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...this world is not the world already become but the world circling around the becoming; which as regnum hominis is imminent only in future, fear and hope. It is the relation to this world which makes Music a social seismograph; it reflects fractures under the social surface, it expresses the quest for change and calls for hope.
Ernst Bloch
The sum of musical differences between Free Jazz and Jazz does not only…..question musical facts. Far more, it poses the question as to a conception of Music and thus means something which equally pertains to musical aesthetics as well as to culture; thus reflecting their relation to ideology.
Carles/Comolli
I
Brötzmann/Van Hove/Bennink: FMP 0130: Titel: For Donaueschingen ever - Konzert für zwei Klarinetten - Nr. 7 - Wir haben uns Folgendes überlegt - Paukenhänschen im Blaubeerenwald - Nr. 9 - Gere Bij - Nr. 4 - Nr. 6 - Donaueschingen for ever. Rec. 25. 2. 1973 in Bremen. Rec. Ing.: Dietram Köster. Supervision: Peter Schulze. Prod.: Jost Gebers.
Piece No. 1 already presents us with an elegant fight, with reduced sound-slaps of p, dr and bs. Under the auspices of a satirical title, the raggy sounds turn into sharp punches, celesta dots are put beside Bennink's upper cuts, laconic, brief: "there isn't any more to say to Donaueschingen". Someone yelling: Jahhh! Knock out! It takes someone who can master the material of serious concretion and electronic expression, to form their parody. Second piece: an over-blown clarinet-chirping with a penetrating lack of themes; later on Evan Parker's method of making noise and sound combine and become a serial event. Double-bottomed satire, the more it becomes evident that this is not just electronics, also not a tour through Mondrian-abstractions or other analogies. Art. 3: a kind of piano recitative by the mournful yet witty pianist Van Hove, the infinitely sad Belgium Heine of the piano (c. f. the most recent solo recording "verloren mandaag" - lost monday – SAJ-11/SVM 1 ) whose odd poetic irony in all his pieces crouches on the shoulder of each note he plays. Cymbals/Tomtom + ts: towards the end, a collective, eruptive improvisation, omitting now any of the queer jokes. 4: Piano-Boogie; a distorted voice growling like a dog; a long sax-tone without vibrato; warning that freedom and phantasy are about to be put into chains. In 6, there is Brötzmann with a full-fledged ts overblow-solo; Earl Bostic says 'hello' with a downward-glissando. Side 2, 1: With the theme of a nursery-song and its crummy cluster-splitting, this is a successful, lovingly malicious comment on the confined seriousness of a middle-class house concert culture. In piece 3, it becomes most evident that the jazz-idioms being cited, not themes/phrases as formerly used in regular choruses, are not exempt from satirical attacks. II, 4 corresponding to I, 1 emerge, electronically distorted like the numerous heads of the Hydra - parts of a romantic piano cadence which Bennink is trying to chop up with rough beats. Soft celesta. Someone yelling: Jaaahhh! Comment Brötzmann: "We're done with artistic music." Bennink: "Yeah, we must introduce Art."
II
The 'Syndicat' in Frankfurt, 'Book Association for Literature and Science' which since 1976 - in persuing the tradition of the encyclopaedistic 18th Century, Age of Enlightment - has been trying with their publications and working groups to crack up the ceremonial scientific work and teaching of the traditional universities, where cognitive understanding is rather impeded than furthered; to break up the retractions made at the end of the Sixties, especially since 1968 when critical-scientific publishing houses began to prosper and, last not least, the ceremonial way of left-wing thinking and left-wing theory itself, in an attempt to finally secularize scientific theory and political practice. The cover of the 'Syndical' catalogue carries the plan for a remodeling of the French National Library, designed by Etienne-Louis Boulée (1728-1799) a large arched ceiling with a wide skylight rests on colonnades to its left and right, designed in an ancient, semi-classical fashion, faintly resembling the basilica; below, at the forefront and the walls alongside, there are the books in oblique staples, parted by three intermediate aisles, in four shelf-systems and accessible to everyone. The perspective suggests kilometers' length. The people, looking relaxed, are lingering by themselves or – seemingly - in discussion groups. The floor of the hall is wide and long, without any furniture. The forefront admits even more light to flow in.
Evidently, idea and character of this design for a library are republican-democratic. In comparison, today's inaccessible book depots and the book order forms in Public Libraries appear like (not only bureaucratic) degenerations of a library system, and no less does the bookworm in his private pseudo-autonomy.
