“Myths and Dreams”: The Rolling Calf/Pat Thomas

(Photograph by Helen Wallace)

The Rolling Calf/ Pat Thomas

Wigmore Hall, London, 22nd January 2023

[A shorter version of this piece appears in this month’s issue of The Wire]

A few weeks into the new year, Elaine Mitchener continued her five-year artist-in-residency at the Wigmore Hall with a performance by her electroacoustic group the Rolling Calf Trio, joined on this occasion by Pat Thomas. In a relatively short first half, first we heard a Thomas piano solo—a characteristic study in piano resonance, making full use of the concert grand the concert hall setting (was this Thomas’ first time at the Wigmore? What are the points of access for what music is or is not allowed to be heard in such places?), thick clusters and repeating figures that never quite coalesced into riff or melody but moved off elsewhere, pealing like wave upon wave, preludial and exploratory. Next, Mitchener came and stage and, with Thomas performed a kind of deconstructed skeleton of a standard, or standards, Thomas playing plangent chords and discrete bursts of blooping electronics, Mitchener at one moment repeating a vocal sound and a physical movement that at first seemed spontaneous—head inclining to the right, hand moving up in the air alongside—and then repeating it, over and over, like a gif or a loop, problematising the notions of immediacy, performance and the like present in the position of the singer of songs of love or lost love, of feminine presentation, of the standard as vehicle for emotions and notions always greater than its lyrics suggest. I was reminded of Fumi Okiji’s paper on Cecil Taylor, Billie Holiday and gesture at the Taylor conference in New York a few years ago, riffing off Taylor’s line “as gesture jazz became Billie’s right arm bent at breast moving as light touch”, accompanied in her rendition by a video loop of Holiday’s arm in an old TV clip. The model of singer and accompanist is here at once gestured at and moved beyond, in that Mitchener, who keeps words to a murmured or half-sung minimum, functions as much as instrumentalist as singer. Even more so than the versions of standards found on Mitchener’s quartet with Alex Hawkins, the model of song form is moved away from into a more open, capacious improvisational and questing and questioning approach to the spirit of the standards more so than their harmonic or melodic content. The duo don’t perform any particular single standard as such as one, fifty-to-twenty minute ur-standard, a net picking up ghostly traces of songs that float by: the word “lovely”, a wisp of melody, a line or two half-recognised from a song. The first comparison that comes to mind—not least for the depths of Mitchener’s contralto voice, here heard with generous reverb allowing it to swell into the hall with the magnified intimacy pioneered in the recording technology of mid-century that did so much to shape ideas of what jazz singing might be—would be the ‘free standards’ of Ran Blake and Mitchener’s long-standing inspiration Jeanne Lee, in which the melodic contour, the verse-chorus-verse structure of the song are adhered to but the harmonic and rhythmic contours moved away from; or any number of deconstructions of the standard, from Taylor’s—or Sunny Murray’s—‘This Nearly Was Mine’ to the quieter, chamber deconstructions put in play by the likes of Paul Bley, Andrew Hill, or, more recently, Jason Moran.

 
Gesture and movement of another kind characterised the performance by the Rolling Calf, Mitchener’s ‘Black Power Trio’ with Neil Charles on bass and electronics and Jason Yarde on alto saxophone and an even wider range of electronics: synths, drum machines, digital manipulations and live sampling. Yarde—whose performance with Louis Moholo-Moholo’s ‘Six Blokes’ band in a three-horn line-up alongside  Byron Wallen and Steve Williamson one night, Shabaka Hutchings the other, the last time Moholo performed in the UK back in September 2019, was so vitally transforming and powerful—appeared miraculously recovered from the onstage stroke he suffered in October the previous year in France, his life saved thanks to the presence of two parademics in the audience who he insisted he go straight to the hospital, and to the treatment he was able to receive in France at a time when a government of millionaires is attempting to utterly destroy and deplete the British National Health Service in the spirit of a kind of nightmarish blend of Dickensian Victorian inequality and neoliberal ideology pushed to the max. Survival, literally, yes—that’s what this music has always been about.

The musicians entered from the back of the hall, behind and through the audience, each playing hand-held “stirring xylophones”—tuned wooden percussion instruments struck with beaters—in the quietly tempestuous manner of early Art Ensemble of Chicago records, first sparsely echoing melodic patterns, then swirling cascades in glissando’ing stir and swell; one at a time, the three came on stage, Charles and Yarde moving into loops and figures on mini-synths, drum machines and samples, Mitchener’s voice totally commanding, moving from the deliberately constricted/restricted register of the first half to declarative, soaring notes, pronouncements and announcements.

 
As in many of her recent performances, Mitchener has developed an approach to form in—rather than compositions or ‘heads’, but not completely ‘free’ improvisation, a set will be organised around different texts, which Mitchener will work at, sing and speak until their possibilities have been temporarily used up, moving to the next fragment. These texts, generally poems, but sometimes incorporating statements from interviews, were on this occasion organised into a collection named on the programme as ‘Myths and Dreams’, that included Césaire, Brathwaite, Una Marson, Taylor, Sun Ra, and Jay Bernard. They form points of reference, clearly demarcated sections that function something like movements in a suite, helping to organise an often quite lengthy piece in ways that are not obvious or circumscribed. These are not ‘lyrics’, in the jazz or pop model, nor are they ‘settings’, in the classical or new music model, so much as elements of musical material; while words imply narrative, context, fixity, in Mitchener’s case are treated in ways that—as in the case of Jeanne Lee, whose approach in her work with Gunter Hampel or on a record like ‘Conspiracy’ is again perhaps the closest formal analogy—might differ each time, in minute or quite dramatic ways, always with an ear to what is happening in the musical texture of that moment, how it might go on from there.

