What can we say about [Ahmed] that hasn't been said already on these pages by Ferruccio Martinotti, Fotis Nikolakopoulos, Stuart Broomer, Lee Rice Epstein, Sarah Grosser and Paul Acquaro?
So, instead of trying to say more, we say, take a front row seat at Cafe OTO and enjoy a show:
Video by roustghoti, published on YouTube.
These are recent and distinguished bands united by the extent to which they’re refined, defined and expanded by electronics, harbingers not of the future but of the immediate present, multiplying and expanding through degrees of transformation, each a legitimate heir to the kinds of informed complexity pioneered by musical outsiders like John Benson Brooks and Sun Ra and literary outsiders like Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs.
Pianist/composer Alexander Hawkins has already covered a broad musical spectrum in his career, from Togetherness Music for Sixteen Musicians featuring Evan Parker to Carnival Celestial, his brilliant reinvention of the piano trio with bassist Neil Charles and drummer Stephen Davis. No Nation but Imagination may be his most striking work yet, with a trans-Atlantic quintet that links Chicago-resident flutist Nicole Mitchell and drummer Hamid Drake with British musicians Rhodri Davies, here playing harp and electronics, and turntablist/sound artist Matthew Wright. That’s not a predictable combination, and it immediately lives up to that promise of the unlikely: it’s music that can find a groove, but it’s a groove that hasn’t exactly happened before, suggestive in some ways of the unpredictable musical culture of Intakt label-mates Elias Stemeseder and Christian Lillinger and their Umbra series of recordings.
Liner note author Peter Margasak has traced the project’s complex lineage and associations, beginning with Hawkins’ enthusiasm for the Mandingo Griot Society, a band that Drake played in in the 1970s with Gambian kora master Foday Musa Suso. Mitchell has played with a kora master more recently, the Malian Ballaké Sissoko. Those associations with the harp-like kora triggered the inclusion of harpist Rhodri Davies, who has also worked extensively with electronics, also the arena of Matthew Wright. The resultant ensemble bears a certain resemblance to Wright and Evan Parker’s Trance Map in its integration of acoustic and electronic instruments and processing, the result here a mix of live and studio recordings with further processing.
It’s music that has covered tremendous ground just coming into being, and it’s fascinating how the most exotic of technological procedures admit of a certain alien prettiness, a provocative banality, evident here from the opening “Solo Way Far Gone”: mysterious electronic piano tinkling, at once bearer and judge of the merely pretty, is here elevated by degrees of mystery and alien artifice. The first real group track, “Resolution Each and Every,” suggests that some 1950s exotica by Martin Denny (e.g., “Quiet Village”) has been recovered by some distant and unknown civilization (perhaps Kurt Vonnegut’s refined Tralfamadorians), then altered, expanded and broadcast back to earth, with Mitchell’s flute assuming multiple identities amidst the complex percussion and a certain general wobbling of harp and synthesizer, with the music stretching far beyond the merely exotic. So too does “Mirror No Border”, which bristles with Hawkins’ percussive piano flurries and Mitchell’s alternately piping and soaring lines.
The more extended pieces create increasingly complex spaces. “Lullaby Much Further” combines near silence with a dauntingly mysterious collection of sounds and a complex web of connections, while “Hocket Fierce Peaceful” achieves the contradictory character of its title by setting a flute of almost unearthly tranquility amidst a maze of abstract and decorative electronic keyboards.
Equally mixed in its combinations of the acoustic and the electronic, Lagrangian Points differs significantly in being a documentary recording of a live performance from Berlin’s Morphine Raum, all the electronic processing going on simultaneously with the acoustic. Sofia Borges plays drums. percussion and electronics; Rieko Okuda, piano, keyboards and electronics; Peter Van Huffel alto and baritone saxophones and electronics.
According to the liner note “ Lagrangian Points are zones of delicate balance where forces align and bodies can remain suspended. In that sense, the trio forms a system of its own: each voice holds and is held by the others, maintaining a moving equilibrium, with enough space left open for the imagination to drift beyond its edges.” That particularly double identity is linked to the presence of electronics employed by each trio member, to the extent that instrumental identities can blur into one another.
