By
Alexander Dubovoy
“If I could, I would build a theme park. Walt Disney is one of my idols,”
said Anthony Braxton during a panel discussion on the third day of Jazzfest
Berlin. At first, this statement took me aback, but the more I thought
about it, the more it revealed its mysteries. Artists and ideas do have
their own theme parks; even creationists and Dolly Parton have their own,
so why not a seminal figure like Braxton? I asked him what the entryway to
his theme park would be, and he responded, “You can start anywhere. I don’t
aim to tell people which way to go. What I want to do is to present a set
of menu of options through which the friendly experienced can travel at
will.” Braxton seems to be fascinated by the concept of cartography, of
conceiving of his art more as a landscape to be wandered than a fixed set
of instructions and, at times, even directly using airport maps as graphic
scores.
Indeed, as the opener of the 56th Jazzfest Berlin, Braxton got one step
closer to building what I hope would be called Braxtonland. With his Sonic
Genome project, Braxton took over the Gropius Bau, one of Berlin’s eminent
contemporary arts exhibition spaces. The Gropius Bau centers around an
imposing atrium, with smaller spaces extending off. Braxton assembled a
group of 60 impressive musicians (I spotted Ingrid Laubrock, Alexander
Hawkins, and many more). They began in one corner of the space playing long
tones. Soon, however, they dispersed into smaller groups, into the foyer
and even the exhibition halls. Over the course of 6 hours, a changing array
of larger and smaller ensembles played compositions from Braxton’s sizeable
ouevre. James Fei, Chris Jonas, and Braxton himself conducted some of the
larger group works. Kyoto Kitamura performed vocal works and led one of the
ensembles in a particularly joyous moment of collective interaction. As a
listener, the experience was unparalleled. All of Braxton’s compositions
are designed to interlock and intersect. Consequently, walking through the
Gropius Bau was a bit like a “Choose Your Own Adventure Book” in which the
listener shaped a musical journey through heterogeneous pieces of the same
story.
As I spent the weekend trying to attend as many of the Jazzfest Berlin’s
events as humanly possible, I felt like I was continuing to navigate a
musical cartography. This sense came in no small part due to the excellent
work of Nadin Deventer, the festival’s artistic director. Anthony Braxton
called Deventer a “visionary and an activist”, and I have to say I agree
fully. Often flagship jazz festivals of major cities can feel like
smorgasbords of (largely straight-ahead) musical content. Jazzfest Berlin
is different. It is a deliberate, curated affair, this year centering
around the work of Anthony Braxton and the mottos “Escape Nostalgic
Prisons” and “A Mother’s Work Is Never Done”. The resulting festival,
rather than taking an agnostic or all-encompassing approach, made a
compelling and largely unified case for contemporary innovations in jazz.
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Christian Lillinger’s Open Form for Society. Photo by Cristina Marx |
In my opinion, one of the most innovative and future-thinking sets was that
of Christian Lillinger’s Open Form for Society. Lillinger’s dense metric
compositions had an amazing sense of grace. Though the music was often in
crazy time signatures and intricately orchestrated between different parts
of the ensemble, it also left space for interaction and communal groove. It
takes a deft band to play music like this, and the unusual instrumentation
(1 drummer, 3 pianists/keyboardists, 2 vibraphonists, 2 bassists, and 1
cellist) held together due to the high level of musicianship. The
collective interactions of pianists Cory Smythe (on acoustic piano with
computer-based microtuning effects), Kaya Draksler (on upright piano), and
Elias Stemeseder (primarily on synths) astounded me. Though the music was
extremely complex, it never felt forced and instead pushed forward with an
urgent sense of naturalness.
The festival largely centered around the Braxton’s work as an innovator and
a pioneer who paved the way for this new generation of musicians in
creative music. At the performance of his ZIM Music on Sunday evening, his
towering creative achievement was apparent. During an earlier discussion,
saxophonists Ingrid Laubrock and Chris Jonas demonstrated the parts of
Braxton’s 12 Language Music types, a classification system of twelve
sounds. The system begins with long tones (1), then trills (2), and extends
further. Eleven refers to “gradient formings”, the transition of parameters
over time (for example, dynamics). Braxton’s compositions can be said to
live “in the house of” a particular number/type. Ghost Trance Music, for
example, which featured heavily in the Gropius Bau performance, makes use
of a steady stream of eighth notes and is therefore said to be more
“static” and live in the “house of one”. ZIM Music is in the house of
eleven, a sacred number that approaches the spiritual unity and
transformation embodied in the number twelve (the culmination of Braxton’s
system).
