Category Archives: Live

Evan Parker/Alex von Schlippenbach/Paul Lovens, Porgy & Bess, Vienna, 3 December 2008

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Evan Parker was the first free jazz/improv saxophonist I ever heard, and the one who made me fall in love with this kind of music. Before I had heard Ayler, Braxton or Brötzmann, Parker was the one who showed me that the saxophone could be a source of great passion and intensity. Live, his serpentine solos and jaw-dropping circular breathing technique burned themselves into me in a way that very few rock performers had ever done.

It’s been a long time since I saw Parker live – there was a stimulating collaborative show with Zoviet France, a phenomenal trio gig at the old Vortex in Stoke Newington, and a concert in Brighton with Spring Heel Jack – so it was great for me to see him for the first time in Vienna, this time as part of his long-standing trio with pianist Alex von Schlippenbach and drummer Paul Lovens. Their improvisational instincts honed by many years of playing together, the trio proceeded to play two long and engrossing sets. Schlippenbach was an agile and eloquent pianist, Lovens an enthralling presence on the drums. Parker was the star for me, but at the end of the day this concert, like all the best group-based improvisation, was an extended conversation between these three gifted musicians.

Peter Brötzmann/Mats Gustafsson/Ken Vandermark, Fluc Wanne, Vienna, 2 December 2008

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Just another evening of great intensity from Sonore, following on from the last time I saw them in the summer. Entertainingly, the gig took place in the blasted post-holocaust surroundings of the Fluc Wanne, not a place where beardy jazz fans are often seen. I know Einstürzende Neubauten played some early gigs under an autobahn, but is there any other venue in the world that sits in a former pedestrian subway?

Funnily enough it was Mats Gustafsson who emerged as the star of this particular show, for me at least. I loved the way he wrestled with his outsize reed instruments, looking as though he was fighting to bring them under control. His resonant low-end horns provided some vestige of a rhythmic structure to these short, hard-hitting pieces, around which Brötzmann and Vandermark improvised forcefully.

Rhys Chatham, Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna, 28 November 2008

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These pages are seriously backed up, so there’s only time for brief reviews of all the recent gigs, starting with Rhys Chatham at the Tanzquartier Wien (which is actually in the Kunsthalle). This was a fine evening of avant rock, with Chatham joined onstage by eight other guitarists (including Eric Arn of Primordial Undermind) and Bernhard Fleischmann on the drums. Together they made a fearsomely powerful noise which was, nonetheless, controlled and rigorous in its execution. Chatham’s instinctive understanding of crescendo and release was hugely impressive.

Okkervil River, Porgy & Bess, Vienna, 22 November 2008

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Okkervil River’s concert at Porgy & Bess on Saturday night is a very strong contender for my show of the year. With just a few weeks to go before 2008 wraps up, its pole position is unlikely to be overtaken. This was a night of sheer blinding inspiration, with song after song ramming home extraordinary amounts of rhythmic flair and melodic inventiveness. In Will Sheff the group has a frontman like none I have ever seen: searingly honest, passionate and quite transported in his breathtaking urge to communicate through live performance.

The epic “A Girl In Port,” from Okkervil’s 2007 album The Stage Names, is probably the best song I’ve heard all year, and repeated listens have convinced me of its greatness. So when the group launched into it as the very first song of this concert, I knew at once that it was going to be a highly memorable evening. And so it proved, as the concert unfolded into a shatteringly effective piece of communal music theatre. Whether welded to his acoustic guitar, clinging to the microphone stand, leaning precipitously over the stage or sharing a moment of closeness with the immaculate band behind him, Sheff does nothing less than redefine the limits of what it is possible for a musician to do onstage. His smile is winning, his voice emotive, his communion with the audience uniquely close and thrilling. After “A Girl In Port,” the other song that has had a deep impact on me this year is “Black,” from 2005’s Black Sheep Boy. I was praying they would play it, but dared not hope; when they launched into this surging rollercoaster of a song, I felt… well, there are really no words.

