John Butcher (tenor and soprano saxophones), Pat Thomas (piano), Dominic Lash (bass), Steve Noble (drums / percussion); Consorts (various musicians—full list below). Café Oto, Dalston, 21.10.2021.
Last year, bassist Dominic Lash began a record label, Spoonhunt, releasing music by three of his own ensembles: on Limulus, a quartet featuring, among others, saxophonist Ricardo Tejero, another quartet on Discernment, John Russell’s final recording alongside John Butcher and Mark Sanders, and a large ensemble called Consorts, heard on a record called Distinctions. Much of this music in turn arose from Lash’s 40th Birthday gig at Café Oto, and so it was fitting that, with the easing of pandemic restrictions, it was at Oto that the releases could be officially launched. The venue isn’t open at full capacity until next Monday, but there was still a good turn-out for what was by no means a flashy or hip gig or something with a visiting act as a draw: an indication of the health of the UK free improv scene, pandemic or no pandemic, and of the respect in which Lash and his music are held.
Given Russell’s passing, and the unavailability of Discernment’s original drummer, Mark Sanders, the quartet that played the evening’s first set had quite a different sound to that heard on the record, with Pat Thomas—originally supposed to be on the original date—replacing Russell and Steve Noble standing in for Sanders. This could have gone anywhere: Thomas sticking to piano, rather than electronics, always promises a certain amount of contained thunder, Noble a perhaps more buoyantly rhythmic approach, but the band might equally well have trod into the more abstract/rhythmically unmoored territory of quote un quote non-idiomatic playing. (By this I mean, a certain idiom that also gets called ‘European free improvisation’, whether that’s meant to imply geography, artistic tendency, style, or genre; usually, some sort of combination of all of those). Expectations of the latter arose in large part thanks to the presence of Butcher, whose earlier work with Russell and Phil Durrant (who was heard in the evening’s second half on electronics) gives his work some affinity with the beginnings of the more minimal school of improvisation that ends up with New London or Berlin silences, while the painstakingly precise multiphonics of his solo saxophone work (latterly, often amplified with electronics or in resonant spaces), suggests a kind of bridge between minimal tendencies and the more reactive scrabble of EFI. This kind of generic hair-splitting, of course, doesn’t go anywhere near to suggest the studious fluidity of Butcher’s playing, or the expansive range of Lash, Thomas, and Noble across numerous contexts. As I say, this could have gone anywhere.
As it turns out, the set—maybe 40-minutes or so in length, though I didn’t check the time—was surprisingly like free jazz. (Surprising, that is, given the tendency of the sectors of EFI with which Butcher would normally be associated to distinguish themselves from ‘energy music’ tendencies.) The quartet didn’t suggest free jazz so much in terms of dividing the music up into ‘themes’ and ‘solos’ or even pulse, but more in certain harmonic gestures and levels of energy/volume, generally initiated by Thomas and picked up on by Butcher, working some way outside his usual vocabulary. This is not, perhaps, Butcher’s preferred territory, but it didn’t show: particular on soprano, which he alternated with tenor, with I think two turns on each instrument apiece, he touched on scalar, declarative iterations that bordered on late Coltrane at its Live-in-Japan woolliest, repeated melodies echoed—not in the rote-repetition that screams “I’m listening and reacting”, but in genuinely surprising and fitting echoes—from musician to musician to musician. Butcher began in jazz when he was starting out in the early ’80s, playing in groups with pianist Chris Burn while studying physics at Surrey University and continuing to play in Burn’s big band while beginning a Ph.D on ‘charmed quarks’ in London. As Burn remarks in an interview with Simon Reynell: “I always joke that what started off as a 22 musician big band playing jazz compositions ended as a free improvisation duo.” (By 1992, the band sounded like this.) And jazz, free or otherwise, has largely left both Burns’ and Butcher’s vocabulary since then, though an unexpected and surprisingly effective duo with Matthew Shipp—convened at the invitation of Trevor Brent in 2010, also at Oto, and followed by an equally unexpected trio with synth player Thomas Lehn—saw a rapprochement of a sort. (A 2016 interview in which Shipp and Butcher sketch out the respective traditions from and out of which they emerge makes for interesting reading: it can be accessed here.) Likewise, one of the highlights of the performance by the Lash-convened quartet was seeing Butcher adjust to a climate that—largely through Thomas’ playing—had more of an idiomatic connection to free jazz than might be expected in this setting. Particularly in a solo context, Butcher plays virtually every note with an extended technique—multiphonics, false fingering, overblowing etc—veering away from any conventionally pitched vocabulary. That certainly figured here, so ingrained is it in his style: notably, on soprano, eerie, ultra-high altissimo, whistle-pitch sounds, or whispered wind ghosts floating through the body of the instrument after the mouthpiece had been removed. Yet these were juxtaposed or combined with melodic and rhythmic shards strongly suggestive of jazz, fragments of stories that Butcher seemed surprised he knew, but which he was able to re-tell, to spin towards and away from, with authoritative relish. What might have been par for the course in the work of more free jazz-oriented group thus attained the genuine “sound of surprise” here because of its variance from the norm of Butcher’s particular idiomatic tendencies, and in any case, I don’t think Butcher, inveterate Cubist that he is, could leave those phrases entirely intact.
