Paolo Angeli's Sponde di Passione live at Moers Festival 2010

(beautiful photos here and here)

Paolo Angeli's project Sponde di Passione was mostly serving folk-based drone structures and adding a lot of visual food. There were black-and-white photos projected onto a big screen behind the musicians, photos of Good Friday ceremonies in (southern?) Italy. And there was a trapeze artist which for the first time made correct use of the Moers Festival circus tent by offering acrobatics. The little program booklet announced that the acrobat and the musicians were meant to influence each other, and the musicians on stage where really watching what she was doing high up there under the tent's roof. Yet I couldn't really figure out any mutual influence between them. (Which doesn't mean that there was none, I just didn't perceive it.) Short before the concert, while watching the preparations for the multimedia performance, I chatted a bit with a stranger and we remembered the 2001 or 2002 concert of the Shibusa Shirazu Orchestra with their many dancers and the giant dragon floating over the audience's heads. (We had a little controversy - while he found everything of that gig "spectacular" and great, I admitted that the show was, but that the music was a bit too much based on repetitive riffs.) So, we were asking ourselves, can we expect a show like that? Well, after the concert had started, this guy left after a while. I later met him again and he told me he couldn't stand these Christian photos. I replied that I didn't have any specific reactions to these photos: "I grew up in a protestant household, so these catholic processions are just strange to me, not touching me in any way, neither negative nor positive."

Takumi Fukushima's singing was maybe a bit harmless but nice. I knew some of her singing from Rale. The best moment though was when she left the tracks of harmlessness and suddenly burst into singing traditional japanese drama, alternating between female and pretended male voice. That might well have been the best moment of the whole concert, which was a little bit boring on the whole, because there was too few instrumental development. After I had seen the high number of sounds that Angeli could get out of his instrument in the duet with Jon Rose, the performance here on the main stage was a bit one-dimensional (or maybe it was the sound mix that was not detailed enough?). Drone music doesn't work so well if it is folk-based. (Lutz Eitel calls it "orotund sonorities" and up to now I've been too lazy to check the dictionary what "orotund" means.)

Paolo Angeli's MySpace site and the one for the Angeli and Fukushima duet.

As already mentioned in the morning session review, Takumi exchanged some smile with my wife as well. That certainly earns her a big bonus point.

Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet live in Moers 2010

(more photos on the festival website, quite wonderful ones)

Venit, videt, vicit – Moers veteran Peter Brötzmann's Chicago Tentet rocked the tent and enthused the crowd, what else could be expected? A lot of tutti blowing at a high volume level, interrupted by a various solos and smaller group combinations. Glued together by a free funk rhythm unit, especially the twofold powerhouse drumming of Paal Nilssen-Love and Michael Zerang. Yet what was going on in my mind while listening and watching was rather alienating me from the enthusiasm of the crowd and the band. This process of alienation has been caused by my observation of cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and Joe McPhee with his pocket trumpet. My considerations were not so much musical but rather socio-political, which I think is fair in this context, as free jazz and a lot of free improvisation are coming out from a movement of socio-political progress. However, whatever I'm going to say now, in this article, about the political matters that I saw to be encapsuled in this Tentet's music, does NOT mean that I think the musicians on stage are having the political points of view that I'm going to describe. On the contrary, I think the musicians on stage are forward-thinking, liberal, progressive and free minds who contribute to a better world, after all. Nevertheless, in any piece of art the author's intention – and in this case the collective author's intention – is one thing, and the meaning contained in the work of art is another. Any great piece of art contains more meaning than what the creator originally intended. What I'm going to describe later is one additional meaning in this improvised work, not what the musicians intended it to be. Please keep that disclaimer in mind.

In conversation with Karl Lippegaus Peter Brötzmann said:

„Das Tentett ist auch ein Beispiel gesellschaft­li­chen Zusammenlebens, in der Nachfolge von Sun Ra's Arkestra.“ (Süddeutsche Zeitung Nr. 119 / 2010, p. 13, translation: „The tentet also is an example for social living together, in succession of Sun Ra's Arkestra“).

So, my impulse to interpret what was happening on the Moers festival stage as a depiction of a society is somehow covered by the author's intention. Yet what repelled me during the concert was that I definitely wouldn't like to live in a society as the one represented by the Tentet. But please allow me to make a little detour and let me ask about the positive aspects of freely improvised music in relation to social life.