The Paris May demonstrations in 1968, as part of a world-wide students' movement, by using Proudhon's main parole "L'imagination prend le pouvoir", did not succeed in transforming public gubernational control of Arts and Sciences into a process of intersubjectivistic verification via permanent discussion and thus into simple democratic confidence regulatives, let alone the development of a republican cultural architecture.
III
It is not merely by chance and not only an analogy, rather signifying the political-organizational development of aesthetic parameters in Free Jazz, when in 1969, in connection with the radical democratic "APO", the rise and fall of the SDS, the students' movement and overall revolt, the European pioneers of Free Jazz - at the same time the core crew of Free Music Production - soon rechristened "Free Jazz" to "Free Music", viewing the whole of Music and their anti-movement directed against repressive social involvement (e. g. the official Berlin Jazz Festival or the Donaueschingen Avantgarde business which has managed to survive since 1922 but meanwhile is caught in a state of ceremonial immobility). So, when in 1969 the first floor of the Academy of Arts in Berlin became the ambient for the first presentation of the "Workshop Freie Musik" - at that time called "Three Nights of Living Music and Minimal Art", relating to happening-oriented ideas toward uniting the Arts and the other departments of Sciences -, this did not come by mere chance.
Apart from magic terms such as "communication" and "spontaneity" which later became the cool fetish-words on wherever there was an Art Scene, the average middle-class concert-goer had to start feeling cold in a metaphysical way while experiencing and listening to this music and while facing the open structure of the concert hall - if there was an audience at all. The inherent, immense distance separating artist-myth and art-believers, between podium and parquet simply shrinks to zero in the Academy. There, the sound-wall separating producer and consumer is made permeable and easier to be verified - mere blasphemy on the hermetic and pseudo-cultural middle-class music life, an effect of creative group rationalism which the predominantly black American innovators of Free Jazz who above all were in search of their own identity - musically, culturally, politically - could not have realized. They, first of all, had to fight against the white monopolies in show business and music industry: comparison with 'Intuition' by Lennie Tristano (1949), a genuine group improvisation which had not quite made it to become the break-through and then 'Free Jazz' (1961) by Ornette Coleman with Eric Dolphy, bcl, Donald Cherry, pocket tp, Freddie Hubbard, tp, Scott LaFaro, b, Charlie Haden, b, Billy Higgins, dr, Ed Blackwell, dr; reissue ATL 50 240 "That's Jazz" 1976 WEA. Others: ‘Ascension’ (1965) with John Coltrane, ts, Pharoah Sanders, ts, Archie Shepp, ts, Marion Brown, as, John Tchicai, as, Freddie Hubbard, tp, Dewey Johnson, tp, McCoy Tyner, p, Art Davis, b, Jimmy Garrison, b, Elvin Jones, dr, Impulse A-95/Ariola-Eurodisc.
In 1969, German, Dutch and English musicians were already on the way in their search for identity and had already developed a Free Music which related to Coltrane, Coleman, Mingus, Shepp, Sun Ra, Taylor, Ayler etc. in the same way as it referred to the deep occidental reservoir of sounds, themes, idea structures and focusing on traditional European heritage; a heritage which in itself had already been productively disintegrated by 12-tone music (Schönberg, Berg, Webern), by concretism, futurism, Satie, DaDa and Eisler, also by the Avantgarde Electronics (Stockhausen) and which rather often had been wittily as much as aggressively destroyed. This hermeneutic impudence is the intellectual, normal state of any intellectual innovation. The "aesthetic socialism" (it comes natural that a Marxist-Leninistic cadre ideology only reacts in contradictory fashion versus a musical development of democratic phantasy) only then became a manifesto for the first time, during the now 10-year-old series of "Workshops'', 1969 in performance and sound-profile of the Alexander-von-Schlippenbach-Nonet, with musicians who belong to the informal body of the "Globe Unity Orchestra" (following similar principles in their organization as Mike Mantler's and Carla Bley's New York "Jazz Composers Orchestra (Association)" (JCOA) - first record in 1966 -: Manfred Schoof, tp, flh, Michel Pilz, bcl, Evan Parker, ts, ss, Peter Brötzmann, ts, bs, Paul Rutherford, tb, Derek Bailey, g, Alex Schlippenbach, p, Buschi Niebergall, b, Han Bennink, dr. In comparison, the 'Donata Höffer Group' represented a small sound-cell: Donata Höffer, viol, p, (after a short "excursion" playing with the Polit-Rock-Group 'Lok Kreuzberg' she's now a genuine actress); Jost Gebers, b, - later became sound engineer, producer and manager of the cooperative "Free Music Production" (FMP), and Manfred Kussatz, dr.
