1999 TMM / "Podewil"

Fredi Bosshard (1999)

Cecil Taylor is a musical builder of bridges. Bridges which open up new connections, make development possible, network a highly compIex system and, in so doing, work against musical simplification. After a concert in Zurich, in December 1990, where the Fee! Trio with William Parker and Tony OxIey was the musical centre point - a trio for which we must, finally, thank the Free Music Production activities on behalf of the pianist in 1988 in Berlin - Cecil Taylor talked a lot about bridges. He compared his concert to building a bridge. Even before the start it has to be clear where the path is supposed to lead and where the bridge is supposed to be built so that it can continue. Even if - just like in a concert - building is started on various sides at the same time and there is a chasm below. Improvised music is always, at the same time, also a dance above this chasm where one works intensively on the slightly fugitive nature of the music and which, naturally, carries with it the risk of tripping up.

In Zurich, Cecil Taylor showed a photo album with bridges from the Alps, he was fascinated by the elegant railway constructions which allow access to the most remote mountain valleys. Nine years later, in May of this year, he passed over some of these bridges in order to take part in the "Uncool-Festival" in Puschlav - one of these remote and wonderful valleys on the border with Italy - in a marquee on the banks of Lago Poschiavo, to make the final statement on each of the three days of the festival which featured the pianist who has just reached the age of 70. Twice he did this with his European Quintet and once solo - and always with this furious intensity. It was a crystal-cIear structured music the Taylor spaceship floated into the equalIy crystal-cIear night of the Poschiavo valley together with the two Finnish players Harri Sjöström (Saxophone) and Teppo Hauta-Aho (Bass), the extraordinary Paul Lovens - an early FMP protagonist - and the no less impressive ceIlo player Tristan Honsinger (who, over here, is regarded as an un-American American). Apart from the festival audience which had traveIled from far and wide, there were also quite a number of unbiased valley inhabitants who were confronted with this kind of music for the first time and who were left fascinated. When Cecil Taylor puts together a new quartet for the Total Music Meeting '99, again with Tristan Honsinger, joined by a new face, guitarist Franky Douglas, and Andrew Cyrille behind the drums with whom he shares a common history from "Unit Structures" and "Conquistador - the legendary recordings for Blue Note in 1966 - to "Spring Of Two Blue-J's" and "Akisakila" from 1973, the yam will be spun further and the dance without a safety net or trap door continues.

Both percussionist Tony OxIey and bass player William Parker, the two other members of the Feel Trio, present their current groups. Tony OxIey is one of the pioneers in using simpIe electronics to broaden the sound spectrum of his instrument. AIready at the end of the sixties, he began to amplify various parts of his percussion armoury, integrated small motors, kitchen machines and the like into his playing. His first two LPs "The Baptised TraveIler" (1969) and "Four Compositions for Sextet have just been re-released by Sony on CD in the series "8 Great British jazz albums from the late 60s & early 70s". These rare early recordings with Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Kenny Wheeler, Paul Rutherford and Jeff Clyne document how much was aIready laid out conceptionally at that time. Within the framework of the TMM '99 Tony OxIey presents his quartet including Phil Wachsmann, Matt Wand and Pat Thomas, musicians for whom the most varied electronic components used to generate sounds have become part of everyday life. It is a distilIation from his Celebration Orchestra whose performance at the Berlin Jazz Festival! in 1994 is documented on the CD "The Enchanted Messenger" (Soul Note). For the pianist Pat Thomas, living in Oxford, his "Monkish Soul" has shifted more and more into the area of ingenious collage. With the help of extremeIy cheap eIectronics, of the weIl-aimed addition of cassettes and the like he succeeds in bringing together unexpected and amusing musical colours and textures. Mat Wand from Manchester has one foot in the worId of DJ'ing. With the group Stock, Hausen & Walkman he sails hard with the wind between free improvisation and experimental, electronically edited music with an affinity for Easy Listening. The violinist and electronics specialist Phil Wachsmann is one of Tony OxIey's early traveIling companions. On his LP "February Papers. (Incus 18) from 1977 you can even hear to both of them on violin. With the support of electronics Phil Wachsmann becomes the sensitively and unobtrusiveIy acting "string section".

"Other Dimensions in Music", the New York bass player William Parker calls a project which he has been pursuing together with three other musicians for nearly fifteen years. It presents, so to speak, the counterpart to the group in Order To Survive, with whom he played as guest last year, at the "30. Workshop Freie Musik" in Berlin, published as live recording by FMP - in its thirtiest year. The CD "Posium Pendasern demonstrates, once more, how multi-facetted "the loudest bass player" as Peter Kowald put it - and he would know - can deal with music. Kowald wrote this in the informative liner notes for the CD titIed "Kleine Hommage an grosse Töne: William Parker and sein Bass und seine Gruppe(n)/A small homage to a big sound: William Parker and his bass and his group(s)". In the early eighties William Parker, together with Rashid Bakr, formed the backbone of many a formation of Cecil Taylor. Together with the trumpet player Roy CampbeIl they toured with the Jemeel Moondoc Quartet and trans-mutated to Other Dimensions in Music with the saxophone player Daniel Carter who also plays trumpet. The latter, by the way, can be heard regularly with the group Test in the Astor-Place subway station in Manhattan's Lower East Side - a reality still in 1999 and not an anecdote from the early days of Free Jazz.