The opening “Ghost Currents” initially seems to emphasize Okuda’s electronic keyboards and Borges’ percussion, but within moments the music’s distinctive complexity is apparent, many of the sounds traceable to their acoustic origins, but nonetheless operating in a transformative state, the three elaborating waves of sound that might suggest a wholly electronic extension of an improvising ensemble akin to Cecil Taylor’s trio with Andrew Cyrille and Jimmy Lyons.
“Parallax” introduces a subtle world of discreet electronic distortions, near-invocations of piano strings and metallic percussion all of these combining to suggest alien transmissions from space as well as a distinctly human music. Just as Alexander Hawkins’ electronic webs on No Nation But Imagination can make Nicole Mitchell’s flute seem alien, Van Huffel’s alto here might be purely acoustic at times, yet his aptitude for abstraction is such that his alto suggests something quite different, almost a harmonica, its voice swimming in an electronic maze, until electronic alterations to the saxophone draw it wholly into an intermediate zone floating between the acoustic and the electronic.
With the final track, “Hypnopompia”, Van Huffel’s saxophone initially provides an acoustic line in an alien soundscape, but as the surrounding sound grows increasingly menacing (there is a suggestion of hybrid alien predators), his sound gradually mutates, becoming closer and closer to the world that surrounds him, achieved with a brilliant combination of acoustic and electronic techniques. As Van Huffel moves further towards the electronic, Borges briefly inhabits the acoustic role, but the ultimate group movement will be almost wholly electronic.
These two remarkable recordings together articulate a new terrain, reflective of an increasingly mediated world, one in which the likelihood of deception conditions interpretation, one in which art and its appreciation might increasingly stretch both creative and interpretive acts toward surveillance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
British Guitarist Daniel Thompson works in a direct line from Derek Bailey and John Russell, somehow mediating the spikiness of the former and the warmth of the latter in a richly distinctive personal art, simultaneously touching traditions that stretch from historical acoustic archtop artistry (e.g., Eddie Lang, George Van Eps, et al.) to engaging an instrument of multiple voices from strummed and picked and plucked to massaged and scraped strings, tapped-upon bodies and traditional chordal vocabularies surrendering to dense clusters, sometimes rich in dissonant harmonics. In his work, Thompson embraces both the tradition and the instrument as invitation to random material speculation, the body as drum, the string as longitudinal invitation to scratch, tuning keys as material assists, and all the other things about the instrument that arise upon material inspection beyond any initial impression. His label Empty Birdcage Records is rich in varied materials, though here he turns up on other labels as well.
To enter the solo CD Violet is to immediately find oneself in a transcendent state, one in which time is simultaneously suspended and insistent, a musical language of startling intimacy, attenuated gestures and under-voiced reflections. Tracks are simply numbered from “Improvisation One” to “Improvisation Five”; their lengths vary from relative brevity, 4’31” for “Three”, to the near epic “Four” at 13’ 26”. “One” begins as a series of evenly strummed dissonant clusters eventually following a series of distinct evolutions. “No. 2” shadows a ground between intimacy and invisibility, sparse gestures on a sea of silence, each new shape as immediate as thought, each minute gesture a kind of micro-composition, bright, isolated harmonics poised against strummed dissonances, sometimes slowing, micro-gestures laid further apart amid a presence that suggests the guitar might be breathing. There’s an exalted level of attention paid to series of micro-gestures – a buzz, a harmonic, paired notes, a 10-minute reverie stretching toward its own disappearance. It’s followed by “No. 3”’s (relatively) loud, fast, chaotic and insistent pace, characterized by sudden shifts in density. “Four” is a master class in diverse approaches shaped into a single work, including an extended passage of high-speed scratched tones. “Five” begins as perfect reverie, with a couple of expansive high-speed bursts, before it returns to a delicate placidity and an ultimate embrace of silence. Like every work here, its evolution feels as natural as breathing. The numbering system is abandoned for the final title track: “Violet” is an eight second burst of insistence that suggests a looped electric guitar.
