Steve Lake (1988)Free Improvisation? Free it from what? It’s a well-thumbed story, but bear with me a moment…: The anecdote still has its merits as analogy. It helps to throw some light on the suspicion with which the standard-bearers of Composition (still) look upon practitioners of improvised music. Most of the animosity boils down to envy. Having volunteered for one of the more laborious jobs in the universe (writing out an orchestral score is less fun even than being a copy typist) composers resent the fact that improvisers make-it-up-as-the-go-along. Improvisers, in return, reject the outdated notion of the composer as Great Man and Authority and question the master/servant relationship that composition imposes upon the performing musician in thrall to those little black dots. But listeners, if I may speak on behalf of this silent minority, couldn’t really care less about any of the foregoing. Derek Bailey’s book “Improvisation”, I think (no longer have a copy in the house; lent it to a musician; always a mistake) insisted that improvisation is an art form without an end product. We listeners, surrounded by shelves of records of improvised music, have never believed this. To a record collector, forty minutes of, say, Brötzmann and Bennink frolicking in the Black Forest seem exactly as fixed and final as forty minutes of the mathematical syncopations of Steve Reich’s musical cogs and pistons. Keep on playing either record and, reassuringly, it stays the same. This is actually acknowledged in the small print of every improviser’s LP where you can read “all compositions by…” An antipathy to the compositional process never yet made an improviser reject any publishing royalties. And besides, what is a composition but a frozen improvisation anyway? Every piece of music in the history of the world began life as an improvisation. In the concert hall, the performer’s social philosophies will not often obsess the listener. Customers, we pay our entrance fee (some of us, anyway) and ask to be amazed. The mechanics involved – score or no score – are somebody else’s problem. Acrobatics performed without a safety net are not automatically more astonishing than if the net is there, it’s just a messier business if somebody falls on his face. Inside a specific time frame – doors open 8 o’clock – musicians do their best to bring a performance to a result, by whatever means at their disposal. As Gertrude Stein said, a gig is a gig is a gig. Material or no material? It’s merely a matter of definitions. None of us would be interested in a musician without material, in fact, is not a musician. The interpretive musician has his score. The improviser has his “vocabulary”. When improvisers talk of “building a vocabulary” (and they invariably do) they are acknowledging that their music proceeds according to a methodology that has its own signposts, gestures, formulae and even, perish the thought, rules. By now, free music is an idiom, not one style but a complex multiple of many styles, of vocabularies, of languages. Some of those languages might seem so recondite as to be almost private but anybody who cares to investigate closely enough will find that they cohere, each or it, own terms. Our improvising men and women are not, or not always, working in the dark or talking in tongues. If free music was one a kind of primal scream therapy for some of its practitioners, this is no longer the case. They are concerned, increasingly, with the ordering of material to find ways in which their personal ways of making music can find mutual accommodation. Increasingly, this has meant the imposing of some kind of structure upon group improvisation. In the 60s and 70s one often heard it said that group improvisation was difficult in a trio, fiendishly difficult in a quartet and outside the bounds of possibility for larger ensembles. The best of the bigger bands, such as the Globe Unity Orchestra were notoriously inconsistent when playing completely “free” programmes. For all of the claims that rival aleatoric music made for our multi-attentive listening capabilities, a dozen or so improvisers in full flood simultaneously very often made very muddy music, much as all the colors on a painter’s palette aspire towards a kind of dustbin grey-brown. And if bigger groups tried to avoid these murky quagmires they ran the risk of compromising their individual musical identities, as a tendency toward timidness or over-politeness began to take over (“After you, sir! No, no – after you!”). Some of the best energies in free improvisation were devoted to dangerous living, both on and off the stage. It was hard to be cautiously caring and melodramatically swashbuckling at the same time. The route around this paradox: more written material, more structure. Anarchists were being asked to develop a healthy passion for order. This is not quite as contradictory as it at first appears. The beauty of improvisation is that the musical systems developed by many of the players are near-untranscribable. Evan Parker’s atomization of the soprano sax’s tone, the