 
To me, the heart of this particular Rolling Calf performance was the rendition of a poem from young British poet Jay Bernard’s Surge, an elegy in pats in which Bernard’s archival research into the 1981 New Cross Massacre—an event which happened eight years before Bernard’s birth—is set against the unfolding tragedy of Grenfell Tower fire, which happened as the sequence was being written. Constructed as homages to the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson—particularly his own poem ‘New Crass Massahkah’—the first of two poems entitled ‘Songbook’ establishes a space and a geometry at once of the dancefloor and of wider tactical manoeuvres, the territory of mourning and militancy that first, the New Cross Massacre Action Committee and later, Justice 4 Grenfell have to trace. In Johnson’s 1981 poem, released as the final track on the 1984 album Making History, words insistently inflect the music in dialogue, in contrast and tension: jaunty but haunted, the rhythms shift from the poem’s section, describing the celebratory sociality buoyed by the rhythms of the party before the fire—“di dubbing and did rubbing”, “di dancung and di skanking”—to the rhythm of the fire itself—“di crash and di bang”, “di heat and di smoke”—to the rhythm of activism, its persistence and resistance. “but wait / yu noh remembah”, “but stap / yu noh remembah”: the poem is a call to remembrance, of the need to tell and re-tell a story ignored or mis-told in official record. Like Johnson’s poem, written in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Bernard’s later poem traces the rhythms of dance—the party before the fire—turned to violence—the fire itself and the second violence of bungled police investigation and racist media reportage—in turn turned to resistance through the work of the committee and the Black Peoples’ Day of Action. Over time, the mathematics Bernard’s ‘Songbook’ traces—“me seh ah one step fahwahd an ah two step back”—its manoeuvres of progress and defeat, of progress and defeat, of going round in circles or back to square one—becomes not just the immediate events of a particular movement, but of the seemingly infinite deferral of closure, as the quest for justice stretches into and beyond the space of a lifetime. Echoes fade away, generations build and develop; Johnson’s insistent call to remembrance fades and must be taken up and replayed, overlaid and overlayered like the laboratories of dub transformations that take up and distort the sounds of an original track. When performing, Bernard themself recites the poem without music: the music-and-speech dynamics of Johnson’s dub poetry, with its low-key delivery given power and contrast by the accompaniment of Dennis Bovell and the Dub Band, internalised into the rhythms of the poem itself, as stripped-back, ghostly echo; a memory, of a social moment, a movement, something we can barely hear. “Me seh half de revalushun deh pun de attack / Only half a salushun to de tings dem we lack.” One step forward, two steps back, half a step, half the revolution, half a solution—the process is incomplete. There’s no closure, no justice. 

 

Yet Bernard’s poem is also about togetherness and community. Playing with rhymes or assonance in words like “back”, “attack”, “tack”, Bernard’s poem , which, like Johnson’s work, refuses to be contained by standard English, is buoyed up and carried on by the pleasures of rhythm and the pleasure of sound, the excess of sound, sounds ability to contain and then explode, the poem as a kind of carrier, an unexploded charge, carrying its “secret cargo” into the present. And when Mitchener delivered the poem within the context of music once more, the poem attained a fresh power, a declarative insistence. In comparison to Bernard’s Johnson-esque understatement, Mitchener’s was loud, present, unnerving: she delivered the text half spoken, half sung, a singer’s voice, expansive and huge, used to projection, not the quiet dynamic of a poet’s voice; her delivery at once toasting and sprechstimme; combined with the abstracted patterns of Charles on bass and Yarde on electronics, drum machines and synths stuttered into loops and sampled patterns, giving way to blasts of Yarde’s alto squall, the music traced another kind of time again, one in which instrument associated with pop music are repurposed and abstracted and which, in turn, an avant-garde that has too often excluded the matter of black life, is repurposed for its energies.

 
The music moves on again—picking up on the carefully poised ironies of a Sun Ra statement—“those who will not dance will have to be shot”—traversing language of ritual and apocalypse, Mitchener now playing with the ritual of calling out the band’s names—the celebratory incantation over music that signals celebration and closure in the Art Ensemble’s rendition of ‘Odwalla’ at the end of almost every concert they gave over the years, or the ecstatic sung shout outs on Pharoah Sanders’ 1981 album Live. “We are the Rolling Calf!” she proclaims, and as she picks up a phrase from a Cecil Taylor interview—“Hearing is playing. Music does not exist on paper”—turning it into an incantation, Pat Thomas makes his way to the stage, adding further electronic bloops and trademark thick chords and clusters on piano to the stuttering loops set up by Yarde and Charles. “Music does not exist on paper”. After a minute or so, the lights go out, the musicians playing in the dark, rendered illumination, focused on hearing, on the work that listening and playing can do, beyond visuality, beyond representation, beyond the page. The trappings of concert hall, of the performer/stage division, of the above-stage frieze, with its art deco image of music-making as a ritual idealized and frozen, already expanded by the trio’s entrance through the audience, by Mitchener’s dance round the stage, blowing a whistle, by Thomas’ entry onto the platform from the front-row seats; all these melt away, focus into the material and more-than-material presence of sound itself. Mitchener has long been an expert at making time melt, bend, twist in this way, all with an awareness of history, of music’s history and the histories beyond music that music sediments. Tonight was a particular resplendent example.

Songs, Offerings, Wastes and Suites

Explore Ensemble at Wigmore Hall

Friday 8th July 2022

Enno Poppe, Gelöschte Lieder

Cassandra Miller, Perfect offering

James Dillon, The soadie waste

Lawrence Dunn, Suite

[Note: A shorter version of this piece appears in the October issue of The Wire magazine.]