This string duo recording chooses the most traditional of string compositions as its model, a Four Seasons with its tracks named from “Summer” to “Autumn” to “Winter” to end speculatively and positively with a brief “Spring” of thrumming to suggest new and future life. Like the other life here, it’s the sense of the closely shared space that gives it its special character.
That opening “Summer” is a genuine hive of sound, brooking scant distinction for its opening minutes, densely plucked acoustic guitar and plucked or bowed bass presenting as a single instrument, the bass replicating the pitches of the lower four strings of the guitar and dropping them an octave, even picking, plucking and spiccato bowing acting as a singular continuum. When the notion of individuation asserts itself, what had been singular simply asserts itself as dialogue, retaining a strong sense of cooperation.
At nearly 21 minutes playing time, “Autumn” represents roughly half the year. It’s a dense dialogue consisting of arco bass and scraped/ wiped high-pitched guitar (they can still overlap in frequency and density), the delicate maelstrom reducing to silence only to gradually rise again with a developing hive of potential. Instruments can usually be distinguished, but that almost seems beside the point of this exalted, telepathic improvising. In the concluding moments, the instruments grow increasingly distinct, the bass insistently bowed, the guitar chorded tunefully, suggesting another evolution is imminent.
“Winter” is a whimper and a scrape, a jangle of disconnected elements slipping toward meaning, a haunted echo of a prepared instrument suddenly given to dizzying chording and lightening-fast picking, some body drumming and the storm is unleashed with the liveliest and least comforting season demanding and overwhelming attention before breaking into an almost pointillist duo of eliding bass tones and rapid guitar strumming, then slipping into a zone of microscopically detailed, evanescent figures, all together grinding toward life’s refresher course called “Spring”.
Dedicated to Derek Bailey and Tony Coe, this is another series of duo free improvisations, a format in which Thompson excels and in which his fitting partners, here the clarinetist Tom Jackson whose recordings encompass work with a range of improvisers, are similarly versed in cooperative creation, in an intensive attention to detail, to finding mystery, to unravelling it and to refolding it into another mystery. The longest work here is the functionally titled “Improvisation One”, a 20-minute piece in which Jackson presents as polyvocal, virtuosic and injured songbird, rapid-fire runs sometimes stretching toward dissolution, before some pastoral re-launch of bell-toned and dissonant guitar harmonics gradually restores the clarinet.
Three shorter tracks are more concentrated, less free ranging. “Improvisation Two” begins with a densely expressionistic clarinet solo, eventually matched by a subtly complex guitar accompaniment that becomes an increasingly significant subtext to Jackson’s compounding bird calls. “Three”, highlighting the duo’s interactive facility, is a high-speed, up and down, back and forth dialogue; “Four” foregrounds Jackson’s lyricism while Thompson creates a quietly unpredictable and abstract soundscape, each gradually becoming more actively conversational.
John Butcher has been among the most creative figures in improvised music for several decades, during that time both maintained long-established partnerships and sought new possibilities, whether it’s a fresh ensemble or a different sonic environment. These two recent recordings present longstanding associations that continue to grow creatively.
John Butcher and Angharad Davies have been playing in duet and other situations for many years, and there’s an essential chemistry at work in their music. This recent duo combines two extended works recorded in live performance in Berlin and a series of short pieces,”Granwyns”, recorded in a studio in Nottingham.
The opening work, “Hydref i”, might be the whole package, an intense 25-minute duo improvisation in which two high-pitched instruments – soprano saxophone and violin – are individually explored and countered, creating a tenuous universe of intense depth and mystery in which solo and duo passages strangely merge. With sufficiently close listening, one enters a microcosm of sounds overlapping and interacting. It is a world in which the concept of A440 is largely suspended, in which most tones deviate from the norm, with Davies frequently mining intervals that differ sufficiently in timbre to suggest two different instruments. The music is always active, always sustained, whether one or both musicians are playing. String and reed have never been closer. There are times when the lines exchange identities, often at very low volume, the grit of string, the vibrating air of the saxophone, twinning and separating. The saxophone can function as strained obbligato, the violin its eerie double. A careening passage, consuming the last few minutes, is so complex, intense and interwoven that it could never be composed or imagined – the essence of great collective improvisation.
