Derek Bailey/Steve Noble

Out of the Past
Ping Pong 004

Michael Wertmüller/Olaf Rupp

The Specter of Genius

Jazzwerkstatt JW 052

Except in the most primitive form of blues or so-called roots music, the unadorned sounds of guitar and drum together aren’t usually considered polyphonic enough to be anything more than Spartan. Yet, as he did with so many other musical conventions during his life, British guitarist Derek Bailey (1930-2005) defied this one as well.

The 12 tracks from this never-before issued 1999 session with inventive London drummer Steve Noble are jam-packed with sonic textures and impressions radiating only from the multi-faceted operation of Bailey electric guitar and Noble’s drum kit and additional cymbals. Instructively as well, with sessions like this extant, the configuration has lost its strangeness. On The Specter of Genius, for instance, – with no indication of who is the genius – two Berlin-based players whose influences encompass Punk Rock and Heavy Metal as well as Free Improv and contemporary notated music offer their variations on this theme. Recorded about a decade after the Noble-Bailey meeting, the improvisations by self-taught guitarist Olaf Rupp and drummer Michael Wertmüller, who studied music intensively in Berne and Amsterdam, differ from the other CD due to the drummer’s larger kit and Rupp’s use of both acoustic and electric guitars.

When Out of the Past was recorded, Noble had been associated with Bailey for at least a decade and knew how best to play alongside him. Moreover his other affiliations –including membership in Rip, Rag and Panic, study with a Nigerian master drummer, and experience in bands with other self-directed players such as reedist Lol Coxhill and cellist Tristan Honsinger – gave him other resources to call on when faced with Bailey’s inimitable but often overbearing style.

On “Motion” for instance the guitarist’s distanced, clanging flat picking eventually leads to slurred and splayed note chiming. In response Noble’s flams and rebounds swell to encompass extra beats from his snares, wobbly, glass tube-referencing pings and showers of cymbal pressure. “Breakaway” on the other hand showcases cymbals clattering and triangle chiming as Bailey’s guitar quivers with trebly reverb and squealed notes. As the guitarist’s slammed and scrubbed licks dissolve into wobbly finger-picking, Noble turns from popping and banging parts of his kit with sticks to rubbing drum tops with his palms. Afterwards a wavering timbre hangs in the air, un-attributed to either instrument.

Bailey’s other strategies encompass tropes as different as stroking harsh arpeggios from the strings below the guitar’s bridge and creating dense strums so quick and staccato that they take on band-saw-like properties. Therefore Noble’s sharp-witted ripostes or sonic foreshadowing include Native-American tom-tom resonations, cross-sticking jazz-like snare and cymbal beats, and slapping unattached cymbals in such a way that the resulting wobbles resemble those of a cuckoo clock.

Interestingly enough, “7 Shades”, the final track, not only sums up the duet work, but further elucidates the Noble-Bailey tactics. First distanced, near-silent reverberating scratches from Bailey finally coalesce into chiming runs and then distorted slurs. Noble paradiddles, backbeats and sounds loud press rolls in military fashion. These are met by hammered slack tones from Bailey’s guitar that grimly distance each stroke from the next. Pulling rhythms together for the finale, Noble highlights engaged and contrapuntal doubled pops and press rolls.

If harsh strumming was one of Bailey’s many improvisational tactics, then Rupp glories in the astringent friction he can wring from both of his guitars using rasgueados, arpeggios, tremolos and picados. Rupp, who often plays his guitar in an upright position for a firmer attack, glories in the cluster of granular effects he can produce. Someone who has played with Coxhill and synthesizer player Thomas Lehn among others, he’s matched in linear power and broken-octave harshness by Wertmüller, who composes computer-assisted scores as well as drums for such outfits as the organ-heavy Steamboat Switzerland and a trio with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, who practically defines balls-to-the-wall improvising.

With tension-filled tones predominating, the duo work here is denser, more frenetic and voluble than that of Bailey and Noble. Not only that, but Rupp probably outputs more notes on this CD’s first track than Bailey sounds in all of Out of the Past. Amazingly as well, on many tunes the fortissimo and rasgueado extensions that define the guitarist’s output are pummeled from acoustic guitar strings.

To match the guitarist’s constant rubbing and slurred fingering, Wertmüller adds shimmering cymbal movements, boisterous press rolls and a percussion formula which constantly erupts into flams, drags and ruffs. On “A_5” for instance, as concentrated strums from Rupp expose his strings underlying textures and tessitura, the guitarist’s playing becomes so unrestrained that his licks snap past the pick guard to hit other parts of the guitar’s strings and body. To keep up, the drummer whacks, strokes and never slackens his chromatic percussive motion. Wertmüller’s opposite sticking and strokes erupt into near-Heavy Metal pulsations on “A_7”, appending a thunderstorm of cymbal strokes alternating with off beat bops and rolls. Rupp’s rapid downward running picados move beyond flamenco here, attaining a crescendo and then ceasing.

Distortion and reverb are some of the few additions to this muscular interface when Rupp uses his electric guitar. His echoing surfaces on “E_2” are so fortissimo and speedy, for example, that the textures that the drummer slams from his kit are regularized to such an extent that they could be coming form a drum machine.

Droning techo-flutters and Jimi Hendrix-like flanges abound on “E_4”, the most characteristic electric-guitar duet. Here the nearly opaque distortion and manically tremolo twanging are breached by the drummer smacking the metallic parts of his snares and toms while adding paradiddles, backbeats and rolls.

Dense and sturdy to an extreme, the sounds produced by the younger Germans wouldn’t be possible without the stripped down improvisational freedom propagated by earlier players such as the British ones here.

-- Kane Waxman

Track Listing: Out: 1. The Long Wait 2. Four for 4 3. Breakaway 4. Raw 5. Unfiltered 6. Motion 7. Out of Sight 8. Bright Moments 9. Pick Up (10. Decoy 11. Time Regained 12. 7 shades

Personnel: Out: Derek Bailey (guitar) and Steve Noble (drums and cymbals)

Track Listing: Specter: 1. A_1 2. E_1 3. A_2 4. E_2 5. E_3 6. A_3 7. A_4 8. E_4 9. A_5 10. A_6 11. E_5 12. A_7 13. E_6 14. A_8 15. A_9 16. A_1 0

Personnel: Specter: Olaf Rupp (electric [E] or acoustic [A] guitar) and Michael Wertmüller (drums)

January 21, 2010

Michael Wertmüller/Olaf Rupp

The Specter of Genius
Jazzwerkstatt JW 052

Derek Bailey/Steve Noble

Out of the Past

Ping Pong 004

Except in the most primitive form of blues or so-called roots music, the unadorned sounds of guitar and drum together aren’t usually considered polyphonic enough to be anything more than Spartan. Yet, as he did with so many other musical conventions during his life, British guitarist Derek Bailey (1930-2005) defied this one as well.

The 12 tracks from this never-before issued 1999 session with inventive London drummer Steve Noble are jam-packed with sonic textures and impressions radiating only from the multi-faceted operation of Bailey electric guitar and Noble’s drum kit and additional cymbals. Instructively as well, with sessions like this extant, the configuration has lost its strangeness. On The Specter of Genius, for instance, – with no indication of who is the genius – two Berlin-based players whose influences encompass Punk Rock and Heavy Metal as well as Free Improv and contemporary notated music offer their variations on this theme. Recorded about a decade after the Noble-Bailey meeting, the improvisations by self-taught guitarist Olaf Rupp and drummer Michael Wertmüller, who studied music intensively in Berne and Amsterdam, differ from the other CD due to the drummer’s larger kit and Rupp’s use of both acoustic and electric guitars.

When Out of the Past was recorded, Noble had been associated with Bailey for at least a decade and knew how best to play alongside him. Moreover his other affiliations –including membership in Rip, Rag and Panic, study with a Nigerian master drummer, and experience in bands with other self-directed players such as reedist Lol Coxhill and cellist Tristan Honsinger – gave him other resources to call on when faced with Bailey’s inimitable but often overbearing style.

On “Motion” for instance the guitarist’s distanced, clanging flat picking eventually leads to slurred and splayed note chiming. In response Noble’s flams and rebounds swell to encompass extra beats from his snares, wobbly, glass tube-referencing pings and showers of cymbal pressure. “Breakaway” on the other hand showcases cymbals clattering and triangle chiming as Bailey’s guitar quivers with trebly reverb and squealed notes. As the guitarist’s slammed and scrubbed licks dissolve into wobbly finger-picking, Noble turns from popping and banging parts of his kit with sticks to rubbing drum tops with his palms. Afterwards a wavering timbre hangs in the air, un-attributed to either instrument.

Bailey’s other strategies encompass tropes as different as stroking harsh arpeggios from the strings below the guitar’s bridge and creating dense strums so quick and staccato that they take on band-saw-like properties. Therefore Noble’s sharp-witted ripostes or sonic foreshadowing include Native-American tom-tom resonations, cross-sticking jazz-like snare and cymbal beats, and slapping unattached cymbals in such a way that the resulting wobbles resemble those of a cuckoo clock.

Interestingly enough, “7 Shades”, the final track, not only sums up the duet work, but further elucidates the Noble-Bailey tactics. First distanced, near-silent reverberating scratches from Bailey finally coalesce into chiming runs and then distorted slurs. Noble paradiddles, backbeats and sounds loud press rolls in military fashion. These are met by hammered slack tones from Bailey’s guitar that grimly distance each stroke from the next. Pulling rhythms together for the finale, Noble highlights engaged and contrapuntal doubled pops and press rolls.

If harsh strumming was one of Bailey’s many improvisational tactics, then Rupp glories in the astringent friction he can wring from both of his guitars using rasgueados, arpeggios, tremolos and picados. Rupp, who often plays his guitar in an upright position for a firmer attack, glories in the cluster of granular effects he can produce. Someone who has played with Coxhill and synthesizer player Thomas Lehn among others, he’s matched in linear power and broken-octave harshness by Wertmüller, who composes computer-assisted scores as well as drums for such outfits as the organ-heavy Steamboat Switzerland and a trio with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, who practically defines balls-to-the-wall improvising.

With tension-filled tones predominating, the duo work here is denser, more frenetic and voluble than that of Bailey and Noble. Not only that, but Rupp probably outputs more notes on this CD’s first track than Bailey sounds in all of Out of the Past. Amazingly as well, on many tunes the fortissimo and rasgueado extensions that define the guitarist’s output are pummeled from acoustic guitar strings.

To match the guitarist’s constant rubbing and slurred fingering, Wertmüller adds shimmering cymbal movements, boisterous press rolls and a percussion formula which constantly erupts into flams, drags and ruffs. On “A_5” for instance, as concentrated strums from Rupp expose his strings underlying textures and tessitura, the guitarist’s playing becomes so unrestrained that his licks snap past the pick guard to hit other parts of the guitar’s strings and body. To keep up, the drummer whacks, strokes and never slackens his chromatic percussive motion. Wertmüller’s opposite sticking and strokes erupt into near-Heavy Metal pulsations on “A_7”, appending a thunderstorm of cymbal strokes alternating with off beat bops and rolls. Rupp’s rapid downward running picados move beyond flamenco here, attaining a crescendo and then ceasing.

Distortion and reverb are some of the few additions to this muscular interface when Rupp uses his electric guitar. His echoing surfaces on “E_2” are so fortissimo and speedy, for example, that the textures that the drummer slams from his kit are regularized to such an extent that they could be coming form a drum machine.

Droning techo-flutters and Jimi Hendrix-like flanges abound on “E_4”, the most characteristic electric-guitar duet. Here the nearly opaque distortion and manically tremolo twanging are breached by the drummer smacking the metallic parts of his snares and toms while adding paradiddles, backbeats and rolls.

Dense and sturdy to an extreme, the sounds produced by the younger Germans wouldn’t be possible without the stripped down improvisational freedom propagated by earlier players such as the British ones here.

-- Kane Waxman

Track Listing: Out: 1. The Long Wait 2. Four for 4 3. Breakaway 4. Raw 5. Unfiltered 6. Motion 7. Out of Sight 8. Bright Moments 9. Pick Up (10. Decoy 11. Time Regained 12. 7 shades

Personnel: Out: Derek Bailey (guitar) and Steve Noble (drums and cymbals)

Track Listing: Specter: 1. A_1 2. E_1 3. A_2 4. E_2 5. E_3 6. A_3 7. A_4 8. E_4 9. A_5 10. A_6 11. E_5 12. A_7 13. E_6 14. A_8 15. A_9 16. A_1 0

Personnel: Specter: Olaf Rupp (electric [E] or acoustic [A] guitar) and Michael Wertmüller (drums)

January 21, 2010

Music Outside, Contemporary Jazz in Britain

By Ian Carr
Northway Publications

Hindsight may be 20/20, but this reprint of Ian Carr’s 1973 classic Music Outside, reveals that he beats the law of averages. However, anything written 36 years ago resonates with the attitudes of the time. Some musicians who seemed significant then are more the province of nostalgia than admiration; others mentioned briefly are major figures.

Parenthetically that sense of being of one’s time makes Roger Cotterell’s contemporary postscript frustrating. While he does tie up loose ends and outlines the subsequent career of some musicians, a few are still ignored. His updates are also mostly personal anecdotes.

One can’t fault Cotterell for following the author’s lead. Opinions trump research throughout Music Outside. Flugelhornist Carr, a Miles Davis biographer, describes jazz as “… a music outside, a perpetual Cinderella of the arts in Britain”. This volume aimed to prove improvised music’s “cultural worth” by creating portraits of “those heroic few who … continue to be totally committed to the music”.

Versatility and virtuosity are cited along with commitment as considerations for making a difference. Today Mike Westbrook and Chris McGregor are still acknowledged as band leaders who redefined comfortable British jazz into something edgier. Saxophonists Evan Parker and Trevor Watts plus drummer John Stevens and guitarist Derek Bailey created distinctive free music, which continues to gain adherents. Thus Cottrell revealing that Carr once stated that “Derek and Evan – I like both of them very much but I’m not interested in their music at all,” proves Carr’s good intentions.