For the past ten years, the London-based Explore Ensemble, a winds, strings and piano sextet, has amassed a steady range of commissions and concerts, from Feldman to Finnissy, last year receiving the substantial Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung Ensemble Prize. Taking place at the beginning of a summer heatwave within the airy confines of the Wigmore Hall, the Ensemble’s early July concert was a pleasingly undiluted presentation of new music, no filler.

 

Each of the four works on the programme, lasting between fifteen and twenty minutes in length, explored in various ways the idea of a group and the historical nature of form. In their own way, each piece was an exploration of a pull between sensual pleasure, conventional or unconventionally beautiful sound, and a self-questioning, interrogative tugging at the limits of formal expectation which opened onto history. The concert opened with the strung-out intensities, tightening and loosening, of what was the oldest piece chronologically, Enno Poppe’s late-’90s Gelöschte Lieder (Erased Songs). A quintet of piccolo (doubling flute), clarinet, violin, viola and piano throw out spiky, fracturing lines moving towards and away from cohesion: dissolving unisons, interlocking peals, all the instruments constantly tangling and untangling, with a propensity to dramatic, extreme high notes. Poppe’s piece is lively, bright and effective, polished and highly assured, striking and compelling as a listening experience almost. Yet its relatively standard New Music textures sounded relatively old-fashioned compared to the next piece on the programme—paradoxically, perhaps, given that that piece has a pronounced tendency to quote music of the past, and an at least apparently simple harmony, melody, textures that are rarely harsh or rebarbative.

Written during the 2020 lockdown, Cassandra Miller’s Perfect Offering takes melody apart, re-enchanting the basics and basis of sound by revealing them in all their deceptive complexity. Like much of her work, it’s based on fragmentary transcriptions of other musics—in this case, slowed-down recordings of bells from a French convent—as if the original object has been held up to refracting and reflecting light. In much classical music, bells signify grandeur: sound and fury, triumphant exhortation, religious or State pomp, premonitions of salvation or doom: Rachmaninov’s The Bells, Boris Godunov, the 1812 Overture the Symphonie Fantastique. But they can also be rendered as gentle, swaying traceries, pealing in decorative rather than annunciatory fashion: Liszt’s ‘Les Cloches de Geneve’, Ravel’s La vallée des cloches, Arvo Pärt’s various tintinnabulatory pieces. (Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie, with its submerged church rising out of the sea, partakes of both tendencies.) Miller’s bells certainly lean more towards the delicate than the bombastic: gently repeating and slowly morphing, figures for wind and strings mimic the bells’ regular rhythms over implacably calm piano figures. The effect is not mechanical or clangorous, but shimmering and lulling, as much watery as metallic, heat-hazed air shimmering on a summer’s day. At certain points the music rises to hymnal grandeur; in another, extraordinary moment, all the instruments drop out save a lone clarinet, repeating two notes for what seems an eternity before the music moves on.

 
Writing Perfect Offering during a period of depression, Miller sang along to melodic lines from the slowed-down recording. An absent voice haunts the music: a voice singing itself back into the world by letting go. For Miller, while musical forms are socially produced and historically conditioned, music is also connected to personal, even private emotion, conveyed in ritualised form. Miller deals with a recurrent new music topos—both as problem and resource: that of musical quotation as direct engagement with the music of the past. Composers of the post-war avant-garde--Nono, Lachenmann, Ligeti, and perhaps above all, Berio--have explored quotation as critical framework, reclamation of submerged and subversive traditions, or melancholic glance backward. In Miller’s case, quotation is not disguised or hidden—as it is often is with, say, Nono—nor is it foreground, collage-style—as with Berio. Instead, it’s refracted across the entire surface, visible at almost every point—and, in some ways generating virtually the entire structure of the entire piece—yet remaining uncanny, other than itself. Miller offers what might be called cubist rearrangements of tradition musical objects, retaining their shimmering aura in a fashion that can, at times lead towards a pleasurable, soothing melancholy, at others create a kind of queasy, calm alarm—a slow panic, a distributed anxiety in the process of turning into calm, or calm turning to anxiety. Miller’s pieces don’t propose to make grand statements about music’s history and future, but modest ones: they are experiments, gentle interrogations, that pay attention in a materially precise way to the question of what beauty is and how we’re conditioned to view it.

Music, for Miller, it would seem, is a form of art that’s socially produced and historically conditioned yet connected to personal, even private emotion conveyed in ritualised form. I say ritualised rather than ritual because, while Miller’s pieces often take their musical material almost entirely from quoted, or, as Miller terms it, “transcribed” materials, their form is abstracted from them. Just as an earlier piece, Bel Canto, takes phrases from Callas’ rendition of a Verdi aria outside the frame of the operatic stage, so Perfect Offering invokes both bells and—in its title—a Leonard Cohen song, without taking assuming the form of a religious call or a pop song. Given all this, there’s at once a familiar strangeness and strange familiarity to Miller’s music. In mood and feel, this, along with the consistent mining of the music of the past—whether in direct quotation, or in explorations of and allusions to post-serialist tonality and musical rhetoric—and the invariable adoption of slow, untroubled tempi, is a quality Miller shares with peers and contemporaries like Laurence Crane and much of the music released in the past few years on the Another Timbre label, which by now might seem to be crystallising into a kind of school or style. I have been struck and moved by much of this work over the years, though, as ever when a style becomes widespread, there is attendant risk: in this case, the critical, defamiliarizing edge that, in this case, prevents the music from settling into easy consolation. At their best, the initial power of such pieces was that it was not often clear exactly how to read them, even as they appeared almost absurdly transparent or opaque in their simplicity of means. This was certainly not ‘New Complexity’, but it was not New Romanticism or New Simplicity, exactly. But once this kind of affect becomes too familiar, there is the risk that the work loses its edge. It becomes, in a word, too readable.

