so without
a moment's hesitation. The otherworldly textures of the electronics
and the Radulescu-like spectra of the violins are perfectly in line
with his all-encompassing vision of a planetary music. If the technology
had been around at the time and this had been recorded in 1970 instead
of 2004, I'll hazard a bet it would now be mentioned in the same reverential
breath as The Celestrial Communication Orchestra's The Seasons,
Schlippenbach's The Living Music, and the spate of recordings
made by Sun Ra on tour in Europe at the end of the 1960s. It's that
good. A mighty disc – don't miss it.—DW
Marc
Ribot / Roy Campbell / Henry Grimes / Chad Taylor
SPIRITUAL UNITY
Pi 15
 This
is one of those albums I really want to like more than I do, firstly
because, like plenty of others, I'm delighted to see Henry Grimes
back in business again (and how – his agent / partner Margaret
Davis has lined up a touring schedule that would punish someone a
third his age), especially playing the music of Albert Ayler, news
of whose death in 1970 had apparently not filtered through to the
cheap lodgings where the bassist was rediscovered just a couple of
years ago by social worker Marshall Marrotte. Secondly because I've
always been a Marc Ribot fan, from his fucked up screaming soloing
on the Lounge Lizards' Live in Tokyo Big Heart via the dry
spunky crackle of his (essential) work with Tom Waits to the tasty
licks he slips into Zorn's Bar Kokhba. As for the other members
of the quartet, though I'm not the world's biggest Roy Campbell fan,
drummer Chad Taylor's work with the Chicago Underground outfits has
always been highly competent and sensitive. The problem seems to be
not so much one of personnel – that polemic is raging over at
PT's half-sister site Bagatellen, where our own "retired"
journalist Walter Horn has put the cat among the pigeons – but
one of repertoire. Maybe it's the Ayler Overkill Effect again –
I'm still trying to digest the hype that surrounded the Revenant box
and already the darn thing's coming round again, on vinyl this time
– but it does seem to me that Messrs Ribot and Grimes have their
own ideas as to how to approach the late saxophonist's compositions,
and I'm not sure they're always moving in the same direction. Both
are prolix, but where Ribot takes Ayler's fondness for quoting extraneous
folk material to the limit by throwing in smart references to "All
The Things You Are" and Ayler's beloved "La Marseillaise"
(which Albert used to call "la mayonnaise"), Grimes goes
for sheer event density, filling up every available cranny with frantic
scrabbling, a lot of it bowed. It's hardly surprising that Taylor
is, under the circumstances, short of an answer – compare Hamid
Drake, who, with David Murray on the recent Live At The Kerava
Jazz Festival, just kept swinging sweet and lovely, letting Henry
roll along happily in the background – and Campbell fares no
better. With the exception of craggy guest spots from Henry Vestine
on the last two Impulse! albums, there are no electric guitarists
to compare Ribot to in Ayler's discography under his own name, but
any trumpeter playing Ayler material immediately runs up against the
double Donald dream team – Cherry and Ayler – and Campbell
is neither fragile or feminine enough to compete with the former nor
sufficiently feral and furious to score against the latter.
It's instructive to compare the version of "Saints" here
with that Ribot released on his solo outing of the same name back
in 2001. Once Campbell comes in (the theme it seems has to be shared
between the musicians – it's called democracy and sometimes
in music it sucks) any illusion of intimacy Ribot managed to create
is shattered, and by the time Grimes enters it's all over: the bassist
spends the entire song scrubbing around the mid to low registers of
his heavily-amped instrument, managing to produce neither a discernible
string of pitches nor a recognisable rhythm. Quite an achievement.
Whenever Ayler himself played, despite the fact that he never left
us with a solo recording, the music was so personal it was almost
painful to listen to, but there's barely a minute's worth of music
on this album that comes remotely close to the album which gives this
group its name.—DW
Scott
Rosenberg, Jim Baker, Anton Hatwich, Tim Daisy
NEW FOLK, NEW BLUES
482 Music 482-1031
 New
Folk, New Blues, the latest entry in 482 Music’s continuing
“Document Chicago” series, has all the boiling intensity
of classic free jazz, but also a curiously quizzical flavour that
sets it apart from so many solemn blowouts. Jim Baker and Anton Hatwich
on keyboards and bass both play admirably, but the key relationship
here is that between saxophonist Scott Rosenberg and drummer Tim Daisy.