With their cover version of Leonard Cohen’s “Take This Waltz,” chosen and rehearsed (so Sheff told us) specifically for this concert, Okkervil River displayed a sense of place and a generosity of spirit that contrasted markedly with Cohen’s own performance of the same song here in Vienna a few months ago. Sheff said the group always enjoy playing here because of the response they receive from the audiences. Maybe he says that every night, although somehow I doubt it. In any event, for them to play that song here felt like a precious gift from the group to the audience. The old groaner, on the other hand, made no specific introduction to the song when he played it in Vienna, as if refusing to acknowledge that there was something beautiful and special about hearing the song played by its author in the magnificent surroundings of the Konzerthaus. This dogged refusal to deviate one iota from his prepared script on those two evenings was profoundly depressing.

And I’m really not in the habit of doing this kind of thing, but on Saturday I couldn’t resist: I reached out and shook Sheff’s hand as he left the stage, then stretched over and retrieved not one but two of his discarded guitar picks (Jim Dunlop 0.6mm, if you’re interested). Whether they’ll enable any of the magic of this concert to transfer to my own hopeless attempts to play the guitar remains to be seen. In any event, this was an evening of transformative joy and elation such as I have rarely if ever experienced in a concert hall.

Photos by David Murobi here.

Michael Gira, Porgy & Bess, Vienna, 21 November 2008

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There seems to be an occasional series of concert reviews on this blog — see Leonard Cohen, Whitehouse and Einstürzende Neubauten — that mostly consist of Epiphanies-style reminiscences of my first awareness of the artist in question. This, though, is the one I’ve been waiting to write — how I fell in love with Swans, the most important group of my life.

I recall the time very well. I was at Sussex University in 1987, casting around for new music to love. I had outgrown the obsessions with Gary Numan and Pink Floyd that marked my teenage years, had taken quite happily to the subdued acoustic muse of Leonard Cohen and Suzanne Vega, but was undoubtedly in need of something more acute. Every week I would scour the pages of the NME — still then my main source of music news, although not for much longer — in search of wisdom and enlightenment. One week I read a review of Swans’ Children of God that was to change my life, although I didn’t know it at the time. I can’t remember who penned it, but this is how it concluded: “And it’s ugly, and it’s difficult, and it’s long and sometimes wearying, and peculiarly beautiful, and utterly essential.” Well, that was it for me. I had never heard a note of this music, had no great history of liking this kind of thing, but when I saw that Swans (not The Swans, as I quickly learned) were playing in Brighton soon, I bought a ticket straight away. I got the album the day after the concert, and I was hooked for life.

Over the next few years, I saw Swans live a few more times (at the Zap Club on the seafront, and in London at the Town & Country Club and the now defunct Kilburn National Ballroom), and bought each new record as it came out, enthralled by the beauty and power inherent in this music. The real turning point, however, came when I wrote a fan letter to the address printed on the cover of 1991’s White Light From The Mouth of Infinity. I expected to hear back, if at all, from some kind of management flunkey; what I certainly didn’t expect was to receive a long and detailed reply from singer and keyboard player Jarboe herself. This kindness and generosity continued over many years in her correspondence with me; in those pre-email days it was a genuine thrill when a letter postmarked Atlanta dropped through my letterbox.

The apex of my association with Swans came in 1997 when Michael Gira asked me to be the merchandise seller on their farewell tour of Europe. As one might imagine, this was an offer I mulled over for perhaps 1.5 seconds before accepting. It was the experience of a lifetime, with 30-odd concerts over six weeks in such widespread countries as France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria (yes, the Szene Wien), Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Slovenia, with the last ever Swans concert taking place in my then home town of London on 15 March 1997, in the rather dingy surroundings of the now defunct LA2. Out there somewhere, there’s a recording of that night in which Gira makes a between-songs announcement thanking me for my work on the tour. I don’t have a copy myself, so please get in touch if you do. Rather mind-bogglingly, those words were the last he ever spoke (as opposed to sang) from the stage as a member of Swans.

