#konfrontationen

[its-samara-berthold]

[the-unwrinkled-ear]

I will be interviewing my dog Cake on tonight’s episode of The Unwrinkled Ear on kchungradio 5-7pm PST. I am not going to tell you how, but I am telling you that it will happen.

I will also be paying tribute to the recently passed Ornette Coleman.

And I will be doing a preview of this year’s Konfrontationen festival, which features Hamid Drake, John Butcher, Tobias Delius, Ab Baars, Katherina Ernst, Paul Lovens, Paul Lytton, Phil Wachsmann, Nina de Heney, Dror Feiler, Miriam Wallentin, Sten Sandell, Joelle Leandre and so much more. See you there if you can make it. 

[grandmasneighbor]

An Extra Silence in Nickelsdorf: Day 3

         Creating an Extra Silence: The 34th Konfrontationen Festival at the Jazzgalerie, Nickelsdorf

Day 3

         The festival was the 3rd weekend in July, per the usual. I started this report 3 months later. I wanted to absorb, I needed to be absorbed.

           Saturday began with another early trip out to the Kleylehof to set up the bar again as I would be helping prepare and sell drinks for the afternoon concerts. Lick--it's what's on your tongue. I may have had a spritz myself. The duet between Christof Kurzmann on laptop/electronics (running a free, open-source MaxMSP piece of software he calls "ppooll") and Sofia Jernberg on voice/tools appeared to be more the performance of a composition than a total improvisation. I can't emphasize enough the quality of the electronic sounds Kurzmann generates: they have a dynamism and warmth that astonishes. The way I heard this duet, it seemed like whatever sounds or words Jernberg sang, Kurzmann accompanied with the sounds of her internal life as she sang. Underbelly maelstrom soft torrent, hot inside the head, gentle melodic sway wobble, milk's thirst for coagulation, the most friendly dancing. Kurzmann's love of melody and variety of sonic palette emphasized each of Jernberg's utterances: little metallic techno beats, underbrush clatters, an end-of-videogame-wipeout blurlp, birdcall whistling, squeaking wood--the timbres wouldn't stop. Jernberg's natural tone is that of submerged lumber, with it's rounded edges, exquisite surfaces, and knotty grottoes. The content of what she sang was a large part of this performance: "Let's go…out of bounds…waiting for the love that blessed break…the big hush…can't get in tune can you…forget about peace, go for attunement…you want a little bit of the breathtaking?…would it hurt?…will it?…no more leaders, no more idols, only beggars…" That wasn't the sequence or all of what she sang, but these were the topics flying through the room. I also wrote down "everything is breathtaking", but I'm not sure if she sang that, or if I just happened to finally realize it.

         A defining moment of the set was when Kurzmann laid down a static wash and Jernberg absolutely screamed on top of it–the static was impeccably, fragilely, diminutively balanced with the scream, just underneath it, nuzzling it, not competing with it or even trying to be equal with it, just a sidekick of static. It made the scream that much more emphatic, and quelled.

         Backyard myoplasm. The instrument whose natural tone I am most attracted to is the clarinet. So the clarinet trio of Paed Conca, Michael Thieke and Hans Koch–known as Porta Chiusa–seemed like just what I would love to have join me for an afternoon. But while I am familiar with and love the more extreme kind of clarinet playing exemplified by this band, their choice to play along in a dark room with a couple of experimental films left me wanting more: more clarinet, more light, more ritual, more attunement with the time and the space. The first film was black and white, showing a blindfolded guy painting a window that was shaped like a door, split-screen so you see the front and back of the window. The music they made to accompany these images was cave sonar, subdued tightrope walking along edges of pitch, grease on eel for the fire and a bright but quick flame. And in the film, he continued painting over the window. The sounds were compelling even if not invigorating and I had wine-flavored chewing gum because of a hopping insect on flaking gray concrete and the sun snaked through the room as curtains were brushed-aside for entry and exit.

         The second film they composed a piece for was a documentary of a deportation at the Zürich airport by Giorgio Andreoli featuring no dialogue and only anonymous shots of legs, stairs, hallways, waiting rooms, etc. interspersed with black screens containing spaced-out letters and phrases relating to "borders" in various languages. The film directed my thinking too much, and in an uncomfortably dogmatic and controlling way, as the music then became a soundtrack of interminable and ambiguous waiting, which seemed like a harsh relegation it didn't deserve. 