They have an extensive history playing together, going back to Rosenberg’s
2001 disc Owe, and it shows in the group’s instant
swerves of direction and ability to develop a coherent structure even
over long stretches – the four tracks here range from 9 to 24
minutes in length. Daisy’s chattering streams of activity unspool
like tickertape or knitting needles in overdrive, often occupying
the foreground; the other three sometimes follow his lead, but more
often work at a slant to him. Rosenberg plays tenor and baritone,
getting a mordant, knowingly absurd sound out of both instruments,
a series of bulbous grotesques perpetually breaking into saw-toothed
oscillations between the horn’s extremes. It can sometimes sound
as if he’s building an entire language out of those passages
of cartoony distortion that turn up in the work of his mentor Anthony
Braxton, and like Braxton he has the ability to make curiously engaging
music out of sounds that would ordinarily seem harsh. The result is
an album rich in event, which finds room for everything from Baker’s
epigrammatic piano solos to the glimpse of late-Coltrane apocalypse
at the end of “Good Morning, Headache”. Is this sort of
energetic but vividly self-aware music “new folk” or “new
blues”? Maybe, maybe not – but in any case this is as
intense and enjoyable a free jazz album as you’re likely to
hear this year.—ND
Eugene
Chadbourne
THE HILLS HAVE JAZZ
Boxholder BXH 046
A
welcome return on the part of Dr Chad to the repertoire he actively
promoted as a journalist up in Canada in the 1970s (the track list
presents a great selection of post-bop and – to coin a phrase
– free jazz classics: Oliver Lake's "Heavy Spirits"
and "Saturn", Eric Dolphy's "17 West" and "Miss
Toni", Roscoe Mitchell's "Noonah", Sun Ra's "Space
Jazz Reverie" and John Coltrane's "Miles' Mode" plus
one relative oldie, Tadd Dameron's "Good Bait"), this fine,
unpretentious album features the good doctor in the company of Richie
West (drums), Brian Walsh (tenor sax), Bill Barrett (harmonica), Dan
Clucas (cornet) and Carey Fosse (electric guitar). Those listeners
who aren't exactly enamoured of Chadbourne's singing voice and the
Country & Western repertoire he's promoted with unstinting relish
since the early 1980s may be relieved to see that neither feature
here, but Dr Chad's unbridled enthusiasm for horror movies is as evident
as ever. The Wes Craven connection goes further than the album title
(which, by the way, refers to his 1977 movie The Hills Have Eyes)
– it's his vintage Gibson acoustic guitar that Chadbourne uses
throughout the album. The story of how the two men hooked up, along
with other priceless anecdotes – the Doc still writes as well
as he plays – is included in the liners. There's plenty of great
playing from all concerned: Fosse's gnarly electric is the perfect
foil to Chadbourne's acoustic, Clucas and Walsh turn in some impressive
solos, Barrett's slinky harmonica work fits in perfectly and Richie
West (the original Camper Van Beethoven drummer, as Chadbourne points
out) does a great Roy Haynes on the Dolphy jams. It all adds up to
Chadbourne's strongest outing since Insect Attracter.—DW
The
Respect Sextet
RESPECT IN YOU
Roister 2
Two
years ago, the Abdullah Ibrahim trio's lackluster performance at the
Montreal Jazz Festival put me in a very foul mood, and the evening
was only saved by a chance encounter with an unheralded group at a
nearby club playing energized versions of Ornette Coleman songs. Recently,
while wondering a) if Dave Holland was ever going to produce anything
as remotely inspired as Conference of the Birds and b) whether
the world really needs a twelve-disc Vandermark 5 live set, this strangely-titled
album arrived and I was similarly lifted out of my trough of despond.
Instead of Ornette, Misha Mengelberg is the stylistic touchstone for
The Respect Sextet; aside from a reading of his delightfully-named
“Hypochristmutreefuzz” (which meanders in an engagingly
madcap manner before finally getting around to the theme just before
the end), they have a habit of throwing in snippets of other Misha
songs throughout the rest of the album, as if New Dutch Swing had
been grafted and transplanted into foreign soil in an unlikely location
– a club in Rochester, New York. But these guys are far more
than an ICP cover band: their influences are wide-ranging. The disc
starts off with Fred Anderson’s “3 on 2”, and if
Josh Rutner doesn’t emulate Fred’s tenor riffs, he has
a similarly brawny tone. The group pounds a series of grooves into
submission Anderson-style, with trumpeter Eli Asher and trombonist
James Hirschfeld getting in their licks while pianist/accordionist
Red Wierenga (somewhat buried in the mix) and drummer Ted Poor team
up with guest bassist Matt Clohesy to propel the horns through the
compositional twists and turns. “Postal (a.k.a. PB&J)”
starts as an upbeat Mingus-like blues with fluid tenor sax over a
cooking rhythm section that downshifts to a trombone-heavy New Orleans
funeral march. As the dirge comes to a halt, Rutner deftly interjects
a couple of Mengelberg quotes (a brief “Die Berge Schuetzen
Die Heimat” followed by “Rollo II”, for you Mishaphiles),
Clohesy lays down a throbbing pulse under Poor’s crisp cymbal
work and the band returns to the initial theme. Please don’t
take my word for how good this is: go to www.respectsextet.com and
sample their generous mp3 offerings, sign the guest book and insist
they get their earlier CDRs back in print.—SG
Mezei
Szilard Trio
A KÖLLYÖKKUTYA RESZKETÉSE/ TREMBLING OF THE PUPPY
Györ Free Muhely CD
Mezei
Szilard is a violist from Vojvodina, Serbia Montenegro's northern
region, and this is his debut release. The list of Mezei’s collaborators
is long, and includes musicians as diverse as Tim Hodgkinson, Matthias
Schubert, Michael Hornstein and Akos Szeleveny, but it's especially
worth mentioning his duo with pianist György Szabados and his
MAKUZ orchestra, and his original music for Josef Nadj’s “The
Philosophers”, a play that was successfully presented in the
Avignon Festival. This album makes it clear that he's perfectly at
home in his own musical heritage, but other formative influences make
their presence felt: Tomasz Stanko, the aleatory counterpoint of Lutoslawski
and the group improvisations of Anthony Braxton and Ornette Coleman.
