lethe/ night

unwise to dream, oft drink
forgetfulness, spawns anew
sleep, empty space, the weary
night cannot reveal, un-
veil



(Image: The Waters of Lethe (1964) by Peter Graham)

The dark side of English folk

Phil Minton - The Cutty Wren

Whereas much twentieth-century folk-inspired music seems rather twee and naive (part of its charm for a lot of people), the original material often deals with very grim subject matter, with the realities of life for ordinary people. That's certainly true of this song, which turns out to be about eating policemen! More specifically, about eating the Cutty Wren, the mercenary police who clashed with the peasants during the Peasant's Revolt of 1381. When the peasants managed to kill a 'wren', they would then eat them, to destroy the evidence and stave off starvation.

Phil Minton, more often heard in a free improvising context, takes vocal duties here, with accompaniment from fellow free improviser Veryan Weston at the piano. Minton's extended techniques are massively impressive, though his use of them can verge on the hystrionic. Or, to put it more favourably, he has a great sense of drama. Listen to the way he treats this song, giving it extra shades through adopting different accents and giving it all a gravelly, gritty fervour, as well as adding a dose of macabre humour to proceedings, to ensure that the lyrics' repetitive structure builds up an impressive cumulative intensity. His voice ain't exactly pretty, but then, he's not singing about pretty subject matter...

"...We're off to the woods said John the Red Nose

And what will you do there said Milder to Moulder
We'll shoot the Cutty wren said John the Red Nose

....Oh how will you cut her up said Milder to Moulder
With knives and with forks said John the Red Nose
Oh that will not do said Milder to Moulder
Great hatchets and cleavers said John the Red Nose

Oh how will you boil her said Milder to Moulder
In pots and in kettles said John the Red Nose
O that will not do said Milder to Moulder
Great pans and large cauldrons said John the Red Nose

Oh who'll get the spare ribs said Milder to Moulder
Oh we may not tell you said Festel to Fose
We'll give 'em all to the poor said John the Red Nose
We'll give 'em all to the poor said John the Red Nose."

Comus - The Herald

Comus' music, too, comes from a dark place. A band dealing in British folk/prog-rock, with a touch of jazz, they only released two albums: 'First Utterances', from 1971, and a 1974 follow-up, 'To Keep from Crying'. 'Utterances' is generally regarded as the best, a minor classic (though it was a commercial failure at the time - too dark and rough-edged for folkies, too folky for rock fans), whose songs deal with such happy themes as murder, the occult and rape, among other things. John Milton's poem/masque, from which the band took their name, describes the preying of a wood demon-style figure (inspired by the Greek god of drunkenness, festivity and chaos) on an innocent young girl, and this music has a similar feel of vulnerability, of beauty and innocence struggling to survive in a dark world. Sometimes this is conveyed explicitly, through dissonance and barking, animal-like vocals; sometimes more subtly (and more chillingly), by contrasting a peaceful-seeming musical surface with lyrics that speak of great suffering and anguish ('The Prisoner', which deals with mental illness). Indeed, singer Roger Wootton was in and out of mental hospitals, although managing to make the band's 2007 reunion tour.

This 12-minute piece, the longest on the album, unfolds in several sections, opening with what sounds like a theremin before the main melody comes in. After that fades out, around four minutes in, a beautiful section of fingerpicking guitar, with a feel of beauty in the face of/in spite of adversity, flowers in the mud, making it all the more hard won. There's a questing, roving feel to the harmonies; things aren't quite certain, they're struggling on the edge of settling down but remain perpetually unable to do so. Some flutes briefly join the guitars before that section fades out, and the theremin, and then the main melody, return. It's partly the instrumentation that makes this particular part so evocative, I suspect: viola, oboe, soaring female vocals, delicate guitar strum. As well as its emotional impact and strong sense of tone painting (this music practically screams 'English countryside'), the tune also reminds us of a time when genres converged without such a fusion seeming artificial or forced - you can hear traces of folk, jazz, prog-rock (in the somewhat episodic, suite-like structure), and even a touch of the old film score (easy to imagine this accompanying something like 'Wuthering Heights'). The fades lead me to suspect that his was edited down from a longer performance, or perhaps spliced together from several different ones; either way, a wonderful track.

Marion Brown - Porto Novo

I don't do this very often (mainly because I don't have superduper hi-fi equipment), but here's an out of print album for download.

It's Porto Novo, by Marion Brown, and it's ripped from my LP at 192 kbps.