 
To repeat, however, this is a risk rather than a given. Beauty, or its signifiers, can become a problem if that beauty hardens into the repetition of style—though, of course, beauty can’t exist without style. Miller’s music remains beautiful because it pays attention in such a materially precise way to the question of what beauty is and how we’re conditioned to view it, but also because of its intimacy. Perfect Offering is a piece ‘about’ various things, and readable in that sense: about depression and letting go, about separation and distance, about the passing of time, about imperfection and suffering and history and other age-old themes. But it’s never grandiose, and it poses these things as gestures rather than answers, its intimate distance offering each listener space to bring themselves to the piece in a spirit at once reflective and generous. I found it deeply moving.

 

Written almost twenty years ago, but still full of biting freshness, James Dillon’s piano quintet the soadie waste is named for a social club on the outskirts of his native Glasgow, built on the site of a chemical factory, whose fumes, it was rumoured, still leaked through the floors. Subtitled “wedding receptions, dances and house-housie” (bingo), the piece conjures up cubist visions of social activity, as tight, overlapping rhythms characterise the intense, memorable opening, a cubist invitation to the dance, giving way to more anxiously reflective music before the opening returns with a brilliant flourish. Dillon began in rhythm and blues bands, before a chance encounter with a Webern while he was living on a commune saw him change direction: since then he has, as he's remarked, sought a “balance between intellectual rigour and sensual speech”, attempting to “drag [the] language” of new music “into a space that I could recognise.” His music consciously speaks form the peripheries: away from central Europe, away from the West, finding value in other kinds of sociality, from social clubs to communes to the sound of New Music—itself an outlier within an often musically conservative classical establishment. The soadie waste doesn’t offer social realism, but it does convey a sense of underclass resilience: on the outskirts, outside the metropolitan centre, on Britain’s edges. Over the leaking fumes of an industrial past—a past of dispossession and imperial aggression that still constitutes the ostensibly post-imperialist and ostensibly ‘devolved’ United Kingdom as it exists today—it stages a defiant dancing on the flames, beautiful and strong.

 

The concert concluded with the world premiere of Suite, by Lawrence Dunn, the youngest of the composers on the bill. I first met Lawrence around a decade ago, at a free improv gig where someone had just demolished a chair: Lawrence looked up with wry and implacable calm as if this sort of thing happened every day. Like Miller’s, Dunn’s work is deeply attentive to musical history, and extremely thoughtful about things like melody and harmony. It’s also determinedly strange, defamiliarizing classical form through the use of quarter tones and apparently out-of-place, sampled recordings. Composed as a single movement, played without a break, Dunn’s Suite falls into discernible parts modelled on the movements that historically comprise a suite. It is, however, far from neo-classicist, staging a kind of enquiry into the form in which it’s written, from within that form.

 
Initially developing as a collection of Baroque dances, and later as a vehicle for Romantic tone painting, by the early twentieth century, the suite had become uncanny, self-consciously archaic, even arcane, its last gasps works like Ravel’s Le Tombeau De Couperin, a deeply melancholic, ironically classicized work written for friends killed in war, and Berg’s Lyric Suite, which channels cryptic romantic secrets in a febrile atmosphere of vexed love. Suites—at least, named as such—have effectively fallen out fashion since then. So why revive the form now? As the programme notes suggest, Dunn explores the suite as a form that developed in tandem with various stages of imperial history—the growth of European expansionism in the Baroque period, when the court opulence it signalled directly profited from the plunder of slavery and colonial extraction; later, the epochs of nationalism and dissolving empires and their crises. The musical impulse to compartmentalise, to categorise, divide, and collect, Dunn suggests, is a process with wider ramifications as regards imperialism’s practice of division and collection, its violent remapping of the world itself.

 
This is not so much an overt programme as a backdrop. Three field recordings play at various points in the piece (there were some technical mishaps with the playback in the concert, but they can be heard perfectly in the concert video uploaded to the Explore Ensemble’s YouTube page). The first of the recordings sounds out during the opening. As the ensemble offer knotty, staggered melodic lines and the piano plays a part labelled in the score as “like water”, the faint “sounds of a pier being demolished near the entrance to the Terminal Island Prison and Deportation Center, Los Angeles, US., 2012” add acousmatic background connected to a specific socio-political background which can’t be detected by ear but which by its very presence refutes politically quietist abstraction. Later on, an unaccompanied field recording of schoolchildren singing the national anthem of Suriname in Dutch hints at colonial legacies. Finally, a recording of a fly trapped in a bottle—again, largely submerged within the ensemble texture—gestures towards the trope of the memento mori, a warning of time’s passing, yet without fatalism, suggesting a struggle against the enclosing structures that trap individual perception, history as a nightmare from which we still are still barely awakening.