There's a distinctly Colemanesque drive to the music, both in the
originals and the folksong arrangements (notably "The Dove"),
with fat acoustic walls of sound, enthusiastic riffing, plenty of
great bowed work from Szilard and bassist Ervin Malina and explosive
breakouts from percussionist Istvan Csik. Do yourself a favour and
check it out.—VJ
Peter Brötzmann / Han Bennink
STILL QUITE POPULAR AFTER ALL THOSE YEARS
Brö 4 LP
After
2003's The Ink Is Gone with Walter Perkins, the second release
on the revamped Brö label –180g top quality vinyl only,
with classy silkscreened original cover art by the performers –
teams Peter Brötzmann up with longtime road warrior and fellow
titan of European improv Han Bennink for the pair's first duo release
since 1980's Atsugi Concert. Though neither can be said to
have "mellowed" with age, there's real depth and maturity
in these superbly-recorded 2004 performances from Cologne's Loft,
and Bennink also brings a playfulness too often lacking in Brötzmann's
vein-bursting blowouts, tapping out mad Morse code messages on a drumstick
jammed into the inside of his cheek and humming a tune by his (and
Brötz's) old pal Misha Mengelberg at the same time. The third
track might just be the quietest thing either musician has ever recorded,
with Brötzmann gingerly investigating the chalumeau register
of his clarinet while Bennink flicks around his kit (and elsewhere)
with tiny, impeccable brushstrokes. The Dutchman is just itching to
swing hard and loud, but Brötzmann takes his time to rise to
the bait, concentrating on his clarinet and tarogato and saving the
alto and tenor saxes for the finale. But when he takes up the big
horn for some vintage gutbucket free R&B, Bennink suddenly lays
back and concentrates on his snare, a masterly false retreat before
the final push for home, ending not with a machine gun bloodbath but
a neat karate chop.—DW
Tania
Chen / Steve Beresford
OINTMENT
Rossbin RS 018
These ten tracks were recorded in London between December 2002 (the
two final cuts come from a live Bohman Brothers event in Vauxhall)
and August 2003, and feature pianist Tania Chen (a new music specialist,
member of the Apartment House ensemble and student of John Tilbury)
in the company of Steve Beresford, who leaves the piano stool to concentrate
on his objects, electronics, trumpet and water (!). Chen also plays
violin and both make extensive use of toys, so there are plenty of
tinny jingles, blurts of lo-fi pop, toots, tinkles, twittering birds,
chirping crickets and all manner of videogame bleeps and zaps. Chen
is so at home in Beresford's playpen that it's impossible to tell
who's doing what most of the time. Beresford's career as an improviser
from Teatime to last year's I Shall Become A Bat
has epitomised the playfulness associated with the so-called "second
generation" of British improvisers – playfulness not being
synonymous with superficiality (talking of synonyms, how about the
track titles here – "Gel", "Lotion", "Serum",
"Ointment, "Balm", "Liniment", "Embrocation",
"Demulcent", "Cerate" And "Chrism"?!).
That said, Beresford's music isn't to everyone's taste – my
pal Brian Olewnick over at Bagatellen found this one rather hard going
– and listening to all the album in one go might make you want
to raid your kids' bedroom and lock up any sound producing gadgets
you can lay your hands on. But as any six-year-old will tell you,
you don't have to play with the same toy all afternoon, do you?—DW
Civil
War
WHEN FACT THREATENS BELIEF
Longbox LBT 031 3"CD
Chicago's Adam Sonderberg and his Longbox label epitomise the stubborn
independence – whatthefuckness, I described it elsewhere –
that characterises the best of today's new music. Coming from an improviser
who refuses to play by the unwritten rules – check out his compendium
of anti-duets with Boris Hauf – it's hardly surprising that
this debut ("and, by default, finest recording", deadpans
the press release) from Sonderberg's Civil War trio with Amy Cimini
on viola and Katherine Young on bassoon consists of three solo
tracks (Sonderberg himself is credited as playing bass drum,
but his contribution sounds more like bowed cymbals to me). So much
for the idea of a group, and recording studios be damned too: this
was recorded in an abandoned grain silo, "pregnant with rich
textures and overtones that only a relic of American agriculture could
help foster" (can't resist another quote from the blurb). It
sounds, as one might expect, amazing, and not at all like improvised
music's "supposed" to sound: well, OK, Eddie Prévost
comes to mind in Sonderberg's offering, but Cimini and Young's offering
could easily pass for Scelsi or Radulescu. A copy of this should be
sent post-haste to Werner Dafeldecker and Uli Fussenegger –
a label like Durian that bridges the gap between improvisation and
composition would be an ideal home for a full-length Civil War outing.