           An excellent documentary of the festival by Slovenian television (with subtitles in German but some dialogue in English and plenty of amazing concert footage from throughout the festival) features sections of both these films as well as commentary by Conca on Porta Chiusa's work. Also, plenty of people have posted videos of a bunch of the sets from this year's festival on YouTube (look for 34th Konfrontationen Nickelsdorf), but so much of the ambience is lost that I am not inclined to recommend a look for any other purpose than a slight glimpse into the Jazzgalerie world.

         Speaking of slight glimpses, this was the fifth year that "sound art" was a component of the festival. I have a problem with "sound art.” Not because it is bad to consider sound as art, but because I think music already is art. Not only that, but it seems like a term wielded by elite institutions (and elitist individuals) to designate a higher quality of artistic merit to sounds that fit in galleries and museums than to sounds produced from a person on a stage. People like Caleb Kelly and Susan Philipsz and articles like this inform my skepticism of the term and my disgust at the overall ignorance of sound art champions to the rest of what is happening in creative music. (They refer to creative musicians as "honk-tweeters" and "dial twiddlers" for example.) But even looking at someone like Frank Zappa, who would never be considered a "sound artist," I see someone who engaged in radical social commentary, incorporated a deep knowledge of the history of music (Varèse, Mingus, Stravinsky, Howlin' Wolf, etc.) into his writing and playing, and used elaborate theatricality on stage as a way to enhance and emphasize his compositions. That sure seems like someone who used sound as art to me.

         Just to finish this digression about the attempted gallery-and-museumification of evocative and provocative sounds, I'd like to point out that it's not impossible for institutions to address advances in music and the panoply of the world's sounds in a way that isn't condescending to musicians or sound. The Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona's Radio Web Macba features thousands of programs investigating creative sound in all its richness and history. (Chris Cutler's "Probes" series, now with 5 episodes, is an extraordinarily enlightening investigation into how various technologies inserted themselves directly into the developments of Western music beginning in the late nineteenth-century. And Felix Kubin’s curatorial project Parasol Elecktroniczny, which explores contemporary Eastern European underground music in Estonia, Latvia and the Czech Republic, are two examples of some of the excellent work being commissioned and broadcast through this institution.)

           The "sound art" at Nickelsdorf itself had nothing wrong with it; I just had to air my offense at the term and what it seems to want to represent. Sivan Eldar and Anna Adler made a nice sculpture of leaves suspended ever-so-daintily via fishing line over various small piles of ash. Assorted fans blew the leaves around into the piles of ash and made tiny scraping and hissing sounds with their edges. Robert Mathy mounted a bunch of small metal spikes to surfaces all over the room; these were activated at surprising intervals to tap and hit various materials. He writes, "Crucial for the tone colour are the materials existing in the room. The score adapts every time in every room where the installation is exhibited; so every time the work has its distinctive sound qualities." Too often for my taste, this 'specificity is king' mentality dominates instances of "sound art," as if just because something exists it is automatically worth paying attention to. Actually, now that I write that as if it's not true, maybe I see that it is. Maybe the fact of existence, itself, is enough to warrant importance. The problem is that I've already experienced too many works that iterate and reiterate this idea.

                    On to the evening concerts. You breathe it in, you expel it: you give back a little of you either way; in comes the ether, out goes the ether. And possibly a little essence. Lawrence "Butch" Morris passed away this year, and the first set, while the sun was still out, featured his longtime colleague and friend J.A. Deane leading an incredible stage full of musicians in a memorial conduction. With Hamid Drake, Paul Lovens and Tony Buck all on drums and percussion, plus Els Vandeweyer on marimba, there was plenty of rhythm to be found in the glissando of passing. I felt my own father's passing more deeply during this set than any other, probably because it was a memorial already, but also because it was the kind of memorial Butch and my dad would have appreciated: boisterous and serious, focused and exalted, full of smiling faces and energized bodies both on stage and in the audience. It also started so solemnly, with a series of bass clarinet trills by Hans Koch and gradually intruding doublebass bowing from George Cremashi and Joëlle Léandre, plus a perfect hue of fading sunshine behind the stage, that a certain tranquility and hard-won peace-with-death permeated the air. (Throughout the festival my great Romanian buddies in JADD kept teasing me for paying so much attention to the quality of light and how it affected each set, but it really made an impact this time!) I haven't seen that much smiling from musician to musician onstage in quite some time; there was downright giggling with enthusiasm and playfulness. They did three or four conductions, and a couple highlights for me were Magda Mayas' percussive strikes at the piano in the first piece, the bluesy warblings and bell swings by trumpeter Liz Albee in the last one, Vandeweyer's soft but dense marimba mallet work during a duo with Buck, Hans Falb's concentrated stare while waiting for the sign from Deane before unleashing a wild chorus of twisted barks from his turntables, and all the razor-sharp back-and-forths between the groups of musicians happenstantially formed by being on either the left or right side of the stage. 

