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Ether column, November 2009

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Another cracking month for concerts. Top of the list is the visit of Six Organs of Admittance, playing in the grimy surroundings of the Kleine Halle at the Arena. Six Organs is more or less guitarist Ben Chasny, joined by various collaborators for both live and studio work. Chasny tends to get lumped in with the “weird folk” crowd, which is actually not a bad shorthand for his uncanny and hypnotic blend of acoustic guitar-driven, mostly instrumental music. Calling to mind mystical Eastern ragas alongside the primitivist fingerpicking style of the late John Fahey, Six Organs music sparkles with melodic invention. On this tour, Chasny will be joined by electric guitarist Elisa Ambrogio, whose playing is as thrilling to watch as it is to listen to, and Alex Neilson, one of the most gifted and inventive drummers of modern times.

Moving right along, there’s an unmissable evening of free jazz and improvisation at the excellent Blue Tomato club this month, featuring two of the key figures in the genre. American saxophonist Ken Vandermark is a workaholic who spends most of his life on the road. His fierce and passionate playing effortlessly combines the swinging Fire Music style of Albert Ayler with the more abstract European style of Peter Brötzmann. Like most free jazz musicians, Vandermark has a list of collaborators as long as your arm; he’s one of those who believes in improvisation and ad hoc groupings as essential elements in keeping the music fresh and vital. On this occasion he’ll be joined by the awesomely talented Norwegian percussionist Paal Nilssen-Love, sticksman with The Thing (see the March 2009 issue of Ether), Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet and too many others to mention. This kind of duo concert, with two musicians facing up to each other onstage with no preconceived notions of what they are going to play, represents for me the perfectly symmetrical essence of free improvisation.

And rounding things off, a very different kind of duo, KTL, the guitar and laptop pairing of Sunn O))) mastermind Stephen O’Malley and Vienna’s very own Peter Rehberg. O’Malley is the master of the drone guitar, playing pulverizingly loud sub-bass frequencies that resonate deep within you. Rehberg, meanwhile, coaxes all manner of hectic and crystalline sounds from his laptop. As well as being a formidable presence with their own records and concerts, KTL have often created music for dance and theatre pieces. It’s a natural move for them, therefore, to make film soundtrack music. As part of this year’s Wien Modern festival, they’ll be performing their own score to the classic early Swedish silent horror film, The Phantom Carriage, live as the film is shown.

Sonore/The Thing, Vienna Blue Tomato, 15 October 2009

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A truly blistering night of free jazz and improvisation from five of its finest exponents. Consisting of a series of combinations of the all-reeds trio Sonore (Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson) and Scandinavian power trio The Thing (Gustafsson plus Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on double bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums), the evening showed up the rock and noise crowds’ frequent claims to ‘extremity’ and ‘intensity’ for the empty boasts they are. With no guitars, no electronics and no amplification, these five gentlemen conclusively demonstrated that there is no music in the world more extreme and intense than the cry of a saxophone being flayed from the inside out, and the thunderous rumble of a drummer assaulting his kit into submission.

The concert began with a beautifully balanced set from Sonore, followed straight after by an incandescent duo set from Brötzmann and Nilssen-Love. Next up, Vandermark and Håker Flaten varied the mood and pace considerably. Vandermark showcased his sheer versatility, foregoing his usual Ayleresque attack with a bout of cerebral blowing that reminded me of Anthony Braxton. Håker Flaten remained onstage for The Thing’s set, during which Mats Gustafsson played sax with a jaw-droppingly physical ferocity. The inevitable conclusion saw all five men come together in a breathtaking show of mutual understanding, improvisational flair and deranged sonic attack.

Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, Vienna Porgy & Bess, 23 May 2009

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A stunning evening of molten free jazz and way-out Improv from the ever reliable Brötzmann and his largest, most diverse configuration. Over two hour-long sets, the saxophonist led his group down a maze of glorious soloing and bravura ensemble interplay. Never letting up, always reaching for higher and more dangerous territory, these guys took your breath away.

Without any need for prior planning, the ten gifted musicians knew instinctively when to come together and when to step back to let in other members of the troupe. This is the magic of group improvisation – that wonderful blend of intuition, togetherness and respect.

Brötzmann’s co-stars, for me, were his regular collaborators Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson (both on saxes) and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love. The two reedsmen proved themselves the German’s equal with their ferocious blowing; Vandermark took a particularly fiery solo with no-one but Nilssen-Love for company, while Gustafsson’s relentlessly physical approach was perhaps underexposed. As for the Norwegian percussionist himself, his face told a story of formidable effort that was reflected time and again in the awesome power of his playing, including a fierce double-headed drum interlude with the more undulant approach of Michael Zerang.