I have a tour-bus load of memories of those six weeks, the good, the bad and the ugly, but if it’s all the same to you I’m going to keep them to myself (with the exception of this rather facetious letter which I wrote to The Wire last year). I will say that it was by some measure the hardest work I’ve ever done; this was not a matter of a few T-shirts. There were shirts, books, CDs, records, tapes, badges, stickers and wooden boxes, all of which had to be loaded in and out, sold and accounted for in any number of currencies (no euros then!). I’m well aware, though, that I was slumming it compared to the Herculean nightly efforts of the band and the rest of the road crew. And if anyone reading this bought anything from the merch table on Swans’ last European tour, I hope you were happy with what you bought.

Fast forward eleven years and I’m at Porgy & Bess for a solo concert by Michael Gira. This form represents a distillation and finessing of everything I ever loved about Swans: the brimming rage, the barely controlled power and the passionate intensity. The lyrics, as ever, are extraordinary: visionary, convulsive flashes of elemental forces, drenched in deep colours hewn from the strings and wood of Gira’s guitar. And when he plays my favourite Swans song, the overwhelmingly bleak and nihilistic “God Damn The Sun,” as the encore, I think… well, at the very least, I’m in the right place tonight.

Peter Brötzmann/Michiyo Yagi/Paal Nilssen-Love, Alter Schlachthof, Wels, 9 November 2008

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Another eye-opening, ear-cleansing evening of free music in Austria. The appetite of this country for this kind of music never ceases to astonish me. Here we were in a small, unfashionable city on a wintry Sunday night, with the streets pretty much deserted. But you walk to the Alter Schlachthof and suddenly you are in the middle of, what, 300? people, all of whom have paid a not insignificant sum to be there. The upstairs and downstairs bars are both lively and animated, there are well stocked record and CD stalls, then you walk into the hall and you find it is full to capacity with people listening attentively to two people making abstract sounds on a viola and a double bass. And that’s only the first of four full-length concerts this evening; all the others will be equally well attended.

One of the things I like about living in central Europe is that free jazz and improvisation are not regarded here as way-out, avant-garde, experimental or difficult musics. The people here just take this stuff in their stride, and that includes the music of Peter Brötzmann, who played in Wels in a trio with Michiyo Yagi on koto and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums. I’m running out of superlatives to describe Brötzmann, so let me simply state that he was as intense as ever. Nilssen-Love, whom I had not seen play before, was a ferociously inventive drummer, while Michiyo Yagi was a total revelation on the koto. Together the three of them made a beautiful and utterly inspired racket.

Heather Nova, Gasometer, Vienna, 19 October 2008

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My first visit to the Gasometer in ages, and my first Heather Nova concert since a rather subdued acoustic affair at the Concorde in Brighton in 2003, when she was pregnant and my own son was not yet two weeks old. I met her afterwards and got my copies of the CDs signed, also my copy of her book. Strangely enough, that book was one of the few I brought to Vienna with me.  On taking it down from the shelves the other day, I found to my dismay that the hard cover had come adrift from the pages.

As for the Gasometer, it was too big a venue for her (she related the story of how this evening had originally been planned as a rest day on the tour, but she told her agent that she wanted to come to Vienna), and they closed off the circle to make the space more intimate. The acoustics, however, were pin-sharp. J., with his alert and experienced pair of ears, has often been critical of the PA at this venue, but they seem to have put a new rig in now, perhaps to coincide with the takeover by Planet Music.

The concert was highly enjoyable from beginning to end. Heather is a stunningly natural performer with a magnificent voice; when she lets rip with one of her extended high notes, she sounds like an angel as well as looking like one. She’s also a hard artist to pigeonhole. When she first emerged in the early ’90s, she was mostly thought of as an indie girl, and she also has something of the waifish folk singer about her. But at the end of the day, what she is more than anything else is a rock chick. She is at her best on bright, confident tunes like “London Rain” and “Walk This World”, with their swaggering chord progressions and thrilling guitar solos. The ballads, meanwhile, such as “I Wanna Be Your Light” and “Fool For You”, are supremely affecting, touched by the luminous emotions of her lyrics and the aching beauty of her voice.