           I have to warn you I'm a very thorough lover. I had never heard of the French pianist François Tusques before looking at the program for this festival, and I say that with a little embarrassment because he has, I now know, an extensive discography that stretches back to 1965. His duo with now-local Nickelsdorfer Mats Gustafsson was clearly a dream of Gustafsson's, and I for one and am all in favor of the realizing of dreams, especially if they involve paying homage to an artistic hero/influence. Even better that Gustafsson chose to pay homage by playing together with Tusques. Gustafsson let Tusques begin their first improv, and Tusques played continuous off-kilter patterns to which he added jumpy, halting phrases. Tusques didn't play the reaction game at all, and continued to let Gustafsson pepper the proceedings with staccato outbursts and fragmentary lines. Gustafsson started their second improv and it immediately had a more Gustafsson-y feel with sharper turns, wider dynamic changes from ragingly loud to post-coitally soft, and moments of absolute togetherness. As their playing continued it became clear that Tusques has such a distinctive sense of jazz phrasing that his personal language takes some time to get involved in; it's a strange, often inscrutable, unrhythmically compelling tone, like folksy drifting. Sifting through memories for moments of courage; how many do you find? Deep down, Gustafsson is one giant, raspy, guttural howl from the abyss of the self, and when he tries to play it rhythmically it gets stuck in the throat, naturally. On purpose. How could it not? Gustafsson brought out his contrabass saxophone for one number and they both ended up stomping their feet on the stage; it's a contrabass saxophone and piano duet! How could they not?

         All of the other times I've attended this festival it's been with at least a couple of other friends in tow, and the biggest difference I noticed with that absence was that the lack of an immediate circle of folks to talk to right after a set causes you to hear less: you're left with your own impressions only. Because when a friend hears something and tells you about it right after a set, you hear it too, and it adds to your memory and is inserted into the experience itself. After this particular set, I was talking with Baldrin, one of the numerous festival volunteers, and he described this set as "the minimal meets the animal." I hear that too, and it makes me thankful. A toast to all the other ears.

           On paper, the quartet of John Tilbury on piano, Hamid Drake on drums, Franz Hautzinger on trumpet and Rozemarie Heggen on doublebass looked like a tangle of styles with no hope of cohesion: Tilbury's minimal piano, Drake's groovy bebop drums, Hautzinger's breath-focused trumpet, Heggen's punk bass. But this set was surprisingly sensical, with each musician listening so intently to the others and contributing just what they could offer that everything stuck together in deep accord. The set started with Tilbury opening and closing the piano lid–not bringing it all the way down or all the way up to reverberate any of the strings inside the piano, just enough to make the hinges creak and whoosh. As he told me later, "I like to remind people of the thing.”

         This work with the piano lid immediately brought me back to the first time I saw him play, in AMM, in 1994. It was in an atrium, and I was up above Tilbury, looking down and admiring all the preparations inside the piano. At one point during the set he stopped playing and was casually looking around, not making any sound for several minutes. Suddenly he took the piano lid, slammed it down, and after a small pause, slammed it back up, and then continued to look around, not playing anything else for several more minutes. It was so intensely sonic and so intensely performative of the "thing-ness" of the instrument that my eighteen-year-old mind was instantly captivated by music that could not only contain such a gesture, but also incorporate it into a meaningful sonic landscape, as Rowe and Prévost did by refusing to directly react with it and instead continued to build layers of smoldering hum and rain-patter out of their guitar and drums.