Carr’s treatment of Watts’ and Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME) provides insight on the methodology that birthed British improvised music. He notes that the “development of the SME has been a gradual movement away from predetermined structures” and then describes how group improvisation works. Carr’s chapter on Parker deals with Incus Records, precursor of many experimental labels. “I don’t see the point of making a record for … CBS or RCA because when music like ours gets recorded only a minority audience is ready for it,” noted Parker. “But maybe when it’s been around for a year, a few more people are ready for it…but by that time a big company would have it deleted.” More than 35 years later, Parker’s actions seem foresighted and practical.

Carr’s prescient outline of experimenters’ triumphs and failings is balanced by chapters devoted to himself and drummer Jon Hiseman, who led commercially oriented fusion bands. Carr’s reminiscences about organizing the personnel of his group Nucleus, securing management and record deals plus working out crowd-drawing strategies, reads like a manual for launching a pop band. As he writes: “apart from prestige and the approval of posterity, there is also money to be made if one can establish that one is a true original.” Linkage of originality and monetary rewards clashes with his mention of pianist Stan Tracey, who because of his uncompromising talent was then “on the dole”, a situation Carr decries. Yet he doesn’t seem to notice that his game plan was the antithesis of what Tracey and others do.

Hiseman trotted out the argument that those who play “more accessible forms of the music would subsidize the more way-out forms and a natural balance would be found.” The abandonment of experimental music by mainstream outlets negates this theory. The drummer started his band Colosseum after touring with a Rock outfit because “I’d got used to …a big time way of life… where you play to large audiences. I couldn’t really face going back to playing in dreadful pubs to 40 people”. That Hiseman isn’t mentioned in the postscript, may say something about the fickleness of mass popularity.

Contrast this with Carr’s observation that “[Evan] Parker’s music is difficult but he is at pains to make people aware of it”. Then decide which interviewees’ musings and actions resonate almost four decades later.

-- Ken Waxman

-- MusicWorks Issue #104

August 8, 2009

Derek Bailey

To Play: The Blemish Sessions
Samadhisound Sound CD ss008

Free improvisation’s answer to composer John Cage, British guitarist Derek Bailey (1930-2005) was as much a theoretician as a performer. Someone who inculcated the idea of permanent improvisation, Bailey lived by the credo as well. During the course of his long career he was as open to trading licks with neophyte rock-oriented players as the most respected international jazz figures.

Fundamentally however, Bailey was never more impressive as when he played solo. These memorable eight tracks – all entitled “Play” – conclusively demonstrate this. Recorded in 2003 before illness muted some of his inimitable tropes and techniques, the spur-of-the-moment improvisations are one of a piece, yet also linked to the distinctive FreeImprov modus operandi that Bailey and others evolved and modified in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Manipulating both an acoustic and an electric guitar, all the hallmarks of his mature style are on show. Jagged runs, single-string snaps and below-the-bridge strums share space with chromatic pulsations, percussive rasgueado, animated flat picking and microtonal slurred fingering.

Vibrant and melodic in its own way, there are points when To Play’s playing vibrates as if Bailey is a 1930s big band rhythm guitarist, as well as a specialist in angular contemporary music. In truth Bailey formulated this style through constant improvisation and selective references to what sounds preceded his. Ultimately the most fitting triumph of the CD is that on it he resembles no other guitarist but himself.

-- Ken Waxman

For Whole Note Vol. 12 #4

December 6, 2006

Evan Parker

The Topography of the Lungs
psi 06.05

More heard about than heard, ever since Britons Derek Bailey and Evan Parker had their falling out in 1987, which included the proviso that The Topography of the Lungs (Incus 1), would not be reissued as long as Bailey ran the Incus label, the 1970 four-track LP has taken on the status of a totemic object.

Finally available again on Parker’s psi label, following Bailey’s death, and expanded with two additional tracks, the 1970 session lives up to its reputation as a defining artifact of European Free Improv. Yet 36 years later what resulted from the collaboration among Parker on soprano and tenor saxophones, Bailey on guitar and Dutch percussionist Han Bennink now sounds if not commonplace, at least contemporary. The saxophonist’s split tones and extended slurs, Bailey’s fastidious string manipulating and bending plus Bennink’s volleys of cymbal scratching and drum top pummeling have become lingua franca of a certain segment of the improv world.

To be honest the “new” tracks “Found Elsewhere I” and “Found Elsewhere 2” don’t add much to the existing session. There is bell-like resonation from the drummer’s kit, vibrating piles of cracked notes from the guitarist and quacking tongue slaps plus false register forays from the saxophonist; but these strategies would be explored in more detail in subsequent decades. One standout, however, is the virtual spiccato fiddle line Parker creates on the first track. In this case, the altissimo resonation is almost unique among his solos.

As for the touchstone session itself, its celebration of dissonance and absolute music at a time when jazz-rock and lesser instrumental sounds were in ascendancy could be its most revolutionary aspect.

Even the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (ACCM) players who were beginning to be recorded tempered their freeform experiments with rhythmic and blues-like echoes of earlier styles. Not Bailey, Parker and Bennink.

From the first minutes of track one, “Titan Moon”, the saxophonist is contrapuntally matching pressured tongue stops and smears against slurred finger picking and single string snaps from the guitarist, while Bennink clatters away on snare, toms and ride cymbal. Bailey’s rasping claw-hammer downstrokes on the area below the bridge plus Parker’s strident echoing squeaks and power multiphonics are already firmly in place.

But 2006 listeners might be most surprised to realize that the mid-point of the piece includes a period of protracted silence, the touchstone of 21st century reductionism, which also seems to have been presaged by this trio. Equally revealing is that the self-consciously non-jazz – note not anti-jazz – Bailey, Parker and Bennink of the epoch, include a stop-time section in the piece built on Parker’s irregular pitch vibrations and Bailey’s slurred fingering.

Not only is jazz referenced here, but so is rock, with Bailey – of all people – almost obliterating the saxophonist’s clusters of sharp and sour notes and the drummer’s rattles, rumbles and pops with an assembly of distorted notes whose reverb easily links to the amp feedback so favored by ProgRock bands of the time.

The three remaining tracks enlarge on the primary statement, as you hear three musicians gradually forging a unique take on the music. Although his technique was not as developed as it is today, Parker’s triple-tongued fluttering effects begin to ascend towards polytones contested by Bailey’s chiming descending drones. Meanwhile Bennink’s rolls and pumps are often spelled by traditional – in this context – drum rolls and rim shots and the odd shuffle rhythm.

Don’t expect earth-shattering revelation when you hear The Topography of the Lungs. Instead listen to it for its historical music and inventiveness.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Titan Moon 2. For Peter B & Peter K 3. Fixed Elsewhere 4. Dogmeat 5. Found Elsewhere I 6. Found Elsewhere 2

Personnel: Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones); Derek Bailey (guitar); Han Bennink (percussion)

November 27, 2006

Bruise

With Derek Bailey
Foghorn Records FOGCD006

Perhaps the most unintentionally shocking part of this 2004 live London gig by the British Bruise band joined by guitarist Derek Bailey is its cost, reprinted on the back CD cover: “₤5/₤3 concessions”.

While a bargain for the audience, it proves once again that no matter how well-known someone like the guitarist was in the improv world, he was still doing local gigs for the equivalent of the price of a beer a little more than a year before his death at 75. Obviously no one ever got rich – or is it comfortable, in both senses – playing improv.

At this same time Bailey probably participated in this 70-minute session because of his respect for the participants, who richly deserve it. Bass saxophonist Tony Bevan, who has single-handedly rescued the largest member of the saxophone family from the clutches of the Moldy Figs, first played with the guitarist in the 1980s. Sound collage creator Ashley Wales is part of electro-acoustic sessions involving equally famous first-generation improvisers like British saxophonist Evan Parker and Dutch drummer Han Bennink.

Singly and together, bassist John Edwards and percussionist Mark Sanders have backed up BritImprov heavy hitters ranging from Parker to saxophonist John Butcher. Orphy Robinson, who plays steel drum, marimba, percussion, electronics and trumpet here, subtly and without showing off, often adds funk and African inferences to his more sophisticated note selection.

The likelihood is that Bailey worked with all the others beforehand in some combination or other. Or maybe he didn’t. Bailey had a reputation for improvising with everyone and anyone, preferably for the first time. Often this all-inclusive impulse served him badly and on some record dates you can hear him picking away oblivious to all around him. Luckily this isn’t one of those.

As always Bailey sounds unmistakably like himself, using the non-idiomatic style that he arguably invented. At points he appears to be tapping or rattling his strings; at others stroking a cluster of legato notes; and elsewhere seemingly wiping and cleaning the guitar neck or space below the bridge – musically, and in the context of the improvisation of course.

By the final more-than-34-minute track, perhaps impassioned – or irritated –

by the vibrating samples and effervescent wave forms from Wales, the guitarist’s pin-point notes turn to distorted flanges, as if he was practicing for a Yardbirds’ rave-up. While this is going on the bassist and drummer develop their accompaniment from low-key, stop-and-start to delineate a speedy walking bass line and rhythmic drum-stick rattles.

Still earlier Robinson shows off blustery trumpet tones slowly submerged by shrieking and twittering machine modulations. One early climax is reached however, when Bailey’s single string snaps and resolute flat picking attains double counterpoint with Bevan’s lip bubbling and snorts.

Throughout, the saxophonist’s purpose-built honks join knife-sharp rasgueado from the guitarist to build up the intensity. Most of this takes place on top of horizontal wave forms from Wales’ soundscapes and a percussion display from Sanders that swiftly evolves from bounces and rebounds to heavy, anvil-like beats. When one series of sounds resembles the sweeping textures of a violin recital, can it be attributed to electronic legerdemain or to stroking spiccato lines from Edwards’ bass?

All and all, between Bevan’s masticating basso slurs and altissimo cries, Bailey’s string bending and chiming frails plus off-centre pitch molding from the others, the applauding audience obviously had a great time – at bargain prices. So will the listener.

In sympathetic, challenging company on one of his last sessions, Bailey rose to the occasion to help define his brand of improvisation – as did his five confreres.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Search 2. Locate 3. Destroy

Personnel: Tony Bevan (bass saxophone); Derek Bailey (guitar); John Edwards (bass); Mark Sanders (drums and percussion); Orphy Robinson (steel drum, marimba, percussion, electronics and trumpet); Ashley Wales (soundscapes and electronics)

July 21, 2006

The Sound of Squirrel Meals: The Work of Lol Coxhill

Edited By Barbara Schwarz
Black Press

By Ken Waxman
April 17, 2006

Perhaps the sort of player who only could have thrived in the ever-shifting scene that developed in the United Kingdom starting in the mid-960s, soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill is one of improvised music’s most distinctive characters.

In truth, the bulky, bald-headed Portsmouth-born saxophonist has always been a fellow traveller to Improvised Music, but never quite a card-carrying member. That’s because his quirkiness – and need to make a living – has encompassed a multiplicity of gigs, most of which he’s accepted with the same equanimity of spirit. In other words he’s been just as satisfied playing a featured role with punk band the Damned and other rockers as improvising with fellow reed masters like Steve Lacy and Evan Parker. He has been part of oddball vocal-and-instrumental groups like The Melody Four as well as more serious endeavors like the London Improvisers Orchestra. He has appeared as a TV and film actor. Plus he’s spent days busking outdoors almost as often as he’s been featured in proper concert settings.

As unconventional as the man himself, this scrapbook-sized volume, edited by Barbara Schwarz and available at schwarz.blackpress@gmail.com, has about as much in common with the standard jazz biography as jumble sale clothed Coxhill does with John Lewis, the impeccably groomed pianist of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Organized in several sections, The Sound of Squirrel Meals, is made up of a short biography; reprinted interviews with the saxophonist from the 1970s to the 2002, a chronology of his recordings as leader, band members and sideman on CDs, CDRs, LPs, 10-inch LPs, EPs, cassette, 45s and 78s – including reissues and bonus tracks; a similar chronology of his film, TV and video appearances; a bibliography; and an alphabetical discography of every Coxhill session then extant, complete with song titles, recording dates and personnel. No explanation of the book title is offered.

To keep this from appearing too much like an academic treatise or a fan’s obsession, Schwarz has broken up the text with a variety of illustrations, including album covers, drawings – of and by Coxhill – and photos. These range from Coxhill carrying a Union Jack as a teenaged Boy Scout, marching in white face as part of the communal political consortium, the Welfare State in the 1970s, plus performance shots of the saxophonist in bands such as The Recedents with similarly bald-domed percussionist Roger Turner and guitarist Mike Cooper and on his own. Original commentary by Coxhill is appended to the descriptions of most of his recorded projects.

Born in 1932, Coxhill was initially attracted to Bop and R&B, while developing his own style of improvisation. Unlike his slightly older compatriot, guitarist Derek Bailey, who made quite a good living as a commercial guitarist before tuning to improv, Coxhill was trained as a bookbinder. Although he was playing semi-professionally by the 1950s and was once characterized by New Musical Express as “the Thelonious Rollins [sic] of British Jazz” he was the epitome of the jobbing musician, only quitting his factory job in 1965. In dark glasses, black turtleneck and loud check plaid jacket, the already bald, then tenor saxophone-playing Coxhill backed visiting American soul singers, and was part of the local blues/R&B scene in bands led by guitarist Alexis Korner.

Already playing solo intermission gigs at jazz clubs, by the 1970s he developed simultaneous careers as an actor – eventually he would have featured roles in films by directors Derek Jarman and Sally Potter; as a member of audacious big bands like Centipede and the Brotherhood of Breath; as a free improviser as part of Bailey’s Company weeks and with drummer John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble; and as a sideman in progressive rock bands, including those led by bassist Hugh Hopper, singer Robert Wyatt and singer/guitarist Kevin Ayers.

His two-year, on-and-off association with Ayers’ Whole World band came about after the rocker saw and heard Coxhill busking near a London bridge. Although in 1972, the saxophonist referred to busking as “open-air concerts for anyone who wants to listen”, insisting he never busked to live, only for extra money, it’s hard to imagine unbending performers such as Bailey putting up with playing outdoors for 10 hours at a stretch, and sporadically having his instrument damaged and being physically attacked by unhappy, music-hating passers-by.

