1988 Just Music
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At Pentecost FMP will present a second block of studio-concerts; appearing on the program, this time without rotation, will be four wind groups, each allotted an entire evening concert. Under-estimated or simply ignored by many critics, the baritone saxophonist and clarinettist Manfred Schulze must nevertheless be counted among the most important East German improvisers. Since the mid 1960's, the Manfred Schulze Wind Quintet has conducted its ground-breaking experiments in complete isolation from the official East German jazz-scene. Schulze's music was initially problematic for many musicians because, in a time when the driving forces in Jazz, even in East Germany, were trying to find a stable identity in Free Jazz, the Saxon Schulze was advocating structural models, which though new, were also highly constraining; at the same time he demanded from his fellow musicians unusually intense discipline. Setting no stock in free improvisation, Schulze developed fully-notated and binding "improvisation-models" for his musicians to use as the basis for their playing. Interpreted according to a predetermined set of rules and procedures, these models did allow for some degree of freedom and choice, Schulze's primary concern being not so much the realization of a given structure, but far more, through the development of textures and sound-masses, the creation of new structures. His musical conception, falling somewhere in between the cracks of the officially accepted categories, brought him together with a composer from the New Music scene, Hermann Keller, with whom he co-founded the Berlin Improvisation Quartet. In full accord with his unwillingness to compromise his compositional philosophy, Manfred Schulze developed a highly idiosyncratic craft on his instrument. Ekkehard Jost, a leading authority on European Jazz, acknowledges in Schulze's playing an extensive and very controlled use of "irregular fingerings as well as an unorthodox approach to the embouchure". "On the whole," writes Jost, "this is a very eccentric way of playing the baritone saxophone; on the one hand it's very dependent on the instrument itself; on the other, it's completely different from that of any other baritone performer I've ever heard". The current Manfred Schulze Wind Quintet consists, by the way, of four saxophonists and one trombonist. The "Atipico Trio" comes to us from the other side of the Alps. The three clarinettists belong to that circle of young musicians residing in Italy who are attempting, as Enrico Rava described it four years ago, "to combine a jazz-derived musical language with forms, rhythms, and other structures of Italian traditional music still close to its folk-origins; occasionally they also employ traditional instruments in novel ways." For one of its improvisations, the "Atipico Trio" is just as likely to pick a medieval song or dance, or a Florentine folk-song, as it is to choose a pop tune; in the course of dismantling and reprocessing such "found pieces", the musicians transform them into their own, fully original compositions. Still another ensemble on the "Just Horns" series is the duo, "Peter Brötzmann/Alfred 23 Harth"; as this goes to press, the program for the fourth concert is still being worked out. Translation: Daniel Werts from: Booklet “improvised music” by Free Music Production (FMP), 1988 |
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