Pat Thomas’ approach to the piano is historically rooted yet utterly distinctive. Spaciously hammered, thick, thick two-handed near-cluster; sparingly used and stringently lush ninth chords; repeated figures that are not quite riffs, not quite melodic fragments, more like rhythmic stutters that sound like a succession of mini-hammers. Deliberately so, there’s something beautifully paradoxical about his approach: gracefully ungainly, liquid granite, utterly poised in consciously distorted fashion. It’s immutable, authoritative, declarative, but entirely adaptable; the hyper-arpeggiated, glissandi-thick, rolled and clustered figures he gets in the upper register are nothing like that of Cecil Taylor, with which such playing inevitably gets compared—partly because of Thomas’ very different sense of space, his tendency to play in measured bursts rather than continuous streams (the unbroken sections of playing tend to focus on repetition rather than constant development); likewise, I don’t think any other pianist has quite the control of the lower register that Thomas has; and his use of the pedal is inevitably much subtler than the morasses of sound he conjures up with it might at first suggest. One chord he played maybe half-way through the set saw him release the pedal before the natural stage of decay where others would have simply let the note ring out; like Butcher, Thomas reminded us, in a kind of hyper-materialist, self-conscious meta-gesture, of the sources of sound production, drawing on the power of the gesture—the reverent haze or dramatic cloud the sustain pedal allows—while also drawing attention to its provisional quality (but with none of the studied fussiness that description suggests). Meanwhile, Steve Noble’s scraped or struck, perhaps bowed, small gongs and cymbals, along with other ways of playing the drum kit as pitched more than rhythmic instrument (his kit was out of my eyeline so I could only guess as to the origin of the sounds) kept things texturally open and spacious. And Lash, of course, has it all down—bowed harmonics, free arco hinting at but never settling into walking patterns, careening caterwauls and ship-wreck groans, the perfectly-placed pluck pinging into the space like a falling droplet that sends ripples from the centre to the edges of a body of water, be that puddle or pond.
During the course of the set, there were ‘episodes’, the conclusion of one and the beginning of the next generally signalled by Butcher switching instrument, but they felt more like movements in a suite than the variable incidents of a typical free improv set, moved between as they were with total, fluid assurance. The first such transition, about five minutes in, saw the music suddenly stop—one of those serendipitous pullings of the emergency-brake that generally sees the musicians wryly laugh and the audience begin to applaud, as if willing the music to end there. Here, the silence was sustained, and things immediately moved in a different direction: a focussed adjustment characteristic of the set to follow. Thomas was often the driving force behind the quality of each particular ‘movement’, though his playing was anything but grandstanding: repeated chords suggested, even as they slid away from, a harmonic direction or area. Yet it was above all a collective music, a conversation between equal musical personalities. Take away any one of the parts and the quality would radically have changed. It’s rare to see a purely improvised set of such cohesion, no hesitancies or verbiage or over-staying of welcome, each transition natural and surprising and fitting, everyone in sync, knowing when to sit out and when to step back in, no one treading on each other’s toes but no one hiding around the corner waiting for things to get going either. I trust the set was recorded, and I hope it might see release in some form or other.
Consorts, kind of chamber ensemble-cum-big band which, as far as I know, has only previously performed on the 40th Birthday gig which forms the basis for the group’s Spoonhunt release. Here’s the full line-up, taken from that release’s info sheet.
Douglas Benford - harmonium and percussionI don’t think this was entirely reproduced on the night—Lash was playing electric guitar rather than bass; I didn’t see Alex Ward, Bruno Guastalla, Sarah Hughes, or Helen Papaioannou; Seth Cooke didn’t appear to be playing a steel sink and I’m not sure if the objects he was crouched over next to a small amplifier were metal detectors or not—but I think it’s largely representative. And whatever the individual components, the ensemble is in a sense also the piece they play, even if that piece is only loosely structured, certainly not formally scored or even conducted. With this line-up they could conceivably function in any way Lash decided, from the more conventional Improvisers Orchestra format, with its conductions and exercises, to full-on Alan Silva Celestrial Communications-style skronk. Full disclosure—Dom asked me to write the liner notes for the group’s album last year, but was more interested in what I might have to say about the music without knowing the methods that produced it than provided with the nuts-and-bolts of its structure. And I think that concern with what the music sounds like, rather than how it’s structured, is the point: an exploration of large-group texture that deliberately avoids the aforementioned large-group improv tendencies to density and information over-load while also gesturing towards—and departing from—the more minimal tendencies with which Lash’s has been involved in the Set Ensemble and other Wandelweiser-related endeavours.