The second piece from the Berlin concert, “Hydref ii”, is a brief work in close resonance, long tones abounding, Butcher’s hyper-resonant soprano activating the air, Davies’ high-pitched, bowed tones moving towards the silence of sonic eclipse. When its four-minute playing time is up, it feels like it is continuing, whether lending character to the air or merely anointing its continued presence.
“Granwyn i”, remarkably bright sounding, has a relatively provisional feel, attention riveted on the combination of room ambience and the interaction of overtones. “Granwyn ii” has the feel of a hurdy-gurdy, that ancient, resonant wail suggesting the character of a trance. “Granwyn iii” is air-drenched squall; “Granwyn iv” is densely compacted, each instrument occasionally coming to the fore; “Granwyn v” is the soul of somber sound, an interaction of reed harmonics and violin glissandi; “Granwyn vi” has an uncanny suggestion of oblique calypso; “Gwanwyn vii”, the last and most developed of the Nottingham pieces, is as astonishing as anything else here, an improvisers’ mind-meld in which the two musicians are constantly modulating their sounds, adjusting their volumes, pitches, air column or bow, harmonic spectra – creating a six-minute piece that manages to suggest the scale of the opening “Hydref i”.
Last Dream of the Morning is a collective trio that includes two other essential figures in contemporary improvised music, bassist John Edwards and percussionist Mark Sanders. The group’s first CD appeared in 2017 with their current name as title; it became a band name with 2020’s Crucial Anatomy . Sharp Illusion continues a series that is required listening for anyone interested in the current state of free jazz or free music. I’d like to begin with a certain confession. I was struck a few times by the presence of extended clicking passages, certainly not the first I’d heard from Butcher but by Sanders as well. I knew I’d heard the techniques before, but here the affinity with certain South African click languages seemed particularly striking. I googled “John Butcher click languages” and was struck by the first result, a review of the trio’s first recording from 2017, then paired with another Butcher trio CD, The Open Secret with Gino Robair and Dieb 13, the latter including a track entitled “Last Morning of the Dream”. The review appeared in this journal on April 21, 2018, and, embarrassingly, was written by one Stuart Broomer. Why some respectable linguist/musicologist hasn’t pursued this line of inquiry is beyond me, but it’s both a busy and increasingly preoccupied world, however much all this might reflect on a positive and inter-penetrating – not to mention utopian – human future.
That instrumentation – “sax and rhythm” – will signal a certain tradition, a format employed by numerous musicians and one that has resulted in some of the masterpieces of jazz and/or improvised music (a problematical distinction in some quarters that doesn’t have to arise in the utopian space enjoyed here). This music will stand solidly on its own, but it might also stand comparison with a certain hierarchy. The foundational masterpieces for consideration include Sonny Rollins with Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones (at the Village Vanguard), Lee Konitz with Sonny Dallas and Jones (Motion), Albert Ayler with Peacock and Murray ( Spiritual Unity or Prophecy ) or anything by Evan Parker with Barry Guy and Paul Lytton (say Imaginary Values ).
Like them, Sharp Illusion, a July 2024 performance recorded at the Cultural Centre in Lublin, Poland, is about the specific potential of its specific time, or perhaps already an anytime when anything might be possible. If Butcher can be celebrated for numerous innovative voices, more recently he frequently sounds declarative/authoritative in a traditional tenor saxophone voice. Meanwhile his partners here participate freely, often beyond traditional functions. The effect is a trio that occupies an exalted space, at once intimately entwined with free jazz and improvised music, at once alive to the tradition of the former and still expanding potential of the latter, a dialectic organized around both utopian form and a potential for a shared state of auditory grace.
The opening “Roof Rattle” is a continual, 13-minute, reshaping of auditory space, beginning in a trio passage of equal parts bending individual instrumental sounds into an eerie and supportive collective voice. Eventually distinctions come to the foreground, loosely linking arco bass and a miscellany of percussion that can suggest any number of non-musical implements. As it rolls along Butcher becomes more conventionally central to the collective narrative, sometimes assuming a “boss tenor” voice that might recall musicians like Yusef Lateef or Booker Ervin, all the time supported by arco bass grunts, swivels and high harmonics, and a percussive storm that willingly ventures well beyond the conventional, the whole giving way to an extended click dialogue that involves the entire trio to varying degrees..