"It was only a short step from belief to vision, from vision to reality a jump into the East River. Even though very short, his life is representative and his death, above all, not an entirely unusual testimony to the everyday depression a player of un-saleable music - as his friend and co-fighter CharIes Tyler put it - is subject to in the USA and particularly in New York", Peter Brötzmann writes - one of the musicians I remember simultaneously along with the acronym FMP - in the liner notes of the CD "Die Like A Dog - Fragments Of Music, Life and Death Of Albert Ayler". Out of this production, intended as a homage to the great tenor player, a band has developed, in the shortest possibIe time, which makes just as much sense as Last Exit did in 1986 (Brötzmann, Sonny Sharrock, Bill LasweIl, Shannon Jackson). Die Like a Dog goes beyond Ayler and still remains indebted to his spirituality, they sound bold and rebeIlious, thus having everything you can expect to get from music. We meet William Parker again, here, and when the trumpet player Toshinori Kondo, commuting between Amsterdam and Tokyo, with his "jet-black [electronic] box of tricks" is not available, the so-called "unplugged" version with Roy Campbell is called forth (see Die Like A Dog Quartet, "From Valley to Valley", Eremite, 1998). The percussionist Hamid Drake from Chicago is a just as colourful a character as is Toshinori Kondo. He was to be seen in the wider circle of the A.A.C.M. (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) since the late seventies and played in the quintet of the tenor saxophone player Fred Anderson who became his mentor, as weIl as in Reggae bands and in the Madingo Griot Society. In the mean time he has become one of the core integrationists in Chicago and the connecting link between the black and the white scenes. "LittIe Birds Have Fast Hearts" - but not only they!

Hans Reichel and Rüdiger Carl have known each other since the times of "Buben". Their musical development is tightly associated with that of FMP, and thus the major part of their documented music is published on this label. The guitarist and 'sound tinker' Hans Reichel is also the inventor and most adept player of the daxophone which is, in the mean time, played by a whole number of other guitarists from Canada to Japan - but none as virtuosic as he. Now he has put together a quartet with Rüdiger Carl, the Korean Komungo player Jin Hi Kim, living in the USA (Komungo - a six-string Korean "Zither") and the violin player Carlos Zingaro from Lisbon which is also a formation that has slowly grown over the years and through the various encounters at various nodal points of free improvisation. Hans Reichel met Jin Hi Kim in 1993 in Berlin during the Workshop Freie Music resulting in a subtle duo. Since the beginning of the nineties, Rüdiger Carl and Carlos Zingaro are linked to the bass player Joëlle Léandre in the Canvas Trio. Then, recently, Hans Reichel, who has just been awarded the 'Sparkasse Award' in Wuppertal, couId be heard together with Jin Hi Kim and Rüdiger. It is a closely bound characteristic of this music that so often geography plays no role, it is only the musical idea behind it which counts.

The English guitar player Derek Bailey writes in "Improvisation - Kunst ohne Werk" (Wolke Verlag, Hofheim, 1987)/ "lmprovisation - its nature and practice in music" (The British Library National Sound Archive, London, 1992): "But ultimately the greatest rewards in free improvisation are to be gained in playing with other people. Whatever the advantages to solo playing there is a whole side to improvisation; the more exciting, the more magical side, which can only be discovered by people playing together. The essence of improvisation, its intuitive, telepathic foundation, is best explored in a group situation. And the possible musical dimensions of group playing far outstrip those of solo playing."

At the TMM '99, solo playing only takes place in the group context but on three of the days the most intimate form of musical interaction is sIotted in between the two sets of each of the quartets, the duo. This year there are saxophone-bass and saxophone-ceIlo combinations respectiveIy. In the case of Paul Dunmall and Paul Rogers this is a combination which has been going for quite a while, as a duo and as pad of Keith Tippett's Mujician. Their CD "Folks" (Siam, 1989), recorded 10 years ago, had chamber music-like qualities and a tendency towards imaginary folklore in the English vein. John Butcher, one of the most single-minded, hard-edged and creative sound architects of the soprano and tenor saxophones, meets bass player John Edwards who comes from the hardcore group God and B-Shops For The Poor, but more recently can be heard increasingIy in the circles of Evan Parker, Eddie Prevost and Veryan Weston. Gregor Hotz is a Swiss living in Berlin who commutes between bass saxophone, soprano and alto clarinet. He joins with the ceIlo player Nicholas Bussmann who I only know from the group "Ich schwitze nie" and their CD "Träume der Sehnsucht - Lockender Rhythmus" (Manifotture Criminali, 1996). He has recorded the six piece "Suite For SIow Dancers" on FMP with Gregor Hotz in 1997 which has been released this summer. It is a restrained, almost meditation-like different type of dream of desire from two musicians of the next generation.

You cannot argue about the program of the Total Music Meeting '99 - it is improvised Music - and the participating musicians as weIl as the promoter, Free Music Production, are far too honest to dress this up with a more stream-lined or more modern wrapping - and for this, thanks to them alI. ExpIoration of the moment at the TMM deserves more attention than the reproduction of 'always the same old thing' which is so often celebrated as a success. Let the collective writing in water continue - quoting a record little of Phil Wachsmann ("Writing in Water", Bead, 1984) or, as William Parker puts it, "The music called Jazz is less than a hundred years old - too young to repeat itself''. Walking along the tracks of this music is fun, maybe exactly because the paths are narrow and the fragile meetings often take place away from the big highways. They are part of a musical network which allows you to travel around the world - in reality and not only virtually. The concert remains the central focus and thus the immediacy of expression, encounter and experience.

Translator: Unknown

from: Leaflet TMM 1999

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