People who attend concerts like this with the word ‘jazz’ in their heads are bound to experience discomfort, which will probably be rationalised in two ways: 1. ‘Is it jazz?’ (that’s a purely academic question); 2. ‘They’ve gone too far (that’s a disguised cry of despair). So it’s not jazz. But jazz is one of its sources, and a very important one because it was through jazz that improvisation was brought back into western music, and along with it a partial breakdown of traditional European musical procedures (like that ‘souring’ of western scales and harmonies that you get in blues, or the rhythmic tension in jazz when European metrical rhythm crosses with Alrican pulse-rhythm). In ‘free music’ (if that’s what it is to be called), jazz was an invaluable tool for attacking and uprooting the constricting formalities of ‘straight’ music, not to mention the academicism and snobbism which went with them. And it still retains that instantaneous conversion of individual energy into musical sound which is essential to any jazz worth listening to.
What the jazz enthusiast misses is those particular perversions of western musical structures resulting from their clash with tribal music
What that cultural specialist the ‘jazz enthusiast’ misses is all the formal procedures that his ear needs in order to place the sound within the category of jazz – those particular perversions of western musical structures resulting from their clash with tribal music. And historically, he can hear them being jettisoned one by one in the straight and clear logical progression through bebop, ‘new thing’, free jazz etc: jazz scales, repetition, tonality, song-forms, vertical structuring… all gone for a Burton. And in being no longer jazz, the music is also no longer black, white or grey American, but European or even English music. The pioneers of European free music came out of jazz: Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, etc – they all started as recognisable jazzmen. Indeed, some of them still adopt that role from time to time, if only in order to make a living. But the importance of this Wigmore Hall concert was that it proposed a second generation of free improvisors. It selected eleven (actually there were ten, Simon Mayo being off ill) of the younger musicians active in this field in London, and was meant as a definitive demonstration of the existence of this generation to a wider public than it normally attains. (Actually the wide public didn’t, as usual, turn up, but at least the gesture was made. It was a very rainy evening.) Most of these younger free musicians didn’t enter improvisation through jazz, but via classical music, rock, or quite often with no previous parentage but straight into total improvisation. The result of this is that the music no longer seems to be a distinct and specialised offshoot of jazz, but is a sphere of its own which is in a very active state of expansion and consolidation. A wide variety of musical experience can now be comprehended under the heading of ‘free improvisation’.
In showing this, the concert was more important theoretically than for the quality of the individual performances, for some of the players, perhaps overawed by the Wigmore Hall or the West End in general, didn’t seem to be at their best. There were four sets, each a very distinct musical environment.
Dave Solomon (percussion) and Herman Hauge (alto sax): This opening set plunged us straight into the high-energy concentrate of black free-jazz and Continental thunder-music. Solomon’s drumming walks a tightrope between a situation where it doesn’t matter if he misses a cymbal, and one where it does – i.e. between primary energy directly transmitted into sound, and energy mediated through technique. That uncertainty produced a tension which was exciting, if lacking in resolution.
The problems thus engendered were at times settled by recourse to a rather nostalgic ‘earthiness’, reinforced by Hauge’s rich, hoarse tone with occasional hints at familiar jazz licks. But Hauge too can build up a lot of force on his own account, and this was particularly evident in the way he wove in and out of the drum-thunder, letting himself be subsumed in it and then re-emerging with a flux of percussive blasts which were also quite tender as the bent notes followed sinuous curves in the air.
It has underneath it a serious reduction of art-activity to the mere presence of the artist, like sculptors who don’t sculpt, but just set up notices in a field saying ‘this is a sculpture’. At best it’s satire on the fetishism of high-status artistic activity
Steve Beresford (toy pianos, toys, objects, flowers etc), Nigel Coombes (violins), Terry Day (percussion, cello, mandolin, balloons, things), Roger Smith (guitars): This was quite a different matter, and a problematic one. Hush-hush, tinkle-plonk music, with much fooling around, dropping things etc. Very classical. The abandoning of formalities here reaches a stage of complete casualness where the musicians merely set up a sound-making, semi-musical situation, and potter around within it in case something interesting happens. Musical autonomy is made to include not playing as a musical activity. It’s humorous of course, but it has underneath it a serious reduction of art-activity to the mere presence of the artist, like sculptors who don’t sculpt, but just set up notices in a field saying ‘this is a sculpture’. At best it’s satire on the fetishism of high-status artistic activity. But the big problem is that the group is very difficult to listen to, because their visual presence is a distraction from the sounds they make. And this is a pity because musical felicities do emerge from it all, but the audience is likely to miss them because it is watching Steve Beresford inflate a plastic flower at the time or wondering whether Roger Smith is producing any sounds or not. Nigel Coombes’s weird, fragmented violin sounds tended to lift the group above the nihilism that threatened it, into a real exploratory musical language – not, I think, because it was the only one capable of it, but because only he chose to do it on this occasion. It became solo violin with scattered accompaniment. But the other three are all professionals of some standing in experimental music, and perhaps they’re improvisors who aren’t willing to persevere with their instruments and have been seduced by fashionable notions of avant-garde performance as such.
Peter Cusack (guitar), and Terry Day (percussion etc): Day, who did almost nothing for 30 minutes in the previous set, reappeared and performed brilliantly in this one. He was constantly alive to everything the guitar was doing and moved with impeccable virtuosity and at great speed among his various dead-sounding pieces of percussion and miscellaneous objects. Perhaps from his point of view he was regressing to old-fashioned ‘musical’ music; but from another viewpoint he was correcting a misjudgement as to the nature of music, which is a performing art, not an art of performance, and which is in its own terms an inexhaustible field. Cusack, who dominated, led the music through a processional sequence of mostly brief episodes, each one defined by a particular technical point on the instrument. His use of high amplification produces a very delicate spectrum of sound, which is also tough and vibrant, by his sure sense of time-tensions.
Roy Ashbury (percussion), John Russell (guitar), Garry Todd (tenor sax). Perhaps this group attained the most impressive synthesis of the possibilities open to improvised music at present. No nonsense, no nostalgia, no formalities – fast-moving, hard-driving mutual exploration into improvised sound. And they played not just for moment-to-moment effect, but all three working together through a coherently extended musical art. And that is the most difficult thing of all, to arrive at a music which fully occupies the time in which it takes place from beginning to end, maintaining interest not so much by dramatic changes in the flow, but by sustained projection of interlocking planes of sound. More than most of the others, they are musicians who insist on instrumental technique, mastery of the instrument. The power is not sentimentally projected into music by wilful self-abandon, nor is it mediated by formalities of technique, but the power is created by the technique. Power is created by knowledge. Ashbury’s (rather subdued on this occasion) knife-edge-accurate, quick-fire drumming; Russell’s sparkling and crashing electric-guitar thrusts as he battles with his amplifying equipment; Todd’s resounding, gritty tenor hoots, sputters and swoops – not just the presence of these static situations but the interplay of all three together, and that mutual mass moving enthusiastically along in transformed time: that is energy humanised.
