1994
TMM / "Podewil"
|
|
|
This is the 27th Total Music Meeting in Berlin. When the story started, in 1968, the "Total" in the titIe heId implications, for many, of a music unfettered, relent- Iess, all-out, no-holds-barred. "Total" like the total in "total war", the pent-up furies and social-political frustrations of the era spilling into the programmatic nature of such works as Brötzmann's Machine Gun. More than a quarter century later a measure of restIessness and discontent remains: this cannot help but be a music-in-opposition, its very existence a sustained criticism of commercial music's status quo... Yet it has also become more generous, more inclusive. At the end of the 60s none of the players imagined that the Total Music Meeting would one day provide a showcase for overtone singing from the Siberian-Mongolian border - for exampIe. The music has grown and expanded as the men and women who initiated the genre - sometimes (inaccurately) termed "non-idiomatic improvisation" - have travelled and made contact with players in the furthest flung corners of the globe. "Total" today means something like all-embracing, albeit with critical faculties and necessary scepticism intact. Free music today can take aboard as much as it needs of paralIel genres, skirt the hinterlands of performance art (see SheIley Hirsch in the September Band for exampIe) or make use of composition for dialectic purposes. It can examine its own history: in his current quartet Peter Brötzmann brilliantly expIores the paralleIs between Albert Ayler's art and his own development. The Zentralquartett picks up the pieces of East German jazz history and moves into the future. The music, today, can even laugh at itseIf, a healthy sign, and one can safely predict there will be no shortage of ridiculous moments in the seIfironic performance of the U.K.'s Melody Four. Guitar soloists and bands comprise this year's "themes". Back at the beginning, there were only one-and-a-half "free" guitar-players: Derek Bailey was "free" all of the time and Sonny Sharrock was "free" when not playing Herbie Mann's pop- jazz tunes. (Actually there were two-and-a-half free players but Keith Rowe, then as now, was ignored). Both Bailey and Sharrock were early visitors to the Total Music Meeting (Sharrock jammed, disastrously, with John Stevens in 1968; Bailey's been a fairly regular attendee down the years) and for a long time Derek and Sonny provided the standard frame of reference in any discussions of guitarists - in the meantime there are hundreds of them - trying to play "out". In an early issue of the British magazine Musics for exampIe one finds Londoner John RusseIl described as occupying "a unique territory between Bailey and Sharrock". With his preference for the acoustic guitar, Russel! is less likely to be compared to either today, though temperamentally he is cIoser to Bailey. He's a stubborn player with his own system of dry, rasping sounds and dampened chords, from which he constructs a provisional architecture - or at least a rude shelter (a sound like "scratching in a kenneI" according to The Wire) - each time he plays. He's been committed to the concept of Free play since the early 70s: "This is the best way for me to work as a musician, bringing together both the inteIlectual and the emotional with the practica! in the creation of a music that is unique to a specific time and place". In the UK, the superiority of semi-ad-hoc groupings of musicians over fixed groups, or vice versa, is still a debated theme in improvising circles - one RusseIl sidesteps by adhering to both viewpoints. His flexibIe ensembIe Quauqua features a floating cast of characters but he also works in long term groupings including the acclaimed News From The Shed (with Paul Lovens, Radu Malfatti, John Butcher and Phil Durant), in duos with Evan Parker, Roger Turner and others and in Malfatti's large ensembIe Ohrkiste. Solo concerts have long been a means of uncovering fresh material that can be brought to the collective endeavour. French guitarist Jean-Marc Montera, based in Marseille, co-founded the musica! research and improvisation organisation called GRIM in 1978 and through the 1980s was active in his homeland, writing extensiveIy for film, dance and video installations and playing with, amongst others, Barre Phillips, Joe McPhee, Herve Bourde and André Jaume. Not limiting himseIf to anybody's definition of free music, he has worked across the genres and since 1988, for exampIe, has functioned as Artistic Advisor to young rock groups in the northern districts of Marseille. In the 1990s he has travelled further from his home turf and gained recognition for international collaborations. He is a member of the Mediterranean EnsembIe which features Tunisian oudplayer Anouar Brahem, Greek