Live in hope.—DW
David
Grubbs & Nikos Veliotis
THE HARMLESS DUST
Headz Vector 5/Headz 38
In
my world, dust has never been harmless; in fact it's one of my worst
enemies, especially considering how depressed – not to mention
allergic – I get when trying in vain to remove it from records
and books. As a symbol for our eternal inability to accept the passage
of time, dust is invincible and must be accepted as such. This sense
of ineluctable dejection permeates the first movement of Grubbs and
Veliotis' composition for cello, Hammond organ and piano (both regular
and eBowed) in this splendidly packaged release on the Japanese Headz
label. Grubbs's infrequent piano chords sprout in Veliotis's slightly
dissonant, seemingly unplayable cello stasis, and a delicate, plangent
grieving lyricism permeates the acoustic space throughout the first
half of the record. It's a sort of multi-layer lithograph where the
scarcity of material forces us concentrate on the essential. After
30 seconds of silence at the end of part one, the scenario changes
completely and the pair set out on a long exploration of those aural
phenomena deriving from adjacent tones beloved of composers like Phill
Niblock. But where Niblock builds walls of sound, Grubbs and Veliotis
remain close to the ground except for some intense Hammond bursts
emerging from the grey mist. It all amounts to an intense listening
experience where music and receiver truly become a single entity.—MR
Veryan
Weston / John Edwards / Mark Sanders
GATEWAY TO VIENNA
Emanem 4214 2CD
From
Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson, Thelonious and Bill Evans to Cecil Taylor
and Marilyn Crispell, the piano / bass / drums trio is probably the
most widely recorded combination of instruments in the history of
jazz, and Veryan Weston's trio with Mark Sanders and John Edwards
belongs up there with the celebrated line-ups featuring the Taylors,
Bleys, Van Hoves and Schlippenbachs of this world. Gateway to
Vienna is further proof of it. The nine tracks on the Gateway
disc were recorded in 2003 in the studio of the same name in Kingston-Upon-Thames,
birthplace of so many fine recordings on Emanem and Matchless, while
the two extended tracks on the Vienna disc come from a concert in
the Porgy and Bess club in 2002.
Pianists and drummers thrive on tension, in a play of contrasts and
similarities (Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg being an extreme example),
but Weston and drummer Sanders play as if they shared the same mind.
Indeed, it needs some listening to, because Sanders makes no concessions,
and no diversions, following the angles, curves and flurries of the
pianist. John Edwards' bass brings the vibrations of wood and the
elasticity of strings to bear on the percussive metallic web, adding
a deep soulful vibration. It's more than a conversation: these men
are reading the same text. Weston's fingering is as precise and delicate
as the fleet movements of his playing partners. It's time to stop
making CT the unique point of reference of improvised piano music:
VW has something nobody else does and Gateway To Vienna is
a veritable tour de force. Emanem hits big!—JMVS
Louis
Moholo–Moholo / Roger Smith
THE BUTTERFLY AND THE BEE
Emanem CD 4114
Louis
Moholo and Roger Smith at first might seem like an odd couple. What
could the muscular African drummer of Brotherhood of Breath fame possibly
have in common with the elusive nocturnal acoustic Spanish guitar
player? Dig a little bit though and connections become clear: Smith
is best known as the longest-serving member of John Stevens’
Spontaneous Music Ensemble, while Moholo is the only survivor of the
South African expat Blue Notes, both groups which fundamentally changed
the shape of British jazz and improvised music. Moholo and bassist
Harry Miller played in groups led by Keith Tippett and alto sax legend
Mike Osborne, while Stevens had a similar relationship with Brotherhood
bassist Johnny Mibizo Dyani (heard on SME’s 1969 Marmalade release
Oliv, and later in the trio Detail with Frode Gjerstadt).
Stevens also recorded a tribute album to Dyani with another now departed
South African, alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana. Now that Louis Moholo–Moholo
is to return to his country of origin, this encounter with Roger Smith
is a fond goodbye to the community of free improvisers Stevens helped
establish. From 1975 until Stevens’ death in 1994, the SME had
a steady line-up featuring Stevens, Smith and violinist Nigel Coombes.
On their last recording Coombes was replaced by saxophonist John Butcher,
who released the recording as A Certain Distance on his Acta
label (rejoice: an Emanem reissue is coming soon). That was recorded
in London's Conway Hall, now home to the Freedom of The City festival,
whose 2004 edition welcomed Smith and Moholo's first encounter, almost
all of which was released as "For The Very First Time" on
the Emanem double Freedom of The City Small Groups 2004.