Coxhill’s sense of humor probably served him in good stead here, as did his theatricality, also expressed in agitprop aggregations like the Welfare State. But those two qualities became paramount in his long-standing gigs with semi-satirical combos such as the Johnny Rondo Trio and especially the Melody Four. Consisting of the saxman plus other British jokesters like pianist Steve Beresford, the songs covered by the Four ranged from Groucho Marx’s “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” and Doris Day’s “Secret Love” to “the Latin classic Besame Mucho”. The band also showcased Coxhill’s semi-pro vocals as well as and recorded originals ditties such as the reedist's own “Surfing Sausage” – “Silly little surfing sausage/What a funny saus is she/Cares not that it’s impossible to surf/When it’s time for tea …”. The group went a long way in setting him apart from most dead-serious Free Music players, who are as divorced from humor as they are from bar lines.

Considering that despite this, Coxhill continued to play with top echelon Free Musicians from the U.K., Europe and North America – along with improvisers and the odd rock band – confirms his talent and individuality, as well as the respect in which he’s held by other musicians. Today, at nearly 74 he’s an undeniable presence on the scene.

Lacking analysis and insights – except from Coxhill himself – the book is only tangentially related to jazz scholarship. Not that there’s any pretense of that, of course. The Sound of Squirrel Meals is a light read to be dipped into and out of, perhaps while listening to your Coxhill CDs.

Still if you have an interest in the saxophonist, BritImprov or the unclassifiable music that has flourished in some circles in the United Kingdom during the past 40 years, you’ll probably enjoy the details in this volume.

April 17, 2006

BAILEY/BECK/HESSION

Meanwhile, back in Sheffield
Discus 21CD

FREE BASE
The Ins and Outs
Emanem 4116

Free Improv merry-go-rounds, these CDs feature veteran players from the United Kingdom extending themselves in previously unrecorded trio formations.

Oversight and commitments to other groups are why, after a decade of existence, the fine Free Base trio debuts on record with THE INS AND OUTS. Conversely, MEANWHILE, BACK IN SHEFFIELD captures on disc a now-uncommon occurrence: the first live gig in a decade by that British city’s best-known native improviser: guitarist Derek Bailey, now a Barcelona-resident. He’s joined by local Mick Beck on tenor saxophone, whistles and bassoon, and drummer Paul Hession from Leeds. Both men have played individually with Bailey, but never recorded with him in this formation.

Each player on the other CD has a similar intertwined BritImprov history. After a stint in jazz-rock drummer Steve Noble was involved in a few of Bailey’s Company Weeks and more recently played in bassist Simon Fell’s quintet. Fell, Hession and Free Base’s alto and baritone saxophonist Alan Wilkinson form another longstanding Free Jazz trio. Before that, the ferocious reed-shredder was in Art Bart & Fargo with Hession and a member of Feetpacket with Beck.

Mario Mattos, who plays bass and electronics in Free Base, is as experienced a player on THE INS AND OUTS as Bailey is on the other date. The Brazilian-born bassist has worked with every other musician on both dates in some context or another, while Mattos’ other associations have ranges from pianist Chris Burn’s Ensemble to sessions with saxophonist George Haslam.

Despite this near incestuous relationship between the trio members, the final CDs are anything but interchangeable. Again, the divergence arises from the veteran members. Adding his solid bass work to the coarse textures spewed from Wilkinson’s reeds and the rumble and punch of Noble’s percussion, Mattos’ presence means that Free Base’s CD leans towards take-no-prisoners Energy Music. With eight long pieces allowed to germinate during this 72-minute studio session each player aptly defines his territory.

Recorded live – but with audience applause excised – the barely 53 minute MEANWHILE, BACK IN SHEFFIELD reproduces the concert exactly as it evolved. Bailey’s hyper-distinctive guitar phrasing is such that while Beck sometimes screams and squeals through both horns, and Hession unleashes fierce cross-handed textures, the fretman guides the improvisations. Oh course, whether this happens through tacit musical agreement, the force of Bailey’s personality or the others’ deference to an elder is open to interpretation.

Showpiece track is “After The Red Deer”, the nearly-33-minute opening salvo. Beginning with bird-whistle chirps from Beck and understates flams from Hession, it gains its shape from Bailey’s distinctive strums and string swipes. Soon the saxophonist’s sparrow peeps swell to crow-like caws as he tops off the body tube with glottal punctuation and tongue-fluttering.

With the drummer limiting himself to nerve beats and wooden concussions, the guitarist’s irregular patterns, scraping pulsation and quaking reverb match Beck’s spacious tone expelling, finally diminishing to trilling obbligatos from the reedist and claw-hammer picking from the guitarist. Asserting himself, Bailey chromatically works his way across his strings and frets, goading Hession to follow suit with snare press rolls, cymbal slaps and drumstick-across-the-metal squeaks.

Beck’s response in the improvisation’s penultimate minutes is to bring out his bassoon, showcasing basso quivers, and side-slipping sonority. Diminishing his own contribution to a dewy mist of spiky notes, the guitarist presages the ending with highly rhythmic chording.

Both other, shorter instant compositions feature more of the same, with Bailey and Hession sticking to spanked and tapped single note textures. Meanwhile Beck consolidates his sound, at one point spraying a wailing melody with one horn as he simultaneously peeps penny-whistle decoration. As a maximalist, his solos often consumes the entire sonic space.

You might say the same about Wilkinson’s harsh blowing on the other CD.

For instance the almost 13½-minutes of “Absolute Xero” [sic], finds him spewing out a series of irregular, nearly reed-melting pitch variations and multiphonic variations. As Noble pounds his drum tops and exercises the rivets on his pang cymbal, Mattos quickens his pace from slurred fingering to spiccato tones, eventually resorting to a combination of triple stops and string riffs. As animalistic cries fly from Wilkinson’s horn, Noble proactively bangs his drum stick together as if they were castanets and smacks single tones from the cymbals and the wooden parts of his kit. Appearing to be burrowing ferret-like within the kit, this resolution coupled with the bassist stretching and scratching his lines sul tasto serves as the climax, with a simple reed timbre as the coda.

Tunes such as “I Wak [sic] On (for John Lester)” and “Sortie” – unsurprisingly the final number – show off the Free Jazz-oriented disparity between Free Base’s conception and Bailey, Beck and Hession’s model. The former begins with a single boppish whack from Noble and swamping bass runs from Mattos, which sets up distinctive sonorous coloring from Wilkinson’s baritone. Initially favoring a legato approach to the larger horn, eventually Wilkinson turns to reed-biting in false registers and bell-muting stops. Measured panting grunts that seem to emanate from his horn’s bow rather than the mouthpiece, allows him to he produce two different reed textures and a satisfactory climax.

Rubato low-pitched horn obbligatos that despite extended timbres almost sound Mainstream characterize “Sortie”. Could the saxman have internalized Gerry Mulligan’s smoothness? Behind him Noble pops his toms and vibrates cymbal tops as Mattos quietly plucks his base. Then as the tonal centre shifts, the reed lines shatter, side-slip and smear. Sul ponticello sweeps and drum beats delivered with strength and passion are the responses of the other two. Conclusive penny whistle-like shrills from the saxophonist, a rare dip into electronic pulses from the bassist, and bravura floor tom ruffs and constant cymbal pounding combine for a concluding crescendo.

Many improvisers from the United Kingdom are interconnected through similar playing experiences. Yet these CDs prove that when it comes to free sounds different groups easily create textures as distinctive as the country’s topography.

--Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Meanwhile: 1. After the Red Deer 2. Raining 3.Buckets

Personnel: Meanwhile: Mick Beck (tenor saxophone, bassoon and whistles); Derek Bailey (guitar); Paul Hession (drums)

Track Listing: Ins: 1. Trepid (09.14) 2. Sea Frett (05.5 3. Absolute Xero 4. Skzypce 5. Kissing the Shuttle 6. Soup Song 7. I Wak On (for John Lester) 8.Sortie

Personnel: Ins: Alan Wilkinson (alto and baritone saxophones); Mario Mattos (bass and electronics); Steve Noble (percussion)

December 5, 2005

DEREK BAILEY/EVAN PARKER

The London Concert
psi 05.01

STEVENS/WATTS/GUY
Mining the seam - the rest of the Spotlite sessions
Hi 4 Head Records HFH CD003

Combining and splitting apart numerous times in various bands – ad hoc and not –during a period in the late 1960s and early 1970s now seen as the genesis of British Free Music, guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer John Stevens (1940–1994) are almost universally acknowledged as dual catalysts who nurtured the nascent scene.

Although over the years both improvised with just about anyone and mentored a large number of younger musicians, Stevens had, and Bailey still has, a fairly prickly personality. That meant that at the same time newer players were being initiated into freer sounds, one or both was usually carrying on a feud with older associates and sometimes with one other. Bailey has maintained from that time that every performance should be completely improvised with each creation a tabla rasa. Less rigid, Stevens didn’t disdain composition and wasn’t above playing jazz, Free Jazz and a touch of jazz-rock.

MINING THE SEAM and THE LONDON CONCERT, both recorded in the mid-1970s, are historical documents, which preserve mature manifestations of Bailey’s and Stevens’ sounds that continue to shape British improv. Each distinctively reflects the protagonist, yet the scene was then so small that the other musicians featured negotiated a path between the two.

Initially, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME), Stevens’ original cooperative band, featured his army buddy, alto saxophonist Trevor Watts, and the reedman is on this CD. Bailey briefly joined the SME, but soprano and tenor saxophonist Evan Parker, who partners the guitarist on THE LONDON CONCERT, evolved his distinctive reed style though a more extended tenure with the SME, sometimes alongside Watts. Bassist Barry Guy who provides much of the rhythmic impetus on MINING THE SEAM, was associated with Bailey in the Iskra 1903 trio with trombonist Paul Rutherford. Yet more notably for the past 30 years, he and Parker have worked together in situations ranging from a duo to big bands.

Considering the trio assembled, it may be surprising to note that MINING THE SEAM is out-and-out, circa 1977 Free Jazz. Made up of alternate and unedited versions of three of the five tunes session issued as NO FEAR (Hi 4 Head Records HFHCD001), it offers another look at what long been viewed as a masterful BritJazz session. Most surprising is the soloing of Watts. At that point, before he began his ongoing flirtation with so-called world music, Watts was firmly in the Ornette Coleman school, with his jagged phrasing and interjections harsh and relentless.

Not only does he trot out pet licks that seem to enliven each track, but all three players are also committed to the song form, with nearly every tune ending with a recapitulation of the head after variations have been sounded. Matching the saxophonist’s squeaks and staccato flutter-tongued excursions, Stevens rattles each part of his kit with ruffs and flams and pays more attention to the bass drum than is the wont in BritImprov.

Ruffling passing tones, Guy too is removed from the cerebral interface he often exhibits with Parker. At different points, his shuffle bowing highlights the jagged edges of the strings, the better to sabotage the drummer’s steady beat. Alternately contrapuntal, his chiming bass lines are the perfect antidote to the speedier and staccato dog-like barks from the saxophonist. Walking, thumping or stopping, he moderates a space between the other two.

As the multiphonic reed tones, bull fiddle sweeps and percussion rebounds and strokes coalesce, taken together the five tracks provide a substitute, but equally valid version of the already released proceedings.

Equally valid too are the 30-odd minutes added to the previously released

LP version of 1975’s THE LONDON CONCERT (Incus 16), which now boosts its length to more than 69 minutes. Still in their honeymoon period, Bailey and Parker offered both solo and duo material, with the reedman playing soprano and tenor saxophones and Bailey a stereo guitar with volume pedals and a modified 19-string guitar.

Despite the hardware, there are no signs of ProgRock, electronica or – as Bailey would probably insist dogmatically – jazz. That’s open to debate, but what is noticeable in this context is how each of the eight tracks seems to be moderate and unhurried compared to the urgent staccato of the Stevens’ trio work.

There’s no mistaking Bailey, plinking, slightly flattish tone and attack, whether he’s using the so-called stereo guitar or the 19-string mutant. “Part 1”, for example, is almost 15 minutes of constant plectrum plink and plucks intersected by masticated curt note patterns and duck squawks from Parker’s soprano.

As the piece develops so do the saxophonist’s jagged snaps, slurs and smears while the guitarist’s steady rhythmic guitar fills include additional vibrations. With the pedals allowing him to output an unusual vibrating pulsation, Bailey’s contrapuntal display is matched by trills within the body tube, shrill penny whistle tones and undulating columns of colored air from Parker’s axe. Seemingly mumbling to himself and evidentially concentrating on what rhythm can be constructed by stroking strings on the guitar neck, the guitarist leaves space for Parker to buzz his reed and bubble lip forms. For the finale the reedist contorts his snarls to a legato tone, then showcases his characteristic circular breathing as Bailey plucks away.

Previously unreleased, Bailey’s strategy on “Second Half Solos” find him demarcating sharp, single-note friction on the 19 strings as the crinkling vibrations add rattling hum and tone resonation. For his part, Parker reveals a nephritic shout as repeated tongue slaps, pops and diaphragm vibrations expand to multiphonics and usher in “Part 3” from the original LP.

Spectacularly, shredded split tones and irregularly pitched vibrations then explode all over the aural space, causing Bailey to turn to harder plectrum interface, as node response swells into unique counter patterns. Soon you start to feel like a spectator at a particularly frenetic tennis game, with the ball constantly in motion, jumping, soaring and bouncing from one to another. Each man is concentrating on an individual strategy, but as polyphony emerges, so does the shape of the cooperative contest. Climatically, Bailey announces a variation change as his flat-picking suddenly clangs like an egg timer. Parker vibrates ghostly slurs beneath him, as if he was playing a chanter, with a renal squeak for a coda. Elsewhere the two intertwine harmonies that include glottal punctuation and staccatissimo overblowing from Parker and distorted finger-tapping and harsh, scraped fret actions from Bailey.