saxophonist Floros Floridis, Portuguese violinist Carlos Zingaro and others. He plays frequently in duo with feIlow guitarist Fred Frith and with pianist Christine Wodrascka and is a regular contributor to the quintet of Italian bassist/ceIlist Paolo Famiani. Another Italian association has proven fruitful: Montera appears on saxophonist Mario Schiano's album Unlike (in a quartet that also includes Paul Lovens and Maarten Altena) where his playing incorporates some radical abstractions upon the blues. Montera is currently in the process of assembling a new ensembIe, Et Plus Si Affinités, a big band comprised of rock players. The compIeteness and extreme originality of guitarist Stefan DilI's art is more than impressive and provides a reminder, that the most interesting music has a way of flowering in unlikeIy places. Dill is from Albuquerque, New Mexico, once home to another creative desert plant, Harry Partch, but his resume includes out-of-town studies with George RusseIl, Cecil Taylor and, above all, Joseph Gabriel Maneri. Maneri, one of the unsung innovators of new music, is a master of microtonal improvisation and has developed a compIex and internally consistent language built upon the slur. Playing microtonal music on the acoustic guitar, however is no easy matter; Dill uses the tips of his fingernails to slide into the spaces between the notes. He has drawn inspiration from all manner of sources: the percussive power of flamenco has a role to play' balancing the expressivity of free jazz and the structural concerns of post-Schoenberg straight music, plus whatever Dill may have extrapolated from his studies of Mayan poetry ("my family roots"). Crucially, his music is no potpourri: his tastes may be ecIectic but his art is focussed. He has his own, very distinctive, voice. Like most guitarists of his generation - he was born in 1951 - Erhard Hirt grew up listening to rock and blues, was playing blues by the age of 16 and continued to tour with blues bands in the 70s, maintaining a kind of schizophrenic dual identity for a while until first free jazz then free improvisation emphatically gained the upper hand (the biographies of Mike Cooper and Davey Williams have folIowed similar curves). By 79 he was giving solo concerts of improvised music and leading his own band whose shifting personnel included Wolfgang Fuchs, Martin Theurer, Hans Schneider, Torsten Müller and "Pinguin" Moschner, all gifted members of German free music's "second generation". The association with Wolfgang Fuchs has been particularly productive: the saxophonist and guitarist collaborated in the group Xpact before co-founding the King Übü Örchestrü in 1984, a colIective that uncovered new and subtIe means with which to approach the challenge of large ensembIe improvisation. As a soloist Hirt is very much an electric guitarist - he seems to wish to make the humming of energy through his cabIes audible, and has no compunctions about working the noises of foot-pedals or the plugging and unplugging of jack-Leads into his sound... it is al! part of the process. Achim Knispel is another German guitarist who came to free playing via rock music, but he switched streams as early as 1970. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he studied painting in Wuppertal, an undertaking that has had a radical effect on several players (Brötzmann was a Dixieland player before he enrolled in the art academy! Some musicologist shouId research the interconnections between free music and fine art in Germany). Knispel, in common with Hans Reichel has also been an instrument builder and customizer and it is hardly surprising that the two guitarists wouId hook up - first in a quartet in 1974 and then as a duo three years later, bouncing odd noises off each other on the recording Erdmännchen. A veteran of several Total Music Meetings, Knispel has collaborated over the years with assorted participants at the current event; in the mid-80s he played quite often with Lol Coxhill, for exampIe, and has also worked with Peter Brötzmann and with Steve Beresford on occasion. His most enduring musical alliance, however, has been with drummer/vibraphonist Willi KeIlers: they have been playing together since 1980. Achim Knispe! has also been giving solo concerts for more than 20 years. Peter Brötzmann's German-American-Japanese Quartet is, arguably, the best band he has led, and its debut recording Die Like A Dog, subtitIed Fragments of Music, Life and Death of Albert Ayler is brilliantly conceived, taking off from Ayler's and Brötzmann's shared love of early jazz (and Bechet's wide vibrato in particular) and working through the history and transformation of the music as experienced in different cultures. The Japanese role in jazz history has been largely one of synthesis