During the performance, the musicians followed a series of graphic scores
with lines that indicated the “gradient formings”, or transitions, of
musical characteristics like timbre and pitch. Within this larger
macro-composition, however, they were welcome to play others of Braxton’s
compositions, as well as to improvise. The resulting music combined
macro-level transition with micro-level playfulness, resulting in a
confluence rather than dichotomy of improvised and composed elements. The
ensemble, featuring Ingrid Laubrock on sax, Erica Dicker on violin, Adam
Matlock on accordion/voice, Jacqueline Kerrod and Brandee Younger on harp,
and Dan Peck on tuba played beautifully and interactively. Every time
Braxton picked up his horn to solo, it was magical. Though I spent much of
the weekend enmeshing myself in Braxton’s philosophy and in the Tricentric
Thought Unit Construct, I hope and imagine that an “uninitiated” listener
could also have appreciated the sheer inventiveness of the performance.
Not only did the festival’s artists innovate sonically, they also drew
techniques from other art forms, like theatre and dance. The Berlin-based
Kim Collective staged a “fungus opera,” a wild multimedia work that
incorporated composition, improvisation, choral music, video...you name it.
Over the course of the performance, a rhizomatic set piece rose from center
stage. The fungus opera was the newest culmination in a continued
relationship between the Kim Collective and Jazzfest Berlin. The collective
also designed an installation (“Gardens of Hyphae”) in the foyer of the
Haus der Berliner Festspiele, in which they conducted (intentionally
awkward) interviews, played occasional music, handed out the odd spring
roll, all from the comfort a billowy, white fungus canopy. The collective
stayed in character during the festival, and Liz Kosack wore a mask even
during a panel discussion.
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| Trumpeter Rob Mazurek & São Paolo Underground. Photo by Cristina Marx |
A highlight of these multimedia works for me was the performance of
T(r)opic, a work originally conceived by trumpeter Rob Mazurek and
guitarist Julien Desprez for the Sons d’Hiver festival. In collaboration
with the dance project COCO and São Paolo Underground (an alliance of
Brazilian musician formed during Mazurek’s time living in São Paolo). The
performance began with members of COCO producing rhythms through dancing
the coco—“a dynamic folk tradition from the [Brazil’s] northeastern region,
born out of slavery and marked by a rhythmic manner of stomping”(program
notes). Soon, São Paolo Underground began playing rhythms reminiscent of
Brazil’s batucada bands. The horn-heavy band featuring such luminaries as
Mette Rasmussen and Lotte Anker played music that was somehow immensely
experimental and free, while also grounded in Brazilian folk traditions. An
LED installation surrounded the band and dancers. Ushers also gave the
audience 3D glasses for an accompanying live-generated 3D visualization.
Somehow this wild spectrum of Brazilian folk song and dance, free
improvisation, electronic music, and visualization fit together to powerful
effect—an unexpected highlight of the festival.
T(r)opic formed the second of two “Late Night Labs”, a new format for
Jazzfest Berlin of concerts starting at 22:30. I viewed both labs while
lying down on the futons provided in the front row of the Haus der Berliner
Festspiele. Fortunately, the music was electrifying enough to firmly
prevent me from giving in to the exhaustion that had caused me to choose
repose. On Friday night, three trios (Kaos Puls, Moskus Trio, and Mopcut)
met for a night of exciting improvised music. In particular, Audrey Chen’s
expressive and often unpitched vocal explorations were the source of much
intrigue. Sadly, attending these later programs meant I was unable to
attend some gigs I wanted to see at the Jazzfest’s partner clubs, A-Trane
and Quasimodo. I was particularly sad to have to miss were James Brandon
Lewis’s Unruly Quintet, pianist Elliot Galvin, and guitarist Miles Okazaki,
who played a Thelonious Monk retrospective (I reviewed the album
previously). I also couldn’t make it to the Kiezkonzerte, a free set of
concerts with “secret” lineups in neighborhood institutions. I was,
fortunately, able to catch the performance at A-Trane of Melting Pot, a
collaboration between Jazzfest Berlin, Handelbeurs (Ghent), Nasjonal
jazzscene (Oslo), and Jazzfestival Saafelden. Each festival picked a young
improviser from its respective scene, and the resulting music was
beautiful.
