1997
TMM / "Podewil"
|
|
|
Now the longest-running institution in the annals of what used to be called free jazz, the Total Music Meeting has, since 1968, provided an alternative nightly programme for the duration of the Berlin Jazz Festival. Most of the names corralled for the thirtieth such programme (where have the years gone?) will be familiar to listeners who have passed this way before. At least, Peter Brötzmann, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Peter Kowald, Irène Schweizer, Evan Parker, Rüdiger Carl and Sven-Åke Johansson are players who seem to me to have been identified forever with the piquant sonorities and textures conjured in the mind by the words "Total Music Meeting" - which is another way of saying that the musicians have defined the event. Readers under 40 may be surprised to learn that the Total Music Meeting is actually older - by roughly a year - than Free Music Production itself. At the first Meeting, at the Quasimodo Club, where the now-famous sign on the cash register declared "Price of admission double for jazz critics", Jost Gebers still belonged to the rank-and-file of the free players: untroubled by dreams of record label presidency, he was just the bassist in Donata Höffer's trio. John McLaughlin, nobody's idea of a free improviser today, played with Gunter Hampel's Time Is Now group. And John Stevens, whose many talents did not include a flair for international diplomacy, arrived for his only visit with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, managed to alienate all but the most hardboiled German improvisers, and also baffled Sonny Sharrock, who dropped by to jam. Yet oppositionalism, of varying intensity, was indeed the lifeblood of the early TMM. It had been initiated as an "anti-festival" to challenge what was perceived as the "slick professionalism" of the Jazz Fest proper. (This part of the history is confusing in retrospect. After all, Globe Unity, the first European free big band, had made its debut at the Berliner Jazztage in '66 - with Albert Ayler also on the bill! - three years before FMP got into gear; in that era, it has to be said, the big festivals took some chances, too). An uneasy truce was established between the parties by the early 70s; in 1973, for example, the group that the musicians called the Hobby-Quartett - Brötzmann, Schlippenbach, Kowald and Paul Lovens - appeared on stage at the Philharmonie but strove to emphasize that, contrary to appearances, this was no pact with the showbiz devil. A militant programme note announced that their festival fee would go towards plugging the Total Music Meeting's shortfall. Funding of the Meeting has been somewhat touch-and-go since those early idealistic days, with an arts grant here and a little sponsorship there keeping the event in the calendar, if only just. A "final" Total Music Meeting was first announced as long ago as 1983 and programmes have occasionally been trimmed at short notice when the cash ran out. Just like symphonic music, twentieth century composition, the opera and the ballet, free improvisation could not have survived on popular support alone; unlike the other arts, however, it has hod to make do with the scrapings from the bottom of the subsidy barrel. But what of the music? For two decades, the Total Music Meeting unfolded at the Quartier Latin, a funky converted cinema on the Potsdamer Straße. The overriding impression that remains with me of the music made there in the 70s is of sounds too big to be contained by the space. The experience of hearing vintage Breuker Kollektief or Globe Unity at close quarters, for example, as massed horns jabbed furiously, could be simultaneously exhilarating, wildly funny, and claustrophobic. The sweat ran down the walls. Not only the big bands generated the row power, either; you could see, but seldom hear, Fred Van Hove, as Brötzmann and Bennink lobbed enormous noises at each other over his head. The records began to become essential as a means of verifying what you thought you might have heard under different conditions; at the same time, there were artists - and Bennink was certainly one, as Sven-Åke Johannson was another - unprepared to accept that improvisation was merely organized (or disorganized) sound. The drift towards a spontaneous performance art may have peaked with the Feminist Improvising Group (whose membership included Iréne Schweizer) pushing its vacuum cleaners over the Quartier Latin stage in '79. To appreciate, or object to, this, you had to be there. By the time the Total Music Meeting entered the 1980s, the music's overfly "political" phase was over. The players had largely ceased to allude to the