         Back to 2013. Mouse of grief for the past, rabbit of happiness for where it's brought you. Drake responded first to the piano-objecthood intro with light, swirling brushwork and Hautzinger added surprisingly melodic little patterns across the top. As unlikely as it sounds, Tilbury continued to 'lead' this set by going into places he wouldn't have on his own or with his usual cohorts, all the while remaining true to his own playing. He didn't get jazzy, but he did speed up and play hard, cranky chords, animating the proceedings with unexpected turns, bright-fisted corners and then subtle, tiny accents when the others had their own thing going and were rapt up in it. Drake's signature touch–O those bass drum thumps!–lent everything (and I do mean the whole world) a vibrancy. Heggen, like so many great doublebassists, displayed a supersensitivity to every moment, lending a solid dignity to every move: a bird's nest dignity, a fought-for dignity. The reward was a perfectly balanced set that somehow displayed every musician's strength while also revealing new facets of their playing.

           At the Los Angeles County Fair I heard a dad bend down and ask his 4-year-old daughter, "Why aren't you afraid of the animals, but you are afraid of the rides?" He confused his own manufactured wariness of animals with his daughter's instinctual fear of artificially contorting the body. By the time Braaz, the final band of the night, came on, I was so absorbed with music that I was ready to party with the great kids running the festival's "back bar.” Near the end of their set, this quartet of tenor sax (Werner Zangerle), guitar (Gigi Gratt), doublebass (Marcus Huemer) and drums (Martin Flotzinger) played a tune with large-sweeping dynamics alternating between fast little quiet sounds and big loud swinging blasts. As we were talking in the back bar, our conversations instantly conformed to this structure as we went from whisper to normal voice to whisper with no hesitation, in direct correspondence with the music. Sometimes you hear more while partying along with music than by sitting in superbly silent concentration.

 - Andrew Choate

Part 3 of 4, final installment next week

[grandmasneighbor]

Nickelsdorf's Extra Silence: Day 2

Creating an Extra Silence: The 34th Konfrontationen Festival at the Jazzgalerie, Nickelsdorf

Day 2

         The Friday afternoon concerts at the Kleylehof started for me with an early drive out there to help set up the bar. I held my arm out of the window and cupped the wind like a breast. Since my last time at the festival, a stone amphitheater, with a nice field of grass in the middle, has been built at the Kleylehof. Stunningly gorgeous, like sunlight laughing in clay. Conny Bauer played an incredible trombone solo from the top tier of the amphitheater, aiming the bell of his trombone against the stone to bounce the sound around and at other times directly piercing the hot summer air with long plangent waves. I heard a slurry curl in his sound I had never heard before. Laying on my back, looking at the sky, I was a little startled when he started adding electronics to this set, multi-tracking some downright funky trombone lines with folk tunes and his own live-sampled vocals.

           When ashes blow on me from a firepit, I lick my lips a lot and it makes them stick. And then everyone will know how hot I've been and will be again.

           The Friday evening concerts began with a quartet of Raymond Strid on drums/percussion, Sylvia Bruckner on piano/electronics, John Butcher again on saxophones and Joëlle Léandre on doublebass. Strid and Léandre began this set, furiously and quickly building a dense mesh of sonic strafing. Bruckner and Butcher took so long to jump in that it was a little difficult to get the full group sound established; they both stabbed into the music searchingly, with the hasty tension of looking for the right coin in a foreign country, desperate to find the correct color, bulk and value for what you need to contribute, and in a timely manner. So most of the set played out in groupings: a Bruckner/Butcher duo, Bruckner solo, back to their duo, a trio with Léandre, etc.

         But then Léandre began chanting. And when she does, everything becomes sacred.

         Speaking of the sacred, I also noticed how Butcher's voice is so strong (and yet malleable) that when he stops playing, other musicians pause and reevaluate what they're up to, shifting slightly. The pause may not be in time, and the shift may not be in timbre, but a palpable self-examination flashes across the stage. More comradely curiosity than self-consciousness, but wonder arises nonetheless.