As the suite has developed—and disintegrated—historically—its functional relation to dance has become all the more distanced, as the dances it contained fell out of fashion and practical use. In the case of Ravel’s Tombeau, allusions to those dances, their rhythms and particular character, form part of a melancholic, arch and ghostly container: the form consciously denuded of its content, while wistfully harking back to those associations it cannot leave behind. In Dunn’s Suite, meanwhile, the kinds of fractured, rhythmically jagged renderings of dance unisons that animate, for example, Dillon’s Soadie Waste, receive a more subdued, uneasy rendering. The music is often characterised by a kind of agitated flow. Rippling might be a good word to describe the feel it often takes; at other points, a conflict between stasis and movement creates a kind of purposive irresolution with a particular, and very compelling tension to it. In the opening minutes, an elaborate, unceasing piano part which almost disappears behind the playing of the ensemble; pianist Siwan Rhys switches to keyboard for subsequent parts, her synth-like sounds at points merging into the thick ensemble texture, at others standing out like matter out of place. The work culminates in an astonishing piece of collective writing, in which a simple melody rises up the octaves, topped off by a screaming piccolo. A brilliant example of how to build and sustain a musical climax, it is, in context, quite unexpected, and all the more effective for it. But Dunn doesn’t let the piece end at its natural resting point. Instead, as Rhys switches back to piano, there’s the briefest of pauses—in which the fly buzzing in the bottle can be heard unadorned—before a kind of sardonic coda, one which refuses the gains of rhetorical accomplishment: not with a bang but a whimper, a muttered afterword to something that had seemed definitively concluded. It’s anything but affirmative, offering unease rather than resolve. Like all of the pieces on the programme, it reverberates as a series of questions as much as a series of reinforcements of answers or what we know already: and, of any of the pieces on the programme, it perhaps offers the most “edge” (a favoured term of Dunn’s).

 
Within British classical musical culture of late, there seems to be a growing musical conservatism: not so much on the part of performers, composers, or artists, but on that numinous network of programming, funding, and institutional survival within a period of crisis sparked, not only by the covid situation, but by the current government’s increasing hostility towards culture (perhaps the “culture wars” might be renamed by their true term, “class war”, despite the pseudo-populism indicated by appointing Nadine Dorries as Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport of the United Kingdom). Spoken or unpsoken apologias disavow all but the briefest of traces of the avant-garde within the world of the classical concert hall—a glance at this year’s Proms line-up, in comparison to the programmes of even, say, five years ago, serves as a good example. And so a concert like that of the Explore Ensemble is all the more welcome for bucking the trend. Thanks, in large part, to the Wigmore’s scheme of £5 tickets for under-35s, and to its programming choices—Elaine Mitchener and Jason Moran as resident artists, fairly frequent performances by groups like Apartment house—there’s a notable change to the usual audiences found in such a venue: often younger, sometimes—though by no means always—less overwhelmingly white and male. Not only this, but that audiences—for this concert, for the Roscoe Mitchell set in late June, for the concerts that Mitchener has been curating during and after lockdown—are engaged, and have come specifically to see this “difficult” music we’re otherwise implicitly told has no audience. On the night, applause for the pieces by Poppe, Miller, Dillon and Dunn was suitably and equally rapturous. Let’s hope we see more such programmes soon.

[Written July 2022]

Time Jumping Over Itself: Roscoe Mitchell in London, June 2022

Wigmore Hall, 28th June 2022

Roscoe Mitchell: saxophones

Simon Sieger: trombone, tuba

Kikanju Baku: percussion

Dudu Kouate: percussion

No-one does abrasiveness quite like Roscoe Mitchell: his tone, on numerous saxophones, sharp and sour, each note sounded out into space like a rock dropped in water, his approach to form bordering on the ascetic, a calculated restraint, in which the space between the notes is, as the familiar adage goes, as important as what’s played around those spaces. For this concert at the Wigmore Hall, the 81-year-old Mitchell, on alto, bass, and curved soprano saxophones, along with a rogue piccolo, was joined by Marseilles-based Simon Sieger, on trombone and a giant borrowed orchestral tuba, and two percussionists, Kikanju Baku and Dudu Kouate. An unusual set-up which balanced the chamber music timbres of his composed, new music works with the structural openness of Mitchell’s improvised work, the range of registers allowed by the array of horns allowing an expansive play between high and low sounds, encouraged by the Wigmore’s excellent, chamber music acoustics.

Played over two long sets, this is music of intense focus. It begins with Sieger’s throat singing and Mitchell blowing some spare notes on curved soprano saxophone. “Time to move on, perhaps”, Mitchell suggests, and Sieger, picking up the trombone, sits there holding it in silence for some minutes. Much of the contribution the musicians make is about listening: we’re beyond the logic of the solo and the showcase, into the world of sound and silence. As the percussionists set up a transparent wall of sound, Mitchell leans forward into the bass sax—an instrument so big he has to play it sitting down—and blows a single note. He sits back and folds his arms, eyes closed, listening. A pause, and then another note. He sits back once more. The enigmatic space between enigmatic notes erases linearity while forcing us to listen for linearity all the more. The notes form a kind of dispersed melody, each one an entity, a world or even an entire piece in itself, yet also part of a structure that could, potentially, extend infinitely. This is Mitchell’s gnomic method in a nutshell: his tone sharply precise and yet woozily loose; the structure intensely focused and open to any direction, within a self-limiting set of confines.

By contrast, the two percussionists provide a veritable forest of sounds and textures. On one side of the stage, Kikanju Baku leans over a drum kit with expanded gongs, bells, and wooden and plastic cowbells; on the other, Dudu Kouate deploys a whole array of sound-making devices, from a giant gourd filled with water to cymbals and gongs, flutes, a thunder-maker, and bowed crotales. Sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, Kouate in particular draws the audience in like a magnet. At one point, he starts swinging a pink whirly-tube—more officially known as a corrugaphone—over his head, narrowly missing the Wigmore’s vase of plants and the top of Sieger’s tuba, and setting in motion the aethereal strains of the harmonic series. At another, he submerges flutes attached to plastic bottles in the water-filled gourd so that they’re played by the water itself. None of this, however, feels like showmanship: Kouate’s playing throughout is characterised by a profoundly melodic sense, whether varying the pitch on a drumhead to play counterpoint with Sieger’s horns, or in dialogue across the stage with his fellow percussionist.