Each of the other tracks represents comparatively subtle evolutions, reshapings and transformations, always redefining the roles and relationships of three musicians’ constantly evolving views of the individual potential of the collective music, whether it’s the 12-minute “Turning the Soil”, hive interior or rich earth; the rich play of the longest track, the 28-minute “Movable Bridge”, which shifts positions in the manner of the preceding pieces but with even further development; or the very brief “Afterglow”, which Butcher begins with a strange transformation to a convincing simulation of a trumpet voice before turning to an openly tenor saxophone voice as his partners join in, eventually ending with more forceful clicks.
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| Jazz (c) David Monaghan |
Guido Montegrandi
Stef Gijssels
Eyal Hareuveni
Lee Rice Epstein
Paul Acquaro
Historic/Archival Releases:
KnCurrent is a quartet organized by patrick brennan, the New York-based alto saxophonist and musical explorer. Among his recent projects are a substantial book of his reflections on sound, Ways & Sounds (the book) Audio Edition, available in both print and audio download editions, and the 2023 recording by his quintet patrick brennan sOnic Openings - Tilting Curvaceous (Clean Feed, 2023), previously reviewed on Free Jazz Blog. While Tilting Curvaceous explored brennan’s complex composed cells with a conventional quintet format -- trumpet, piano, bass and drum kit supporting his work -- Kn Current is a radically different conception, setting brennan’s hard-edged, expressionist saxophone amidst a minefield of collectively improvising, amplified strings, with Cooper-Moore, more typically thought of as a pianist, on diddly-bo, On Ka’a Davis on electric guitar and Jason Kao Hwang on electric violin, an ensemble that expands the sonic field into a maze of percussive and electronic strings. brennan’s brief liner note connects the group’s informal architecture to the flexibility of the strings’ electronic resources:
“As much as common practice codifications of pitch & rhythm might enable musical architectures & connections, what about the other sounds, the ones that can’t get so glibly mapped as they fly between the cracks & boundaries? How then to interact with this spectrum if not directly? What combust here is the empathic chemistry among these extraordinarily imaginative musicians.”
A brief word of explanation might clarify Cooper-Moore’s “diddly-bo” and its life beyond the “boundaries”: it’s a bass register string instrument, held horizontally and played either as a plucked instrument or with two sticks, one used to strike the strings percussively, the other employed as a slide, creating glissandi. Fine video examples of his work with the instrument in another remarkable NYC band, guitarist Brandon Seabrook’s trio with drummer Gerald Cleaver, are available on youtube.
While Cooper-Moore still lives partially in the world of acoustic music, Davis and Hwang are often highly electronic here. The group’s startling texture is apparent immediately in the opening “slip apophatica”, beginning with a maelstrom of fluctuating electronic burbles, beeps, whirs and glissandi, a more elusive development of the proto-electronic music of Forbidden Planet, before Brennan enters as an insistently human presence, his saxophone at once convulsive, choked and explosive by turn.
The six tracks that follow are evenly split between longer quartet tracks and shorter works by the strings. The shortest of these is “Dné Wol”, a perfect miniature, little more than a minute long, a solo by Cooper-Moore revelling in the diddly-bo’s bass register, as low as a piano’s but with the pitch-bending, shape shifting, percussive possibilities of an electronically enhanced bass. “micro circus” begins with Davis’s guitar. Already a glittering transforming presence, it’s eventually joined by the wobbling wonder that is the diddly-bo’s unique character and by Hwang’s violin. “Must be ‘Who Say’” is a string trio that begins with Hwang’s sound sufficiently distorted that only the shaping trace of the bow distinguishes it from Davis’s guitar which eventually achieves its own electronic pre-eminence.
A sense of dueting shapes the quartet track “polyneuroreceptive”, propelled initially by brennan’s joyously liberated alto and Cooper-Moore’s propulsive bass lines, gradually adding Davis and Hwang to the mix, the technological transformation of the strings ultimately suggesting not automation but a richer human universe.