As his four solo Emanem discs testify, Roger Smith is a true virtuoso
of the nylon-string Spanish guitar, but his subtle fingerings and
arpeggios were often barely audible in the SME’s acoustic sound
mix. On this studio recording, the balance is rectified, and the music
flows in full spate. Moholo rattles his snare drum like no one else
(he also handles timpani and even a music box) and Smith pounds his
lower string dangerously, in a rumble in the jungle quite unlike the
conscious call-and-response of more "classic" insect music
– even though the album title The Butterfly and The Bee
refers as much to that famous description of vintage English improvised
music as it does to Muhammad Ali. There are plenty of unexpected turns
(to quote the title of Smith's second Emanem outing) in this refreshing
exchange of messages and signals that effortlessly transcends fads
and frontiers. Bon voyage, Louis.—JMVS
Benat
Achiary
THE SEVEN CIRCLES: DEDICATED TO PETER KOWALD
FMP 128
Basque
vocalist Benat Achiary is a remarkable soloist, with or without his
arsenal of rare folk instruments and percussion, and this live recording
from 2002's Unlimited Festival, which finds him interpreting texts
by various poets along with four of his own compositions is a homage
to his erstwhile playing partner Peter Kowald, recorded as it was
just a couple of months after the bassist's sudden death. Achiary’s
interpretation of "L’ Anti-toi" and "La voie
Lactée" by Gherasim Luca (hailed, incidentally, as the
greatest French poet by Deleuze and Guattari, of all people) is fragile
and sensitive, but the following “Pansori for Peter” is
a hard bite. It starts with an animal wail and develops into Tuvan
drone via David Moss hum, sounding remarkably like Fred Frith’s
prepared guitar of late 1980s – and all that in the first minute.
On “Chant d’Exil” Achiary goes to the limits of
both vibrato and circular breathing, with an occasional James Chance
scream thrown in for good measure, while Jon Mirande’s “Pigalle”
is more elegiac and jazzy – there's even a scat solo. The traditional
Balearic “Harvest Song” is sung in the dialect and accompanied
by the droning stove bass, which imitates the plough at work,
and the following “Nuit Sans Sommeil” (Lorca) manages
to incorporate verses from Charles Mingus’ “Freedom”.
Careful with the track order: “Lullaby For Peter” comes
earlier than the liners would have you believe, and is followed by
Luca’s “Héros-limite”. Of the many tributes
to Kowald that have appeared since his death, this is one of the most
touching.—VJ
John
Zorn
RITUALS
Tzadik TZ 8011
 I
remember reading an interview Lou Reed gave just after Magic And
Loss came out, saying something about wanting his music to grow
old along with his fans, or words to that effect. They say that rock'n'roll
is here to stay, but seeing my contemporaries in fair round belly
with good capon lin'd bopping around the living room to "Tainted
Love" while their offspring look on in horror isn't my idea of
fun (if I want to blast the bloke downstairs with "She's Lost
Control" or "William, It Was Really Nothing" I tend
to do it when nobody else is looking). John Zorn is now past 50, as
we all know, and the souvenirs of his month long half-century birthday
bash at Tonic have been filtering out ever since. Also out again (though,
thanks to the vagaries of the Tzadik contract, the original albums
are still in print and should theoretically remain so throughout the
universe until the end of time) is the complete Naked City back catalogue,
remastered and repackaged. And it sounds better than ever, the perfect
apotheosis of over a decade of Downtown eclecticism – but let's
hope Messrs Zorn, Frisell, Frith, Horvitz and Baron resist the lure
of filthy lucre and decline to reform for some garishly horrible comeback.
Like Joy Division and The Smiths (not like Soft Cell..), Naked City
still sounds fresh while remaining very much of its time (fucking
horrible expression, but never mind, you get the point), but, to quote
Bobby & Shirley Womack, it's all over now. Even Masada and its
spin-off projects seem to have receded into the recent past –
though nobody can complain that any of them have been under-recorded
– as Mr Z concentrates on what he calls "Composition with
a capital C". Which is where Rituals comes in.
Written in 1998, it's a five-movement chamber work for soprano (Heather
Gardner, exemplary throughout) and ten instrumentalists: Tara O'Connor
(flute, alto flute and piccolo), Mike Lowenstern (Eb, Bb and bass
clarinets), Peter Kolkay (bassoon and contrabassoon), Jim Pugh (trombone),
Stephen Drury (piano, harpsichord, celesta, organ), Jennifer Choi
(violin), Fred Sherry (cello), Kurt Muroki (bass) and percussionists
William Winant and Jim Pugliese, who "play" wind machines,
water, bull roarers, gravedigging, fishing reels, paper, bowls of
bbs and bird calls. Don't know about that gravedigging, but the wind
machines are certainly prominent, obtrusive even. All the esoteric
"instruments" as well as the tosh about "a live owl
may somehow play a part in the proceedings" (yeah, right, what
are you going to do, release a cage full of white mice too?) might
boost JZ's street cred with Aleister Crowley fan club, but it's basically
nothing more than a smokescreen to disguise the fact that Rituals
is a perfectly normal (traditional, even) post-serial composition.
