Right around the 20th anniversary of Derek Bailey’s passing on December 25, 2005, three recordings appeared (or in one case reappeared) that share some kinship with Limescale (Inctus, available as download), that brilliant late career recording that must be regarded as among Bailey’s most significant works (it received special attention in Ben Watson’s Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation [Verso, London 2004], p.370-373). The band was a quintet consisting of Bailey on guitar, Tony Bevan on bass saxophone, Alex Ward on clarinet, and the radical duo of THF Drenching (Stuart Calton), playing Dictaphones, and Sonic Pleasure (Marie-Angelique Bueler), on bricks. Though Bevan and Ward were regular Bailey collaborators, the young duo with strange, assumed names and equally strange instruments emphasized an expansive radicalism in Bailey’s late music, including Domestic Jungle (scatterArchive), his home recordings with late-night London underground radio. Limescale is work of collective genius, a language of myriad scrapes, whirrs, jingles and blasts in which the simultaneous sounds of the five musicians seem to emerge collectively and almost anonymously. It’s among the highest achievements of free improvisation.
Rex Casswell, THF Drenching, Martin Klapper, Sonic Pleasure – ARGOT (scatterArchive, 2025)
When I encountered “Drenching” and “Pleasure” on this recording, their names seemed new to me, having forgotten their presence on Limescale. My familiarity with English guitarist Rex Casswell was largely based on a couple of brilliant CDs by a trio called Bark! released on Evan Parker’s psi label. ARGOT is a brief but brilliant recording, a single track just 23 minutes long, a brevity encouraged by scatterArchive’s format of downloads only, so that music of the first rank doesn’t have to fill out an LP or CD. It documents a performance from December 4, 2005, at Klub Argot, Copenhagen, though the word “argot” might well cover the special language of the unorthodox instruments. Martin Klapper is heard playing toys, amplified objects, electronics and tapes of numerous recordings.
I was soon reminded that improvisers practiced in close listening (with an occasional and similarly skilled not listening) can produce wholly engaging, formally (and anarchically) satisfying, genuinely social music with the unlikeliest of means, with Casswell the sole quartet member playing a conventional musical instrument. As on Limescale, their instruments are, as defined on the recording’s Bandcamp page, Dictaphone (“a small handheld device for manipulating sounds recorded onto magnetic tape. see ‘tape scratching’”) and brick (“a percussion instrument made of pieces of stone struck or scraped with metal sticks”).
The resultant work has a variety of unexpected sounds and textures, from squeeze toys and buzzers to possible airport announcements, some possessing their own compound unidentifiability. The musicians are intensely engaged in collective invention, constantly interacting to create continuous phrases that shift amongst the four members, their sonic bits spontaneously aligning and reacting, creating a shimmering, shifting field of sounds that possesses both rhythmic complexity and undercurrents of meaning just beyond recognition. Even Casswell’s guitar is barely distinctive amongst the sounds. Argot is a genuinely liberating experience, consistently renewing itself, highly recommended.
Derek Bailey + Tony Bevan River Monsters (scatterArchive, 2025)
Equally germane to the special character of Limescale is the presence of Tony Bevan, heard exclusively there playing bass saxophone, an instrument that might be the best suited of all acoustic devices to represent the primordial roars of the largest and most ferocious of dinosaurs. Bailey and Bevan played extensively together, and River Monsters , released on the 20th anniversary of Bailey’s passing, gathers their duets over an 11-year period between 1988 and 1999. It’s a mix of live performance, studio and home recordings, and is sufficiently personal to include one of Bailey’s cassette “letters”, in which his spoken reflections are accompanied by continuous guitar playing. This one, to Bevan, on the subject of saxophones and their players, includes a discussion of Charlie Parker that includes a perfectly idiomatic insertion of “Scrapple from the Apple”. The sound quality varies from session to session, but the music has a distinct and sometimes extraordinary quality, even benefitting from the interactions of loud and complex sounds in relatively small spaces. The oldest track (each track or series is identified solely by its date), is from 1988, from one of the Company concert series that Bailey curated. It’s heroic, rapid-fire, improvisation with Bevan playing tenor and the two musicians already revealing the intense listening and response skills that will characterize all their work together. The latest tracks, from October 1999, might also be the subtlest, Bevan sometimes underplaying the special sonic heft that his bass saxophone will reach elsewhere, the two musicians at times developing spectacular rhythmic interaction. Bevan is also capable of microscopic details and surprisingly subtle shifts in timbre given the scale of his instrument.