ṣumūd صمود , at 9:22 the longest track, its title Arabic for “steadfast perseverance”, is also the most developed, from Cooper-Moore’s opening compound of sounds, suggesting at once electric bass and microtonal percussion, gradually adding Davis’s highly electronic guitar, then brennan’s twisting, shifting alto explosion, to ultimately conclude with a solo by Hwang in which the violin’s character is genuinely electronic, not merely amplified, extending to eery sounds that are at once electronic and liquid.
The concluding “tewetatewenni:io” embraces a contrasting, near-acoustic dialogue, shifting from the pre-eminence of diddly-bo and warmly vocal, lyric alto to Davis’s subtle guitar lines and the ultimate collective design of the full quartet. It’s a remarkable ultimate transition, the cloak of alien mystery gradually evaporating to reveal a relatively clear and joyous empathy in now near-natural voices. The whole program is a rich and resounding success.
These two recent recordings are linked by the presence of Portuguese guitarist Abdul Moimême, but more than that, each is a masterful work of inspired collective improvisation, each a work of hive mind, achieving a collective synergy so close-knit, one in which initiating impulses and successive responses are so closely interwoven -- perhaps impossible to assign -- that they might be the work of a multi-armed and multi-mouthed deity, a figure playing numerous instruments at an initiation into the mysteries.
Dissection Room first formed in Lisbon in 2017, combining Moimême, Spanish saxophonist Albert Cirera and Uruguayan bassist Alvaro Rosso. This is their second CD, following the eponymous release of a 2017 concert, Creative Sources 549CD. At the root of the trio’s mystery there is Rosso. His instrument will suggest foundation, stability and form, even those players in the virtuosic lineage, but Rosso is also an agent of chaos – his contribution a chain of disruptions: claw-like plucking of multiple strings, quivering bowed harmonics, his sound amplified or closely miked, bass grit ground out at the frog of the bow, tones seemingly echoing backward as well as forward. Cirera’s soprano and tenor saxophones provide strong central voices, whether or not they are altered with various objects and insertions; at one point there is a continuous line suspended between saxophone timbre and a violin. Moimême’s instrument is the soul of unpredictability, frustrating even identification: two horizontal guitars, one a radically evolved baritone of his own design, with extensive electronics and preparations and striking devices. Distinctive individual events from any of the three occur amidst a dense field of quivering sound, the act of distinguishing events and individual contributions only clouding the listener’s essential immersion in the collective work’s unfolding, the miracle of collaboration that take place here.
The trio of sound artist Matthews, Moimême and violinist Luz Prado is a merger of two pre-existing duos, Matthews and Moimême, Matthews and Prado. If anything, it takes the elements of synthesis and mystery even further than Dissection Room’s Live at Penasco, for Matthews represents the same scale of sonic variety and invention (timbral, contrapuntal, environmental) as Moimême. My early descriptions of Moimême’s work included metaphors of train stations in outer space. The same qualities of mystery. energy and inclusive terrain are even more evident here, with all the partners contributing to the mystery, whether it’s Matthews’ wandering sound samples (at one point documentation of a recorded voice will appear, then move from natural timbre to Disney Duck range) or Prado’s exacting imaginings of alien insect voices. This is not a trio but an orchestra, operating both in the internal world of dream in collision and in imaginings of outer space, the nervous system and the overlapping voices of distant radio frequencies. At every turn, every dance of drama, mystery and eerie, speculative glissando or rattle, this work moves both further in, to the echoing songs of the subconscious, and further out, where elastic string harmonics fade into twilight. The work’s complexity, its invocation of both lived in spaces and/or psychic realms, both evades description or synthesis, demanding listening.
Note: In an “Ezz-thetics” column from 2017 I recounted a 2016 Lisbon lunch meeting with Moimême and Matthews when they were making field recordings for Lisbon: 10 Sound Portraits (Creative Sources 421 CD): https://www.pointofdeparture.org/archives/PoD-60/PoD60Ezz-thetics.html
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.
