1983 TMM / "Quartier Latin"

Steve Lake (1983)

Barring a benevolent act of God, or a sudden Scrooge-like change of heart from the men who control the purse-strings of German culture, the 16th Total Music Meeting will also be the last. Since 1968, Berlin's Free Music Production team have run this festival on vast enthusiasm and a very tight budget. Often enough they have subsidised it from their own pockets and with work-hours way beyond the call of duty. Now the money has run out and it looks like the end of the line for both the Total Music Meeting and FMP itself. Artistically, at least, the company is going out full strength. The final line-up at the Quartier Latin is as comprehensive as any the team have offered over the years, a testament to the diversity of improvised music despite the indifference of the mass media and the recording industry.

If free music can be classified as an "idiom" it is one that is now worldwide, and the Total Music Meeting - and its documentation by FMP - has played a valuable catalyst role in this evolution. More than fifteen years of radical music - cause for celebration, surely, rather than morbid dwellings upon the demise of an institution.

FMP nurtured the German free jazz scene through its infancy and gave it a platform for expression in the first Total Music Meeting. Originally conceived as a sort of angry-young-man's retort to the showbiz limitations of the official JazzFest, the Meeting rapidly developed into an international event in its own right. It was acknowledged by the so-called avant garde as the year's major opportunity to catch up on the latest developments in improvisation, and to exchange ideas, techniques and information.

One early consequence was the dissolving of the old demarcation lines that had separated groups of improvisers previously. While critics still argued Black versus White, American versus European and so on, and wrote near-impenetrable pseudo-musicological theses on the distinctions between the British, Dutch and German "schools " of free improvisation, the players themselves found the points of congruence rather than contention and got on with the matter of making music together. Today, the multi-racial, international improvising group is the norm rather than the exception. The rationale of a "Globe Unity Orchestra" is vindicated, where once it seemed like a naïve pipedream.

The crusading zeal of FMP and its musicians even penetrated the Berlin Wall. Contacts made with East German musicians in 1972 by Jost Gebers, Alex Schlippenbach and Peter Brötzmann led to the first Western release of records by groups of Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky and Ulrich Gumpert and, ultimately, to the regular appearance of GDR instrumentalists at the Total Music Meeting and the Workshop Freie Musik. Because their isolation from the rest of the jazz world had been more complete, the integration of the East German players with their Western contemporaries has been a gradual process but one that can now be considered realized. Who, in 1968, could have guessed that Mississippi Delta trumpeter Leo Smith and East German drummer Günter Sommer would become partners in improvisations? Such are the combinations that FMP has sparked and the vocabulary of music has been enriched accordingly.

With the growth of the music an informed audience has also grown up, a still small but faithful following that has taken the trouble to investigate and understand the problems under consideration in the work of this or that musician. Again, this is a direct result of the continued commitment of FMP and a handful of parallel organizations who, in records and concerts presentations have shown the development of the music in each of its stages of evolution. And from this informed public have arisen a number of young musicians, some of whom have subsequently been recorded by FMP.

But the picture I'm painting of an expanding improvisers universe does not address the question that the uncommitted reader will surely ask: why has there not been a corresponding commercial success to match the artistic achievements?

A tough question, and one that usually leads to wearying discussion. The musicians often plead simple lack of exposure, arguing that if, say, Evan Parker was on the radio all day long he'd be as big as The Police. I very much doubt it.

If the music industry's moguls had glimpsed the faintest opportunity to become richer by harnessing free improvisation to their purpose, they would have done so by now. For better or for worse, the strength and integrity of the free music have made it resistant to commercial packing. While FMP faithfully documents the sound of the musicians at the Total Music Meeting, popular jazz is actually running in the opposite direction. One could go so far as to argue that jazz is no longer a live music. The modern jazz musician now goes on the road to perform his record and promote it, sales techniques learned from rock.

For the free musicians, an LP is largely a side-effect of his or her creativity; for others, is it the end product. In an age when the standard jazz record has become a multi-tracked studio confection (if you doubt, check out Billboard´s jazz chart) and the public, particularly in Germany, have become hi-fi fetishists, the free players idea of an LP as information, an illustration of live achievement, is altogether too humble to fit into the big picture

But one of the curious attributes of the free scene - perhaps the secret of its resilience - is that it has always fulfilled all those clichés about creativity blooming in the face of adversity. Back when there was almost no audience, the music was of ferocious strength: just listen to Brötzmann´s 1968 "Machine Gun", still a shocking record in its intensity. Later, when a playing circuit had been established by the sheer hard work of the innovators, free improvisation was temporarily invaded by a new breed that drummer Eddie Prèvost described as "wishy-washy abstract expressionists" who interpreted freedom as a licence to play without mastery of ones instrument. Most of these have since disappeared to play in punk groups pr become music critics or both. (Incidentally, not many of them were ever invited to play the Total Music Meeting,) The heavyweights, on the other hand, are still very much with us, continually overhauling their music, chasing down new directions, throwing themselves into ever more challenging contexts. The disappearance of the Total Music Meeting is likely only to strengthen their resolve and stubbornness.

Just watch - this may be the beginning of a new era rather than the end of the old. Me, I´d like to thank the musicians and FMP for a lot of inspired free music in the Quartier Latin, and to believe that the best is yet to come.

from: Program Booklet JazzFest Berlin (1983)

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