Whether hardcore Zornies who dig the cartoon mayhem of Cynical
Hysterie Hour or the adrenalin buzz of Kristallnacht or
the smoky noir of Spillane or the punishing workouts
of Execution Ground have grown up enough to appreciate what
is essentially a competently executed but not exactly earthshaking
piece of academic chamber music is a moot point, but they ought to
remember that Zorn has always remained deeply attached to the contemporary
classical roots he sprang from in the 1970s, rewarding thorny modernists
such as Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt with Tzadik releases to
boot. Zorn's career has been about building bridges between genres
– one wonders how many people discovered Napalm Death and the
Boredoms via Naked City and Painkiller (I did) – and it's to
be hoped that the traffic across this particular one will be two-way:
devotees of The Big Gundown and Godard might end
up digging Donald Martino and Elliott Carter, and hardcore Princeton
serialists might start tapping their feet to Bar Kokhba.
I somehow can't imagine many 50 year olds sitting down with a glass
of Chardonnay to the accompaniment of Torture Garden, but
Rituals would be perfectly acceptable. Without the owl.—DW
Eliane
Radigue
ELEMENTAL II
ROSA 01
The
inaugural release on Kasper T.Toeplitz's new label ROSA (Recordings
Of Sleaze Art) is nothing less than a composition by Eliane Radigue,
one of the very few artists who can really claim the copyright of
the term "minimalism". In a blindfold listening session,
one could be fooled into thinking it's a work for electronic tape,
but it was recorded live at the Cités Soniques Festival in
Paris in 2004 and the clouds of mystery thicken when you read that
the only sound maker involved is Toeplitz himself, on an electric
bass that I failed to identify throughout the piece – and that's
meant as a compliment. Elemental because it's a representation
in sound of the five basic elements, but also elemental in terms of
the fundamental energy that's been the essence of Radigue's output
for decades. As soon as the first waves start, an intense subsonic
activity is at work purifying our nervous system, the protective barriers
raised by these frequencies constituting a comfortable refuge during
a continuously flickering yet slowly changing state of emergency,
memories of early human activity evoked in a decaying 8mm film. This
cocoon generates electricity, but it also attracts bewildering calls
from beyond, purposeful indications of new ways of approaching the
reeling holiness that only Radigue can depict. Elemental II is
a fresh take on ancient literature, music that moves towards the centre
of a gravitational architecture based upon the extremes of the audio
range, but it's also a spectacular reproduction of eternal sound,
the mass of vibrations that probably gave birth to primitive forms
of life itself. Being surrounded by Madame Radigue's undying cycles
of slow motion radiance is one of the most wonderful experiences a
sensitive listener could aspire to.—MR
Kasper
T. Toeplitz
CAPTURE
ROSA 02
Here's
a French music trivia question for ya: which composer has netted most
money in royalties from the SACEM (the French equivalent of BMI or
ASCAP for you across the pond and PRS for you across the Channel)?
Not pop singer – that honour goes, apparently, to Jean-Jacques
Goldman ("Who?" I hear you ask.. well, unless you have French
blood or French family you're probably better off not knowing) –
composer. Give up? Answer: Maurice Ravel. (Or at least it
was last time I bothered to check. Monitoring my own SACEM payments
is a thoroughly depressing exercise, and usually calls for a drink
– in a good year my own royalty check can just about buy one.)
Why? Bolero, apparently. Ever since Bo Derek said the "F
word" (as they call it on the BBC) in that film with Dudley Moore
years ago, it seems countless children have been fathered to the strains
of Ravel. Paris-based composer and bassist Kasper Toeplitz's Capture
is a kind of Bolero for the 21st century, as it follows
the same basic rules: start quiet and get louder and louder. Except
that, unlike Ravel's piece, nothing is actually repeated: Toeplitz's
work consists of a gradually intensifying swathe of noise, beginning
with an almost imperceptible hiss à la Francisco López
and, frequency by frequency, building up the kind of huge terrifying
wall of sound that KT's pal Zbigniew Karkowski would be proud of.
