The Word Itself Interrogated: Two duos

By Stuart Broomer

If free improvisers are the bravest of musicians, then free improvising vocalists may be the bravest of all, confronting both the blank slate and the audience without the comforting intercession of a musical instrument. Most of the best will have some special background or capacity. Sainkho Namchylak has centuries of Tuvan throat-singing/shamanic mysticism in her background. Lauren Neuton, who literally wrote the book on the subject (VOCAL Adventures: Free Improvisation in Sound, Space, Spirit and Song, Wolke Verlag, 2022), has an astonishing range of cross-cultural techniques including opera, jazz and everything else. There are musicians as well who are significant vocalisers and self accompanists, like Joëlle Léandre whose voice often joins her bass in profoundly resonant (vocal/cultural) chant that seems to stretch across the Mediterranean from the Iberian peninsula to the Middle East; the drummer Sunny Murray’s rising and falling hum-wail-moan is a background voice on several great records, his own and others; Milford Graves was a master of chant.

John Russell/ Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg - before the wedding (Empty Birdcage Records, 2025) 

Phil Minton & Ståle Liavik Solberg - TRUE (Nice Things Records, 2025) 

These two recordings, in a rare moment of special affinity, appeared within a couple of weeks of each other. Each duet matches a vocalist with a single partner; each presents a single piece from a live performance in which a senior member of the British free improvising community works with a continental confrere. More than that, though, is that each duo wills a crossing of boundaries, testing the notions of speech, language, utterance and the human animal’s potential for transcendence. Each simultaneously presses the culture of free improvisation toward spell, shamanism and vaudeville. In either performance, genius is never far away, nor is the spectre of Ducks Daffy and Donald.

before the wedding (released on guitarist Daniel Thompson’s remarkable Empty Birdcage label) is initially a reminder of how much we lost when we lost John Russell (another is Thompson’s acoustic solo reflection, entitled John, a digital release recorded on the day of Russell’s passing). Russell was a great duet partner (including, coincidentally, a long-running duo with Ståle Liavik Solberg), among his many gifts, and on before the wedding his chorded passages and subtlest rises and falls in dynamics are never far from the voice of the Belgian Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg, a commentator on improvised music of genuine insight as well as a vocalist of special gifts. I wish I had the vocabulary to describe all the things that Van Schouwburg can do with voice from the commonplace whisper to fricative and fortis (a commentator with a richer background in linguistics/phonetics would be better equipped to describe this work).

In a single 26-minute piece recorded on April12, 2018 at Klub Gromka, Ljubljana, Slovenia, parodic opera and grande dame/ grand guignol voices arise. Van Schouwburg and Russell are ideal complements throughout this 26-minute duet. There’s a certain focussed intensity in Russell’s playing, a determination that always expands Van Schouwburg’s mutations and divagations, already rich in meaning and drama, even when dancing with the comic. Transformed cartoon voices that arise here are drawn to something larger, both through their own dynamics and through Russell’s abstract, yet warm, mediations. Sometimes a cartoon-like impression will move toward articulate speech, only to wander backward into voluntary squall and willful chaos. The true complexity of this work gradually asserts itself: it is a guitarist and vocalist, yes, but it is also work moving freely – sometimes at warp speed -- among genres, all comedy, all music, all seriousness… but also no genre at all, some avatar of reality, no mediation between conception and voice. Van Schouwburg is expressing something as close to the vocal range of the human condition that might arise in art, rapid fluctuations from ghostly trill to Warner Bros. cartoons and horror, even nasal snorts, reminiscent of Animal Farm, not entirely neglected.

TRUE, recorded live at Blow Out, Kafe Hærverk in Oslo on November 21st, 2023,begins in the thin, high-pitched rattles of Ståle Liavik Solberg’s minimalist drum kit, followed almost immediately by Phil Minton’s intense and utterly far-fetched song – part senescent ramble, part protest and vision, part rapid-fire triple-talk in an unknown tongue. When Minton breaks briefly, he comes back strangling, combining high-pitched yodelling cries and gagging inhalations, all shadowed by the prospect of language. Solberg’s sounds reduce to the whistle of a light resonant scrape on the surface of something material, gradually expanding to his compounding, shifting tapping, while Minton drives further into an unknown world of whispers and muted cries and sudden bird whistles (eliciting a cymbal tap), word-gagged, shattered, choked, called out in some imaginary station to some unimaginable passengers (us, I assume, by proxy). There’s a gesture toward some gong-like device, then a thin (human) whistle, then more of the gong’s light resonance, a snare-like rattle, a choked chant (added to but not quite interrupted by cough and whistle).

Later there be loud and forceful utterances voiced as if part of a serial opera, and so it goes, every manner of human utterance explored, even a moment that sounds like Minton is channeling two choked voices at once, all subtly underpinned by near-invisible drumming. It’s like a radical, freely improvised oratorio (staged in this rendition by a listener’s imagination). A drum solo will appear, created with a minimal kit that seems to include wood block and cymbals. It’s all technically amazing, but that relatively minor feature is overshadowed by the exploration of life’s vocal extremes of madness, a madhouse production of Lear or Godot (It’s a mere 38 minutes, but it is so compressed that it’s effect is comparable) occasionally joined by Daffy Duck, sometimes searching an imaginary globe for absurd and unknown accents for spotlit shrieks, all accompanied and accented by a Tin Drum drummer who finds some especially sentient metal resonance to accompany a thinly whistled reflection.