much-vaunted "emancipation of European jazz" (a wishful myth) and no longer called each other "comrade" (indeed, sometimes they didn't talk at all). Old visions of a proletarian art form by and for the people were quietly laid to rest, along with the workers' boots and braces (formerly de rigeur), and the Weill/Eisler charts that had made effective encores for several bands. When the Wall finally came down,- East-West German free music solidarity seemed to crumble with it - or perhaps old relationships just took second place to rising Cecil Taylor fever at FMP. "Total music" could no longer be claimed as a localized phenomenon, that was for sure, certainly not as a unified "movement". Reinforcements arrived from all over the globe and from myriad genres, each musician bringing along a different perspective on the meaning of the music; it was difficult, if not impossible, to keep the whole picture in focus. Some of the "givens" that free music, in its early radical phase, had thrown out the window began to be (selectively) reinstated. If "free dissolved time", the "nerve-pulse" playing of the free percussionists, had been one of the common denominators of the music, visits by the drum group Africa Djolé demonstrated that the potentialities and subtleties of "conventional" rhythm, far from being exhausted, had barely been grazed by westerners. About this time, Brötzmann began to mutter, heretically, that only American rhythm, stemming from a real jazz base, could truly galvanize his sound. He's been getting it, too, in and out of the Total Music Meeting, from drummers that have included Andrew Cyrille, Shannon Jackson, and Rashied Ali, and is more than happy with the rhythm section (to welcome back that old term) of William Parker and Hamid Drake, which still drives his excellent Die Like A Dog quartet. FMP's intensive work with Cecil Taylor also overturned the "Europe-only" emphasis of the Total Music Meeting, which had never been absolute anyway; Schlippenbach's groups in particular had often included American contributors (Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Bob Stewart, Alan Silva, Sunny Murray and others; the recent alliance with Sam Rivers continuing the trend). But, with Taylor, an important new chapter in Euro-American collaboration was opened up. The Total Music Meetings of '89 and '96 put special emphasis on Taylor's methodologies and in general, ties between the European improvisers and the survivors of the Black new jazz community have been strengthened since the big Taylor FMP festival of '88. One of Taylor's occasional collaborators, saxophonist Charles Gayle, came to the TMM on the recommendation of Peter Kowald who first heard him literally on the streets of New York. Gayle's arrival at the 1 991 Meeting (the first one at the Podewil) was greeted with excitement by German free music diehards: at last an American who plays the way "we" do - no charts, high energy stream-of-consciousness playing, dismissive of conventional technique - a fairly paradoxical appreciation of an artist who considers himself very much in the spiritual/musical tradition of Coltrane and Sun Ra's hornmen. Musics which have superficial affinities do not necessarily share the same motivations. In 1995, the TMM broke with its own traditions by turning the event over to a conductor- a notion that would have been ideologically untenable, if not downright preposterous, in '68. Butch Morris, who had previously appeared with the X-Communications group and with his own trio, presented his DAAD-supported "Berlin Skyscraper", five days of meticulously controlled improvisations and "conductions" with a 17 piece band. Nothing so "formal" manifests itself at this 30th anniversary which resembles, for the most part, a gathering of the elders of the tribe. Even if anniversaries traditionally encourage re-evaluations of the path taken, I don't anticipate too much nostalgia in the playing of the German and English musicians, who tend to be unsentimental until the bar is open. On the other hand, the duo Radici, new to the Meeting, and featuring Gianluigi Trovesi (clarinets) and Gianni Coscia (accordions) plays a music that is entirely nostalgic, and to an extent that perhaps only Italians could countenance. Swing music, folk ballads, the mazurka, the waltz, the tango, sounds of the synagogue and the church intermingle in improvisations and compositions that seem to ache for a return to a simpIer, perhaps mythical, past. Unquestionably the most misty-eyed music ever played at the Total Music Meeting. The notion of a group with Irène Schweizer, Pierre Favre and Rüdiger Carl prompts memories of two old bands - the