rather than major innovation; in this group this works in Toshinori Kondo's favour. He can conjure up both Don Ayler's frantic whinnying and - via wah-wah pedal - the electric guitars that Albert also craved (e.g. Henry Vestine), in the course of a single solo (echoes here too of Miles's undervalued mid-70s work). Brötzmann's music has often been perceived by detractors as ponderously heavy, but this is so only when his partners fail to grasp his modus operandi. Kondo, who can think faster than the average musician and has an excellent sense of pitch besides, is able to anticipate and key into Brötzmann's most startling explosions and play with him in a way that few other horn players have done down the years. In consequence, the music sings with a beautiful clarity, greatly aided by the tremendous bass and drums team of William Parker and Hamid Drake. Parker, perhaps best known for his work with Cecil Taylor, is essentially a rhythmic player. He has spoken of hearing his bottom string as a bass drum, the top string as a ride cymbal, and the interaction with Drake is often based on richly detailed cross-rhythmic exchanges that supercharge the efforts of the horn players. The Chicagoan Drake was little known in Europe - despite sterling recordings with the Mandingo Griot Society and Fred Anderson - until Don Cherry brought him out with the Multi Kulti band; it won't be long before he is acclaimed as one of the real masters of spontaneous invention. In brief, this is a band of enormous power and range. The September Band inhabits a different universe from Brötzmann's progressive yet tradition-conscious free jazz. Rüdiger Carl may once have pushed toward similar climaxes when wielding a tenor saxophone but, having switched his allegiance to the accordion, practically all "jazz" references in his music have dissolved. The September Band plays a species of "art music" and for all the significant capabilities of the instrumentalists (and guitarist Hans Reichel and Paul Lovens are innovators of the first rank) the players tend - out of chivalry and/or necessity - to take a back seat to the charismatic presence of singer Shelley Hirsch. A commanding performer, Hirsch stands out from the crowded ranks of improvising female vocalists - many of whom belabour the hoary scat concept of imitating instrumental solos - through her uncanny ability to pull entire songs out of the air, lyrics and all. She sings in languages known and unknown, frequently adopting a whole theatre play's worth of characters in the course of an improvised song. Sometimes one has the eerie impression that Cathy Berberian and Judy Garland have been reincarnated in a single body, as her performance teeters between cabaret camp and high modernism. With such an exotic front woman Carl, Reichel and Lovens have little choice but to follow and illustrate the scenarios she unveils, eking out their own idiosynchracies in diluted doses. But even a muted Lovens or Reichel is more than interesting. The September Band provides a context, anyway, for some subtle playing, a good place for Reichel to provide "background vocals" via the neo-operatic potential of his self-made daxophone and for Lovens to coax spirit voices from his musical saw. England's Melody Four is a trio. At the outset this was no surprise to anybody a little familiar with the track record of Lol Coxhill and Steve Beresford, whose off -kilter sense of humour has charmed - and also mystified and antagonized - audiences for many years. In the Melody Four Coxhill plays soprano sax, Tony Coe plays tenor sax and clarinet and Beresford plays (mostly) piano. All three also sing. Though it's unlikely that the participants have ever done much conceptualizing about their shared endeavour or drawn up any manifestos, the Melody Four systematically set about debunking expectations. Their repertoire - incorporating tributes to the Marx brothers and a bottomless bag of cheesy TV themes - celebrates the trivial and, at its best moments, makes art out of junk... or at least asks us to re-evaluate music written "merely" to entertain. Art aside, there is something schoolboyishly appealing about the idea of forcing music from The Munsters down the thronts of a free jazz audience. For Tony Coe, a virtuoso player, the Melody Four must seem like a holiday from the tristesse and brow-furrowed earnestness of his work with Franz Koglmann. Lol Coxhill is one of the world's great soprano players - see the recent Three Blokes CD with Evan Parker and Steve Lacy where he interacts persuasively with his peers - but his cantankerous personality rarely allows him to stay in "serious" mode for too long. Beresford has always insisted that he is a second-rate musician (Misha Mengelberg, for one, disagrees: "There is a touch of genius about Steve's