Going back to Bo Derek (not that I particularly want to, mind –
she's probably old enough to be your granny by now, and maybe not
even as good looking), one of the key attractions of Bolero
was that it was the perfect metaphor for the sex act. Somehow I rather
doubt you could make love while listening to Capture –
first of all it lasts an hour and a quarter, so you'd probably have
to be Rocco Siffredi to make it to the end, and secondly because it's
so defiantly, brutally unsexy. It's an impressive if uncompromising
listen, though.—DW
Rick
Cox
FADE
Cold Blue CB 0020
Those
familiar with the movie "American Beauty" may recognise
Rick Cox's cloudy elegies and composed sorrows; "Fade" is
yet another classy release by this American artist working in the
realms of corporeal abandon and calm desolation. Scored for electric
guitar (played by Cox himself), piano (Thomas Newman) and bass (Peter
Freeman), this 25-minute minor masterpiece is a continuous stimulation
of our most introvert melancholy, through an ever shifting tonal landscape
whose radiance carries the same intensity level of those anxious dreams
where undecipherable languages and distant scraps of illusory harmony
ensure we're breathing heavily when we awake. The closing section
is a separate celestial caress, a totally functional coda to one of
the most engrossing records this year so far – and one of those
instances when, in terms of duration, less is not more.—MR
Jim
Fox
DESCANSOS, PAST
Cold Blue CB 0021
Dedicated
to the late composer/performer John Kuhlman, "Descansos, past"
is a short composition for double bass and superimposed cellos that
alternates a sense of poignant regret, not unlike certain works of
Gavin Bryars (notably "By The Vaar", written as it was for
Charlie Haden) with powerful fingering by bassist Barry Newton, who
at decent listening volume is able, through sheer timbral intensity,
to solicit some serious glass shaking in the living room. Steering
clear of sugary sentimentalism, Fox's concise statements, performed
superbly by cellists Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, Jessica Catron, Aniela
Perry and Rachel Arnold, describe a sober celebration whose orchestral
flavour is enriched by rewarding aural poetry, like an inscription
on a tombstone to be read with a faint smile instead of tear-stained
eyes.—MR
Kyle
Gann
LONG NIGHT
Cold Blue CB 0019
Pianist
Sarah Cahill plays all the three different overlapping manual loops
that form the tranquilising architecture of Kyle Gann's "Long
Night". Although the music is absolutely not intricate (it works
wonders as a source of relaxation while you're immersed in different
activities – wasn't that the very concept of "ambient music"?),
the cross between the casual intersections of modulating chords and
the Satiesque peacefulness of Cahill's keyboard painting, with its
beautiful natural resonance, is complex enough to substantiate the
creative effort and imagination Gann has put into the work. The thin
air moves in and around this mature evocation of events definitively
entrapped in a past from where they can no longer return; just being
able to have a peek at them through this ancient looking glass brings
long nights of aural fascination.—MR
Elliott
Sharp/Merzbow
TRANZ
Caminante Cami 002
I'll
admit it right away: the potentially devastating collaboration between
Elliott Sharp and Masami Akita is exactly as I thought it might be
– minus the groundbreaking factor. Dividing their work into
two tracks each as composers and two as remixers, the duo reveals
once again the malleability of noise, as material that is commonly
discarded becomes an integral part of dynamically overcharged experimentations,
deprived of ugliness and "ignorance" and lyophilised and
channelled into amorphous conduits, epileptic generators and harmonic
disintegrators. Although it's hardly a wasted opportunity, I would
have been happier if Sharp and Akita had shown greater interest in
their reciprocal trademarks: just imagine adding some shrieking Merzbow
to one of Sharp's avant-looking, pseudo-blues improvisations, or putting
a serious eBow tapestry of massive guitar and bass magma above Akita's
rumbles and thunders.. Instead, the "futurist/cyber/laptop"
component prevails, raising hell at times, yet just a tad predictable
after 47 minutes. Let's just say that Sharp and Merzbow have chosen
a well-defined strategy, planned out their route in advance and decided
to explore everything they find along it, without any consideration
for eventual detours.—MR
Lawrence
English
TRANSIT
Cajid 003
This third release on Cajid is the richest and most rewarding to date,
featuring seven evocative and superbly crafted soundscapes by Lawrence
English (who's usually based in Brisbane Australia, though I read
this was recorded in Tokyo and England between 2002 and 2003), using
"audio tools" supplied by Mike Cooper (guitar and voice),
DJ Olive (turntables), Cat Hope (bass), Tam Patton (keyboards), Gail
Priest (voice), Heinz Riegler (guitar), Robin "Scanner"
Rimbaud (electronics) and field recordings from Thailand, Vietnam
and Tasmania provided by, respectively, John Chantler, Ben Frost and
Philip Samartzis. If I might be permitted the luxury of quoting from
one of my own reviews (of Keith Berry's The Ear That Was Sold
To A Fish), much recent electronic music, "as if ironically
commenting on the size of the machine that produced it, a laptop about
as large and heavy as a folded Sunday newspaper [..] has explored
vast reverberant space." If Jérôme Noetinger ever
gets round to reactivating his Metamkine Cinema For The Ear series,
Lawrence English should be high on his list of potential contributors;
I remember an old track by Opik on a long out-of-print Ambient compilation