Schweizer/Carl/Moholo group of the 70s and the still earlier Schweizer Trio with Favre and Peter Kowald. Given the major changes that have taken place in the music and conceptual thinking of both Carl and Favre they are more likely to create new music than to look over their shoulders. Almost 20 years ago, Carl seemed to come to an abrupt understanding that fate did not intend him to be a powerhouse tenorist in the slipstream of Brötzmann and Parker. The accordion and concertina were recovered from his childhood closed and he began to write in earnest, shaping the book of the COWWS quintet (which also includes Schweizer) with grooves, loops, almost anything except "free jazz". With Sven-Åke Johansson, it seems safe to assume, he will explore the periphery of the Swede's strange world of invented art songs and impromptu singspiel (like Pierrot Lunaire thwarted by the midnight sun). With Carl, Johansson and Coscia, there are as many accordionists as drummers at the 30th Total Music Meeting, which must tell us something about Central Europe improvisation struggling to come to terms with the mixed blessings of its cultural heritage. Pierre Favre also backed away, quite early on, from what he considered to be the "brutal" attributes of Germanic free music, hewing more to an older jazz sense of "swing" (defined by Big Sid Catlett as "my idea of how a melody should go"). Since then he's studied ethnic music and composition, his drum set has blossomed like a sprawling sound sculpture, and he no longer much resembles the player who partnered Irène Schweizer in the free sixties. As for Schweizer herself, her resourcefulness is legendary and has been nowhere better demonstrated in the 90s than in her performances of Theoria, the epic and thorny piano concerto written for her by Barry Guy. "Form is out, content makes its own form", Sam Rivers used to insist, as, fresh from his stay with Cecil Taylor's group, he fronted a sequence of bristling trios through the early 70s. At the same time, he initiated and was one of the guiding lights of the N.Y. Loft Scene Sightings of 1he multi-instrumentalist in Europe were all too rare in the ensuing years and the records too thin on the ground. Very much in top form at 73 years of age, Sam Rivers came together with Alex Schlippenbach in 1995, when both were featured as soloists and composers with the workshop group called the Improvisers Pool, and a new chapter was opened. After a mammoth trek round the world, documenting duo encounters with players of three continents on assorted CDs and LPs, Peter Kowald (cleverly) spent a year at home between May 94 and May 95, inviting the audience over to his place for change. This provided a good opportunity to work on solo music, a process that had been a recurrent preoccupation over the previous 15 years. Christine Wodrascka made an impressive showing with her FMP solo recital Vertical - slightly Bley-ish, vaguely Monk-ish, very "European" - which she dedicated to bassist Yves Romain, "without whom I could never have imagined being a pianist". Wodrascka and Romain, long term partners, play together in this year's event.
Keith Tippett qualifies as a second generation Total Musician, I suppose: he had been playing his own brand of free improvisation long before the invitations arrived from Berlin. His "semi-prepared" solo piano sets con make you think of Nancarrow, Cage or koto music. With humble lumps of wood and plastic free-floating on the piano's harp of strings, and one foot anchored to the sustain pedal, Tippett frequently draws forth quasi-electronic sonorities from the acoustic instrument. Master saxophonist Evan Parker's use of circular breathing and overtone manipulation has also often prompted critical comparisons with electronic composition and systems music. Latterly, Parker's taken a break from more literal experiments with electronic sound synthesis to launch a new acoustic quartet featuring Mark Sanders, John Edwards and guitarist John Russell (whose solo performance was a highlight of the 1994 Meeting). The only electronics per se to be heard in the current Meeting are those hooked up to Toshinori Kondo's trumpet; they bring a welcome sense of space and depth of field to the Brötzmann Quartet, a group which bridges more jazz history than most, finding the links between Ayler's message and Bechetīs (down at the "St James Infirmary", for instance) and, in Hamid Drake's use of djembe, tabla, and frame drums, finding points of congruence with other improvising traditions. Machine Gun hadn't sounded like an invitation to a "world music" 30 years ago, but, curiously, that's what it has turned out to be... from: Leaflet TMM 1997 |
|