A series of three pieces (tracks 5 to 7) from January 1998, recorded by Bevan, possess a ferocity that exceeds that of Peter Brotzmann or Mats Gustafsson, the wonder being the way in which Bailey’s compounding, detailed, clanging abrasions fuse into a singular roar with Bevan’s titanic blasts, creating a stream of sound that might suggest Armageddon with empathy. A series of recordings by Toby Hrycek-Robinson at Moat Studios from July 1998 might have the best technical balance of these recordings, matching Bailey’s metallic bursts and abstracted clangs to Bevan’s intensely vocalic roars and runs. It’s music that seethes life, in some ways not unlike the raw spirit of Albert Ayler’s 1964 trio recordings. There are moments in the concluding track in which the two achieve a special level of coordination, their phrases somehow suggesting chaos, but doing it so happily that it simultaneously invokes the reckless joy that could permeate early jazz, especially when it involved the roar of Adrian Rollini’s bass saxophone.
Henry Kaiser - Domo Arigato Derek Sensei (Balance Point Acoustics, 2025)
Around the time of that 20th anniversary of Bailey’s death, a few copies of a 2006 tribute to Bailey appeared for sale on the Balance Point Acoustics website. The work remains available as a download. It’s of genuine interest, not least of all for the detailed immersion in Bailey’s principles and practices that the homage usually represents in these then fresh tributes, but it can also reach back another 30 years into Kaiser’s formative past. It begins with Kaiser speaking about Bailey and the tribute project, self- accompanying himself on guitar, a la Bailey, throughout. From there follows an extraordinary range of unpredictable, exploratory music, drifting from Asian instruments to highly developed electronica and a certain edginess worthy of Bailey himself.
“Gamera Tai Reptilicus 2005” has Kaiser playing electric guitar and joined by the startling wail of Kiku Day’s shakuhachi. “Continue On” begins as a spoken dialogue between Kaiser and Henry Kuntz, founder of the journal Bells , an early advocate for free jazz and improvised music, the spoken dialogue leading to a musical one with Kuntz playing tenor saxophone. “Improvisation 102a”, from 1978, finds Kaiser playing with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, while “102x” has Kaiser matching long electric slides with percussionist Andrea Centazzo. “Just Be a SCUBA diver” is another dialogue, this one with Damon Smith playing bass and Kaiser ukulele as they discuss Bailey’s art. Longest and perhaps strangest of the tracks is the 13-minute “Book Review”, initially a highly developed guitar solo by Kaiser that segues into a self-accompanied spoken critique of Ben Watson’s aforementioned Bailey tome.
There’s also the brilliant, constantly shifting music of “The Metalanguage Trio” (2006), the trio of Kaiser, Larry Ochs on sopranino saxophone and Greg Goodman on voice and piano. After a couple of minutes of brilliant interactivity, it devolves into brief and comic reminiscences of Bailey: honest, direct and spontaneous. “The Night of Departure”, from 1996, is a strikingly bright acoustic guitar solo. “Tokyo Trio For Aida” (1979), is energized collective improvisation with Kaiser, bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa and tenor saxophonist Mototeru Takagi.
“Pre-Vou” (1996) has alto saxophonist John Oswald and Kaiser exchanging strange, wandering glissandi in instrumental voices that can fuse identities. The concluding “Kavichandran Salp'uri” (1993) is sublimely beautiful and mysterious. It has Sang-won Park singing and playing changgo, an hourglass-shaped drum with two different pitches, with Kaiser and Derek Bailey both playing subtly empathetic electric guitars, an ideal conclusion to a near optimally global homage to a man who defined his own, insistently immediate, sonic world, one in which human speech might happily coincide with spontaneously improvised music.
0 comments:
Post a Comment