1998
TMM / "Podewil"
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The program makes one aware of points and lines within a process. Lines of musical development and lines of human lives. Hardly fixed points, but rather pointers to personalities and their musical practice, points set as an example in a constant process of volatility. Illumination of essentials that ignite upon the concrete. Lines of connection between works of sound that have distinguished themselves and still - be it indirect- communicate with each other. Free Music Production has never taken the music it presents or produces as a basis for a preconceived idea. Initial points were always the integrity and the intentions of the musicians bound up with it. With their lives and works (improvised music understood as a work in process) sound images transformed themselves. What remained and counts as permanent can be described with a musical attitude that resists exchangeability and arbitrariness, and that marks the quality close to improvisation that gets lost in the grinding cycles of the cultural machine: authenticity. The names and combinations listed in the program of the Total Music Meeting 1998 can be read in various ways, just as one reads a text or a sheet of music. One should follow the soloists, and it appears revealing to search for parallels, correspondences, and counterpoints in the web of voices. In the end it proves to be valuable to reflect upon the current situation and its historical dimensions. With Alexander von Schlippenbach and Tony Oxley, the musical dialogue of two pioneers of this music steps on stage. Since they - both celebrating anniversaries - have pursued a long term continuum in their own work, it would appear senseless to dismissively celebrate them as classic musicians. The two encounter each other upon a high plateau. Stemming from jazz, they have formed their own language, which makes playing with common experiences possible: already in the sixties Oxley's language included "the liberation from the dogma of the beat" and Schlippenbach's the fascination for the sound worlds of new music along with an equal reverence for the great jazz innovators. The nuances in this interactive communication consist in formulating and leaving out, in avoiding and in accentuating. Having performed decades ago within the charged atmosphere surrounding Monk and Dolphy, European tradition and Fluxus, Misha Mengelberg is also among those musicians who have founded something appearing far too original to set a precedent unless it is a method: "when I play piano," the pianist revealed, "I feel like a man who repairs a bicycle. It's a matter of getting the bike to work again." The interruption and continuation describes a process thot appears to be miles from a music that celebrates bourgeois complacency or devotion. And although the extemporizations of Vinko Globokar, one who has broken out of the circle of new music, tell it differently, he too considers "improvisation as a kind of musical and visual description of daily problems." That includes "contradictions, despair, neuroses, hopelessness," but also leads to grasping the continued improvisational attempt as a chance, as "a space, in which one can find solutions." FMP can point to decade-long continuous work with its presentation of the duo of Ulrich Gumpert and Günter Sommer as well as with Selbdritt, the father-figure trio of the free playing that gained musical acceptance on the other side of the wall, as the region before or still afterwards was still registered as the GDR. For a long time from West Berlin, FMP functioned in the east as a moral- musical influence. Without FMP important phases of this music (also that of the duo Gumpert/Sommer and of the Petrowsky Trio) would be memories without re-sounding documents. In the end, FMP itself created podiums. At the Total Music Meeting of 1978 - exactly 20 years ago - the presentation of East German musicians on West German stages began. Already one year later the concert series followed with the programmatic title "Jazz Now. Jazz from the GDR." Now, since everything spectacular has died down, it is worth listening back and carefully to understand what has evolved in the playing of musicians like Gumpert, Sommer and Petrowsky and to what has endured and what forms of experience have accumulated. The music that Manfred Schulze, with his horn quintet, has developed also originated in the GDR but strikes one, however, almost exterritorial by a wide margin. A brilliant maverick who neither was influenced by fashionable streams in jazz, nor ever became established in the new music circles, Schulze initiated playing processes and created sound structures that cannot be pigeon- holed. What makes one aware of the current value, the freshness and the concision of the compositions and conceptions of Manfred Schulze is how these five musicians of an upcoming generation take on this heritage. Since Gert Anklam knows that he cannot do justice to Schulze by copying but rather by his own communication on the baritone saxophone, he succeeds in his multi-dimensional solo concerts, which focus on the essential and which reach from a concentration upon the individual tone up to semi orchestral density. The program of the Total Music Meeting 1998 revolves around the relation of improvisation and new music, which is thematized in individual points and is a subtitle throughout. It would appear childish to cordon off these areas from each other, they themselves having become fluid regarding tonal impressions. Nevertheless, the profile of FMP distinguishes itself clearly from chamber music events, which locate themselves at the centre of contemporary composed music. At the Total Music Meeting, it is less a matter of materials and methods be they improvised, composed or combined), but more one of authenticity of the musicians, of the identity of sound creators and players. Composer and double bassist from Perugia, Fernando Grillo conceives his playing as realizing "sound sculptures," striving for spiritual contemplation. For him, logically, it s not a question of showing off all of the virtuosic techniques he has developed and that are at his disposal as a medium, but rather of the levels of depth of making music. Although his path has led him from Lyon to Paris and on into the world, Louis Sclavis is still associated with the Workshop de Lyon, which he co-founded, and the vision of an imaginary folklore. And yet the musical language of Sclavis has become more and more individual with the years. That is reflected in not only his group projects, which at times resemble an abstraction from jazz and new music, but also in his solo performing. With Jean-Marc Montera from Marseilles, the co-founder of a cooperative of improvising musicians and also himself a guitarist involved in multi-media, Sclavis meets a wayward sound sorcerer, who lets buzzing tones, noise and sound tapes swarm through the room. To want to understand Matthew Shipp, a whiz kid pianist with black roots in the music of John Coltrane and Sun Ra, as a counterpoint could lead to a false conclusion. In Shipp's solo performance, namely, one hears an equal proximity or rather distance to Cecil Taylor as to Bill Evans, as well as one knows how to pick up sound traces and formal elements of European origin. Already fifteen years ago, at the time of its origin, the King Übü Örchestrü appeared to be an answer to the earlier improvising large formations like the Globe Unity Orchestra. In the alternation between playing newly raised questions and answers, the ensemble succeeds in its unmistakable orchestral language that forms itself within the process of improvising. With it, Wolfgang Fuchs composes to the individualities of the participating musicians. That which might remotely remind one of a method that comes from jazz manifests itself tonally as a jazz-distant "newness", as a radically improvised music equally conscious of form. But then concepts here in this program, as well as elsewhere, are only good insofar as they can be overcome. Towards sounding, towards music. Thus, in its 31st year, this event of FMP, referring from its individuals on to an entirety, is therefore simply called the Total Music Meeting. Translation: Bruce A. Carnevale from : Folder TMM 1998 |
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