(Photograph by Helen Wallace)
The Rolling Calf/ Pat Thomas
Wigmore Hall, London, 22nd January 2023
A few weeks into the new year, Elaine Mitchener continued her five-year artist-in-residency at the Wigmore Hall with a performance by her electroacoustic group the Rolling Calf Trio, joined on this occasion by Pat Thomas. In a relatively short first half, first we heard a Thomas piano solo—a characteristic study in piano resonance, making full use of the concert grand the concert hall setting (was this Thomas’ first time at the Wigmore? What are the points of access for what music is or is not allowed to be heard in such places?), thick clusters and repeating figures that never quite coalesced into riff or melody but moved off elsewhere, pealing like wave upon wave, preludial and exploratory. Next, Mitchener came and stage and, with Thomas performed a kind of deconstructed skeleton of a standard, or standards, Thomas playing plangent chords and discrete bursts of blooping electronics, Mitchener at one moment repeating a vocal sound and a physical movement that at first seemed spontaneous—head inclining to the right, hand moving up in the air alongside—and then repeating it, over and over, like a gif or a loop, problematising the notions of immediacy, performance and the like present in the position of the singer of songs of love or lost love, of feminine presentation, of the standard as vehicle for emotions and notions always greater than its lyrics suggest. I was reminded of Fumi Okiji’s paper on Cecil Taylor, Billie Holiday and gesture at the Taylor conference in New York a few years ago, riffing off Taylor’s line “as gesture jazz became Billie’s right arm bent at breast moving as light touch”, accompanied in her rendition by a video loop of Holiday’s arm in an old TV clip. The model of singer and accompanist is here at once gestured at and moved beyond, in that Mitchener, who keeps words to a murmured or half-sung minimum, functions as much as instrumentalist as singer. Even more so than the versions of standards found on Mitchener’s quartet with Alex Hawkins, the model of song form is moved away from into a more open, capacious improvisational and questing and questioning approach to the spirit of the standards more so than their harmonic or melodic content. The duo don’t perform any particular single standard as such as one, fifty-to-twenty minute ur-standard, a net picking up ghostly traces of songs that float by: the word “lovely”, a wisp of melody, a line or two half-recognised from a song. The first comparison that comes to mind—not least for the depths of Mitchener’s contralto voice, here heard with generous reverb allowing it to swell into the hall with the magnified intimacy pioneered in the recording technology of mid-century that did so much to shape ideas of what jazz singing might be—would be the ‘free standards’ of Ran Blake and Mitchener’s long-standing inspiration Jeanne Lee, in which the melodic contour, the verse-chorus-verse structure of the song are adhered to but the harmonic and rhythmic contours moved away from; or any number of deconstructions of the standard, from Taylor’s—or Sunny Murray’s—‘This Nearly Was Mine’ to the quieter, chamber deconstructions put in play by the likes of Paul Bley, Andrew Hill, or, more recently, Jason Moran.
Gesture and movement of another kind characterised the performance by the Rolling Calf, Mitchener’s ‘Black Power Trio’ with Neil Charles on bass and electronics and Jason Yarde on alto saxophone and an even wider range of electronics: synths, drum machines, digital manipulations and live sampling. Yarde—whose performance with Louis Moholo-Moholo’s ‘Six Blokes’ band in a three-horn line-up alongside Byron Wallen and Steve Williamson one night, Shabaka Hutchings the other, the last time Moholo performed in the UK back in September 2019, was so vitally transforming and powerful—appeared miraculously recovered from the onstage stroke he suffered in October the previous year in France, his life saved thanks to the presence of two parademics in the audience who he insisted he go straight to the hospital, and to the treatment he was able to receive in France at a time when a government of millionaires is attempting to utterly destroy and deplete the British National Health Service in the spirit of a kind of nightmarish blend of Dickensian Victorian inequality and neoliberal ideology pushed to the max. Survival, literally, yes—that’s what this music has always been about.