Although 30 years later what they did then may sound standardized, the duo performance is invested with the novelty and excitement of musical discovery. So too is the trio set. Both prime slabs of interactive improv, these CDs should attract anyone desirous of a deeper insight into the musical currents of those times.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: London: 1. First half solo 2. Part 1 3. Part 1A 4. Part 2 5. Part 2A 6. Second half solos 7. Part 3 8. Part 4

Personnel: London: Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones) and Derek Bailey (stereo guitar and modified 19-string guitar)

Track Listing: Mining 1. No Fear (alternate take) 2. Ah! (unedited version) 3. Ah! (alternate take) 4. Speed from the light (alternate take) 5. Speed from the light (alternate take)

Personnel: Mining: Trevor Watts (alto saxophone); Barry Guy (bass) and John Stevens (drums)

October 31, 2005

ALEX CLINE/KAORU/MIYA MASAOKA /G.E. STINSON

Cloud Plate
Cryptogramophone CG 121

DEREK BAILEY/AMY DENIO/DENNIS PALMER
The Gospel Record
Shaking Ray SRR-CD004

Using the human voice in improvisation can be tricky. Singing words brings with it the fear that metrical qualities will overtake spontaneous interaction; used wordlessly, its proper place among other instruments is suspect and sometimes redundant.

CLOUD PLATE and THE GOSPEL RECORD deal with variations of these snags and neither fully overcomes the obstacles. On the first CD, Kaoru – no last name – so diffuses her vocal timbres through electronics that often you lose track of the human element, especially when she seem to be expressing herself in ethereal tones that are neither Japanese nor English. Conversely, Amy Denio intones the lyrics of the gospel songs on the other session with such bright-eyed conviction, despite the instrumental mayhem behind her, that you’re not sure how much is parody and how much Pentecostal.

One leans towards the former. That’s because Denio, an on again-off again member of the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet, usually plays saxophones, accordion and bass, writes film soundtracks and chamber pieces, and has worked with bands like Curlew and The Pale Nudes.

Her associates here are British guitarist Derek Bailey, whose religion is more Free Music than Christianity, and The Shaking Ray Levis (SRL)’ Dennis Palmer, a avant gardist from the American South, who plays rhythmic synthesizer and samples and contributes the odd Carter Family-style harmony vocal. Still Palmer is based in Chattanooga, Tenn., where as a child he used to watch a particular religious program which featured the famous gospel quartet, the Stamps. Furthermore, while the songs may be taken from a hymnal found in a five-and-dime store, gospel music has always had an influence on innovators, with everyone from Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash and Albert Ayler and Duke Ellington having recorded religious material.

THE GOSPEL RECORD is much more POMO than any of those examples, however. Denio’s timbres may sound more like Dale Evans than ex-rockabilly turned gospel singer Wanda Jackson, but considering her vocals are frequently double tracked, separated into disparate voices, or in the case of “Joshua Led God’s Children” sung in an uncomfortable falsetto, the effects seem a little less than reverent. Also, considering that she vies for aural space on that tune with Palmer’s samples that are mid-way between sousaphone drone and Bronx cheer, it’s not likely that Denio or SRL will ever be heard on evangelical broadcast.

Throughout, Bailey produces amp-shaking distortions in higher pitches, harsh flanged guitar runs and jumbled, oscillating tones that are as mocking as the lyrics are sincere – it’s not likely he’ll be on the gospel train ay time soon either. His eccentric approach to the material combined with Palmer’s instrumental work, which includes signal-clipping in and out of focus, and rumbling, bouncing near-percussive beats, lifts the program instrumentally.

An engaging and wacky trifle, THE GOSPEL RECORD is tongue-in-cheek fun, but at barely 14 minutes, no major statement.

CLOUD PLATE may be envisioned as one though, and that’s part of its predicament. At almost 66½ minutes – with three tracks around the 13 minute mark – the otherworldly, atmospheric timbres sometimes get a bit wan. Contributing to this pallid wash is the instrumentation of the Los Angeles-based musicians.

G.E. Stinson, who co-founded the Jazz/Rock/World Music band Shadowfax, brings guitars and so-called implements to the session. Miya Masaoko who performs traditional Japanese, notated contemporary, performance pieces and improvisations with musicians such as trombonist George Lewis, uses an electric koto to produce miasmic sounds. Only percussionist Alex Cline, who has worked in bands with Stinson as well as reedist Vinny Golia among many others, brings a concentrated rhythmic sensibility to the eight tracks filled with reverberating strings and vocal tones from Kaoru, an ongoing Stinson collaborator.

Using what sounds like a vocoder to turn her voice robotic and synthesized, Kaoru’s contributions often seem barely there, and as if she’s reciting prose rather than singing. With the buzzing of so-called electronic effects and the projection of string drones dominating most tracks, much of her vocalizing is out-of- earshot mumbling. Infantile cries and ethereal tones, often distorted, are heard as well. Periodically it may be that words are part of her disconsolate sounding plaints, but precise language and sense are lost among the musical mists.

These include abrasive reverb, intentional distortion and scratched string runs from Stinson’s guitar, and ricocheting cymbal claps, metallic pings and hollow resonation from Cline’s percussion. When all these sounds, real and sampled, link to the cascade of scrapes and wiggles that characterize Masaoka’s koto turns, the effect is that of skewed gagaku music. Replication or crinkling rice paper is heard on both the first and final tracks, serving as connective tissue for real-time improvisations.

Among the ruffling chords and chromatic picking the most satisfying performance is “Naming”, which clocks in at fewer than three minutes. Yet all the tones stretched to excessive length elsewhere are presented and accounted for here. There are multi-tracked cries, whispers and shouts from the vocalist, bells and gong rattling from the percussionist, singular finger picking from the guitarist and sweeping colors from the kotoist.

“Assisted Collapse” is the other track that makes more of an impression since it’s much livelier than the rest. Mixing slanting arpeggios from Masaoka, ratcheting flams and ringing bell tones from Cline, and an underlying guitar drone which accelerates to fuzz tones and down to finger picking action, the tune logically reaches a climax then dribbles away to silence.

No one is suggesting that CLOUD PLATE could or should have been as condensed as THE GOSPEL RECORD. But briefer tracks and more succinct idea elaboration may have produced a more memorable session.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Gospel: 1.Let The Little Sunshine In 2. Heaven Will Surely Be Worth It All 3. I Miss A Friend Like You 4. The Ole-Time Religion 5. Joshua Led God’s Children 6. I’m Gonna See Heaven 7. I’m Bound Fort Land of Canaan

Personnel: Gospel: Derek Bailey (guitar); Dennis Palmer (voice, synthesizer, samples); Amy Denio (voice)

Track Listing: Cloud: 1. Ions 2. Robot Mudra 3. Mountain 4. Cloud 5. Naming 6. Visual Drift 7. Assisted Collapse 8. Face

Personnel: Cloud: G.E. Stinson (guitars and implements); Miya Masaoka (koto and effects), Alex Cline (percussion); Kaoru (voice, percussion, sound toys and effects)

August 22, 2005

Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation

By Ben Watson
Verso Books

by Ken Waxman

October 1, 2004

Endlessly inventive as an improviser and a superb organizer, guitarist Derek Bailey is also opinionated, combative, passively aggressive, dogmatic and often self-satisfied. Still, the 74-year-old Sheffield, England-born Bailey is pretty much at Ground Zero when it comes to discussing Free Music, at least in its British manifestation.

London-based critic Ben Watson attempts to explain both the man and his music in this volume. Yet Watson also tries for much more than standard biographical, chronological and discographical fact gathering. He not only ponders Free Music’s place among other, more commercial musics, but also tries to show how experimental sounds reflect musicians’ liberation from what he sees as a class-ridden, capitalist society.

A fascinating read for most of its 443 pages plus index, Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation offers impressive insights as well as infuriating opinions. Besides tying together the various strands of history that created Free Music almost a half-century ago, Watson interprets many of the events according to his variant of humanistic socialism. Understand that this is likely the first serious, yet anecdotal book on jazz and improvised music to come from a Marxist perspective since Frank Kofsky’s John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s. As Watson writes at one point, “Free Improvisation … is the manifestation of socialist revolution in music -- practical, collective, anti-ideological and humanist”.

There are times however when Watson’s admitted bias results in some conclusions that are more discordant than a Free Music solo. Most off-putting is when his criticism of careerism takes in such hitherto unconnected players as pioneering fusion guitarist John McLaughlin and uncompromising saxophonist Evan Parker -- once a close associate of Bailey now estranged. Both these two and many other players are suspect it seems, because they refuse to accept in toto Bailey’s singular theories that the basis of Free Music is selfless collective improvisation.

Born in a lower working class family in 1930, Bailey was a dance band and studio musician at a time in Britain when that sort of music-making was considered a craft rather than art -- rather like being a pipe fitter or a blacksmith. Someone who says he probably played every night of the week at one job or another from 1955 to 1968, the guitarist’s no-nonsense work ethnic has carried over into Free Music. As he tells Watson: “I’ve never thought I could do anything -- what I do now or playing commercial music -- unless I did it full-time”.

Although satisfied as a pre-rock commercial musician, Bailey admits he was still looking for a way to express himself more creatively and was constantly woodshedding during that period. Although he has had a lifelong admiration for American guitarist Charlie Christian’s advances, because of circumstances, he never described himself as a jazz musician. British jazzers couldn’t play the music full-time, he notes, and that was a violation of Bailey’s working class ethos.

In a perverse way it was the advent of Beatlemania that drove Bailey and others to Free Music. No longer did a commercial musician have the freedom to interpret popular songs his own way; they had to sound exactly as they did on the record. At about that point, Bailey, and two younger Sheffield musicians, student bassist Gavin Bryars -- now a certified composer of so-called serious music -- and Tony Oxley -- who later on was house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s famous London jazz club -- started searching for their own path.

Impressed by the advances of such Free Jazz stylists as John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and Scott LaFaro, in 1965 they formed the co-operative Joseph Holbrooke Trio, named for an early Cockney composer. In short order they went from playing conventional jazz, to playing an English variant of Free Jazz, to outlining the first stirring of what could be called Free Music.

Later Bailey and Oxley moved to London and began interacting and exchanging ideas with other early BritImprov experimenters such as drummer John Stevens, trombonist Paul Rutherford and saxophonists Trevor Watts and Parker.

It’s at this point where the book’s chronology and Watson’s analysis breaks down somewhat. Claims and counter claims about which musician developed which way of playing that was later accepted as Free Improv, divided and continues to divide certain parts of the Free Music world. Certainly the supposed free spirit of the 1960s when previously experimental groups like Soft Machine and Pink Floyd had best selling records encouraged everyone, including journeymen like McLaughlin -- whose breakthrough fusion LP, Extrapolation, featured Oxley -- to try new things. And major record companies even recorded them. Anyone who nowadays collects Free Music on weirdly distributed CDs on tiny labels can attest to how things have changed.

But Bailey has remained constant in his collectivist ideas -- at least as he sees it. Despite being part of various playing situations with those men and many other contemporary musical explorers, Bailey was and is a Free Music purist, and the author describes the guitarist “formulating his theory of permanent improvisation”, a resonance simulacrum Leon Trotsky’s slogan of “permanent revolution”. Always seeking more freedom and less structure, Bailey is now capable of describing 1968’s Karyobin, one of the first certified British Free Music classics -- and one on which he played -- as in retrospect sounding like “Whitey Free Jazz”.

Bailey has also peevishly insisted on the irrefutable difference between European Free Music and American Free Jazz, which seems a bit perverse as years go on. However, this hasn’t stopped him over time from collaborating with American musicians firmly in the jazz sphere including saxophonists Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton and Lee Konitz plus bassist William Parker and pianist Cecil Taylor.

As Bailey’s biographer, who constantly interviewed and consulted with the guitarist over a three-year period as this volume was being written, Watson is also a little too accepting of the guitarist’s POV. Bailey’s stated role as a working class bloke from the provinces who just happened to stumble upon a way of playing that satisfies him and is somehow accepted by a few other intelligent fans, seems a bit louche.

After all Bailey has played literally thousands of gigs throughout the world and has been featured on hundreds of discs over the years. He, Oxley and Parker founded Incus, the first British Free Music record label in 1970, which he continues to run today. In 1980 he turned a series of programs he produced for the BBC’s Radio 3 into the book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, and this seminal volume is still in print and has been updated, republished and translated into other languages.

More importantly for Free Music’s dissemination, from 1977 to 1994, first regularly, then sporadically, Bailey organized Company Weeks. These musical free-for-alls, were concerts featuring mix-and-match combinations of any number of advanced jazzers, boho classical types and dissatisfied rockers playing Free Music. Bailey recorded and released the resulting either spectacular or disappointing admixture on Incus.

Little of Bailey’s adult personal history is included -- we only learn in passing that he has been in three serious relationships. More seriously, Watson, who can report exactly what V. I. Lenin said about keeping useless people off the editorial board of the newspaper Iskra in 1903 -- incidentally the name of another Bailey co-op trio -- discloses the guitarist’s ongoing animosity towards Parker without ever probing the reason for the break. Even Bailey admits that “a lot of my relationships have sundred at the point where somebody thought I was using them.”

Maddeningly as well, the author mostly defines Bailey’s improvisation in terms of what it isn’t, rather than what it is. He writes that “Bailey’s cool and precise -- yet piercing and aggressive -- tone denies the generic associations and pleasures previously associated with the electric guitar”. And later: “The guitar playing of Bailey sabotages merely sonic pleasures, redirecting attention to the totality of the music. With Bailey, a guitar note is not an end in itself, but a purposeful contribution to musical development -- a question.” For Watson as well, Free Music “articulates the values of socialism as against those of capitalism: life lived as a dialectical contribution to human history, rather then cowering in positive and defended comfort.”

Part of Watson’s challenge may be Bailey outwardly taciturn blandness. In critical situations, as when listening to CDs for The Wire’s Invisible Jukebox -- reprinted in the book --, the guitarist refuses to offer anything but non-committal praise for any musician and music he hears, only relenting when he extravagantly revels in the music of -- surprise! -- Charlie Christian.

Luckily Watson hasn’t settled for the superficial. Doing his research, he has gone through masses of published articles and interviewed other observers, including not only Oxley and Bryars, but also a fan who was at most Joseph Holbrooke gigs. Bailey will probably be shocked to find the fellow describe the music as “really swinging hard … very powerful like listening to the [Count] Basie band”.

To offer other perspectives on Bailey’s sounds, Watson reprints his own and others’ reviews of important Bailey discs and gigs. Though it must be said he seems to prefer those who praise Bailey rather than those who damn him. Finally, as someone who personally attended many Company Weeks and was present at many other Bailey playing situations Watson offers his own perspective on what did and didn’t work in those situations. Again, not surprisingly though, it most often appears to the author that Bailey’s improvisations were the saving grace in most awkward musical circumstances.

Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation is invaluable for the way in which Watson situates Bailey’s conception and musicality within the worldwide jazz, classical and pop scenes of the past 40-odd years. Admirable too is his analysis of the many Bailey projects that took place while the guitarist was, in Watson’s words “waiting for the rest of the world to catch up”.

Until someone else with investigative reporting skills and, hopefully no academic or polemical axes to grind, deals with the other major British Free Music figures in as great depth, this book will remain a primary source for understanding improvised music from that country.

Bailey’s sometime perverse music and Free Improvisation itself are precious and memorable for another reason. Watson articulates it at great length near the end of this volume:

“In the late capitalist era, the ability to supply ‘quality product’ has become the assumed aim of everyone, from manufacturers of chicken tika to suppliers of industry-friendly graduate students. The ideology of commodity production means that everything must serve the needs of the accumulation of capital, or be decried as useless, self-indulgent and anti-social. In such circumstances, it’s no surprise that ‘perversity’ has become a word for what the bourgeoisie promised us in its early, heroic, revolutionary epoch: freedom.”

October 1, 2004

DEREK BAILEY & MILO FINE

Scale points on the fever curve
Emanem 409

Staple of jazz records for more than 70 years, recorded meetings between star soloists moved full fledged into improvised music when it came along. Prominent improvisers seem to change their playing partners with the regularity of Jennifer Lopez exchanging paramours though, and it sometimes appears as if each release brings a new grouping.

Chief serial switcher must be London-based guitarist David Bailey -- grand old man of Britimprov -- who in his desire to always make things new, seems to record with every musician he meets. He also revisits partners from time to time -- sort of like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton -- and this CD is a memento of a reunion gig in London with multi-instrumentalist Milo Fine. Fine’s Free Jazz Ensemble (FJE) has maintained its commitment to improvised music since the late 1960s from a base in Minneapolis, Minn.

Fine and Bailey first performed together in 1983, then as part of Company Week in 1988. These 2003 performances however find Fine bringing a couple of clarinets and electronic keyboard to the gig as well as his more customary drum set.

Guitarist Steve Gnitka is a longtime -- and often the only other -- FJE member, so guitar legerdemain is no novelty to Fine. The only defect on the four tunes here is that while Bailey follows a singular path, the American seems insistent on playing any and every one of his instruments in various ways to try to ruffle Bailey preternatural cool.

Bailey, whose guitar is extended with pedal controlled amplification, appears to be perfectly serene and composed -- not in a musical sense of course -- throughout, contentedly strumming and picking with minimum reverb. Sanguinely, he lets notes hang in the air, while Fine strives to fill every space.

This is most apparent on the two longest and more characteristic numbers that begin and end the disc. While Bailey relies on pick guard scraping and single-string resonation on “Opening Gamut”, for instance, Fine is off and running with loud cymbal pressure and press rolls. Later, the older man’s short note patterns are so shattered by squeaky, squawky clarinet whimpers that the guitarist strokes out some speedy chromatic runs to counter this altissimo whistling. When Bailey returns to individualized flat picking, Fine then counters with nervous runs and arpeggios on the electric piano. As he scurries busily back-and-forth on the keyboard with an approximation of Free Jazz stylings, Bailey suddenly lets loose with vibrated amp distortion, while his harsh picking leaves no doubt that he’s playing steel strings. By the end, potent feedback echoes from guitar to keep up with Fine’s bangs and rumbles on the snares and toms.

When “Closing Gambit” comes around however, Bailey already has upped the distortions and volume from his pedal-controlled amp a couple of times to meet Fine’s weighty piano chording and screeching reed lines. With the drummer initially restricting himself to scattered skin slashes and intermittent cymbal strokes, it’s Bailey who turns predatory. At one point he displays the sort of ringing strums that were stock in trade for dance band guitar players in the 1940s and 1950s. Later, he satisfies himself with clumps of downstroke picking and still later he produces pointed licks extended by delay, that seem to resonate on their own course. As Fine contents himself with trying to play a military tattoo, the guitarist ends the duet with scratches on the fretboard and a single, distorted note.

Meetings like this confirm the singular attributes of each player, though this time age seems to have triumphed over relative youth.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Opening gamut 2. Extract before 3. Extract after 4. Closing gambit

Personnel: Derek Bailey (guitar with pedal controlled amplification); Milo Fine (B-flat and E-flat clarinets, electronic keyboard and drums)

September 13, 2004

KENNY WHEELER

Song for Someone
psi 04.01

Epitome of the polite, quiet Canadian, trumpeter/flugelhornist Kenny Wheeler has now lived in Great Britain for more than a half century. During that time he’s gone from playing in large dance and bebop bands to working with international free music ensembles to creating a modified synthesis of all those influences as his own music.

This direct reissue of a 1973 LP may have been when it was first released the most conventional item on what was then guitarist Derek Bailey’s and saxophonist Evan Parker’s Incus label. Wheeler had already played free music with drummer John Stevens and was soon to begin an association with experimenters like American reedist Anthony Braxton and the German-based Globe Unity Orchestra. But except for a couple of tracks, the pieces he wrote for this date mostly meld his big band past with his moody, reflective streak.

That low-spirited attitude was artistically best reflected in the trio Azimuth he founded later in the 1970s with pianist John Taylor and vocalist Norma Winstone. SONG FOR SOMEONE’s present-day fascination comes from how Wheeler, who said “the musicians came first and then the music”, mixed explorers and mainstreamers without fissure. On one hand are free musicians like Bailey and Parker, percussionist Tony Oxley, trombonist Malcolm Griffin and saxist Mike Osborne. On the other are modern mainstreamers like Taylor, Winstone and a brass section that could have played similar licks on tunes Wheeler arranged for John Dankworth’s or Maynard Ferguson’s big bands.

To be honest, only one tune, the 15¼-minute “The Good Doctor” can be termed Free Jazz, and it’s also the only one where Griffin, Parker and Bailey all make an appearance. Parker also takes a characteristic solo filled with multiphonic trills on “Causes are Events”, though. But with that theme shaped more by Taylor’s springy, light-fingered electric piano fills and Winstone’s airy soprano -- not to mention horn riffs that could have been safely played by Toronto’s Boss Brass -- Parker’s reed interjections would have been linked to 1960s psychedelic freak outs by most in 1973.

“The Good Doctor” is the real -- free -- thing, however, and begins with a couple of minutes of squealing circular breathing from Parker and flat-picking from Bailey. Although Wheeler’s almost heraldic solo and the flattened cymbal work that introduce supple brass lines sashaying from one side to the other are pretty standard, soon one trombonist -- Griffith? -- breaks through. He double tongues while Taylor double times, and the trumpets riff out a chromatic counter theme. Exposing a big band vamp in full roar, the other bandmen then give space to hearty sax solo -- from Osborne perhaps -- that introduces intense, Booker Ervin-style honks, growls and squeals as Oxley knocks out powerful Elvin Jones-like rumbles and bounces. By the time the tune ends with a protracted, high-pitched brass crescendo, Wheeler has proven that he can write a composition that swings as much as it seeks.

Mostly characterized by brassy trills and chromatic leaps, a walking bass line and emblematic 1970s tinny electric piano work, the other large ensemble work is more closely allied to Dankworth (John) than Dixon (Bill). Someone does take a well-paced slurry trombone solo, and another trumpeter -- Wheeler himself? -- produces some bent. squealing notes on “Toot-Toot”. But that tune’s resemblance to John Coltrane’s “Cousin Mary” and the ballad that follows it makes clear that the majority of material could have been played by any well-constituted large group of the time.

Finally, Winstone’s lyrical soprano and light scatting and humming on “Nothing Changes” -- an unfortunate title for a date like this -- suggests Cleo Laine’s show biz-oriented singing with Dankworth’s band.

Most interesting historically, especially for proof of how creative Parker and Wheeler were at that juncture, SONG FOR SOMEONE is a valuable addition to Wheeler’s slim discography. But, especially in comparison to other Wheeler dates of that era, it shouldn’t be inflated to be more than it was mean to be -- a showcase for self-expression among friends.

--Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Toot-Toot 2. Ballad Two 3. Song for Someone 4. Causes are Events+ 5. The Good Doctor+* 6. Nothing Changes.

Personnel: Kenny Wheeler (trumpet and flugelhorn); Ian Hammer, Greg Bowen, Dave Hancock (trumpets); Keith Christie, Bobby Lamb, Chris Pyne, David Horler (trombones); Jim Wilson or Malcom Griffiths* (bass trombone); Alfie Reece (tuba); Mike Osborne (alto saxophone); Duncan Lamont, (tenor saxophone and flute); Evan Parker+ (tenor and soprano saxophones); Alan Branscombe (piano or electric piano); John Taylor: (electric piano); Derek Bailey* (guitar); Ron Mathewson: (bass); Tony Oxley (percussion); Norma Winstone (vocals)

April 26, 2004

DEREK BAILEY/SHAKING RAY LEVIS

Live at Lamar’s
Shaking Ray Records SRR CD-003

LIMESCALE
Limescale
Incus CD 56

Getting a handle on Derek Bailey’s recorded and performing output is like trying to grab Jell-O with a catcher’s mitt -- some sticks, but most slips away. The length and breath of the British guitarist’s almost 40 years of musical associations just as a committed improviser is staggering in breadth and unconventionality.

Bailey has said that he considers ad-hoc musical activities essential, and he always appears to be ready, willing and able to play with anyone at any time. Over the years his partners have ranged from those as recognized as fellow EuroImprov theorizers such as drummer Tony Oxley and saxophonist Evan Parker and Peter Brötzmann to unique throw downs with a potpourri of lesser-known solo players, dancers, DJs and even head-banging rhythm sections.

These two CDs fit snugly into the later exploratory category. While some may find it odd that he’s on a live date recorded in Chattanooga, Tenn. with a weirdly named local duo, in fact Shaking Ray Levis’ Dennis J. Palmer on synthesizers and Bob Stagner on percussion are veteran improv associates. Not only have they worked with Bailey previously, but they were also the first American group on his record label.

More notable is the creation of Limescale, a cooperative group featuring Bailey on side with two British Free Jazzers -- clarinetist Alex Ward who is also part of bassist Simon Fell’s SFQ band -- and bass saxophonist Tony Bevan, who in his solo and trio outings has created a modern voice for the unwieldy beast usually confirmed to Dixieland bands. But it’s the other two participants who really show Bailey’s acceptance and courage. Fancifully named T.H.F Drenching improvises on the Dictaphone (sic), while Sonic Pleasure hits the bricks in a way most striking unionists wouldn’t recognize.

Unmasked, the two actually come from other musical areas that admix with jazz and Free Improv. Sonic Pleasure -- real name Marie-Angélique Bueler -- is a Manchester-based composer of so-called serious music, who has tested her improv chops with Fell and woodwind master Mick Beck. A fellow Mancunian, T.H.F Drenching is the stage name adopted by Stu Calton, guitarist in alt-pop band Pence Eleven, when he creates freely improvised musique concrète with his Dictaphones. He too has had improv experience with Fell, Beck and trombonist Gail Brand, who is also part of SFQ.

Back in the U.S.A., despite some sonic overlap between Bailey’s electric guitar and Palmer’s synthesizer, the sounds are more-or-less clearly delineated. Still there are points where it appears as if being near the birthplace of Southern Fried Boogie Rock adds a harder and more metallic cast to the guitar’s solos. He won’t be mistaken for Duane Allman, but then again he’s never been mistaken for any other guitarist during his more than 50 years professional career.

On “Dietrichson”, for instance, the distorted oscillations from his volume pedal eventually mate with the distended reverb washes arising from Palmer’s synth. No beat monger, Stagner varies his strokes from standard time to irregular beats, occasionally crackling the ride cymbal for effect. Sanguine, with stuttering rhythm guitar chording elsewhere, there’s one section just before the end where it appears as if Bailey is using delay to transform himself into a flat-picking guitar army as Palmer lays on the organ chords.

A churchy organ riff completes the penultimate section of “Catfish Night” as well, but for most of the tune the keyboard man relies on less conventional tumult. There’s the spinning massed drone that seems to include the whap of a fan belt that he often shows off. However, that sound often resolves itself into atmospheric rocket launching suggestions and burbling space tones when the guitarist goes the opposite route, worrying single notes with Appalachian thoroughness. If Palmer extends his undulating sound base, Bailey merely uses his reverb to amplify top-of-fretboard investigations and Old-Timey flailing, letting the synth create the feedback that by rights should come from his effects pedal. The distortion pedal is only on tap at the end, raising the volume for some buzzing feedback, complementing similar wavering aural data from the keys, and completing the rhythmic thump from Stagner. Before that, the drummer mostly confines himself to cow bell pealing, brush strokes on the hi-hat and friction between two wooden drumsticks.

Throughout this concise CD of a little less than 27¾ minutes, the mood reflects the more mellow properties of Free Improv.

LIMESCALE would never be described that way. There’s so much happening at the same time during the six titles on the disc, that at intervals it appears as if there’s no central focus at all. Luckily Bailey & Co. are able to keep these tendencies in check.

One of the overriding truisms on this almost-61-minute CD, is how absolutely distinctive and individualistic Bailey’s guitar licks are. There’s never any doubt as to who is holding the plectrum. Conversely it’s surprising how conventional Dictaphone and brick sounds appear in this context. Drenching’s appliance simply becomes another horn along with the two reeds; while Pleasure’s bricks provide the rhythm, with her technique striking them the way a percussive vibist like Lionel Hampton or Terry Gibbs would treat his axe. Resonating rattles and crashes put her output midway between that of a limited drum set and a vibraharp with the motor turned down very low.

The only real departure from this occurs on “Charity singles ball”, the CD’s longest track. Here there are points when the chiming tones of the masonry resemble those from glass test tubes, a carillon, or a wooden desk. Meantime the horn section is respiring out a Greek chorus of honks, with Drenching adding a queer, high-pitched vocalization to Ward’s shrill timbres ranging from double-tongued trills to upper register screeches on top of multiphonic, huffing mouth percussion from Bevan. Irregular staccato picking is Bailey’s contribution, at least before he ends the tune with arching feedback distortion, while Pleasure somehow replicates the sound of log drums and unselected cymbals spinning on the ground.