The festival also staged some interesting shows in the Kassenhalle, the
smaller hall adjacent to the main one at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.
Angel Bat Dawid & The Brothahood harkened back to their Chicago routes.
Channeling the impact of Sun Ra and the AACM on her work,
multi-instrumentalist Dawid combined free improvisation, blues, and pointed
social critique, urging her audience to say that “the black family is the
strongest institution in the world.” Drummer Paul Lovens also played an
excellent set of concise improvisations with guitarist Florian Stoffner
after being awarded the Albert-Mangelsdorff prize. I greatly enjoyed Melez,
a new project featuring vocalist Cansu Tanrıkulu. The music was super punk,
heavy on electronics, distortion, and rock drumming. When I joined, it
seemed like there was some sort of a spider opera going on (it was a
festival of zoological operas, wasn’t it?). Lots of black leather was worn.
It’s always good to see a jazz crowd doing some head-banging.
Not all the music, however, fit neatly into the amorphous label “free
jazz”. Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmuserie’s
Origami Harvest featured a
killer band of Sam Harris on piano and Justin Brown on drums, replete with
the Mivos String Quartet, and Koyaki on vocals/rap. Koyaki (whose work
readers of this blog may know from the album
Way of the Cipher
with Steve Coleman) was inventive rhythmically and addressed political
issues, including Black Lives Matter, in his raps. Overall, I relished the
moments in which Akinmuserie really let loose and in which the string
orchestration heated up, and I wish there could have been more of them. The
Australian Art Orchestra blended elements of pop music with free
improvisation in compositions by Peter Knight and Julia Reidy. Guitarist
Marc Ribot’s set also drew heavily from composed materials and, despite
moments of freedom, was more firmly grounded in the jazz/“groove” idiom. I
found it difficult to engage with the music, but I likely felt this way
because it immediately followed the life-changing experience that was
Anthony Braxton’s Zim Music.
Both the Friday and Saturday night programs began with a solo piano sets,
first by Brian Marsella and second by Eve Risser. Though both sets
contained elements of virtuosity (Marsella in his Art Tatum-reminiscent
flourishes and Eve Risser in her timbral approach to prepared piano),
neither impressed me compositionally as a whole. Similarly, pianist Joachim
Kühn’s performance of Ornette Coleman’s music (“Melodic Ornette”) didn’t
quite connect with me, despite my respect for his playing and historic
collaboration with Coleman himself. Arranging Coleman’s music such that it
can be played in tempo and conducted by a band director was certainly an
unusual choice. The exclusively white and male big band seemed to me out of
place in such a progressive event. Nonetheless, some excellent solos by
Kühn, as well as reeds-player Michel Portal stood out.
One of the unexpected highlights of the festival was the (surprisingly
well-attended) panel discussions, talks, and film screenings. Several of
the events centered around questions of collective organization and of
social change in jazz. These issues raised contentious and important social
issues. During one such conversation, Angel Bat Dawid yelled and cried at
the audience in a demonstration of the trauma she experiences as an African
American woman in America and in jazz/creative music. Earlier in the
discussion, which centered on collectives in the arts, author Emma Warren
spoke about the history of the Total Refreshment Centre, a now-closed DIY
venue in London. She passionately stressed the importance of communities in
creating spaces and the importance of spaces to creating art. She,
furthermore, emphasized the role of space in protecting marginalized
voices. It was an apt accompaniment to a festival in which Braxton’s
literal use of the Gropius Bau space and philosophical conception of space
had been a focal point for me. Warren asked members of the audience to name
a place from our lives where “it felt like things could be made” and then
performed a “roll call” of these places. After this year’s Jazzfest Berlin,
I can say that this definitely is a place where things can be made.
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