IV
"He is nearing Freedom / from a side / we're not used to // He's nearing Freedom / in a way / we do not like // He approaches Freedom / closer and closer / what does he want to do with Freedom // don't go any further / Hey, stay away / or we'll shoot you // We protect Freedom / against anyone / who gets too close"
Erich Fried - for Herbert Marcuse
V
The Rheinland-Ruhr-Berlin-axis is significant for the German Free Jazz and the development of the (now Berliner) musicians' cooperative "Free Music Production". Another red thread leads to Frankfurt where during the Sixties and Seventies a similar but more hermetical (since relatively a-political) development began to show up, around Albert Mangelsdorff who now and then becomes loosely associated with the FMP, and Emil Mangelsdorff, Heinz Sauer, Ralf R. Hübner, Günter Kronberg (†), Günter Lenz, Bob Degen, Peter Giger, Hans Koller, Dieter Scherf, and today - more and more improving their profile - Michael Sell, Thomas Cremer, Rainer Brüninghaus, among others.
In1966, Peter Brötzmann gathered a group of musicians in Cologne to found an association whose musical activities, performed in a garage, ran under the title "Jazz on the Rhein". There, the idea of an absolute autarchy of new music, completely independent from show business, was slowly but constantly taking shape. In the following years until 1968, Peter Brötzmann edited his first series of two self-produced records: "For Adolphe Sax", recorded in 1967, with Brötzmann, ts, bs, Peter Kowald, b, Sven-Åke Johansson, dr, now available as FMP 0080. The other: "Machine Gun", recorded during the Paris May demonstrations in 1968 in the pub 'Lila Eule' in Bremen; with Brötzmann, ts, bs, Evan Parker, ts, Willem Breuker, ts, Peter Kowald, Buschi Niebergall, b, Fred Van Hove, p, Han Bennink, Sven-Åke Johansson, dr; now available as FMP 0090.
During the Berlin Jazz Festival of 1968, the "Free" musicians formed an alternative festival which under the title 'Total Music Meeting' has been developing its own tradition up till today. First conceptions for a continuous Workshop (a) and (b) "self-made" recordings come from there. On Easter Day of 1969, the "Workshop Freie Musik" had its opening night on several stages and podiums at the Berlin Academy of Arts.
The Academy provides monetary support from their own Senate subsidized funds. Therefore, tickets can be sold at minimum prices. The musicians initiating the "Workshop" are guaranteed complete independence and autonomy regarding both form and substance of the event - one conditioning the other. Pianist Alex Schlippenbach and trumpet player Manfred Schoof created the name for the future Free Jazz cooperative: "Free Music Production". [ Even though well formulated: this is where Liefland ismistaken – Gebers was responsible for the company’s name and its inception.] At first, there were musical and organizational difficulties, and only in 1972, the final fusion with the Wuppertal musicians and the groups around Peter Kowald and Rüdiger Carl became successful. Ever since, Wuppertal has its own annual "Wuppertal Free Jazz Workshop", complementing the one in Berlin.
Although still lacking a distribution agency, record sales go by mail order, sales during "concerts", workshops and festivals. In 1969 FMP presented its first record: "European Echoes - Manfred Schoof", FMP 0010, recorded in June, 1969 in Bremen. The title is intention, self-appreciation and program alike: it is the "official" response of the European Free Jazz Avantgarde to the U.S. Again, the majority of musicians are members of the "Globe Unity Orchestra". The "Orchestra" has developed Big band Free Jazz along with the today's Willem-Breuker-Kollektief, the Dutch l(nstant) C(omposers) P(ool) and similar other groups. Gradually, other European self-organized musicians' groups become associated and cooperate - like "Incus", "Emanem" (England), ICP, BVhaast (Netherlands); individual musicians joined as well with their own productions (latest example: Paul Lovens/Paul Lytton "was it me?", po torch records, ptr/jwd 1, 1977) Soon afterwards, GDR Modern Jazz groups around Petrowsky and Gumpert cooperated as well.
Vl
The Academy of Arts and its autonomy continued by the FMP in their Workshops, is a republican stroke of good luck. What appears to be chance, however, is a case of progressive consequence. It still remains an exception, though, because meanwhile the new patrons, the radio stations, have gained powerful influence. But one has to fight for Freedom day by day anew. A freedom which is donated is nothing but dependence and something contradictory to those who prefer to walk u prig ht.