As in many of her recent performances, Mitchener has developed an approach to form in—rather than compositions or ‘heads’, but not completely ‘free’ improvisation, a set will be organised around different texts, which Mitchener will work at, sing and speak until their possibilities have been temporarily used up, moving to the next fragment. These texts, generally poems, but sometimes incorporating statements from interviews, were on this occasion organised into a collection named on the programme as ‘Myths and Dreams’, that included Césaire, Brathwaite, Una Marson, Taylor, Sun Ra, and Jay Bernard. They form points of reference, clearly demarcated sections that function something like movements in a suite, helping to organise an often quite lengthy piece in ways that are not obvious or circumscribed. These are not ‘lyrics’, in the jazz or pop model, nor are they ‘settings’, in the classical or new music model, so much as elements of musical material; while words imply narrative, context, fixity, in Mitchener’s case are treated in ways that—as in the case of Jeanne Lee, whose approach in her work with Gunter Hampel or on a record like ‘Conspiracy’ is again perhaps the closest formal analogy—might differ each time, in minute or quite dramatic ways, always with an ear to what is happening in the musical texture of that moment, how it might go on from there.
To me, the heart of this particular Rolling Calf performance was the rendition of a poem from young British poet Jay Bernard’s Surge, an elegy in pats in which Bernard’s archival research into the 1981 New Cross Massacre—an event which happened eight years before Bernard’s birth—is set against the unfolding tragedy of Grenfell Tower fire, which happened as the sequence was being written. Constructed as homages to the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson—particularly his own poem ‘New Crass Massahkah’—the first of two poems entitled ‘Songbook’ establishes a space and a geometry at once of the dancefloor and of wider tactical manoeuvres, the territory of mourning and militancy that first, the New Cross Massacre Action Committee and later, Justice 4 Grenfell have to trace. In Johnson’s 1981 poem, released as the final track on the 1984 album Making History, words insistently inflect the music in dialogue, in contrast and tension: jaunty but haunted, the rhythms shift from the poem’s section, describing the celebratory sociality buoyed by the rhythms of the party before the fire—“di dubbing and did rubbing”, “di dancung and di skanking”—to the rhythm of the fire itself—“di crash and di bang”, “di heat and di smoke”—to the rhythm of activism, its persistence and resistance. “but wait / yu noh remembah”, “but stap / yu noh remembah”: the poem is a call to remembrance, of the need to tell and re-tell a story ignored or mis-told in official record. Like Johnson’s poem, written in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Bernard’s later poem traces the rhythms of dance—the party before the fire—turned to violence—the fire itself and the second violence of bungled police investigation and racist media reportage—in turn turned to resistance through the work of the committee and the Black Peoples’ Day of Action. Over time, the mathematics Bernard’s ‘Songbook’ traces—“me seh ah one step fahwahd an ah two step back”—its manoeuvres of progress and defeat, of progress and defeat, of going round in circles or back to square one—becomes not just the immediate events of a particular movement, but of the seemingly infinite deferral of closure, as the quest for justice stretches into and beyond the space of a lifetime. Echoes fade away, generations build and develop; Johnson’s insistent call to remembrance fades and must be taken up and replayed, overlaid and overlayered like the laboratories of dub transformations that take up and distort the sounds of an original track. When performing, Bernard themself recites the poem without music: the music-and-speech dynamics of Johnson’s dub poetry, with its low-key delivery given power and contrast by the accompaniment of Dennis Bovell and the Dub Band, internalised into the rhythms of the poem itself, as stripped-back, ghostly echo; a memory, of a social moment, a movement, something we can barely hear. “Me seh half de revalushun deh pun de attack / Only half a salushun to de tings dem we lack.” One step forward, two steps back, half a step, half the revolution, half a solution—the process is incomplete. There’s no closure, no justice.