The sound engineering on the LP itself is slightly strange, really amping up Bennink's drums (I'm guessing the guy was more used to dealing with rock/pop musicians than the likes of Han), but at the same time giving them a really strange, off-kilter quality that's hard to describe. I think Chris Corsano (of the Flowers-Corsano duo) calls it "fucked-up."

It's a fascinating record, one of the strongest examples of Brown's 'purer' free jazz style (before he began to move towards more lyrical explorations with the likes of 'Sweet Earth Flying' and 'Vista', and, eventually, straightahead jazz (on 'Live in Japan' and 'November Cotton Flower')). Good as his albums for ESP-disk are, and good as 'Three for Shepp', on Impulse, is, they don't hold a candle to this one.

Altena's none too well-served by the aforementioned sound engineering (in the trio passages, it's Bennink and Brown who dominate), but, when he gets the chance to solo, he's heard to good effect, often producing sounds one would tend to associate more with avant-garde classical music than with jazz.

Bennink has moved on a heck of a long way from the somewhat edgy straight jazzer trying to keep up with Eric Dolphy on 'Last Date': he sounds propulsive, confident, brash, energetic, without cluttering the music. His playing here isn't quite up to Sunny Murray levels of cymbal-splash noise-bash (and isn't trying to be); neither is it the Rashied-Ali magic carpet colouristic approach, but HB's own maverick kineticism.

And Brown? Well, despite his neglect, he was certainly as good an improviser the better-known 'New Thing' musicians Shepp and Sanders. All along though, he wasn't so much 'New Thing' as into his own thing - a good dose of classical influence, an interest in ethnic musics (which, admittedly, Sanders and Shepp shared), and, above all, a sparer approach than the other two musicians. Whereas Shepp and Sanders were well capable of emoting to great effect (the prelude section to 'Creator has a Master Plan', or Shepp's gorgeous, impressionistic reading of 'In a Sentimental Mood' (from 'On this Night', 1965)), Brown was more understated, relying on the carefully chosen phrase, on clear motivic development rather than the pure sound/smear/scream tactic. Listen to the phrase he plays in 'Improvisation' (which also crops up in his solo on one of the other tracks). Just perfect.

I won't bother with track-by-track analysis: you can find that out for yourself. And some of these tracks were posted (in a cleaner rip) on the destination...out blog a while back. But I thought people who haven't had the chance might like to hear the whole album.

Here's the link, then. Info and scans included with the music.

http://sharebee.com/842f497d

The Cambridge Free Improvisation Society - Miracle of the Sun (2008)

Just under a month ago, I posted about material by the Cambridge Free Improvisation Society, which was being made available on the internet, and briefly mentioned the album 'Miracle of the Sun', which can be streamed from the CFIS' Last FM page. However, as that page doesn't seem to be getting any listeners, I thought I'd make it easier for people to get hold of this stuff, and am putting up a download link.

The Cabmbridge Free Improvisation Society - Miracle of the Sun

Jacken Waters - electric guitar/ effects
Dan Larwood - electric guitar with delay pedal
David Grundy - laptop, piano, recorder, radio

Recorded at Robinson College, Cambridge
6th February 2008
192 kbps/ 96.7 MB

Get it here! (artwork at top of post)
http://www.mediafire.com/?ydcy9xthxgy

Music with liberal doses of guitar feedback! Please leave written feedback too!

EARTRIP (magazine)

I've been creating the first issue of a new jazz/improv/experimental music magazine for around six months - and now it's finally here. You can download it by following the link, which I've posted at the magazine's shiny new blog:

http://eartripmagazine.blogspot.com/

The Cambridge Free Improvisation Society

The Cambridge Free Improvisation Society is an informal musical collective whose members are students at Cambridge University. We gather to freely improvise during sessions which are held on and off during Term times. We have performed occasional concerts and, for the past few months, have been recording the irregular jam sessions we hold in various college music rooms. Selections of these recordings are now being made available online, including 'Miracle of the Sun', an hour-long improvisation which will be available in CD-R form at gigs or on request.

The following material is now available online. Feedback is welcome, and indeed encouraged!

A selection of excerpts from various improvisations recorded over the past few months can be heard at http://www.myspace.com/cambridgeimprovisation http://www.soundclick.com/thecambridgefreeimprovisationsociety
the album 'Miracle of the Sun' can be downloaded and listened to in full from http://www.last.fm/music/The+Cambridge+Free+Improvisation+Society
Members of the society featured in these performances are: Joe Scott (trombone) Jo Davis (flute) Dan Larwood, Jacken Waters (guitar, effects) David Grundy (piano, laptop, recorder)

An Echo in Another's Mind: My Grandfather and Glenn Gould's Bach

Quite a personal article, this one, which is why it's taken a while to get it completed, though I'd written the bulk of it several months ago. Hopefully it will have more than merely personal significance, though, and have something to offer others as well.