It wasn’t all plain sailing; I could certainly have done without the irritating presence of trombonist Johannes Bauer, whose entire demeanour radiated smugness and self-satisfaction. But his solo interventions were thankfully brief. Other than that Bauer was part of a brass section that, when it was not tussling spiritedly with the reeds, laid down a slew of brisk and imaginative patterns, bolstered by Fred Lonberg-Holm’s whizzy, effects-heavy cello work.

Now twelve years into its existence, the Chicago Tentet is a group at the height of its powers. Brötzmann may be the nominal bandleader, but there was precious little evidence on Saturday night of him shaping and controlling the music to any great extent. Which is as it should be, of course. In the mysterious, elemental world of free improvisation, meaning and inspiration come not from individuals but from the spaces and the traces between them.

Ether column, March 2009

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Not much doubt in my mind about the concert of the month (although work commitments mean that I can’t be there, annoyingly) – an evening of blistering free jazz courtesy of The Thing, aka Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and Swedish bassist Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten. Regular readers of this column will not be surprised to learn that both Gustafsson and Nilssen-Love are frequent collaborators of the titanic German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, Gustafsson in the all-reeds trio Sonore, Nilssen-Love in various group formats. Together with Haker-Flaten they walk the precipice between free jazz, out-there rock and garage punk. Gustafsson channels the spirit of Fire Music legend Albert Ayler in his inspirational sax playing, while Nilssen-Love attacks his kit with savage ferocity and the bassist anchors the whole edifice with his rock-solid pizzicato work. Playing in the intimate surroundings of the Blue Tomato, The Thing will surely blast the roof off the place.

If The Thing represent modern European free jazz at its most extreme, saxophonist Paul Dunmall is an example of the kind of dedicated, unsung musician thrown up by the British free improvisation movement. Where Brötzmann and his ilk picked up the sound of American free jazz and took it even further out, Dunmall was part of a British scene that went in the other direction, towards abstraction and relative quiet. Best known for his membership of Mujician, a quartet led by the formidable English pianist Keith Tippett, Dunmall appears in Vienna with a trio that is effectively Mujician without Tippett, i.e. accompanied by Paul Rogers on bass and Tony Levin on drums.

Intriguing evening in prospect – at least for those with good German, which counts me out – at the WUK this month, as Einstürzende Neubauten mainman Blixa Bargeld reads from his new book Europa Kreuzweise: Eine Litanei.  As an attempt to answer the question “what does it mean, to be on a non-stop concert tour for two months?”, the book describes the monotony of movement, interrupted by restaurants, readings and meetings. As I noted in my preview of Neubauten’s last Vienna appearance in April 2008, Bargeld is a lyricist of great skill and acuity, his texts replete with tumbling wordplay and caustic imagery. Between Neubauten activity in recent years, he has given solo vocal performances under the title Rede/Speech, in which he treats his voice with a variety of foot pedals and effects equipment. Expect this not to be a standard book reading.

Peter Brötzmann/Toshinori Kondo/Massimo Pupillo/Paal Nilssen-Love, Vienna Fluc Wanne, 10 March 2009

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Wow, this was a really spectacular evening’s entertainment. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Brötzmann play over the last three years, but I have to say that this was probably the finest of the lot. On this occasion everything just fell perfectly into place, resulting in a non-stop 90-minute tour de force of overwhelming power and intensity.

For non-stop is what it was. No short pieces, no interval, just one endless oceanic tidal wave of brutally organised sound. Nilssen-Love (drums) and Pupillo (bass guitar) were a rhythm section to take your breath away, ceaselessly inventive and frequently locking into a lashing, irresistible groove. Kondo was a vital, turbulent presence on trumpet, his squalls of sustain often fighting for supremacy against the forceful blowing of the saxophonist, whose looming and thunderous playing is still unparalleled.

Total improvisation of this kind is extraordinary to listen to and, equally, to watch. You find yourself wondering, how do the players know when to take it up, take it down, drop out, start, stop? Answer: they listen to each other in real time, they respect each other, they know how to interact with one another for maximum power and impact. This is the kind of awareness that only comes with years of intuition and mutual understanding. It’s the one thing that makes improvisation such a vitally important and creative act.

Kudos to all those people who turned out for this concert, a nice mix of young hipsters and grizzled old jazz fans (I’ll leave you to decide which of these groups I fall into). The latter didn’t seem particularly comfortable amid the Fluc’s distressed concrete aesthetic, but they came anyway because they know what magic this music is capable of conveying. What annoys me are the hordes of avant rock and noise fans who like to see themselves as in thral to the way out and the extreme, yet wouldn’t cross the street to see a performance of free jazz or improv (in the unlikely event that they even knew it was taking place at all). Such people are merely ignorant of the fact that this music serves up sonic extremity and wildness of a kind that nothing in the rock world has ever come close to emulating.

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.