Gesture and movement of another kind characterised the performance by the Rolling Calf, Mitchener’s ‘Black Power Trio’ with Neil Charles on bass and electronics and Jason Yarde on alto saxophone and an even wider range of electronics: synths, drum machines, digital manipulations and live sampling. Yarde—whose performance with Louis Moholo-Moholo’s ‘Six Blokes’ band in a three-horn line-up alongside Byron Wallen and Steve Williamson one night, Shabaka Hutchings the other, the last time Moholo performed in the UK back in September 2019, was so vitally transforming and powerful—appeared miraculously recovered from the onstage stroke he suffered in October the previous year in France, his life saved thanks to the presence of two parademics in the audience who he insisted he go straight to the hospital, and to the treatment he was able to receive in France at a time when a government of millionaires is attempting to utterly destroy and deplete the British National Health Service in the spirit of a kind of nightmarish blend of Dickensian Victorian inequality and neoliberal ideology pushed to the max. Survival, literally, yes—that’s what this music has always been about.
The musicians entered from the back of the hall, behind and through the audience, each playing hand-held “stirring xylophones”—tuned wooden percussion instruments struck with beaters—in the quietly tempestuous manner of early Art Ensemble of Chicago records, first sparsely echoing melodic patterns, then swirling cascades in glissando’ing stir and swell; one at a time, the three came on stage, Charles and Yarde moving into loops and figures on mini-synths, drum machines and samples, Mitchener’s voice totally commanding, moving from the deliberately constricted/restricted register of the first half to declarative, soaring notes, pronouncements and announcements.
As in many of her recent performances, Mitchener has developed an approach to form in—rather than compositions or ‘heads’, but not completely ‘free’ improvisation, a set will be organised around different texts, which Mitchener will work at, sing and speak until their possibilities have been temporarily used up, moving to the next fragment. These texts, generally poems, but sometimes incorporating statements from interviews, were on this occasion organised into a collection named on the programme as ‘Myths and Dreams’, that included Césaire, Brathwaite, Una Marson, Taylor, Sun Ra, and Jay Bernard. They form points of reference, clearly demarcated sections that function something like movements in a suite, helping to organise an often quite lengthy piece in ways that are not obvious or circumscribed. These are not ‘lyrics’, in the jazz or pop model, nor are they ‘settings’, in the classical or new music model, so much as elements of musical material; while words imply narrative, context, fixity, in Mitchener’s case are treated in ways that—as in the case of Jeanne Lee, whose approach in her work with Gunter Hampel or on a record like ‘Conspiracy’ is again perhaps the closest formal analogy—might differ each time, in minute or quite dramatic ways, always with an ear to what is happening in the musical texture of that moment, how it might go on from there.
To me, the heart of this particular Rolling Calf performance was the rendition of a poem from young British poet Jay Bernard’s Surge, an elegy in pats in which Bernard’s archival research into the 1981 New Cross Massacre—an event which happened eight years before Bernard’s birth—is set against the unfolding tragedy of Grenfell Tower fire, which happened as the sequence was being written. Constructed as homages to the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson—particularly his own poem ‘New Crass Massahkah’—the first of two poems entitled ‘Songbook’ establishes a space and a geometry at once of the dancefloor and of wider tactical manoeuvres, the territory of mourning and militancy that first, the New Cross Massacre Action Committee and later, Justice 4 Grenfell have to trace. In Johnson’s 1981 poem, released as the final track on the 1984 album Making History, words insistently inflect the music in dialogue, in contrast and tension: jaunty but haunted, the rhythms shift from the poem’s section, describing the celebratory sociality buoyed by the rhythms of the party before the fire—“di dubbing and did rubbing”, “di dancung and di skanking”—to the rhythm of the fire itself—“di crash and di bang”, “di heat and di smoke”—to the rhythm of activism, its persistence and resistance. “but wait / yu noh remembah”, “but stap / yu noh remembah”: the poem is a call to remembrance, of the need to tell and re-tell a story ignored or mis-told in official record. Like Johnson’s poem, written in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Bernard’s