work") but he has proven to be a challenging catalyst figure over two decades, and any lack of instrumental prowess has not prevented him from dabbling in an extremely wide range of activities. For example: producing the Dedication Orchestra's albums, participating in the realization of Butch Morris's "conductions", writing arrangements for John Stevens's band... Singer Sainkho Namtchylak is a relatively recent convert to the improvised cause. She was born in 1957 in Tuva, formerly the Tuvinian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (population around 300,000) near the Mongolian border; her grandparents were nomads on the steppes. The Tuvinian religion in which she was raised combines shamanism and features of Tibetan Buddhism. We've grown fairly accustomed to musicians - particularly city-bred American musicians - talking blithely about shamanism and spirit-possession and "living close to the earth" but these things are part of Namtchylak's family history. She has been singing in public since 1986 and involved in improvised music since 1988, but still considers herself primarily a folk singer working in free music. The free players were immediately swayed by Namtchylak's extraordinary vocal abilities - Peter Kowald was to produce her first FMP recording - and in particular her magical adaptation of traditional overtone singing, and her attention to timbre, texture and ornament. Manipulation of overtones has been a central consideration of new jazz and free music (cf. Evan Parker, Albert Mangelsdorff, Phil Wachsmann, Barry Guy - to name but a few) and this by itself would make Namtchylak's music worthy of concentrated study. She has more to offer, however, and is able to integrate her own visions in the free world: see, for example, When The Sun is Out You Don't See Stars, her intriguing, nerves-ends-bared recorded collaboration with Kowald, Butch Morris and Werner Lüdi. At the Total Music Meeting, however, Namtchylak is appearing with Biosintes, a Tuvinian trio making its first German appearances. Apparently - I can only refer to a publicity sheet for background info - the group started out as jazz-rock influenced ensemble at the "Rock Asia Festival" of 1991 before settling, after many personnel changes, on the current line-up and a style that attempts to reconcile traditional Siberian overtone singing with elements of contemporary European improvisation. Finally, closing this year's five-day event, there is the Zentralquartett, a quartet of old comrades from what used to be East Germany. Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, Conrad Bauer, Ulrich Gumpert, Günter "Baby" Sommer... these seem almost like household names now. We owe our knowledge of their capabilities largely to FMP and its itinerant musicians. Back in 1972, a wave of free players including Peter Brötzmann, Peter Kowald, Alex Schlippenbach, Paul Rutherford, Detlef Schönenberg and Paul Lovens made their first musical forays beyond the Berlin wall. Günter Sommer has acknowledged that contact with West German contemporaries, and particularly the drummers, confirmed his own conviction that it was no longer enough merely to adapt and echo American approaches to the music. The early 70s were years of accelerated innovation in GDR jazz. The Westerners, for their part, were surprised by the strength of the best of the East German players, whose music had been forced to grow up in extreme cultural isolation: the common consensus, inside and outside the country, was that a band called Synopsis was the hottest of the lot. It's line-up? Precisely that of the Zentralquartett. FMP was able, after much bureaucratic hassling, to license their album Auf der Elbe schwimmt ein rosa Krokodil for release in the West. After this it was possible regularly to present colleagues from Leipzig and Dresden and Weimar in Berlin - and vice versa. (It's not uncommon now for European free musicians to speak, misty-eyed, about the Golden Age of East German jazz, though the players involved can't see it quite that way...) Synopsis caused a sensation at the 1973 Warsaw Jazz Jamboree, blowing away most of the competition, but the original line-up and conception survived only until '75 when Conny Bauer (now widely regarded as the pre-eminent improvising trombonist) left the group. The four individuals, before and since, have played with each other in many contexts - Gumpert and Sommer in duo and in the Peter Brötzmann Trio; Petrowsky, Bauer and Sommer in the Hans Rempel Octet; all four of them inside Gumpert's Workshop Band. Reunited at the beginning of the 90s as the Zentralquartett they have a lot of shared history - painful and triumphant - on which to draw. And as they like to stress, this is not a "revival": it is a continuation... from: Folder TMM 1994 |
|