1994
WFM / Straßenbahndepot
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Once more unto the breach, filling the void between the style-categories with the sounds that don't fit (and never have), the music that is no longer the newest sound around (to quote the title of Jeanne Lee's earliest recording), but still perceived, when it is perceived at all, as "radical". There is a spikiness and intrasigence about free improvisation that has successfully kept the commercial music machine at bay in the quarter-century that the Workshop Freie Musik has existed. This music, in all its complex shades of texture and meaning, its tangled, tangential relationships to the "jazz" and/or "New Music" and/or for that matter - "folk" idioms, is not easily co-opted, despite periodic attempts (watch out, for example, for Charles Gayle's album with the post-punk/proto-grunge Henry Rollins Band, just announced in Billboard). Still the real work goes on and the word is passed along, the network of improvisers continuing to spread. Participants at this 26th Workshop illustrate, once again, the extent to which free improvisation has become a kind of international esperanto, with participants originating from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, Britain, Holland, Sweden, Italy, Croatia, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Korea, Japan. There are a lot of different dialects engaged here, but it is not hard to believe that it is essentially one language being spoken: on the stand, the players seem to understand one another - even if a few of them reject outright the nation of music as communication! Two groups and a solo performance each night, then. All the solo performers happen to be women, while the men cling to each other for support (the exception is the "co-educational" group Hickory).The socio-political message? Clearly that women improvisers have become more self sufficient over the years. In the first ten or fifteen years of the Workshop, it would have been difficult to find five women anywhere confident enough to play unaccompanied free music for an hour. (It is a big space to fill - ask Anthony Braxton, ask Barre Phillips). For a long time Irène Schweizer was out there by herself. In fact, Schweizer can claim seniority over any of the participants at this year's meeting. The Swiss pianist was present at the second Workshop Freie Musik in 1970. Of the current roll-call, Louis Moholo checked in 1973, Hans Reichel in 1974, Tristan Honsinger in 1976. Endurance is an index of sincerity, and to look back over the Workshop cast is to confirm that FMP's instinct for spotting the long distance artists has been acute. Irène, who was confirmed in her sense of vocation when experiencing Cecil Taylor live in Stuttgart in 1966 has been travelling her own path ever since. The occasion of her 50th birthday in1991 prompted Barry Guy to write a concerto for her, "Theoria", subsequently recorded with the London Jazz Composers Orchestra. Schweizer's music has stronger roots in jazz - from ragtime to post-free - than that of many of her European contemporaries. The energies of her playing and its rhythmic vitality have been appreciated by a wide cast of musicians, and she has had particularly close musical relationship with drummers - from Pierre Favre to Andrew Cyrille via Louis Moholo and Günter Sommer. French bassist - and occasional mezzosoprano - Joëlle Léandre has also been a frequent associate of Schweizers's; both have given some meaning to the notion of a feminist aesthetic in improvised music. Their musical backgrounds and motivations are quite different, however. Léandre arrives at improvisation via modern composition. Citing John Cage as her spiritual father, she is more inclined to "let sounds be sounds" than burden them with the weight of applied "self-expression" or emotion. Cage wrote music for her, as did Giacinto Scelsi; she has played under Boulez's direction in the Ensemble InterContemporain. Léandre has already had, then, a distinguished career in straight music, but the pull of improvisation takes her ever further from the interpreter's role. American singer, choreographer, poet Jeanne Lee wrote the book an the use of the voice in free jazz improvisation (which is but one of the many areas she explores); her contributions to the music of Archie Shepp, Gunter Hampel, Ran Blake, Marion Brown, Anthony Braxton, Andrew Cyrille, and many others prompting numerous vocalists around the world to utilize man's first instrument in imaginative ways. Lee's scat singing has followed lines first inscribed by the horn players, traced a path back to Africa, carried (unselfconscious) echoes of her studies of New Music, and built upon the advances of the jazz singers - especially Abbey Lincoln and Billie Holiday. Jim Hi Kim is from Korea and plays the komungo, a large-bodied six-string zither. She has studied the principles of Korean court music "based on Buddhism and Confucianism and the folk tradition centred in Shamanism". Kim elaborates: "I like the energy and meditation of court music. We are not expressing human feelings in our music. The outward signs aren't shown. It's very introspective. I don't emphasize the elaboration or ornamentation. I focus more on the energy inside. Jin Hi Kim, however, is more