In many ways my Grandfather was a cold man, and deliberately so: closed-off, probably very shy, darting out with flashes of dry humour, sardonic remarks often at others' expense. Someone who closed himself off, who protected himself from the world, who wanted to exist in a cocoon where there was never any bickering, where there was never any trouble, where people behaved and got on with things, where he could do what he wanted and others could do what they wanted, as long as it didn't adversely affect him. Someone who shut himself off from the past, who liked to embrace modernity: in wanting to get a computer, to keep up with the latest technology, and in his fondness for modernity in art and design (the last time we ever took him outside for an outing, he expressed a wish to go and visit the Tate Modern, and, after he died, we got stacks of his old Bridget Riley-esque abstract paintings, and delicate, filigree, abstract, mathematical models).

I remember him in an old photo, surrounded by grinning people in their 1970s regalia, in a very 1970s room – incidentally, that same living room which, when I remember it, was green and ordered, somewhat fusty and dead, yet also attractive in its pristine cleanliness (albeit betrayed somewhat by the large cracks descending from the ceiling down the wall like intrusive ivy). He looks utterly lost and out of place, the only one not smiling. Probably suffering from the effects of his wife's death, and also from the depression that plagued him throughout his life, he is thin, pinched, his chin covered with traces of rough stubble. In an even older photo, taken during the war, he is with a couple of other army buddies and a girl, large, old-fashioned beer mug in hand, grinning happily in a way that I never saw in life: perhaps because of his difficult marriage to a woman, my dad's mother, with mental difficulties (though to paint him solely as a victim is to simplify things: of course it was difficult for him, but the way he behaved wasn't exactly praiseworthy). He did himself very well, as he would have put it, with his second marriage: round-the-world cruises, good fine, good drink, sketching, house extensions, the spending of money...Nevertheless, there were times when he couldn't, or wouldn't get out of bed in the morning, when he couldn't face the world: we later found out that one Christmas, after we'd spoken to him on the phone (he seemed in quite good spirits), he'd gone straight back to bed, unable to face the traces of false or real jollity.

It was in another bed that he ended his life, wired up with various tubes in a hospital, sleeping constantly. We'd sit by him, he'd wake for a few seconds, smile, make some sort of grunt or groan of acknowledgement, grip someone's hand and go to sleep again, his fingers wrapped round like a child's, a fisty, tight grip that needed the certainty of another presence to ease him through. Who knows what went through his befuddled mind, marred by dementia and the effects of the TIAs, the series of mini-strokes he'd suffered over a period of five or so years - perhaps nothing, a strange blankness, like those moments in sleep that you can't remember, when you're not dreaming and not conscious: empty spaces, vacancies. He wouldn't want to be remembered that way, mentally inactive, inert, a passive being rather than an active, thinking person. And such a person wasn't really him: a reversion to something he perhaps never was, never allowed himself to be, even when young - a helpless child, someone dependent and needy. He may have leaned on others a bit, but in the end it was self-sufficiency he wanted - independence, distance, borders.

That was surely why I never really engaged with him - no-one could, not even my father, not even (perhaps) his second wife, though I suspect that, in their own way, they loved each-other (she perhaps more than him, in a sentimental kind of way). But, when I was about 12, we discovered a mutual liking for classical music, and we used to go upstairs to the attic they'd had converted into a sketching/listening room for vast amounts of money, sit and listen to music, look at cassettes and CDs; he would lend me them, I'd sit in a chair at home, headphones on, let the music soak in. Too often when one hears music it's when one’s doing other things - writing an essay, looking at bills, surfing the internet. That makes those moments all the more valuable: moments of total immersion, moments when you sit and do nothing but listen to the music, focus in, concentrate, maybe shut your eyes, when you let the sounds, and yourself, simply be...

His favourites were Schoenberg's early oratorio Gurrelieder, a work full of post-Wagnerian twentieth century Romanticism - an extreme chromaticism, which would soon move into the atonality of the Second Viennese School; Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues, played by Tatiana Nikolayeva (he was very particular about that particular performance being the one he liked); Russian piano music - Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Scriabin - sprinkled with the old masters - Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. When looking through his old CDs, given to me by his wife after he died (she didn't share his passion), I discovered a recording of Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues. I can imagine how it must have pleased him, in its mathematical exactness and formal perfection: music that you didn't have to get close to, to inhabit, if you didn't want to, that you could appreciate in a purely intellectual, abstract way.