VII
FAN Finally! L'imag ination prend le pouvoir'
DESPISER What'cha mean?
FAN Phantasy, man! Freedom. A wideness in your head. Basie - it's done with.
DESPISER That's what you'd like to happen, eh, you idiot. They can't even blow a real solo. They're just mixing up everything. Pure anarchy. Well, no wonder, everything's dissolving nowadays. Dangerous, I tell you, dangerous! Just listen to that! No real theme, no real swing, it all sounds wrong. Is there anything one could get a hold on?
FAN On Whisky, eh? Or beer? Man, you've got no idea! Finally there's democracy entering into Music - and people like you keep sticking to the authoritarian conditions. The old jog-trot of rhythm groups and one chorus after the other going on for hours, boring riffs and arrangements so easy to figure out, and above all there's Basie's guiding finger: that way - or Peterson's strum-dictations.
DESPISER I'll be throwing my bottle in a minute, you. Do you know how to swing? Do you really have a feeling for it? No, am I right? Everything's got to be extremely difficult, eh? Puzzle for intellectuals, right? 11/8-time or 3/4-time over 4/4 under 9/5. And no less than 2 basses, and percussion times two. Each of them by himself can't even play you a real "All of me". Instead, there's noise, no more real sound, no Play-Dirty, no Djungle, no tension on the Blue-Note. No rhythm. And the whole baloney's called "collective". And they even call it "political". Gee, no, let me tell you, Jazz came to an end with Charlie Parker. Coltrane was on the way down.
FAN It only started with Coltrane. Anything else was just pre-history of Jazz.
DESPISER Typical. Left-wing frustration music, that's what it is, this Free Jazz. You're all so hopelessly isolated. Avantgarde…..
FAN Just so, Avantgarde! Music-wise and politically a bit, too. Do you think it's by chance that the blacks' emancipation movement in the U.S. found its musical counterpart with the New York Avantgarde? 1964? They even called it "the October Revolution of Jazz". Would you call LeRoi Jones an idiot? But a finger-snapping fetishist like yours got to be told first what went on in Russia in 1917, and what importance black writers have, Cleaver, James Baldwin….
DESPISER Man, what's that got to do with this chaotic "music"? When I come home from my office or go to a Jazz Club, I just don't care anymore about the anatomy of my intestines or of my brain, boy, then I don't want difficult things, to give it to you straight, then I want it simple.
FAN There's no world to gain with Babbitt’s like you. Besides, the Avantgarde - specifically in speedy Jazz - has always been isolated in the beginning. Twenty years from now you'll sip it as if it was your mom's milk, in your favorite club or sitting at home in your armchair, and think it's something normal. But he who keeps standing on one spot won't go any further. Old Gothic proverb.
DESPISER You're an arrogant chicken. Your Avantgarde just means one thing: It's being puffed up by the cultural columns in some newspapers and made into the musical topic of the day while still a minority thing. I don't even read that stuff. I don't need no public directions for my pleasures with Dizzy.
FAN Hey, listen! There's always been more perception in progress than in constant repetition of what's already known, after 24 twelve-choruses, for example. And, by the way, Ornette Coleman has more in common with New Orleans, Charles Mingus with Ellington and Freddie Hubbard with Ziggy Ellman than you'd like to know. Just climb down from your traditional ivory tower. The last has always been the last but one. I wouldn't want to know what you're doing with clichés in your life, how you'd react if your wife kept behaving the same way all the time.
DESPISER Now you're going too far.
FAN Sorry! But you have an understanding of what Avantgarde is without even knowing it.
VIII
After 10 years of progress and Avantgarde at almost any cost, it could well be that - apart from aesthetic "in-group syndromes" - it will happen as Adorno/Horkheimer say in their writings on the dialectics of cognition: that a hurried progress will react upon those teaching cognition in a totalitarian and destructive way. It also seems as if a cooperative of musicians, one that is independent from show business and a declared non-profit organization, acts in contradiction to their own set goals when using the industrial distribution system of Bellaphon-lmport-Company to sell their records. However, no one has been able to prove yet that in the much-needed process of developing an aesthetic-ecological place in society, one like Avantgarde musicians fried to establish for themselves, non-capitalist conceptions were bound to fail. Music, with its own inherent utopia, is verified only when in reality people materialize it for other people. Music does not become more "real" when manifested in pantheons and infinity. It is never something finished, unless by force. It pertains to life. Work in progress…..
Translator unknown
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