         I didn't mention anything specific about Raymond Strid in that last set. Not because he wasn't enthralling, but because I don't have to. This essay isn't an assignment; I'm writing it out of love. And I love Strid's playing; I have ever since I saw him in Gush more than fifteen years ago. I even wrote about him (and his trio with Barry Guy and Mats Gustafsson in my undergraduate thesis on philosophies of time in improvised music in 1998.) But not only do I love his playing, I love his demeanor. And his enthusiasm for the music: his and his compatriots'.

         When the next set started Friday evening, Strid snuck to the back of the stage, pipe in hand, and watched the entire DKV Trio set–all in smiling, head-shaking rapture. Fellow badass drummer, Vienna's D.D. Kern, joined him on his perch soon into the set, and I saw the two exchange a silent nod of welcome knowingness and companionship re: the glory that is Hamid Drake's drumming, and the fortuitous alignment that put him, Vandermark and Kessler together, in each other's paths, to form the DKV Trio.

         The DKV Trio and I go way back, because I was lucky enough to live in Chicago in the '90s. Every time they played, I made my best effort to be there. Before this gig at the Konfrontationen, I was thinking about the last time I saw them play, and it was probably thirteen years before, at the Velvet Lounge. So I was excited. And of course my excitement was warranted. Kessler's doublebass was mic’ed so well––which is a tough thing to do for basses––that his thick, heavy, slapping sound permeated everything. I was thrilled to hear him sound so good and play so spiritedly. He and Drake got so deeply into a powerfully chugging yet somehow light-on-its-feet propulsion that Vandermark looked like he was going to burst 10 minutes into the set. He paused, so the rhythm section slowed down and backed off a little. I actually would have liked to hear them take it even further, but the thing about this band is that they require all three members in order to wholeheartedly explore those nether regions. Soon enough they were. Vandermark played a double-reedish sounding thing on clarinet that wafted through the improv like BBQ smoke through a good party, DKV somehow channeling the exotic smoothness of Ahmed Abdul-Malik and the hard-edged soul of Sonny Rollins. Vandermark played baritone sax for their final number, unleashing a whorl of what in any other context would be considered spooky sounds as he alternated between loud, gravelly bursts of chunky growls and a steaming-hot melody. The encore was a perfect ballad-to-bop diamond, the kind that this band hangs their hat on, with Vandermark picking a riff and working and reworking it while Drake and Kessler frenzy around the downbeats. I've got to mention one more time what A+ form Kessler was in, whether doing some heavy bowing or precision plucking; I could really hear the gut in the strings. 

           And then Strid was back on stage! Similar to how Eddie Prévost has a jazzier side than is indicated by his playing in AMM, this set by Kege Snö showed that Strid has a tune-oriented dimension that his work in free improv bands hasn't made apparent. With Roland Keijser on reeds and flute, Niklas Barnö on trumpet and Joel Grip on doublebass, I heard a distinctly New York Contemporary Five vibe, especially in the interplay between the trumpet and sax. They started with an Ayler tune and then a Monk tune and what I heard was a love of the form of jazz across generations (Grip and Barnö looked to be in their late 20s/early 30s.) It elated me that there are still young people that think this music is cool, and care enough to recognize jazz as a zone of love and experimentation. While bringing a drawing of Béla Bartók to the front of the stage, Keijser announced that the hotel they were staying at had a Hungarian history book that discussed Bartók. This inspired the band to want to play some of their native Swedish folk tunes, which he would be doing on a South Indian flute. Multiculturalism, while rampant in the arts––obviously and necessarily so––has a bad reputation among critics, who see it in practice as a subtle form of exploitative orientalism and everything-is-relative reductionism. What those same critics aren't aware of in an instance like this is that artists are both scholars of their own domain and cunning tricksters for whom anything they come in contact with is material for their art if they can make it fit. Being inspired by a Hungarian to play Swedish folk tunes on an Indian instrument for an audience in Austria may sound convoluted, but it's actually basic when you're dealing with artists fluent in and engaged with the world's traditions of sound. Yah, and the final tune that Keijser and Barnö played on wooden recorders was a wailing triumph of harsh yet ultimately sweet up-and-downs and back-and-forths; some like it rough.