But the 'Goldberg' was my own discovery. I can't remember exactly why I picked it off the shelf - perhaps it was due to the cover of the three-disc set, 'A State of Wonder', which collects both the 1955 and 1981 recordings made by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. This image, printed on the set's exterior, shows Gould in rich black and white, almost ready to dissolve into sepia, eyes closed, mouth open, tie undone and hanging loosely under his collar, head at an angle as he sits at the piano - a picture of utter immersion, utter sincerity. These, of course, are qualities that come through in the music.

For me, the triumph of the 1981 version is Gould's performance of the great opening and closing aria, with perhaps the greatest of the great melodies Bach wrote, unfolding as it does in two mini sections: the first calm and ordered, with everything in its right place, the second still calm but rising with a slightly anxious, questing quality. Easy to overlook in most performances (i.e. those which actually stick to the specifications of the score!) is a small arpeggio section which Gould accentuates greatly in the 1981 version, so that it seems to unfold in slow motion: a flowering, petals opening as they do in nature films.

Some of the earlier variations on the 1955 version seem as though they're performed by Gould on speed, in comparison to the much more deliberate 1981 version, where he teases out the nuances, the subtleties and craft of Bach's work, as if he wants to revel in every detail, to wring every drop of music out of it. But this does not result in cold speculation - he teases out the spirit as well, which is inseparable from the craft, as it is in all the great art. Whereas earlier he's content to dazzle us with the brilliance, both of Bach's music and his own performance, and everything unfolds with such energy that we can let it wash over us, in the later recording it seeps in.

n the liner notes, Gould talks about the "explosion of simultaneous ideas, which counterpoint, at its best, almost certainly is" – and you really get a sense of this in 1981. Things are laid out so clearly that they become almost stark, particularly variations 22 and 25 – every single idea is given weight, it’s much harder to overlook things than it was in 1955. It’s not that anything’s been pared away: Gould’s still playing the same notes, in the same order, and the speed probably doesn’t vary quite as much as it seems when listening to the two recordings (a glance at the track lengths shows that some variations are actually played faster in the later version). What’s changed is the spirit with which Gould plays – in that near-thirty-year period, his whole outlook on life must have undergone some changes –a maturing, a different way of looking things? – and this informs his approach to Bach.

I’m not saying that the later version is necessarily better than the earlier: both have much to recommend them. While Gould disliked the earlier recording by the time, as he reveals in the bonus interview with Tim Page that’s included in the ‘state of wonder’ liner notes, I can't ultimately say which version I prefer. Both reveal equally valuable aspects of the piece, and of Gould's artistry: I wouldn't be without the energy and sprightly brilliance of the 1955 version (which, I hasten to add, is not merely a breakneck ride, and stops for reflection too), nor would I be without the almost Zen-like clarity of 1981.

In some ways, I find it hard to disassociate Goldberg from Gould - he inhabits the piece so much that any other interpretation, because it necessarily lacks the Gouldian touch, somehow does not seem complete. However faithful to Bach's intentions (which we can't fully know, of course), however many liberties and deviancies he may take, he has captured the soul of the piece in a way that those more faithful to the surface details aren't - they miss the centre, which is straight what Gould aims for.

Take the infamous humming with which he accompanies his own performances. I've read some reviews that say it completely spoils the playing for them. Well, true, it may be completely self-indulgent, like Keith Jarrett's contortions and grimaces, but, for me it never distracts from the performance, and even adds a nice touch - the human, the utter involvement, proof that the music doesn't exist just in a sound-proofed box. I’d rather have such eccentric involvement than a perfectly-behaved, well-mannered, historically correct, and utterly dry performance.

I write these words listening to Gould mid-variation, and my thoughts turn once more to my grandfather. These sounds I'm hearing, and the associations they're bringing up –the thoughts that trail off the notes, that are contained in them, it seems - perhaps he felt them too, as he sat there in his converted attic, closed off from the world, but surrounded by it – surrounded by photos, paintings, plants, by light flooding the room from the window. Enveloped in that musty and comforting environment, what was going through his mind? Could it be that he thought some of the same thoughts as I’m thinking now? Could it be that Gould’s Bach is much more than just beautiful sound and intellectual satisfaction? As Gould communes with Bach, communes with me, communes with my grandfather, could it be music that provides some form of communication with the dead, transcending time? Not in some mystical, new-agey sense of genuine contact, but as a temporally dislocated coincidence of thoughts and feelings somehow brought together, for one brief moment, through music: an echo in another’s mind.