Apart from the fact that she didn’t play my favourite of all her songs, “Truth and Bone”, I had no complaints at all about the setlist, which included a gratifyingly large number of songs from her best album, Siren. Like Peter Hammill (with whom I suspect she is not often compared), she didn’t seem unduly concerned by the need to promote her new record, and only played two or three songs from it. Instead she ranged widely across her back catalogue, resulting in a perfectly paced show that showcased every facet of her exceptional singing and songwriting gifts.

A Silver Mt Zion, Vienna Arena, 14 October 2008

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My first proper rock concert in months – this summer’s three Leonard Cohen shows, as poignant and memorable as they were, didn’t really cut it as intimate live experiences. You have no idea how good it felt to be back in the dark, smoky environs of the Arena among a roomful of likeminded souls. And there can be few better groups to mark the onset of winter than A Silver Mt Zion (I’m not going to call them by their full name).

I last saw ASMZ in May 2006 on my first visit to the Donaufestival, which that year was held in Korneuburg as well as Krems. It’s a real shame that venue is no longer used; it was a very unusual, blasted/picturesque location, some kind of outbuilding of an old shipyard on the banks of the Donau. I seem to recall ASMZ having an extended line-up of at least seven members on that occasion. This time they were down to five – Efrim on vocals and guitar, two violinists, a double bassist and a drummer. And they functioned beautifully as a band, with the architectonics of the songs swelling massively and glacially around the pulsing strings and rhythms.

It’s still hard for me to think of ASMZ as a group in their own right, so keenly felt is the continuing absence of their parent band, whom I saw in London before they escalated to the heights of playing the Royal Festival Hall. But the longer GYBE’s hiatus lasts, the stronger ASMZ’s own group identity becomes. And blazing performances like Tuesday night’s can only hasten that process. I was, to put it mildly, utterly thrilled by this concert. Efrim’s voice has matured from a reedy, quavery instrument into one of bleak power and rage, while his guitar cuts through the funereal throb of the bass and drums like a scalpel. The violins of Jessica and Sophie, meanwhile, are a vital, constantly surging presence, and the ensemble singing is profoundly beautiful and affecting. These long songs are filled with passion, despair and a sense of injustice that is seared into the memory.

Leonard Cohen, Vienna Konzerthaus, 24-25 September 2008

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Not much to add to my review of Leonard Cohen‘s Bruges concert, which is of course part of the problem. Every aspect of these shows is planned, meticulous, slick and competent. No risks are taken, there are hardly any off-the-cuff comments to the audience, the set list varies little if at all from night to night. Listen to recordings of two separate concerts and you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart.

In terms of Cohen talking to the audience, all you get is the endless announcements of the group members (which are often made at just the wrong moment, cutting into the climax of the solo) and the scripted introductions to the songs, which are repeated more or less verbatim from night to night. These are often meant to sound off-the-cuff, but are actually anything but, and (even allowing for the fact that it’s only the fanatics like me who attend more than one concert; for everyone else, it doesn’t matter in the least) their impact is diminished because of it. One would have thought that Leonard would have taken the trouble to say something special about “Take This Waltz” at these shows, since he was singing it in the city in which it is set; but no, he introduced it in the same way as he does every other night (i.e. not at all).

Film of Cohen live in 1979 shows a man with a completely different attitude to live performance from the one we see today. His communication with the audience in those days was raw, spontaneous and improvisatory. In the intervening years, I fear that something precious has been lost.

All of that said, these two Vienna concerts were nevertheless rapturous, inspirational affairs. Cohen seemed to be positioned deep in the well of his immense gifts. As he sang, he focused his infinitely sad, wise, experienced gaze somewhere in the middle distance. Occasionally, I turned my attention away from him and towards the glorious surroundings of the Konzerthaus, and reflected that this kind of alignment is not likely to recur in my life for a long time, if ever.