Elsewhere it’s probably the Dictaphone noises that suggest the squeals of a miniature pooch, the gasping of a monkey, and sibilant Daffy Duck timbres. That links the fowl trills, ear splitting whistles and frequent elongated squeals to clarinet territory. That is, except for a time when Ward creates a liquid laughing solo, expanded with key clicks and ghost notes on “The army stuffing its drum”, and on “French archive”, where his tone turns so legato that it almost resembles that of an outside Buddy DeFranco.

If there’s one disappointment here it’s that far too often Bevan’s parts seem limited to puffing out subterranean rhino snorts, creating split-toned, liquid raspberries evidentially forced from the bow of his horn, or producing rhythmic tongue slaps to emphasize the beat. Segregating him in traditional bass territory means that the octave jumps and higher-pitched pyrotechnics he’s displayed elsewhere are kept under wraps.

Then again, there may be enough cacophony on call, considering that when Drenching’s Dictaphone manipulation doesn’t result in either a whistling wind section role -- shared with Ward’s unattached gooseneck altissimo blowing -- it exhibits the static oscillation of mass-produced office machinery. Drenching’s heavy-breathing mouth refrains passed though the miniature item could be dispatches from Bedlam as well, and perhaps that’s all the anarchy in the U.K. the five wanted on the session.

Between the anvil-like offbeat rhythm of the bricks plus the horns’ shrieking undulations when colored noises aren’t being forced through them, this could be the perfect soundtrack for a very British political demonstration. Yet whether he’s playing expressive rhythm guitar fills or sounding out irregular tones from beneath the bridge, Bailey, in contrast, goes about his job as distinctively, competently and unperturbed as an old time Bobbie.

As a left winger Bailey would likely despise the comparison. But that’s what happens when you, like the Bobbies, have evolved a distinctive persona unaffected by the different situations in which you’re found.

It’s also why investing in these examples of Bailey’s collaboration is as valuable as picking up any of his other CDs.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Lamar’s: 1. Dietrichson 2. Catfish night

Personnel: Lamar’s: Derek Bailey (guitar); Dennis J. Palmer (synthesizers); Bob Stagner (percussion)

Track Listing: Limescale: 1. Bürger plus 2. French archive 3. The army stuffing its drum 4. Charity singles ball 5.Academy now! 6. Titles by drenching

Personnel: Limescale: Alex Ward (clarinet); Tony Bevan (bass saxophone); Derek Bailey (guitar); T.H.F Drenching (Dictaphone); Sonic Pleasure (bricks)

November 17, 2003

PETER BRÖTZMANN

More Nipples
Atavistic Unheard Music Series UMS/ALP236CD

Prime cuts of Peter Brötzmann and company at his most ferocious, the 40 minutes of music on this CD were literally forgotten until 2002 when FMP founder Jost Gebers discovered this cache of unreleased tapes in his archives.

Living up to the series title, the three tracks were recorded at the same 1969 session that produced NIPPLES (Atavistic/Unheard Music Series UMS/ALP 205 CD), one of the German saxophonist’s most distinctive early sessions, that itself was out-of-print for years until reissued in 2000. Unlike that disc, British saxophonist Evan Parker and guitarist Derek Bailey are only featured on the title track. The other two highlight the reedist’s quartet of the time, completed by Flemish pianist Fred Van Hove, the late German bassist Buschi Niebergall and Holland’s Han Bennink on drums and percussion.

Among the likely reasons that these tracks weren’t released at the time of recording is that in contrast to the original LP, the more than 17-minute tune with the two Englishmen sounds closer to certified, restrained BritImprov than the expected balls-to-the-walls Continental variety.

The top of the piece initially features rapid runs or laid back arco work from the bassist, rubato piano cadenzas, irresolute plinks and clinks from the guitarist and drumming that’s more shake and rattle than anything you would imagine from Bennink today. Van Hove’s flashing octave jumping and right-handed tremolo lines appear to share lead duties with Bailey’s flat-picking, with the others almost struggling to keep up. Only when the saxmen shows up does Niebergall assert himself with a buzzing output that takes on jagged, top-of-scale, violin-like qualities. Then Bennink, who could be making music with a collection of pots and pans -- so brassy is his sound -- starts to clatter away at greater volume, while Bailey retreats. Using Van Hove’s high-intensity arpeggios ranging over the keyboard as backing, Brötz and Parker make like an avant-garde Griff & Jaws produced an onslaught of curved split tones. Characteristic wild gouts of overblown notes tumble from the German’s horn, and, surprisingly, he’s answered in kind by the Briton. Before an oscillating bass line and simple piano end the proceedings, Brötzmann has asserted himself with long nasal yowls from his horn

Using the same rattling, metallic percussion, Bennink also introduces timbres that could come from struck wood block and hand-spanked conga drums on the quartet tracks, recorded in another studio six days later. With his cymbals quivering like aluminum pie plates, the Dutchman’s playing starts to resemble what you hear from Third World junkeroo bands that find their percussion instruments in garbage heaps and trash cans. However the bassist is more energized, probably spending as much time resolutely hammering on the wood with his fists and rapidly striking the front of his strings with the bow as he does bowing and plucking. As for Brötzmann, on both tunes he works himself into an altissimo, artery-bursting fury, yanking multiphonics and irregular vibrations from his reed in a style that’s half bar walking R&B tenor sax and half intestinal shrieks. It gets so that any duck quacking overblowing he exhibits is overtaken by unaccompanied renal screams, that under pressure from the rhythm section’s rapid response move into a higher and more feral range.

You have to remember that this was a time when Albert Ayler was still alive and other tenor men like Pharoah Sanders, Charles Tyler, Frank Wright and Archie Shepp were playing at their most vehement. With Teutonic meticulousness Brötz seems to be going them one better.

Is this an essential disc then? Well, it’s different and certainly interesting, but only in spots offers more than expected. Still if you’re a follower of any of the men involved --and/or need another fix of unfettered Free Jazz preserved in its rawest form -- the CD will unquestionably excite you.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. More nipples* 2. Fiddle-faddle 3.Fat man walks

Personnel: Peter Brötzmann, tenor saxophone; Evan Parker (soprano saxophone)*; Derek Bailey (guitar)*; Fred Van Hove (piano); Buschi Niebergall (bass); Han Bennink (drums)

October 6, 2003

MANFRED SCHOOF

European Echoes
Atavistic Unheard Music UMS/ALP 232CD

ALEXANDER VON SCHLIPPENBACH
The Living Music
Atavistic Unheard Music UMS/ALP 231CD

Multi-reedman Peter Brötzmann always insists that when pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and trumpeter Manfred Schoof first heard his pioneering free jazz band in the mid-1960s “they just laughed their asses off. At that time they played the Horace Silver-style thing”. But, by the end of the decade as Brötzmann widened his circle to include other experimenters like Dutch drummer Han Bennink and worked with American jazzers like trumpeter Don Cherry and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, his fellow Germans began to come around as well.

They began to come around to such an extent that by 1969 Schlippenbach and Schoof were recording the outside session showcased on these discs, both of which featured international casts, definitely including Brötzmann and Bennink. Since that time the pianist has maintained his free jazz affiliation, most notably in a long-running trio with British saxophonist Evan Parker, who is also on EUROPEAN ECHOES. The trumpeter, on the other hand, sticks more to a mainstream style, when he isn’t writing and playing contemporary classical music.

Recorded first THE LIVING MUSIC was an indirect nod to Julian Beck’s experimental Living Theater group that had recently set up shop in Europe. It was also a smaller-sized version of Schlippenbach’s on-again-off-again-massive Globe Unity Orchestra (GUO), with British trombonist Paul Rutherford and Bennink joining the five Germans players.

In a way it’s those two, as well as Brötzmann, who are most impressive on this session. The trombonist who had already worked with London’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble and GUO and would go on to play throughout Europe, is credited with the invention of trombone multiphonics. Here his avant-gutbucket tone intertwines among the other instruments, stylistically neighing in his way like Tricky Sam Nanton did with Duke Ellington’s band. Using what sound like a regular kit expanded with a marimba, a thumb piano, a massive Oriental gong and who knows what else, Bennink has more percussion on hand than Ellington’s flashy Sony Greer ever had.

Like Greer, he uses it judiciously, however, smashing, banging and thumping enough to bring the discordant darker toned instruments together. At times, though, when the pianist attacks the keyboard with particular ferocity, Bennink become even more bellicose, becoming Sunny Murray to Schlippenbach’s Cecil Taylor.

However, since he began playing professionally almost at the same time as CT, Schlippenbach is more a Thelonious Monk man. As a matter of fact, his introductory solo on “Tower” has a pianistic conception that’s definitely Monk-like. Furthermore, despite Brötz’s overblowing -- no Charlie Rouse he -- and Bennink’s relentless pounding, the pianist’s nearly 11½-minute composition sounds like one of the tunes recorded by those mid-sized Monk ensembles.

Schlippenbach’s cadences and arpeggios are less adventurous elsewhere, especially when Schoof, on cornet, takes the lead. Influenced at that time as much by Ted Curson and other freeboppers as Cherry, the brassman’s “Wave” suggests The Jazz Messengers playing Ornette Coleman. Vying with swinging, foreground percussion, Schoof’s solo is all flourishes, fanfares and note building, facing counterpoint from the saxophone section and Rutherford’s smeared lines. Elsewhere, the British brassman combines with Bennink for exercises in free march time and otherwise -- perhaps aided by Niebergall’s little-heard bass trombone -- stacks up against the buzzing saxophones and relentless percussion with elongated tones that sometimes sound like the braying of animals.

Throughout, Brötzmann is a holy terror, pumping out notes as if from a machine gun and asserting himself more than anyone else. On one occasion he explodes into a cappella multiphonics, then works his way down his horn, tossing out variations on the theme as he goes along. Although as part of the Schoof Quintet and later on with his own band and work with Lacy, Luxembourg-resident Michel Pilz would be quite well known, he’s oddly reticent here. Only on the cornettist’s Stan-Kenton-meets-Don-Cherry arrangement of “Past Time” do his tart clarinet tone make any impression.

On the other hand, nearly every one of the 16 musicians present gets some solo space on EUROPEAN ECHOES, another of Atavistic’s FMP Archive Edition, recorded two months after Schlippenbach’s CD under Schoof nominal leadership.

It seems nominal because a soon a the fist drum beats echo through the studio, by means of the dual percussion of Bennink and Swiss drummer Pierre Favre, it’s obvious that this almost 32-minute composition is going to be some wild ride. Appropriately named, the disc features all the player on the first CD save Pilz plus Parker and German tenorist Gerd Dudek on saxophones; Italian Enrico Rava and Dane Hugh Steinmetz on trumpets; Fred Van Hove from Belgium and Irène Schweizer from Switzerland on pianos; British guitarist Derek Bailey and bassists Peter Kowald from Germany and Arjen Gorter from Holland.

With the examples of controlled chaos that other large ensembles like New York’s The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, GUO and Brötzmann’s “Machine-Gun” band already created, this disc is most valuable providing aural views of important EuroImprovisers early in their career. Diffident Bailey, for instance, creates some wild, almost rock-oriented electric picking here with such vigor that it overwhelms the dual drummers. A far cry from his present persona as a balladeer, Rava produces some brassy, Don Ayler-like shakes. Meanwhile the triple keyboardists seem to be reconstituted as Cecil Taylor triplets, although during the course of the piece, one -- likely Schweizer -- offers up some inside piano harp glisses, along the lines for which she would later be better known.

Another small big band session that may have been on everyone’s mind at the time was John Coltrane’s less-than-five-years-old ASCENSION. Facing off against one another with cymbals and snares, flams, press rolls and march beats, Favre and Bennink are no Rich vs. Roach but suggest Elvin Jones times two. Additionally, some of the piano chording relates more to McCoy Tyner’s work with Trane than Taylor’s. All three trumpeters appear to be trying to see who can squeal the highest in bugle range as the theme is elaborated, though the plucked bass parts -- when they surface from the din -- may be more advanced than what Art Davis and Jimmy Garrison played on ADSCENSION. Dudek, Parker Brötzmann too generate enough screaming split tones to match Trane’s, Archie Shepp’s and Pharoah Sanders’ multiphonics on ASCENSION, often spitting out several bent notes simultaneously. Finally, as musical shards explode all over like bombs at an anarchist rally, the massed ferment builds to a combative crescendo, ending with the sustained single cymbal echo.

Too young or distanced to have experienced the excitement of 1960s’ Free Jazz? These two discs are the next best thing to being there.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: European: 1. European Echoes Part 1 2. European Echoes Part 2

Personnel: European: Manfred Schoof, Enrico Rava, Hugh Steinmetz (trumpets); Paul Rutherford (trombone); Peter Brötzmann, Gerd Dudek (tenor saxophones); Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophone); Alexander Von Schlippenbach; Fred Van Hove, Irène Schweizer (pianos); Derek Bailey (guitar); Peter Kowald, Arjen Gorter (basses); Buschi Niebergall (bass and bass trombone); Han Bennink, Pierre Favre (drums)

Track Listing: Living: 1. The living music 2. Into the Staggerin 3. Wave 4. Tower 5. Lollopalooza 6. Past time

Personnel: Living; Manfred Schoof (cornet and flugelhorn); Paul Rutherford (trombone); Peter Brötzmann (tenor and baritone saxophones); Michel Pilz (bass clarinet and baritone saxophone); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano and percussion); J.B. Niebergall (bass and bass trombone); Han Bennink (drums and percussion)

December 16, 2002

DEREK BAILEY/AGUSTÌ FERNÁNDEZ

Barcelona
Hopscotch Records HOP 10

Excessive intellectualism is one of the most common properties ascribed to completely improvised music like this. Especially if, as on this duo CD, it involves experienced European virtuosi such as Spanish pianist Augustí Fernández and British guitarist and elder statesman of the genre, Derek Bailey.

But, while the collective biographies of the two encompass experience in contemporary classical music, dance band sounds, studio pop and most definitely jazz, a cozy duo session like this one could be linked to an earlier tradition. Performing together in a Barcelona studio, aren’t Fernández and Bailey expressing themselves in a so-called folkloric way? Bringing experience and mother wit into play as each deals with the other’s techniques and inspirations, they appear to be following early urban blues partnerships such as pianist Georgia Tom and guitarist Tampa Red or pianist Leroy Carr and guitarist Scrapper Blackwell.