than a folklorist, she has applied lessons learned from traditional music to modern composition and improvisation. The impassive, contemplative aspects of Korean music can, in an improvised context, bring subtle new meaning to the notion of Cool. Kim's improvising partners over the last few years have included Evan Parker, George Lewis, Alvin Curran, Shelley Hirsch, Bill Frisell, Henry Kaiser, Elliot Sharp and many others. Her compositions have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, the Fidelio Trio, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the California E.A.R. Unit. If Jim Hi Kim' s music is intentionally distanced and reflective, pianist Elvira Plenar's is emotional in the extreme, seething and boiling with passions. Born in Zagreb but long a resident of Germany. Plenar - at least in the context of her own music - believes, with Cecil Taylor, that the purpose of playing is to lift the performer (and consequently the listener) out of ordinary consciousness. The intensity of this "free flow" music should serve a neo-ritualistic function, bringing the musician to the borders of trance. She is not, however, unbendingly didactic about this and has been willing to harness her considerable virtuosity to music less relentless in its aims, partnering Lindsay Cooper and Marilyn Mazur in their respective bands, for example, or working on theatre music with Alfred 23Harth. The group Das Hukepack, led by trombonist and electronics manipulator Jörg Huke attempts to live up to its motto: Electronic visions: on the way to new sounds. One of the goals is the blurring of the boundaries that separate electronic and acoustic music. Leader Huke born in the former East Germany, was a founder member of the boisterous collective Fun Horns, and is also on the staff of Pierre Dørge's Danish big band the New Jungle Orchestra. Clarinettist Claudio Puntin, who was born to an Italian family in Switzerland, studied contemporary music in Holland before freelancing with international jazz players including Hermeto Pascoal, Pierre Favre and Dave Liebman. Cellist Peter Koch lives and works as a freelance musician and painter in Dresden. Wolfgang Mitterer is from Austria and plays prepared piano and electronics. The composer of many pieces for ensembles, theatre and radio, he recently received a commission to write a work for five thousand singers, drummers, brass players, and loudspeakers ringed around a football field. Bob Rutman, eldest of the band by about thirty years, was born in Berlin but spent many years on the other side of the Atlantic, working as a painter and multi-media artist. In 1968 he began to develop his unique sound sculptures, above all the "steel-cello" which he plays in Das Hukepack. Rutman has worked with dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham and Theatre Of Visions playwright Robert Wilson amongst others. He founded his own steel-cello ensemble in 1984 and has toured the international music festivals with it. Rutman returned to live and work in Berlin in1989. The deliriously hyper-active cello of the expatriate American Tristan Honsinger has become such a familiar, even ubiquitous resource in the world of improvisation - from Derek Bailey's Company pool to freewheeling sessions with Cecil Taylor - that one can forget that Tristan is also a composer. He has written extensively for dance and theatre projects, for example. The present quintet was formed with the intention of bringing his parallel activities a little closer together: in it, compositions are transformed by being subjected to the processes of group improvisation. Honsinger originally projected the group as a standard-instrumentation string quartet, then brought in a double bass instead of viola and, finally, added trap drums. The instrumentation, then is as unprecedented as the blend of personalities within the group. Of the two violinists, Aleks Kolkowski is from London and Stefano Lunardi from Livorno, Italy. Kolkowski is an expert in medieval music, co-founder (with Honsinger and pianist Alex Maguire) of the music-theatre-group The Scoop, and a member of the Tony Oxley band. Lunardi is, perhaps surprisingly, a specialist in Celtic music: he worked for ten years (1973-83) with folk singer Veronique Chalot. Dutch bassist Ernst Glerum's development echoes Honsinger's in some respects. Conservatory trained and for awhile an interpreter of contemporary music, he said goodbye to all that after coming into contact while an interpreter of contemporary music, he said goodbye to all that after coming into contact with the richness of jazz. Eventually he was to come to an uncasy truce with composition - hence his presence in the Honsinger Quintet and the Amsterdam String Trio (which also argues out the dialectical relationship between the notated and the improvised). Honsinger's drummer should, as the cliché goes, need no introduction to Workshop audiences. The South African master drummer Louis Moholo has been a very important force in free jazz, free music and related stations over the last thirty years. His drive and power is legendary but he can also be a most subtle player, detailing the music with the most intricate lattice-work of cymbals, hi hat and snare. Swedish free music has been a well-kept secret for many years, perhaps