During the second set, Mitchell finishes an alto excursion to be met by a single audience member’s vigorous applause: weathering the interruption, he follows up with a piccolo solo that touches on the repertory associations of the solo ‘classical’ flute repertory yet ends up—and starts from—somewhere entirely different. He puts it down, never to take it up again. The music is like that: discrete moments, self-contained, yet bleeding into each other with cumulative intensity. It’s not about narrative, momentum, or progress, though some of the most effective moments contrast Mitchell and Sieger’s slow, fractured melodic counterpart with regular percussion rhythms, paradiddles and polyrhythms, a kind of elongated procession, pausing for thought along the way. Time’s doesn’t so much stand still as jump over itself in somersaults.

In rehearsal, Sieger notes afterwards, the band spend hours playing scales, and Mitchell duly plays a major scale to close the first set. In the second, I swear I hear him perform a kind of cubist reconstruction of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. These moments—a kind of refractive woodshedding, at once private and instantly accessible—seem to lie behind Mitchell’s playing even at its most rhythmically-staggered and tart. Strangely familiar or familiarly strange, they echo the kinds of playing you do when you’re starting out, or the singing you might do to yourself at quiet moments—a point of access at a point of privacy, a threshold over which to enter the music. There’s humour here, and what I would go so far as to call love: a love that manifests in listening, in attentiveness, in a sharing no less meaningful for its sometimes thorny difficulty, and perhaps all the more so. And then, suddenly, Mitchell and Sieger launch into the Art Ensemble’s familiar theme tune, ‘Odwalla’, as he calls out the names of the band members. In the row in front of me sit a father and three teenage sons. Throughout, they’ve been totally with the music, even at its most abstract points. As they hear ‘Odwalla’, they nod their heads in knowing acknowledgment. Coming back to its roots for replenishment, this conclusion, as ever, is only temporary: renewal and resting point, only the latest stage in the ongoing journey.

"May as well be a rainbow": Moran and McBride at the Wigmore Hall

Photograph by Richard Cannon.

Jason Moran (piano), Christian McBride (bass). Wigmore Hall, 06.10.2021. 

The first gig in Christian McBride's turn as artist-in-residence at the Wigmore Hall, following Vijay Iyer's turn in 2019, this was, also, as he announced from the stage, his first performance outside the US since the worldwide spread of the pandemic. Less clearly an experimentalist than Iyer--who played two-piano duets with Craig Taborn and brought experimental hip-hop artist Mike Ladd for two duo performances in a single night--McBride nonetheless chose for this opening duo to bring in an artist who straddles the mainstream and a more experimental approach informed by a rethinking of black compositional trajectories from James P. Johnson to J-Dilla and DJ Screw. Jason Moran will be performing with Archie Shepp in their spirituals-heavy duo at the London Jazz Festival next month. In the much larger space of the Barbican, I've found such concerts tend to lose the intimacy vital to their emotional transmission (let alone the hefty ticket prices), but there were no such problems in the Wigmore (with its heavily-discounted under-35's tickets). The Hall provides an ideal medium-sized space for music of chamber proportions, and its acoustics are excellent: the musicians played un-amplified, thankfully losing the artificial thud that characterises too many large-venue jazz performances, with each detail here singing out crystal-clear. And, despite its generally more conservative programming, the Wigmore was, lest we forget, the site of, for example, the fundamental encounter between Anthony Braxton and Derek Bailey in 1974, a precedent which was, sadly, presumably unknown to the majority of those in attendance this early October.

I'd also been to the Wigmore for the previous day's afternoon concert had seen young US violinist Randall Goosby playing a programme of violin/piano music by African American composers deriving from his recent album Roots, which aims to re-tell the story of 'American' classical music through its Black presence, from Dvorak's use of spirituals to the contributions of William Grant Still and Florence Price. The most interesting part of that concert, to me, were the 'blue/s forms', solo pieces by Coleridge Taylor-Perkinson, sometime pianist for Max Roach and a composer across film, television and classical idioms, whose pieces take seriously the formal implications of marrying what Mingus called 'folk forms' to modernist harmonic extensions. Such pieces are studies in what it means to vary and extend, to 'worry' a line that move out of the vernacular adaptations by Price and Still heard elsewhere on the programme and towards something approaching the radical repetitions later advanced by Julius Eastman. 

Something of that concern with what it means to repeat, in multiple senses--the single note, the circular rhythmic or harmonic pattern, the paradoxically cyclical-progressive nature of improvisation based on chord changes--informs Moran's work too, as it questions the parameters of bop's harmonic vocabulary as opened up by bop itself, extended by free jazz, and shut down again by the 1980s counter-reaction and its legacies, marrying this to the iterative structures of other forms of black music, from hip-hop to gospel, the instrumental transformation of the voice, the voiced transformation of the instrument.

Upon his emergence into the music in the early '90s, McBride, meanwhile, was positioned as one of the 'Young Lions'--young musicians playing traditional, acoustic, bop-derived music in the wake of Wynton Marsalis and Nationalist-turned-Conservative Stanley Crouch, with some of the resources of American capital at least temporarily behind them. Though he rode that wave during the so-called 'jazz bubble' of the late '80s and early '90s (analysed in Dale Chapman's recent book), McBride came to see the "Young Lions" term as unduly promoting a limited set of musicians and styles at the expense of others. As he commented in Down Beat at the turn of the Milenium:

The whole ‘young lions’ hype, which, unfortunately, I was part of, peaked in the early 1990s. I say ‘unfortunately’ because the hype was so strong, I don’t think any musician from that ‘movement’ will ever be looked upon by certain people as serious musicians. We’ll be looked at as puppets for record companies and managers, or People magazine–type personalities as opposed to, well, Down Beat magazine–type personalities.