(Feed Your Head, on Planet Dog records) entitled "Travelling
Without Moving", and that's a perfect description for English's
work. Which is not to say it's music to turn on tune in and drop out
to (though I imagine with a little chemical stimulation the results
could be quite extraordinary): like Keith Berry, Matt Waldron, Stephan
Mathieu and Akira Rabelais, English has not only a vivid imagination
and a great feel for structure, but an instinctive understanding of
what music is capable of stimulating on the emotional level. If Wim
Wenders had waited fourteen years before making Bis Ans Ende Der
Welt he could have avoided Graeme Revell's soppy cello drooling
(in part three) and used Lawrence English's music instead: Wenders'
ambitious and not always very convincing if quite enjoyable movie
tried to imagine what dreams might look like if we could actually
see them on a video screen; I like to think that if one could record
dreams as purely audio information, they might sound something like
this. Magical.—DW
Daniel
Menche
SIROCCO
Important ImpRec 046
Portland
Oregon's Daniel Menche is one of those almost invisible mutating creatures
digging holes under the ground of common artistic certainty, describing
himself as a "mangler" and a "melter" of sounds
from the most disparate of sources, from bodily functions to gorgeous
field recordings (check out his work with Kiyoshi Mizutani on Garden
and Song of Jike). In Menche's soundscapes, everything is
remorselessly modified in dramatically charged lumps of pulsating
tones and scorching spectra carrying both a highly engrossing, hypnotizing
allure and the power to burn both your mental circuits and your speakers
(careful with that loudness button). For Sirocco, Menche
has remodelled beyond all recognition materials sent by SETI, Asmus
Tietchens, Main, John Duncan, Scanner, Akira Rabelais, Illusion of
Safety, Merzbow, erikm, Brandon Labelle and AMT (quite a list), but
don't think for a nanosecond that it's a simple helping of "Menche
Remixes". Imagine instead an android chef gathering up all aural
junk-food leftovers and recycling them in strangely perfumed radioactive
gravy. When Menche redesigns harsh visuals and inharmoniousness, transforming
rotting thistles into raw symmetry – he calls it "vehement
beauty" – his contribution to current evolutional trends
in acousmatics can't be ignored. Bear that in mind while you thrill
to Sirocco.—MR
Sébastien
Roux
PILLOW
Apestaartje
Sébastien Roux's Pillow is aptly named – if
ever there was an album that made you want to curl up under a duvet
with a set of headphones on this is it. That's not quite as negative
as it might sound, either, for Roux's work explores the fault lines
of easy listening, running luminous electric pianos and guitar chords
through his software (Max / MSP I'll hazard a guess) until the gentle
glitches impose their own rhythmic identity upon the material. On
the other side of the pond Christopher Willits has been charting similar
territory, but where his recent work has flirted with song form, Roux
remains downtempo and dreamy, inducing a mild drowsiness on the part
of the listener in which the myriad tiny scintillations and clicks
make perfect subliminal sense. Listening to it too attentively is
like peering at a Seurat through a magnifying glass – the individual
flecks of colour aren't much to look at close up, but stand back and
you'll see how they fit into the big picture. I notice that Roux has
an email address at IRCAM.. I wonder what Papa Boulez would say if
he found out (not that he hasn't already) that someone's squatting
one of his space-age sound labs and using his state-of-the-art gear
to produce music as ravishingly superficial and distinctly un-Boulezian
as this.—DW
Nicolas
Collins
PEA SOUP
Apestaartje 3" CD
Perhaps
I'm confusing it with pease pudding, but I've always associated pea
soup with starch, a claggy concoction served up to spotty kids in
steamy noisy school canteens. Nicolas Collins' splendid work of the
same name (dating from 1974) is nothing of the sort – it's a
16-minute span of diaphanous, luminescent music based on slow sustained
tones (none of which ever sits still long enough to qualify as a drone)
that move in and out of focus to build a harmonic field that's rich
and (for this label) refreshingly non-diatonic. Collins's explanatory
note describes the circuitry he uses to "nudge the pitch of audio
feedback to a different resonant frequency of the performance space
every time feedback starts to build. The familiar shriek is replaced
with unstable patterns of hollow tones, a site-specific raga reflecting
the acoustic personality of the room." The room in question is
the Plasy Monastery in the Czech Republic, where Collins recorded
the work live with bassist George Cremaschi in 1999 (why has it taken
so long to appear, I wonder?). There's nothing else to add really,
especially since the liners and the circuit diagram overleaf explain
what's going on far more clearly than I can. The best thing is to
follow the single word instruction that appears on the disc itself
– listen.—DW
JARL
AKATISI / SOMNOLENS
Tantra X21
"Strictly
limited edition of 499 units" it says on the elegant hard card
cover. For this kind of music 499 is a pretty handsome edition, which
is quite fitting since Erik Jarl's electronic music deserves some
exposure outside his native Sweden. Each of these six predominantly
static sonic tableaux is a rich and rewarding listen, the kind of
drone you can "get inside of" (to quote La Monte Young,
again), but the overall mood of the album is sombre, like the dark
woods and black lakes outside of Jarl's hometown of Norrköping.
If CM Von Hausswolf is your cup of tea, serve yourself some of this
to go along with it.—DW
Copyright 2004 by Paris Transatlantic
|
|