because it seems, to have lacked a central defining characteristic. If we talk about German free jazz, English free music, or Dutch improvisation, sonic images immediately flood the imagination. Admittedly, the associations are not necessarily sophisticated but at least the provide us with a shorthand, and a frame of reference for discussing the many musicians who don't fit the stereotype. In Sweden, however, there seems to be no consensus on how the music should sound; in the long run this may be a good thing. The group Gus was formed in 1988. It seeks to have no group "style". For drummer Raymond Strid, improvisation should be "music as a total stream, without beginning or end", music that has no meaning outside of itself. It is clear enough, though that his partners have other ideas, Sten Sandell's recordings under his own name, such as the fascination "Music From A Waterhole", show a willingness to harness music of other traditions; he is plainly not a wholeheartedly "abstract" player (if that's not a contradiction in terms), but on the contrary one who is continually evaluating, drawing on more than his nervous system for inspiration. Mats Gustafsson is an energetic and enthusiastic reed player, undoubtedly influenced by Evan Parker, and one who already has the endorsement of players ranging from Joel Futterman to Paul Lovens, The interplay of conflicting aesthetic standpoints makes Gush an exciting, volatile band. It has recorded as a trio in Stockholm and also augmented by Workshop Freie Musik veteran Sven-Åke Johansson. The French soprano saxophonist Michel Doneda plays music of disarming originality in which the percussion of Lê Quan Ninh has had an increasingly important role to play in the last decade. Saxophonists find it particularly hard to get past the great role models of the free jazz era and earlier, but for Doneda this seems never to have been a problem. Limiting himself to the soprano he sounds nothing at all like its most celebrated proponents - Bechet, Lacy, Coltrane, Shorter, Parker - but goes his own curiously untroubled way. One French critic described him as "a folklorist of the future" which is apt: he often sounds as if he is sustained by some tradition we don't yet know about. Doneda has often been heard in tandem with fellow saxophonist Daunik Lazro, and at present is also a member of the Barre Phillips Trio. Lê Quan Ninh was born in Paris where he was schooled in contemporary music, he has a particular affection for the music of John Cage and has recorded much of it. Lê Quan Ninh first worked together with Doneda in a theatre group in Poland in 1986, and has been a member of the trio SOC from the beginning. Lê Quan's choice of accents and sounds is simultaneously, inscrutable and unerring: always surprising, always right. He understands about the use of silence; he has sufficient virtuosity not to need to flaunt it. New to the group is British bassist Paul Rogers who has played with every interesting musician in the UK. Rogers is a good team player in the way that Harry Miller once was, and has contributed usefully to the groups of, for example, Keith Tippett, Trevor Watts and Elton Dean/Howard Riley. Hickory is an appropriate name for the German-Canadian-Japanese trio of Hans Reichel, René Lussier and Ikue Mori, and makes one immediately think of Harry Partch's capsule autobiography: I am not an instrument builder, but a philosophical music man seduced into carpentry. Hans Reichel has been taking a fretsaw to good wood for many years in the same spirit. If one "hears" a sound and the instruments to play it do not exist, one has no choice but to take up tools, either to customize some existing instrument (Reichel has shown no mercy to the guitar) or to invent, from scratch a new sound-machine. In this sense Reichel radically personifies the spirit of improvisation; from a free music perspective his work is "radical" in its cheerful acceptance of an unconventional "beauty". There's an elegance about Reichel's music that can seem almost oriental. Though it comes out of the same crucible as German free jazz, it seems - sonically, texturally - to have little to do with it. Fellow guitarist René Lussier come to improvisation by a circuitous route. Starting out inspired by Johnny Winter, he went from the white blues to Zappa to McLaughlin then plunged backwards through the history of jazz. Since 1986 he has worked often with Fred Frith and contributed impressively to Heiner Goebbels "Hörstücke". Lussier is also one of the first players to have mastered the daxophone. Reichel's ingenious bowed-yet-string-less instrument. Fred Frith has described percussionist Ikue Mori as the only musician capable of doing something interesting with a drum machine. Mori wasn't any kind of a musician until she moved from Tokyo to New York in 1977 and, caught up in the do it yourself spirit of punk, began to play drum kit, forming the seminal No Wave group DNA with Arto Lindsay. By 1983 she was working regularly with improvisers, John Zorn and Wayne Horvitz amongst them. From 1985 onward, she turned her attention to drum machines, often operating three of them simultaneously to create surprisingly rich textures and poly-rhythms. from: Folder WFM 1994 |
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