Obviously, unlike those 1930s sessions, there are no vocals here, and the selections last much longer than a 78’s three minute running time -- “Casa Leopoldo” alone is 23 minutes plus -- yet the excitement and honest sense of discovery is common. In contrast to today’s neo-cons, in fact, these so-called primitive bluesmen would probably not be shocked by the Europeans’ unorthodox methodology either. They evolved new ways if playing their instruments, just as those involved in EuroImprov have.

On “Senyor Parellada”, for instance, the pianist’s ripe tremolos often suggest that he’s creating 21st Century boogie-woogie, which Jelly Roll Morton said had to have “that Spanish tinge” anyway. Meanwhile, Bailey’s flat picking can be heard as an extension of Swing band sounds. Percussive in his bass string forays, the guitarist uses minimal amplification and tinctures of feedback to attenuate his ideas. Often preferring to stroke the portion of he strings beneath the bridge and on the fretboard than the instrument’s centre, he invites the pianist to match tones, sending Fernández to use the piano’s harp-like internal strings or produce an atonal staccato keyboard gliss.

The 23-plus-minute centrepiece even finds Fernández, whose playing partners have included saxophonist Evan Parker, bassist William Parker and drummer Susie Ibarra, aping player piano tones. At times the keyboard sounds as if it’s a harpsichord or a spinet, while Bailey chugs along with banjo-like flailing. A bit too long, the piece resolves itself as the pianist leans on the pedals to unleash a string symphony of smashes, wheezes and internal rumbling. Elsewhere, though, on “7 Portes”, for instance, constant arpeggios characterize Fernández’s touch as resounding fervor threatens to take over the entire sound space. Bailey’s wavering lines sometime make it appear that he’s wielding a bottleneck guitar, until he produce ear-splitting feedback as his side of the equation.

Then there’s “Esterri”, the fastest and shortest number on the disc. Bailey’s unqualified rhythm guitar strokes and the pianist’s super staccato and super quick patterns amplified with the sustain pedal, almost transform the two into country dance musicians. Powerful enough to impel committed high steppers across a floor, a variation of the music could have been produced by barrelhouse specialists 90 years ago whose steady cadence encouraged bushed sawmill workers to shuffle along all night.

With empiricism, intelligence and technical proficiency, Bailey and Fernández have created a highly functional set of music that in its context is as free, welcoming and understandable as blues piano-guitar duets were in their time. It’s certainly a disc that will be sought after by fans of either of the two men, and interested others.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Senyor Parellada 2. Botafumerio 3. Esterri 4. Casa Leopoldo 5. 7 Portes 6. Medulio

Personnel: Derek Bailey (guitar); Augustí Fernández (piano)

October 7, 2002

FRODE GJERSTAD/JOHN STEVENS/DEREK BAILEY

Hello, Goodbye
EMANEM 4065

During the long period in the 1970s and 1980s when he was metaphorically alone in the wilderness, as practically the only advanced improviser in Norway, alto saxophonist Frode Gjerstad developed an extended playing relationship with British drummer John Stevens. However this recently discovered almost 73½-minute document is the only time the two worked in tandem with guitarist Derek Bailey.

Bailey, who is often as theoretical as Stevens was spontaneous, was along with the drummer an early BritImprov creator and worked with Stevens many times as a sort of “fellow traveler” to the drummer’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME). But this disc preserves the only meeting -- so far -- between the guitarist and the alto saxophonist. Recorded by Gjerstad on a portable DAT machine during a 1992 concert in his hometown of Stavanger, and computer-corrected in 2000, it’s an instructive example of how three originals can interact without giving up any of their individuality. Most of the tunes flow one into another, with the only real break occurring about 20 minutes after the three begin.

Throughout, Gjerstad casts out a long fishing line of tiny accented notes, while Bailey ranges up and down the strings, plinking and plucking resonating, sharply metallic phrases. At the same time, the ever-busy Stevens moves between cymbals and snare, placing accents with the accuracy of a pastry chef decorating a multi-layer cake. Sometimes, though, as in the middle of “Three Two Three One”, when Stevens lays out things get a little too weightless, with the feathery sax lines and string silences threatening to float away. Strangely enough that track ends with about two minutes of amplifier hum, which seems to be an enigmatic Bailey statement rather than a technical fault.

Perhaps to counter that, “Three by Three” -- the longest track --is much more aggressive, with Stevens occasionally spewing out a stream of off-key mini trumpet blats, Gjerstad elongating his alto lines, sometimes in counterpoint with the trumpet, and Bailey constructing some picked and strummed rhythmic backing. With the guitarist producing an improv version of power chording, Stevens is moved to ratchet up the backbeat while Gjerstad slides out some shards of pitch variations that more resemble the energy music of the 1960s than more restrained EuroImprov.

That moods seem to stay intact during “Two Three Two Three” with a saxophonist-indicated head of long-lined slurs that almost sounds South American. Immersed in his kit, Stevens keeps the rhythm jumping from snares, toms and cymbals and back again, while, as if reacting to the challenge, the guitarist matches both of them with a busy barrage of single notes. Here and elsewhere, using his amp’s and pedal’s capacity and creative feedback, Bailey proves that the booklet description of him playing an amplified guitar is no misnomer.

All in all, HELLO, GOODBYE is much more than the historical souvenir of a unprecedented one-off meeting. Although reminiscent in part of some of SME sessions with the same line-up and a few of Bailey’s saxophone face-offs, the creations are given a fresh twist from Gjerstad’s ingenuity.

Thus the disc becomes triply valuable. It’s another report on the talents of a highly inventive drummer; a supplementary CD of the underrecorded Gjerstad’s work; and as a reminder that no matter how many sessions he plays, when faced with improvisations --and improvisers -- at his level Bailey will pilot his work up to yet another level.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Hello 2. Three Two Three One 3. Three by Three 4. Two Three Two Three 5. Penultimatum 6. Goodbye

Personnel: Frode Gjerstad (alto saxophone); Derek Bailey (guitar); John Stevens (percussion, mini-trumpet)

December 17, 2001

IAN SMITH

Daybreak
Emanem 4059

Think of most memorable examples of British improvising over the past three decades and the front line sound that comes first to the inner ear is that of the sonic advances made by saxophonists such as Evan Parker, John Butcher and Paul Dunmall.

Aiming to redress the balance, Dublin-born Ian Smith has recorded this skillful example of BritImprov at London’s Red Rose club without a reed in sight. Besides Smith on trumpet and flugelhorn, the CD features two exceptional young brass boosters -- trombonist Gail Brand and tubaist Oren Marshall -- as well as two veteran improvisers, guitarist Derek Bailey and Veryan Weston, playing a so-called early music chamber organ.

Mixing and matching the five musicians on the CD’s 14 tracks, this is no vanity project for Smith -- he and the other horns don’t even play on two selections. But with the luck of the Irish, he’s certainly ended up with an exceptional report on the state of British brass finesse in the 21st Century.

Smith has played on hip hop and classical sessions as well as with the London Improvisers Orchestra, as has Brand, who is also a member of bassist Simon H. Fell’s quintet and the Lunge quartet. Those two, plus Marshall, a tubaist usually employed in classical circles, and who impressively held his own on a trio disc with Butcher and Bailey make up The Temporary Brass Trio. In addition, over time, Marshall has developed individual improvisation techniques including deconstructing his instrument with an assortment of hooters and whistles in place of valves.

Judging from the earth shaking blasts that occur from time to time, his axe doesn’t seem to be deconstructed here, but he may be the party tooting what sounds like a penny whistle on “Don't even think about it” and “Windsurfing”.

With the ensembles ranging from duos to quintets, everyone gets to strut his or her stuff. Especially impressive is “Air Apparent” where Weston’s keyboard continuo gives the brass trio a platform on which they can exhibit how musical the sound of breath being forced through mouthpieces and valves can be. Slow moving, “Hidden”, the only brass trio number, shows the three sounding each of their respective instrument’s pitches and then altering them. It’s probably Brand, though, who figuratively converts her sackbut to an alp horn part of the way through.

With only Bailey on-side, Smith has enough room to feature himself on “Coffee” and he responds by exploring all of his instrument’s registers, producing dog growls, fanfares, miniscule mouthpiece squeaks and tones so muted they sound as if they come not from inside his horn, but from within his throat. Meanwhile the imperturbable guitarist blithely strums away. Smith passes that baptism by fire nicely and later on proves that he can come up with enough ideas to take Butcher’s place in an echo of the trio disc Bailey and Marshall recorded with the saxophonist.

However as a quintet or quartet with Weston, it often seems as if it’s the organist who must go mighty-Wurlitzer and take up all the sonic space he can to prop up the horns and get them to start spitting out notable improvisations. With a sonority that skates from that of a circus calliope to one resembling a primitive synthesizer, Weston sometimes makes the horns speed up and chase one another like a litter of cats. They differentiate themselves with reverberating blats from the tuba, quicksilver melodies from the trumpet and choked half-valve effects from the trombone.

Besides the apparent inability of the brass to horn in on the improvisations of their elders, the disc has other weaknesses. Most obvious is that despite the song titles, there seems to be an absolute lack of levity on the session, Maybe Smith was so concerned with making a brass statement that he neglected the lighter part of the equation. No blarney-sprouting stage Irishman he. Coupled with this, is that none of the brassfolk displays the sort of full-fledged self-sufficient identity yet that Brand, for one, has shown on other sessions. They’re good players, of course, but no style or phrase defines them completely. Contrast this with Bailey. From the first note he sounds on “There We Are” you know exactly who is playing that guitar.

Still, considering that the 71-year-old plectrumist has had an entire lifetime to create himself and that the three horn players are young enough to be his children, their labors here augur well for their future. If all keep theorizing and studying, while playing and recording at this high level, we’ll soon be able to note their individualities as easily as we hear Bailey’s.

DAYBREAK, as the title suggests is strong illumination towards that goal.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Daybreak 2. Falange, falanginha, falangeta# 3. Carpe dentum*# 4. There We Are*^# 5. Coffee^ 6. Blás*# 7. Function of the organ* 8. Don't even think about it*^# 9. Closely Linked^# 10. Air Apparent*# 11. Sometimes*^ 12. Hidden# 13. Windsurfing*^# 14. Go On^

Personnel: Ian Smith [all tracks but 7 & 11] (flugelhorn, trumpet); Gail Brand (trombone)#; Oren Marshall [all tracks but 5, 7 & 10] (tuba); Veryan Weston (chamber organ)*; Derek Bailey (guitar)^

December 10, 2001

GLOBE UNITY ORCHESTRA

Globe Unity ’67 & ‘70
Atavistic Unheard Music UMS/ALP 223 CD

Souvenirs of a time when “globe unity” meant more than the convergence of commercial or military interests, this CD of never-before-released tracks feature a small army of Euro improvisers luxuriating in the freedom promulgated by John Coltrane’s ASCENSION and The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra.

Formed in late 1966, following a Berlin Jazz Festival commission for founder/pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, the Globe Unity Orchestra (GUO) evolved over the years from this wild-and-wooly Energy ensemble to one that joined other European large groups in a concern for compositions. Besides, many might find that these two pieces, initially taped for German radio, more exciting than what came from the band afterwards.

The more than 34-minute, 1967 performance, for instance, finds the less than a year old, 19-piece GUO taking full advantage of the era’s heady musical freedom. Roaring up and down the score is a literal who’s who of (in-the-main) German free jazzers, some of whom like saxophonist Peter Brötzmann -- here playing alto of all things -- bassist Peter Kowald and vibist Karl Berger (as an organizer/teacher) went on to greater and more varied expression. Some like reedman Willem Breuker, trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff and brassman Manfred Schoof turned to more conventional playing. A few musicians have since died and others have been lost in the mists of time.

In a composition made up of many climaxes, ending on an extended Wagnerian flourish, and which practically knocks over the listener with its sheer power, von Schlippenbach seems to be the leader only by osmosis. It’s pretty much every man for himself, spurred and taunted by a massed rhythm section of three percussionists, two bassists, a vibist, a tubaist and the pianist smashing a gong when the spirit moves him.

Especially impressive are Schoof soaring into the ozone layer with his cornet and high D trumpet, and Breuker puffing out some deep-dish baritone saxophone blats. Halfway through as well, Gunter Hampel’s flute and Willy Lietzmann’s tuba join for a minuet that suggests a rhinoceros sashaying with a crow. Additionally, the pianist sounds best two thirds of the way through, when he unleashes some space boogie-woogie, rather than at other places where he still seems in thrall to Cecil Taylor.

However with such a large aggregation and so many short solo peeping out of the dense musical mass, at times it’s hard to ascribe proper praise where it’s due. Is it Gerd Dudek or Heinz Sauer who takes the hairy-chested, Coltranesque tenor saxophone solo at the beginning; and does Hampel or Kris Wanders contribute bass clarinet bottom elsewhere? With everyone trying to contribute his two marks worth, identification become difficult.

Three years later, with the band members’ hair and beards grown even longer and wilder, the Germans are joined by Czech, Polish, French, Dutch and a whole contingent of British musicians -- most prominently saxophonist Evan Parker, guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Han Bennink. With the section swelled by U.K. trombonists Malcolm Griffiths and Paul Rutherford, the almost 18-minute piece is more brassy and thanks to Dutchman Bennink and his German opposite number Paul Lovens, more percussive. Interestingly enough, though, except for some minor guitar feedback at the top and a small circuit of protracted saxophone excavating in the middle -- which could come from any one of the five saxophonists -- neither Bailey nor Parker seems to showcase any part of what would soon become an instantly identifiable persona. Instead the -- at times -- nine brasses assert themselves more than the other instruments.