later poem traces the rhythms of dance—the party before the fire—turned to violence—the fire itself and the second violence of bungled police investigation and racist media reportage—in turn turned to resistance through the work of the committee and the Black Peoples’ Day of Action. Over time, the mathematics Bernard’s ‘Songbook’ traces—“me seh ah one step fahwahd an ah two step back”—its manoeuvres of progress and defeat, of progress and defeat, of going round in circles or back to square one—becomes not just the immediate events of a particular movement, but of the seemingly infinite deferral of closure, as the quest for justice stretches into and beyond the space of a lifetime. Echoes fade away, generations build and develop; Johnson’s insistent call to remembrance fades and must be taken up and replayed, overlaid and overlayered like the laboratories of dub transformations that take up and distort the sounds of an original track. When performing, Bernard themself recites the poem without music: the music-and-speech dynamics of Johnson’s dub poetry, with its low-key delivery given power and contrast by the accompaniment of Dennis Bovell and the Dub Band, internalised into the rhythms of the poem itself, as stripped-back, ghostly echo; a memory, of a social moment, a movement, something we can barely hear. “Me seh half de revalushun deh pun de attack / Only half a salushun to de tings dem we lack.” One step forward, two steps back, half a step, half the revolution, half a solution—the process is incomplete. There’s no closure, no justice.
Yet Bernard’s poem is also about togetherness and community. Playing with rhymes or assonance in words like “back”, “attack”, “tack”, Bernard’s poem , which, like Johnson’s work, refuses to be contained by standard English, is buoyed up and carried on by the pleasures of rhythm and the pleasure of sound, the excess of sound, sounds ability to contain and then explode, the poem as a kind of carrier, an unexploded charge, carrying its “secret cargo” into the present. And when Mitchener delivered the poem within the context of music once more, the poem attained a fresh power, a declarative insistence. In comparison to Bernard’s Johnson-esque understatement, Mitchener’s was loud, present, unnerving: she delivered the text half spoken, half sung, a singer’s voice, expansive and huge, used to projection, not the quiet dynamic of a poet’s voice; her delivery at once toasting and sprechstimme; combined with the abstracted patterns of Charles on bass and Yarde on electronics, drum machines and synths stuttered into loops and sampled patterns, giving way to blasts of Yarde’s alto squall, the music traced another kind of time again, one in which instrument associated with pop music are repurposed and abstracted and which, in turn, an avant-garde that has too often excluded the matter of black life, is repurposed for its energies.
The music moves on again—picking up on the carefully poised ironies of a Sun Ra statement—“those who will not dance will have to be shot”—traversing language of ritual and apocalypse, Mitchener now playing with the ritual of calling out the band’s names—the celebratory incantation over music that signals celebration and closure in the Art Ensemble’s rendition of ‘Odwalla’ at the end of almost every concert they gave over the years, or the ecstatic sung shout outs on Pharoah Sanders’ 1981 album Live. “We are the Rolling Calf!” she proclaims, and as she picks up a phrase from a Cecil Taylor interview—“Hearing is playing. Music does not exist on paper”—turning it into an incantation, Pat Thomas makes his way to the stage, adding further electronic bloops and trademark thick chords and clusters on piano to the stuttering loops set up by Yarde and Charles. “Music does not exist on paper”. After a minute or so, the lights go out, the musicians playing in the dark, rendered illumination, focused on hearing, on the work that listening and playing can do, beyond visuality, beyond representation, beyond the page. The trappings of concert hall, of the performer/stage division, of the above-stage frieze, with its art deco image of music-making as a ritual idealized and frozen, already expanded by the trio’s entrance through the audience, by Mitchener’s dance round the stage, blowing a whistle, by Thomas’ entry onto the platform from the front-row seats; all these melt away, focus into the material and more-than-material presence of sound itself. Mitchener has long been an expert at making time melt, bend, twist in this way, all with an awareness of history, of music’s history and the histories beyond music that music sediments. Tonight was a particular resplendent example.
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