Steve Beresford - electronics
Marjolaine Charbin - piano
Chris Cundy - bass clarinet
Seth Cooke - steel sink and metal detector
Angharad Davies - viola
Phil Durrant - modular synth
Matthew Grigg - guitar/amplifier
Bruno Guastalla - cello
Martin Hackett - Korg MS10
Tim Hill - baritone saxophone
Tina Hitchens - flute
Sarah Hughes - zither
Mark Langford - bass clarinet
Dominic Lash - double bass
Yvonna Magda - violin
Hannah Marshall - cello
Helen Papaioannou - baritone saxophone
Yoni Silver - bass clarinet
Alex Ward - clarinet/amplifier
As I understand it, the Consorts piece is essentially a set of sustained tones building to a crescendo, and those are the only guidelines: no score, no conduction, no other signals. (And in the rehearsal/soundcheck last night, apparently no mention of sustained tones was made.) So in part Consorts can be understood as a sort of exercise in orchestration, a textural experiment. As an exercise in orchestration, there’s a kind of giddy delight in textural variety—I’ll take not one but three bass clarinets, combine a string section with various electronics, ‘small’ or otherwise, round out the bottom end with a baritone, throw in two guitars. The group Lash had chosen is not ‘star-studded’—though who wouldn’t want a violin section with Angharad Davies in the corner! —which is, in fact, all the more index of their dedication in a music that is, after all, at its best, never about egoic fulfilment: players who quietly work away, in London or Cheltenham or Oxford or Bristol, at their craft: Martin Hackett’s inimitable Korg MS10, the tripled bass clarinets of and Mark Langford, Yoni Silver and Chris Cundy; Hannah Marshall’s richly adaptive cello; Steve Beresford in small electronics mode. From my seat, the only musicians in view were Marjolaine Charbin on piano, Mark Langford, the nearest of the bass clarinet players, and Hannah Marshall on cello (with Lash’s guitar popping in and out of view behind her). Consequently, I only realised, for example, that there was a flute in the mix about 30 minutes in, and had no idea Angharad Davies had been in the mix until Lash called out her name at the end. All this meant that I had to concentrate on it as a group sound rather than focusing on the individual sources of any particular sounds. Which is to say that being able to see the individual members of the ensemble perform both does and doesn’t make a difference. The ability to identify by eye, and thus by ear, the individual contribution of a particular instrument/individual helps one pick out one texture in the weave, one dot of paint in the pointillist whole, or any other such metaphor you might choose, but it doesn’t really reveal much more than how the parts are put together—which, as Lash’s reticence about explaining the piece’s structure implies, isn’t really the point of the exercise. Hearing snippets of sound and realising half an hour in that there was a flute in the ensemble, for example, is rendered all the more serendipitous, and the overall texture all the richer.
On Distinctions, the peak crescendo section has something of the quality of the more avant strands of doom metal; the 2021 iteration, while not quite as glass-rattling, certainly reaches for an effect you might call overwhelming, for its sheer, sustained volume, and the thick intensity of its accumulated textural thicket. The groups imperceptibly reaches a massive cataclysm of sound—driven, I think, by Phil Durrant’s very loud electronics, or perhaps it was Seth Cooke’s amp and whatever objects he had plugged into it; or maybe Matthew Grigg was also doing some small-scale Hendrix things with a guitar and amplifier; or Charbin was deploying e-bows, piano strings, and sustain pedals to give similar clouds. Either way, the sound was, thick and immutable, catharsis or textural exploration, followed by a shorter de-crescendo out (though it apparently lasted around ten minutes). Live, as opposed to on record, you can really feel the music fill the space; in providing contrast to the ‘climax’ and a mirror to the opening, the de-crescendo emphasizes the piece’s architectural, or is that architectonic, qualities. It reminded me a bit of taking part in a Michael Pisaro large group piece—also at Oto—back in 2015, in which everyone played ppp so that the overall volume was the strange effect of a very large group playing at a kind of medium volume: like an orchestra with a mute on it. Harry Gilonis also suggested the piece might be set alongside new music exemplars of the crescendoing sustained/repeated tone like James Tenney’s ‘On Having Never Written a Note for Percussion’ or Stockahusen’s Inori, to which I’d add some of Giacinto Scelsi’s orchestral pieces. (Lash himself mentions Phill Niblock, whose music he’s performed and on whom he’s written academically.) The Tenney is an exercise in solo texture and focus, with its own influence on a strand of improvised music—think Mark Wastell’s tam tam or Eddie Prévost’s bowed cymbal—as well as the general ‘swell piece’ structure found in larger groups. It would be interesting, meanwhile, to think what an improvised ‘swell piece’ like Consort’s does that those composed pieces don’t, and vice versa. If Scelsi and Stockhausen’s experiments in the form associated it with a specifically ritualistic quality (in Stockhausen’s case, unexpectedly Messiaen-type sonorities, allusions to the 'Dies Irae' melody, etc), there was almost nothing ‘ritualistic’ about Consorts. Let’s call it a more materialist approach to sustained tones that aims to be a study in texture and group contributions to an overall sound rather than a trance-inducing exercise. (Of course, the whole crescendo thing might also be seen to originate in the serious musical joke that is Ravel’s ‘Bolero’.)
These are all open-ended hints rather than a final say on the matter. Suffice to say I enjoyed both halves of the evening very much: unusual in the level of contrast between the sets and the level of focus throughout. But of course, given the calibre of the players, entirely to be expected. Roll on the next series of Spoonhunts!
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