And indeed, the marketing and recording strategy pursued by major labels like Verve soaked up the majority of the limited resources available to the broader field of jazz as a whole for what was ultimately a limited, blinkered vision of what the music is, based on a dubious respectability politics and an erasure of the aesthetic and political radicalism that had characterised the music of the '60s and that still suffuses free jazz, which, I would hazard, was in fact the music's major source of continued, politicised investigation and creative extension, and yet which was the principal victims of the Young Lions' success. 

Meanwhile, Crouch's other main target--apart from 'ethnic music'--fusion, both of which he saw as a betrayal of the virtues of acoustic, swing-based jazz, is familiar territory to McBride, who is not averse to electric playing, and is capable of an elastic transformation to seemingly any context. (It was McBride who played bass in the one-off meeting between Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman in 2011 that gathered accolades as one of the performances of the decade.) When playing acoustically, his tendency is to more traditional walking bass patterns, along with bluesy, self-consciously virtuosic solos, each note placed out for maximum effect. But Moran's distinct identity as composer and improviser promised to take things gently away from the straight-ahead territory at which McBride could excel in his sleep, and this duo, while hardly as tied to the music's avant-garde as the Iyer-Taborn duo of 2019, were sure to shake things up, just a little. 

Bass-piano duets have an obscure but storied history in jazz. Mal Waldron and Johnny Dyani, Duke Ellington and Ray Brown, Charlie Haden and Hank Jones, all offer duets with distinct characters and differing approaches to a setting that lacks the rhythmic propulsion of a drummer and in which, if the pianist isn't careful, the bass can be reduced to a mere supporting role. As a bass player who's also a bandleader, McBride is no stranger to negotiating between supporting and leading roles. While Moran and McBride have known each other for years, this was not an established duo, leaving open that crucial element of surprise. And this was their first performance, with 30 minutes of rehearsal, as McBride announced from the stage, even if that sense of spontaneity perhaps belied the careful arrangement of the programme. They began with 'Blue Monk', one of (Thelonious) Monk's catchiest and most relaxed of melodies, and a kind of meeting point for them to test the waters, laughing and calling out in mutual appreciation at a well-timed note or a spin on a jazz cliche. Despite Moran's claim that they'd only rehearsed for half an hour, they had a well-developed programme: just under a dozen pieces, each one lasting nearly ten minutes, over the course of a 90 minute programme, ranging from compositions, mainly of the '60s and '70s, from Monk, Mingus and Wayne Shorter, to Moran's originals. 

The second piece, a Moran original, begins with a moto perpetuo bassline figure, over which a melody is delivered with complexified legato as the piece transitions into a more traditional blues-type figure (Oscar Brown's work of the early 60s comes to mind--it may even have been an Oscar Brown piece.) Moran, sitting in a backed chair rather than the traditional piano stool, goes for a few scampered runs, nearly knocking over the chair, but before he can get into full Cecil Taylor territory, McBride pulls him back, tethering him to the familiar changes. This happens a few times over the night, but by the end, McBride's allowed himself to enter the free zone for a minute or so, and one of the pleasures of the night is watching how he stretches his established virtuosity into less familiar territory. Another Monk piece, the rarely-performed but captivating 'Bright Mississippi', is followed by Wayne Shorter's melting 1960s ballad, 'Miyako', from the underrated 1967 album Schizophrenia. Like Monk, Shorter delights in setting up, then undercutting, harmonic expectations, but the main impact is in the rapturous yet wistful emotional territory the tune suggests. Here, the melody's delivered with McBride's melancholic arco echoing and transforming the memory of Shorter's gently brittle tenor on the original, Moran judiciously lifting the foot off the sustain pedal at just the right point, McBride plucking the same string he's continuing to bow on the final held note as Moran trills octave chords, techniques that might appear like mere display--look, I can do this!--harnessed in the service of the music's understated grace. 

Solo features for each musician followed: Moran's 'how much more terrible was the night' sees him crossing over his hands to play a motorically-repeated figure interspersed with a bass clef toll; as the two hands uncross, Moran plays octave figures, reiterating the theme further down the keyboard, the sense that any part of the structure could be transposed at any point on the keyboard at any time lightly suggesting Cecil Taylor's methodology, if sounding very different in content.  There's something here of the quality of Ligeti's Etudes, an assured, glassy rhythmic assurance on the edge of panic, but in control at all points. McBride's solo takes the standard 'Alone Together', melodic figures moved up and down the fingerboard, with harmonics, single note trills, and bent notes not so much decoration as an integral part of the melodic trajectory. This was a lesson in embellishment and development of a solo line, delivered with poise and poignancy, and humour--from the play on playing solo and in company of the title, to the staggered pauses, well-timed delivery of cliches or their subversion--if, sometimes, a little too much polish. A meditative Moran piece saw McBride reading off sheet music. Though the piece mainly consisted of both musicians playing through the melody, the improvisation lies in the delivery, the dynamics, as much as in the development of independent solo lines. They end with a whispered iteration to silence. The next piece, again by Moran, and more gospelly, cycles in wistful hope. Moran knows he's got an earworm of a melodic line, and whistles out the melody as he continues to play it--I'm reminded of Wayne Shorter leaning into the microphone to whistle out a spooked introduction while playing with his quartet in London over a decade ago--exemplifying the feeling of relaxed camaraderie evident from the beginning, McBride laughing in delight at Moran's audacity, and vice versa.

