I first wrote about AMM at some length about 25 years ago. The most durable sentence in the piece (further expanded at length ten years ago and since supplemented with regular reviews) might be “AMM deserves hearing in inverse proportion to which it can be talked about successfully.” While I still believe that, I’ve learned nothing from it, and continue to try, if only to alert fellow listeners to the availability of new releases.
David Ilic once wrote in The Wire that “With AMM, their albums are as alike or unalike as trees.” That may be truer of some editions of the group than others, with Eddie Prévost as the sole constant in the group’s nearly sixty-year history, and that allusion to trees may take on special significance in the performance under discussion: Testing documents a concert at the Museum of Garden History in Lambeth, London. The concert took place on December 13 th 2004 when AMM existed in one of its duo forms, with EddieP révost here playing tam-tam, stringed barrel drum and other percussion and John Tilbury playing piano. They’re joined by guest Sachiko M, who plays sinewaves. Testing is a single piece, running to 1:07:33. The work is sufficiently subtle, the sonic materials so spacious and mysterious, that some identities here attributed to the sounds might well be mistaken.
In addition to Tilbury’s gifts as an improviser, he is also one of the most distinguished interpreters of recent piano compositions, with a special affinity for the work of Morton Feldman, those works that are at once minimalist in gesture and vastly expansive in time. Testing begins as a study in the ineffable. Prévost’s initial rumbles of bass percussion give way to his scraped and bowed cymbals, inviting Sachiko M’s high-pitched sine waves and Tilbury’s spare contribution of isolated piano tones, initially in the bass register.
There is no slight intended in suggesting that there’s a fundamental resemblance between Tilbury’s luminous, floating and concentrated inventions and the depth of resource that he brings to the music of Feldman and others. Prévost’s usual instruments are here, his use of resonating surfaces and varied materials often as sustained as they are percussive. He has a special instrument here, a barrel drum replete with strings, that he explores with sustained ferocity at one point in the piece, plucking at the strings that hold it all together, suggesting the presence of a particularly rugged string bass. The vast and vibrating space of the piece suits Sachiko M perfectly, her sinewave generator adding sustained fields of organizing tones to the enterprise, resulting in a trio that feels perfectly orchestral.
A note on Testing’s liner essay: Testing is a work that might challenge any commentator—vast, subtly shifting, dream-like, a reverie that’s outside language’s capacity to describe, a spacious sound world for which words might seem particularly ill suited. However, Seymour Wright has contributed a liner note to Testing that seems perfectly apt. Wright has recently written highly insightful essays on jazz and free improvisation, notably on Horace Silver and John Butcher, and he has a long association with both Prévost’s workshops and various bands. His contribution here, as an attendee at the 2004 performance, explores relationships between the Museum and its gardens, as well as the music’s unfolding in time. It’s a telling enrichment, a complementary reverie that somehow fuses the setting with the music itself. It’s the kind of thing that has long made the associated materials of Matchless recordings, usually Eddie Prévost’s own writings, among the most enlightening and expansive documents in the arena of improvised music.