            As quiet as a bite. The last set of the day featured Tony Buck on drums, Christian Fennesz on guitar/electronics, and Joe Williamson on doublebass.  The band didn't have a proper soundcheck and spent the first little bit trying to get the balance in order, but Buck and his inviting mischief were apparent from the start as he sprayed cymbal smears into the field of sound at moments when Fennesz and Williamson were still trying to get their levels set. Delightful. Soon enough, the throbbing layer of Williamson's bowing and Fennesz' hum was even enough that all three were able to cavort and carouse on top of the steady stream. Despite the ingenuity and inventiveness of the sounds this band ultimately produced, the template they used is a reliable old structure: one layer of steadiness, as many layers of accents to that steadiness as possible. Fennesz discharged shattering strums from his guitar and squiggly swirls from his electronics. Once Buck really started hitting the cymbals, the tone became surprisingly elegiac without slowing down at all; in fact it gradually sped up and Fennesz amped up. This set was the kind of good improv that encourages your mind to wander, figure out other things in your life, and generate ideas–all while paying attention to the music, following its ebbs and flows with extreme concentration, and appreciating the tiny details of sonic decision-making that accent and fundamentally determine the zeitgeist of the piece. And Tony Buck has a seashell emporium. I don't know the exact amount of percussive seashells he has, but every time I see a string of them shaking or spinning on the head of his tom I smell an ocean wave crashing.

         Right as that set started, Hans and his girlfriend Utesat down together on a shelf in front of the stage, she leaning her back on a beam and wrapping her arms around him so he could nestle against her. She put her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes, turning away from the stage, listening to him listening, and that was as beautiful as the music: the loving desire to hear what your lover hears and loves, and love it in turn.

 Oh what a sleep that night.

 - Andrew Choate

Part 2 of 4, subsequent installments weekly

[grandmasneighbor]

Creating an Extra Silence: The 34th Konfrontationen Festival at the Jazzgalerie, Nickelsdorf

Day 1

         My dad passed away a couple weeks before this year's Konfrontationen. While flying to Atlanta to clean his apartment and then driving to Columbia, where I arranged his funeral, I did a lot of thinking and decided that the best thing for me to do was to go to Nickelsdorf for the festival. It was the right decision.

           The music started Thursday with Selvhenter, a Danish quartet of two drummers, a trombonist and a saxophonist. But the instrumentation alone doesn't adequately describe what their sound is made of, because the giant amplifiers the trombone and sax run through are crucial components of the gigantic sound they produce. Sonia LaBianca played the saxophone like a herd of caribou running through and occasionally lingering in a fine art gallery: wild, frenzied, and yet imbued with the strange logic of a Roscoe Mitchell saxophone line circa 1987's "Live at the Knitting Factory." Yes, that skewed. Is it rude to compare a musician's sound to an animal? I think it's a compliment. She'd also throw out Ted Milton-y squawks and blurts like eggs in a tornado: some might not even break. Maria Bertel played the trombone like a rhinoceros visiting a garden--not tromping over it, just mixing up the soil so that everything good and heavy can get deeper into the earth and grow. Is it apropos to compare a musician's sound to an animal's activity? Only when the musician displays a naturality mixing prowess and presence. Bertel's style combined with the massive amplification she plays through made her trombone sound like a guitar, like Jimmy Page on guitar in fact. I wasn't the only one left with this impression of a distinctly Physical Graffiti-era Led Zeppelinish vibe, as I talked to other folks who heard Robert Plant wailing in the saxophone. One of their tunes was a freaky Bernard Herrmann-on-the-edge-of-a-panic-attack soundtrack. The physicality of how Bertel plays the trombone was a microcosm of the intensity these four brought to the stage: she pushes and pulls the slide toward and away from her mouth in violent spasms, crunching her body over at the hips and frenetically reeling in place. And all the while that she and LaBianca were battling it out up front, the two drummers, Anja Jacobsen and Jaleh Negari, pummeled their instruments, providing the kind of fetching momentum that both starts an engine and makes sure it's got enough oomph to come back. I found it impossible not to let the body language of the drummers, as they nodded at each other while absolutely rocking out, overtake me with a well of happiness. One of my enduring images from the festival is of Jacobsen smiling beatifically with her eyes closed while she vamped out, the slight smile in her cheeks and rhythmic focus of her limbs communicating that all-too-rare feeling of seeing someone who has found the place where they are most at peace with themselves and the universe. 