hyperactivity of Tristan Honsinger’s cello, the shockwaves induced by Han Bennink’s larger-than-life gestures – this list could go on and on – are examples of a non-transferable idiosyncratic virtuosity. Each musician represents a musical resource; he (or she of course) is a chapter in the history of improvised music, a link in the chain. EverySingle One Of Us Is A Pearl, as a Globe Unity title had it. At this point, each player carries his repository of information with him. To date, there’s no computer, no sampler that can do what Brötzmann or Peter Kowald does. A composer who wants to utilize the textures and sounds that are unique to free improvisation has to go to the musicians for them. Penderecki has, so has Hans Werner Henze. One distinctive sub trend of creative music in the 1980s has been the setting up of systems within which improvisers can “be themselves”, frameworks to showcase what they can do. And who better to establish such systems than the improvisers themselves? The notion seems at first to go against the old arguments (“form is out, content makes its own form” etc. etc.) but it’s really a pragmatic compromise in the interests of hearing, and being able to hear, what the players can achieve. The examples of Butch Morris and John Zorn as composer/conductors point towards new directions. If experience has proved that large groups rarely achieve homogeneity and that the detail in individual styles is swapped in the attempt. Zorn and Morris have proposed a faster moving sound-world built up of tiny incidents, swirling, constantly changing. On cue, the improvisers rattle off solos, duos, trios that flash past almost like subliminal adverts. It is collage art, a cut-and-paste pointillism that hopes its patchwork effects will finally be reconciled in a single image. Meanwhile, its episodic nature is glossed over with titles that suggest the broadest focus, like “Current Trends in Racism in Modern America”. By and large, critics love this fast-moving stuff, but pockets of dissent also begin to the heard. Do these storms of images and ideas add up to more than a three ring variety show??? How different is the net effect from a disconsolate evening in front of the TV, punching buttons and jumping channels in a last ditch attempt to ward off ennui??? Anyway, we can be glad that there are a few artists whose work endures outside of any historical trends and is a law unto itself. Cecil Taylor once said “we are all period musicians”, but this observation seems less true of him than virtually anyone else one could name. Radical from his emergence and as far from the jazz mainstream as from the conservatory’s concept of good taste, his impact on European improvisation has been especially profound. Cecil Taylor’s Berlin concerts and workshops are unlikely to find him making many concessions to the modi operandi of local improvisers (concessions of any kind don’t seem to figure in his way of looking at the world) but, well, he needn’t. In his capacity as inspiration to every musician featured in these Berlin events, he instilled some of his musical thought in them at a formative stage, long before they could ever have contemplated the possibilities of laying together. So much of European free playing has derived from the ground breaking example of recordings like Taylor’s “Café Montmartre” sessions that, in a sense, any collaboration is just bringing it all back home. Improvisation is a provisional Esperanto now. The band Dutch bassist Maarten Altena is bringing here also includes musicians from Finland, Austria, France and England. We’ve gone beyond the time when anybody could talk with any coherence of national stylistic identities. The German school, the Dutch school and so on. (Where these terms every more than the convenience labels of journalists?) But however universal the form becomes, however close we can get to old dreams of “world music”, the best players will not forget where this music comes from. I find it encouraging that Cecil Taylor is prepared to play with European musicians. I also feel that the old soldiers of European improvisation have earned the honour. By now, the relationship is close to symbiotic. Taylor and his contemporaries invented and developed free jazz, yes. And Europe nurtured it (exploited it, some say). Without European cultural support of gigs, listeners, record labels and so on and without a wave of European improvisers to propagate the message, “energy music” would just be a footnote in jazz history, an uncommercial aberration of the 1960s. It’s still not exactly a license to print money, but the people who play improvised music show no signs of going away. Maybe because, as Brötzmann says, “we don’t know how to do anything else”. But Cecil Taylor put it better in an interview with J.B. Figi: “I think the larger responsibility is now to let as many people hear us as possible…There’s a kind of development that goes on that is beyond the power of words to describe: the pleasure at seeing the music grow. from: Booklet „improvised music“, Free Music Production (FMP), 1988 |