Cleaner than many live recordings, but not sonically perfect, the disc boosts the GUO’s slim discography and offers a fresh and memorable look at the band in its formative, most experimental, years.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Globe Unity ’67 2. Globe Unity ‘70

Personnel: ’67: Manfred Schoof (cornet, high D trumpet); Jürg Grau, Claude Deron (trumpet); Jiggs Wigham, Albert Mangelsdorff (trombone); Willy Lietzmann (tuba); Gunter Hampel (bass clarinet, flute); Peter Brötzmann (alto saxophone); Kris

Wanders (alto saxophone, bass clarinet); Gerd Dudek, tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinet); Heinz Sauer (tenor and soprano saxophones); Willem Breuker baritone saxophone, clarinet); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano, bells, gong, tam-tam); Karlhanns Berger (vibraphone); Buschi Niebergall, Peter Kowald (bass); Jacki Liebezeit, drums, tympani); Mani Neumeier, Sven-Åke Johansson (drums)

Personnel: ’70: Kenny Wheeler (trumpet, flugelhorn); Schoof (trumpet, flugelhorn, high D trumpet); Tomas Stanko, Bernard Vitet (trumpet); Malcolm Griffiths, Mangelsdorff, (trombone); Paul Rutherford (trombone, tenor horn); Niebergall (bass trombone, bass); Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones); Michel Pilz (flute, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone); Dudek, tenor and soprano saxophones, flute); Sauer (alto, tenor and soprano saxophones); Brötzmann, tenor and baritone saxophones); von Schlippenbach (piano, percussion); Derek Bailey (guitar); Kowald (bass, tuba); Arjen Gorter (bass, electric bass); Paul Lovens (drums, percussion); Han Bennink, drums, shellhorn, dhung, gachi)

December 3, 2001

DEREK BAILEY & NOEL AKCHOTE

Close to the Kitchen
Blue Chopsticks 06

An outstanding example of pure guitar extemporization, this European dust up is a cross-generational, cross-cultural tryst as well.

On one side there's British improv elder statesman, Derek Bailey (born 1930), who practically invented the U.K. variant of free music and who continues to work with nearly every player with whom he crosses paths. In the other corner is young French guitarist Noël Akchoté (born 1968), influenced by noise bands and rockers as well a free music and who has honed his improv chops with musicians as different as Americans, saxophonist Tim Berne and trombonist George Lewis and fellow Gauls drummer Daniel Humair, reedist Louis Sclavis and bassist Joëlle Léandre. Known for his POMO band The Recyclers, Akchoté also writes for film and run the Rectangle record label, on which this session first appeared on LP in 1996.

Despite the nearly 40 year difference in their ages, there's no sense of a master-disciple relationship here; with Bailey there rarely is. Instead the older man gives as good as he gets on these six tracks recorded in a London studio.

In truth, with Bailey's experiments having influenced the entire guitar world, there are times when his playing and Akchoté's sound eerily similar. On "Impossible n'est pas Français", for instance, the two spend time throwing phrases, notes and finally little string scratches back and forth to make their points. If the younger guitarist creates a little melody of buzzes, then Bailey responds with what appear to be bass string burps and string fanfares. However, it's very likely that the feedback specialist on some of the tunes is Akchoté, the child of rock's excesses.

Most of the time though, you get a mental image of the two doing an aural Louis Prima and Keely Smith act. Bailey as Smith, plows along, head down, cycling through a series of tiny plectrum strokes, painstakingly constructing solos. Akchoté on the other hand is Prima, hyperactively, though metaphorically leaping around, countering the older guitarist's meticulous journey with spooky horror-movie style passages, and accelerated strums that could be introducing Led Zepplin's "Whole Lotta Love".

Bailey remains unflappable throughout, mostly concentrating on creating ghostly, echoing intonation. However, at intervals to counter Akchoté's fluttering bird cries or what sound like space satellite signals, he'll slowly introduce straight bass guitar comping or bell-like notes or slowly bang the instrument's side with his hand. Earlier, at the beginning of "Ankara-Boulogne" both appear to be having a great time launching bursts of metallic notes into the atmosphere, before settling down to some whistling lines and wire scratchings. You could call it energy music of unfamiliar gestures.

Although his play-with-anyone ethos has meant that Bailey has produced some missteps, this masterful disc isn't one of them. Having it available on CD as well, means that more than just the cognoscenti can hear it. Listen yourself to see how two men who could literally be grandfather and grandson can, congruent to a food preparation area, create beautiful improv.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Pas la montagne! 2. Dans distribution il y a distribuer 3. Ankara-Boulogne 4. Impossible n'est pas Français 5. ça s'aime, (society of authors and...) 6. Toi et moi

Personnel: Derek Bailey, Noël Akchoté (guitars)

September 24, 2001

DEREK BAILEY/INGAR ZACH

Llaer
SOFA 503

INGAR ZACH/IVAR GRYDELAND

Visiting Ants
SOFA 502

Those who complain about the supposed sameness of improvised music should listen closely to these two completely off the cuff sessions. Even though they were recorded less than four months apart, feature the exact same instrumentation as well as the same percussionist, only the very obtuse could confuse one for the other.

LLAER presents British guitarist Derek Bailey, the grand old man of EuroImprov trading licks with Ingar Zach, a young Norwegian percussionist. VISITING ANTS -- shouldn't the disc titles have been reversed? -- highlights duets between Zach and fellow countryman, guitarist Ivar Grydeland.

A conservatory trained percussionist, Zach has worked with a variety of improvised and other bands in the Far North. Besides his ongoing percussive duo with Grydeland, his best-known affiliation is with Tri-dim a Trans-Scandinavian trio, which also features the exceptional Swedish guitarist David Stackenäs. Grydeland has played and recorded with British drummer Tony Oxley, Bailey's old confrere from the dawn of the close-knit London improvised music scene.

Recorded in Oslo following a Norwegian mini-tour by the duo, LLAER finds Zach seemingly deferring more to 71-year-old Bailey than he does to his younger compatriot on the other disc. At the same time, Bailey, an old hand in this sort of setting, frequently offers smoother, more pliable licks than Grydeland. Only rarely does the Englishman go hog wild with blaring feedback and electric effects, as he does on "Jerky Heads". Even then, that outburst eventually subsides into more moderated tones.

Fearless in such situations, the drummer brings out the heavy artillery, and happily bangs away on his snares, tom toms and bass drums. Elsewhere, when Bailey turns to simple repetition and even simpler licks, Zach offers up cymbal scratches, cowbell knocks and little snare tattoos. At times it can appear as if you're listening to him polish various parts of the kit as he searches for the right stroke to complement the guitarist's exploration.

After building itself up with an entire family of tiny gestures -- a paradiddle here, a roll there, one-half second of a cymbal ricochet here, one-half second of a cow bell thump there, "Hepp", a drum solo, resolves itself in a speedy frenzy of almost straight jazz. In marked contrast, "Warts'n'All", Bailey's solo showpiece is mostly silences, balladic meanderings. and strumming.

Having demonstrated singular capabilities, the more than 17 minute "Real Flying" evolves as a real meeting of minds -- and hands. Guitar sounds escalate from near noiselessness to hockey arena loudness. At one point Bailey introduces a section of twisted screech notes and ear splitting feedback. Zach replies in kind, pounding out a ballet of dark metal bass drum counterattack, finally forcing a return to the little rivulets of sound with which the duet began. Throughout the Norwegian comes across like Northern Mr. Fix-It in his workshop, restlessly busy, experimenting with first this tool and then the next.

Happily, a climate of easy intimacy marks the little more than 37 minutes of VISITING ANTS. Hyper-familiar with the other's moves, Zach seems freer and more insulated from the need to get hot before he's ready. If either musician suddenly wants to blast off -- as they both do on "First Visit" -- the other is ready. During the course of the disc, tiny bells, bowed guitar and cymbals, seemingly throttled voices, megaphone shouts and electronic washes all make their appearance. Echoed, repeated frantic or restful passages turn the entire disc into a sort of modified rondo sonata

Settling into a drum solo on ". … But Still Sofanatic" Zach maintains a measured pace, relaxing enough into the proceedings to substitute silences for the industriousness he exhibits with Bailey. While his entire kit seems to get a workout, it's the bells, cymbals and what could be vibes that appear most prominently.

Additionally, in contrast to Bailey's matter of fact stance, Grydeland is more focused. On "Think Happy Thoughts", for example, he launches a Star Wars missile attack full of rocket ship feedback and metallic electronica. So overpowering is the onslaught, though, that it's hard to determine whether Zach is along for the voyage or not. With the two compatriots definitely on side for "Dog", they come up with a speedy rock-tinged blow out that could easily attract those who have come to improv through such postrock bands as Sonic Youth.

To sum up: two discs, three musicians, many ways to approach improvised music. Both CDs deserve investigation, not only for the minute unfolding of a new Bailey partnership, but also to hear two young Norwegians evolving their version of the freest of musics.

-- Ken Waxman

Llaer:

Track Listing: 1. Shiny Crimp 2. Jerky Heads 3. Horizontal Rain 4. Hepp 5. Warts'n'All 6. Real Flying 7. Buckle Up!

Personnel: Derek Bailey (guitar); Ingar Zach (drums, percussion)

Visiting Ants :

Track Listing: 1. Sofamiliar … 2. First Visit 3. Sofasticated Lady 5. Hakavik Loek 6. Think Happy Thoughts 7. … But Still Sofanatic 8. Darbu 9. Dog 10. Last Visit

Personnel: Ivar Grydeland (guitar); Ingar Zach (drums, percussion)

May 15, 2001

PETER BRÖTZMANN

Nipples
Atavistic/Unheard Music Series UMS/ALP 205 CD

One of the great, lost Euroimprov records, NIPPLES could rightly be described as a supersession. Recorded in 1969, less than a year after German saxophonist Brötzmann's seminal call to free jazz arms, MACHINE GUN, it has been out of print for almost the same amount of time. Not only does the title track feature five of the MACHINE GUNners, but it adds guitarist Bailey, who with saxophonist Parker would very soon turn away from this extroverted style to concentrate on the distinctive British "scratch and pick" style.

NIPPLES' unavailability put the same hole in the European creative music discography that would have happened with rock if The Rolling Stones Now! had quickly gone out of print. Not only would listeners have been deprived of a glimpse of the Stones with such disparate folks as Gene Pitney and Phil Spector, but some of the band's best early blues playing would have been lost.

In the Euroimprov firmament, each of the men here has proved to be as important to that music more than three decades later as the Stones were to rock. Flemish nationalist Van Hove, has continued to refine his piano style; Bennink, from Holland, is still as bombastic as ever and has propelled many a free jazz blow out, as well as several large orchestras; Bailey is the crotchety grand old man of improv; Parker, a master of circular breathing, is arguably one of the most influential sax stylists in the world; and Brötzmann's lung-shredding tone is still on view anywhere from Germany to Germantown. Unfortunately, though, German bassist Niebergal, died a few years ago).

Probably the most unexpected part of the title track is how much both saxophonists sound like one another (sort of realizing that it was Brian Jones not Keith Richards who played lead guitar on an early Stones track). At that point, Parker seemed able to match Brötzmann power shriek for power shriek, intertwining sounds as if they were two snakes. The one extended, unaccompanied stop-time solo must be Brötz, however. Overall, the effect is exhilarating.

Noteworthy too is Bailey's work, since he's as upfront here with literal electric lines, as he would be in the background for most of his subsequent improv projects.

On the other hand, "Green Man", the quartet track, is quieter and more rhythm section and rhythmically-oriented. At least until the saxophonist gets warmed up. Then

It's strictly a Teutonic eruption, with Brötz exploring the range of his horn through several themes including one that echoes Albert Ayler's "Ghosts". His work forces Van Hove -- the second soloist -- to play more assertively than he does in 2000, while nothing has ever prevented Bennink from adding obstreperous percussion colors to any proceeding.

If there's a drawback to this CD, it's that it's less than 34 minute long. But if your interest is well recorded, quality music rather than quantity of sound you can't go far wrong with this session.

--Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Nipples 2. Tell The Green Man

Personnel: Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker (tenor saxophones); Derek Bailey (guitar); Fred Van Hove (piano); Buschi Niebergal (bass); Han Bennink (drums)

June 17, 2000

DEREK BAILEY/STEVE LACY

Outcome
Potlatch P299

If any two musicians can be said to be the "fathers" of the European free jazz/improv, then the two represented on this thought-provoking session could claim the title(s).

In actuality British guitarist Bailey and American saxophonist Lacy would likely opt for the inclusion of a gang of other Continental and British improvisers, but it's they who set the standard for non-idiomatic playing and have more-or-less stayed true to it ever since.

Lacy, jazz's first modern soprano saxist had already been a valuable addition to the ensembles of leaders as individualist as Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor before a more sympathetic climate drew him to Europe in the mid-1960s. Since then, from his Paris base he has mixed and matched his talents with improvisers of every stripe, country and temperament, while never losing sight of his jazz roots. Along with such quirky experiments as creating settings for poetics and perfecting the solo saxophone recital, he's still managed to put out discs celebrating such giants as Monk, Ellington and Herbie Nichols.

Bailey, a former dance band and studio guitarist found his salvation first in so-called free jazz, then very quickly contributed to the gestalt that birthed the British branch of Euroimprov. An organizer of the Company, improv free-for-alls, Bailey will play with nearly any musician who walks through the door. And since the late 1960s that has included everyone from traditional American jazzers and "serious" composers to interpretive dancers and metallic noise bands.

Yet no matter what goes on around him, the playing of Bailey --who insists that every musical moment be improvised -- remains unequivocally the same. The non-idiomatic plinks plunks and single-note scratches he gets from his instrument aren't compromised whether his partner is Pat Metheny or DJ Soulslinger.

That's what makes this 1983 Paris session so valuable. For among the hundreds of discs Bailey and Lacy have collectively recorded, very few have been in one another's company. Be warned, though, this isn't a standard duet. Instead it's the creation of two simultaneous soloists whose conception is so convincing that the adventurous listener's ear can follow one or the other without disorientation.

Overall, the five listed tracks dissolve one into another. During OUTCOME's more than the more than 60 minutes, Lacy can be thorny, squeaky and sour for a time, then dulcet and breathy. Meanwhile Bailey's notes resonate as he alternately strums, picks and slides. Sometimes one or the other drops out for a section.

If bare bones improv is your passion, search high and low for this session. If you're less sure of that taste, but be would like to experience the work of uncompromising modern masters first hand give this CD a try as well. The outcome may be different from what you imagine.

-Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Input #1 2. Input #2 3. Input #3 4. Input #4 5. Input #5

Personnel: Derek Bailey (guitar); Steve Lacy (soprano saxophone)

April 22, 2000