A lesser-known Mingus tune from Let My Children Hear Music sets up an ebulliently sardonic swing over which the musicians overlay the familiar melody to Mingus' Lester Young tribute, 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat'. I'm not sure the overlayering really works--the poignancy of that great melody lost to a kind of technical trick--but Mingus lines give us the opportunity to hear Moran's freer side, with its lineage in the sideman work of Moran's teacher Jaki Byard in Mingus' Jazz Workshop of the '60s and of Don Pullen in the bassist's bands of the '70, as he splashes out a few clusters. Unlike the utter exuberance of his predecessors, though, Moran tends to stick to the middle register, to restrain the energy in near-ironised anticipations and reflexive echoes: playing that's almost--but not quite--in quotation marks. On the other hand, McBride's playing took on suitably Mingus-like timbres--twanging, thick, caustic, voice-like, echoing Mingus' famous 'talking' duets with Eric Dolphy. He even briefly plays 'free' in tandem with Moran, shadowing the latter's parallel motion lines as his fingers leapt across the fingerboard. A final Monk piece, 'Evidence'--probably the most radical of all Monk's compositions--was memorably deconstructed by Anthony Braxton's standards quartet in their London residency just before the pandemic. Moran and McBride play it safer, offering the pleasures of contrast as Moran lets out high-register pings over McBridge's walking bass, opening up the spaces of the melody so that what he plays is as much about what's left out as what's there, the skeletal outline of the harmonic material described and re-inscribed in real time: which is, after all, what Monk had done as early as the 1940s. The piece that sings in the head on the way home, though, is the closing piece from Moran's most recent album, The Sound Will Tell You, 'Toni Morrison said Black is a Rainbow (Shadows)', sees Moran read out a passage from Morrison's Song of Solomon as he plays-"You think dark is just one colour, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black". Black as colour, condition, metaphor, process: blackness in the space of the Wigmore Hall, where, as Moran put it when he played the venue in 2019, "people like me don't play in halls like this". Rapturously received, the duo play an encore. Throughout, they put on a show, and then some. An audience until recently starved for live music were delighted. 

Beyond this, as I overheard someone saying on the way out, "[McBride] was much more weird and wiggly than usual"; often, there you could hear him adapt in real-time, particular on Moran's piece. And it was Moran's pieces that were in some ways the most interesting pieces on the programme, taking them away from the familiar virtuosity on which they--particular McBride--could easily have coasted the entire night. Moran's compositions tend to focus on gospel-tinged chordal progressions and melodic fragments, treated in the manner of a hip-hop sample as looping, lightly-modified figures that lope or stride ahead with a kind of melancholic poise--whose simplicity can at first seem affected, but which, on each repetition, increase in emotional power. Moran is a master of dynamics, in particular, of the hushed diminuendo, repeating the figure until it disappears into silence, into space, and the unexpected--but perfectly-placed--hammered fortissimo in the midst of innocuous explorations of familiar figures. Moran has learned from minimalism. Here I'm thinking in part of the familiar minimalism of Steve Reich, at one point an associate of pianist Anthony Davis (whose opera X is to be revived at the Met in 2023). But Davis broke with Reich over the latter's Reich's rigidity and refusal of emotional texture--a key feature of the Black music and speech he used (and arguably, exploited) in his work, and we might equally trace Moran's minimalism to Davis' gamelan-inspired work such as the 'Wayang' pieces. (At the least, Davis himself must be counted among Moran's peers for his fusion of composition and improvisation and for his extension of (and beyond) jazz's rhythmic parameters.) But perhaps a more important part of the mix is the minimalism hip-hop looping, a post-electronic form of acoustic music in which harmonic fragments sampled from jazz, soul or R&B records get chopped up, turned over on themselves like an ouroboros. On The Sound Will Tell You, Moran employs electronics he calls DrIp to add echoic traces to his notes in a manner he likens to the slowed-down effects of the late, great DJ Screw. But it's the fascination of hearing that acoustic transformation that takes the music from mere imitation of effect and into a consideration of the structural territories opened up by the now-decades old sonic technologies of hip-hop, an inter-genre, trans-historical dialogue that's, of course, very much within the 'changing same' of jazz's (radical) tradition. (Moran reflects further on some of these questions in a recent lecture here.)

In his own pieces, Moran plays patterns, and it doesn't seem to matter whether they're composed or improvised--though of course he'll run off a flurry up the keyboard to remind you of his chops. With McBride on pieces from the tradition, he can step inside the more functional role of accompanist or lead at will, comping and soloing on changes with the best of them. But his real interests lie somewhere to the left of this, investigating the kernel of figures and putting them through their paces. In this he echoes not only Davis but a piece like Roscoe Mitchell's 'Nonaah', albeit in gentler form. In its expansive, self-consciously historical 'modernistic' approach, Moran echoes the catholicity of musicians like Byard, exemplified in Beaver Harris' 1970s formulation "from ragtime to no-time", though there can be something almost arch and self-reflexive about his playing: this is considered music, and while it lacks the expansive re-structuralism of the compositional systems of an Anthony Braxton or a Henry Threadgill (with whom Moran performed in duet at Ornette Coleman's funeral), it merges the formal explorations and historical weight that befalls anyone who plays this music consciously and with good conscience with a moving resilience, a hope we might call spiritual or secular, but which resounds nonetheless. As Morrison puts it, night "may as well be a rainbow", its shades of gradation, of difference, resounding in the neglected, the shadowy, the obscure, brought to Black light, to Black life.