           Because of the existence of the International Journal of Time Use Research, I'm investing in not only the healing power of music, but also in its ability to tangle temporal experience with surprised surges of enlightenment: now that makes sense. Cosmic Brujo Mutafaka was next:Marco Eneidi on alto sax, Itzam Cano on doublebass and Gabriel Lauber on drums. To get the audience ready, Eneidi told us to "Sit back and relax, eat some peyote, and let the brujos take you to the other side.” Absent any actual peyote, I did just that, and their music was all the transportation needed. This was a loud, sprawling, roiling mass of free jazz, the kind that puts the coffee in your cup and splashes a little extra on your wrist, just to make sure you're really aware of what's going on. Eneidi has the tone of a forest butterfly flickering its wings, open and closed, camouflaged and triumphant, ready to mate and satisfactorily spent. These brujos made a brouhaha, for sure.

           The only monogamous amphibian is the poison dart frog, and it's only the size of a thumbnail. Improvisers are much bigger-minded than most musicians and keep things vital by playing with new folks and old friends, lest they become poisonous. The duet between Tristan Honsinger on cello/voice and pianist Chino Shuichi was a master-class in free improvising nimble-footedness. Honsinger used his voice almost as much as the cello, speaking in partial and non-sensical Italian, French, German and English, and occasionally singing an obliquely relevant snippet like "we were very popular in those days," repeating and refracting the phrase until it too became a melody amidst the mayhem. It seemed like he was using his voice to prod Shuichi, to catch him off-guard, but it seemed like just as often he surprised himself. And Shuichi was more than ready at each moment, dancing with him every step of the way. At one point, Shuichi threw his hat down during an exchange and it hit the stage with a dull thud. "Flutter away I dare say," quipped Honsinger before he bebopped the bow across the cello, instigating a strong attack of the strings inside the piano from Shuichi, every interaction charged with the possibility of perfect solace, and menace.

         It can be hard to decide whether to stand or sit in an apple orchard. Shuichi's body at the piano keys was all potential; at one moment he placed his hands on them and throbbed toward them with his back, his arms, everything--but playing nothing for three throbs--just letting his body absorb a rhythmic bounce. This physical presence was matched by his musical alacrity, and the two cannot be separated in his playing: at another moment he swung his body toward the piano and then, listening to Honsinger's shenanigans, flung his arms backward, away from the keys, but heard something he needed to play with, caught his arms mid-flail, and lunged back toward the keys—the expectation of his own body movements trumped by the music's demands. A rabbit unfurled in the sweat clinging to the back of his shirt. This set was interactivity at its best: hyper, layered, chaotic, respectful, goading, loose, but, most of all: playful and beautiful. When you're equally comfortable spending time on land and in water, you know the key to it all is breath.

           One of my favorite aspects of going to see live music is getting the opportunity to be quiet around those I love and those I don't know. It's just so nice to be quiet, and listen, around others. The last set of the night was Eddie Prévost on drums/percussion, John Butcher on saxophones and Guillaume Viltard on doublebass. I thought it took a little while for this band to come together, but when they did, their set created one of the single most extraordinary moments of the festival: Butcher played one tone so full of honest apology, regret, good sense, sorrow and ultimate everlasting peace with the past that I couldn't help but be relieved. And charmed. It's possible that the recent death of my father played a part in how I heard this tone.

         This trio didn't play in AMM-like layers, but instead engaged in a subtle centrifugal spinning, sometimes throwing the music hard into the spin, so that it accelerated unnaturally fast, and at other times slowing down just. enough. to feel. the cycle. and then lean in, vibrating the rotation. I had never heard Viltard before, but he fit in perfectly with these two giants of improvisation, deftly complementing their phrases and handily instigating the navigation of the music to all the places it needed to go.

 - Andrew Choate

Part 1 of 4, subsequent installments coming soon

[vipal]

Butch Morris Dedication Orchestra by J.A. Deane

Here’s Butch’s great friend, J.A. Deane, conducting an Improvistaion at Konfrontationen 2013, in Nickelsdorf on July 20. Deane met Butch in New York in the 1990s, and they worked closely together on many projects.

The ensemble features Liz Allbee…

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