All sorts of jazz, free jazz and improv. Never for money, always for love.
Licks, riffs, and gnarled, bronchial-purging hollers on alto sax; crippled
bass ostinatos; drumming that circles around and around recognizable patterns
of propulsion and accompaniment (ride cymbal action, press rolls); heavily
chordal piano style that nonetheless eschews conventional tonality: Return
of the New Thing makes music that, however spontaneously realized, relies
on repetition - internal and external.
The cooperative's very name establishes the musicians' individual and collective
responsibilities towards a very specific set of musical customs older than
perhaps some of the individuals participating in this group activity. Its
not enough to point out the historical irony of an "avant garde tradition",
to note how old, in real years, the "new thing" is. For this does
not answer the question of why the "new thing" continues to intrigue
musicians and appeal to (admittedly, quite small) audiences.
And I suppose the listener won't find any answers here unless they have
either a very strong sympathy for or a powerful antipathy against this music.
Myself, I remain unmoved from basic neutrality (which is not synonymous
with ambivalence, though it feels that way sometimes), though I have tried
over the course of several auditions of this recording to form a firm opinion
of the proceedings it documents: the title track - and longest work - is
a studio performance from 2002; the remaining four are drawn from an engagement
at the Festival Jazz á Mulhouse from 2000. There is no question that
these four musicians - François Fuchs on bass, Edward Perraud on
drums, Jean-Luc Guionnet on (primarily) alto and soprano saxophone, and
the always-eloquent Dan Warburton on piano (he does not make much use of
his violin in this ensemble) - are all technically adept, committed to their
chosen aesthetic, and well-matched in terms of their listening sensitivity.
But what these five pieces lack is a certain amount of character and context.
Perhaps I reveal here just how unimaginative a listener I am, but to me
the trope "new thing" resonates with a whole set of cultural and
historical connotations.
Unlike the French New Wave in cinema, the new thing was never about pure
style. To treat the music of Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Archie
Shepp, and the first generation of European "free jazz" players
(Peter Brötzmann, Marcello Melis, Chris McGregor) as such is to bowdlerize
that music. So that in gazing backwards as this music, the players open
themselves not just to inspiration, but to danger as well. Huh? Well, the
2000 pieces are more distinctively "out" and yet more conventional
in terms of what going on in improvised today.
As Warburton himself discloses (confesses?) in his annotations to this release,
the band does somehow split the difference between "free jazz"
and "free improvisation". Passages of Art Ensemble of Chicago-like
hushed sound experimentation, oafish figures maneuvering tiny, delicate
objects of silver and porcelain around in a room whose brilliant lighting
is silence. The tension is not without its comic aspects. Not so suddenly,
"energy music" tumult is unleashed, but it does not manage to
reach a status of "startling". "Scent" a good example:
there are passages that sound almost modal, melismatic muezzin-cries on
soprano sax, the slowly accretion of forward momentum, but for much of its
length it's a discharge of noises that jostle and scrape against one another
but remain largely inert. Susurration; tap; rattle; chime; thump; squink;
klonk; howl; etc.
Looking back over the performance's expanses from a retrospective vantage,
one sees how sectional, even episodic it is. It could have been seven or
eight different performances as easily as it could have been one. This is
not to say that it lacks some unity, but that a certain amount of arbitrariness
is built into the processes by which it was made. One cannot disavow linear
story-telling techniques, however, and expect to retain the exact dramatic
potential that old-fashioned exposition-conflict-complication-climax-resolution-denouement
narrative produces. Yet it seems to me sometimes as if inherent in much
strictly non-idiomatic free improvisation, from the Maneri's to AMM, is
the desire to retain precisely this kind of dynamic but without having to
sully itself with the oh-so-square and obvious means by which it is most
easily achieved.
So that, though we've heard it all before in some wise, attitudinally, even
philosophically, there's something more risky about the tenor sax excoriations
of a Charles Gayle or the sheer megatonnage of Borbetomagus, which deny
any sort of arc. There is nothing but drive, unforgivingly starting on high
and never wavering. To paraphrase Nigel Tufnel, there's no moving back and
forth between one and ten, with all the drama that implies. There's only
setting it at eleven and leaving it there. No anticipation, no nuance, no
lesson (but perhaps a caution). Even Archie Shepp's massive 60's medleys,
which "Scent" superficially resembles, powerfully enact this fascination
with only one connotation of "extreme". This is further born out
by the studio / title track - the operative metaphor for this release, despite
other compositions entitled "Trictrac" and "Babil",
is not locomotion, but inhibitions - which is pure energy music, quite dense,
with Warburton especially impressive, creating truly inspired chromatic
sequences at a number of junctures during the performance.
But the moment the music lets up, pauses, becomes an expression of what
Warburton describes as "playing against an opponent… [and not]
play[ing] with someone," the music feels calculated. I wonder never
characterize it as disingenuous, mind you, but the music does sometime seem
to substitute over-analysis for the supple interplay of reflexes.
Maybe the distinction Warburton draws between "free jazz" and
"free improvisation" is not so useful after all. Or the line just
masks a deep, unbridgeable chasm. The group cannot seem to occupy both territories
at once. Perhaps we can attribute this to the "classic" horn-plus-rhythm-section
instrumentation, or to the constrictions of an overarching conceptual ulteriority.
To answer a question you may be waiting to have acknowledged by a "reviewer":
yes, this is a "good" CD. In a number of ways, it is a superb
CD, spacious and tuneful in ways "energy music", with its 120
fps [frames per second], jagged abstraction often is not. But what this
CD also proves is that, as is only fitting for the times in which we live,
it is much easier to reference a tradition than it is to honor it, extend
it, found a new tradition upon that which it is comforting to call old.
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