In the preface to „Noise and Capitalism“, Anthony Iles writes: „There is strong field of attraction to the cultural space of noise for the politicised musician – a music that does not have a set code or form nor an expected mode of behaviour. Those packing a liberatory politics with their music often turn up here.” That kind of describes my original attitude to freely improvised music – and to the recordings of Peter Brötzmann that I have heard in my life. I perceive (rationally and emotio­nally) freely improvised music as a liberation, as a partial loosening from the cultural and social ties that we are bound by. At the same time it is an alternative way of communication: between the musicians as well as between musicians and the audience. (In high school I had a wonderful music teacher who held some free improvisation sessions with us kids, too, so I had some positive experience with this early on.) Certainly the liberation and the communication aspects of free improvisation were pointless if after all they wouldn't mean anything to us human beings – zoon politikon that we are. Our cultural achievements are related to the states of our minds and the ways we live together. Freely improvised works can speak to body and mind, the first one on a more emotional level of evoking and/or recalling feelings, the latter one on a structural level by letting us focus on non-trivial, complicated relations within the musical material and/or among the musicians and audiences and by relating these musical structures to other structures we are experiencing. So from the listener's point of view improvised music can be a catalyzer for broadening one's mind and one's experience. And it at least can evoke the illusion that a society where self-expression is less restricted and more evenly distributed among the individuals is at least possible.

And now finally back to the concert. First, let's look at Fred Lonberg-Holm. He's playing an instrument, that is by nature more silent than many of the others. This would be true for a non-amplified, naturally acoustic context: When the two drummers, three saxophone and three brass players start to beat and blow like crazy, they can simply drown the cello. Now, this concert was not "naturally acoustic", but amplified in a big tent for an audience of 2000 people. Shall we call the amplification „realistic“, because even in this context the cello could not be heard? Well, to be fair, I must say, that Fred Londberg-Holm was given a slot for a solo, where he got the chance to get his sound through. But on the whole, I estimate the time that he was audible to me was less than 5 minutes. As a listener one would ask: What's the use to incorporate a player in such an ensemble who doesn't have the ability to make himself heard – and we're not speaking about a symphony orchestra context here, where players of the same instruments are combined to groups and therefore deprived of their own, individual voice? Well, there is one thing imaginable, I admit: Maybe the audience couldn't here him, but the players on stage could. If that's true then Lonberg-Holm had the option of triggering or influencing the other players and therefore assist in shaping the overall sound of the ensemble. This is something I certainly don't know, yet given the nature of the cello, it seems rather unlikely – he was put rather at the edge of the stage as well, so that his physical presence was marginalized as well.
Now case number 2, which is different but of equal importance for the string of thoughts that was aroused in my head during this concert. Joe McPhee was not marginalized on stage. He was right in the center of it. His instrument, though very small, was powerful enough to cut through the noise even at the loud moments. Yet there was seemingly a problem with Mr. McPhee's personality that made him not really fit in: He looked like too modest, too humble a person. The people around him were using their elbows, fighting. When things were getting loud they were blowing in a „take-no-prisoners“-approach. At such moments, Joe McPhee often retreated a bit. Though he had the physical ability to make his voice heard through his instrument, he often didn't play in such moments. And when he did, he didn't cut through the noise either, he restricted himself – and in effect wasn't reaching my ear.

Now, analysing these two individual players' roles in the tentet and bringing them into relation with society, we could see a symbol for the workings of a fascist or social-darwinist version of society. There are those who are strong by nature. (In this concert the strong ones were the ones with the loud instruments, the big lungs, and the will to play loudly without making sure that the disadvantaged players could still be heard.) And there are those who are weak either by physical nature (in this context the lack of loudness in the cello) or by spiritual / ethical / mental „weaknesses“ (just like virtues and ethical considerations can be obstacles to a person within a context of a fascist society).
I don't want to live in a society as the one depicted by the Chicago tentet in this concert. Now some people who have seen the concert as well may reject my view and retort that the concert wasn't always a full-noise, loud blowing, but that there were the smaller-group settings where the playing was more silent and every voice could be heard. Yes, that's true. But isn't that just due to clemency from the side of the noise-makers? It's as if the strong elements in a society said: „Well, you weak ones, we let you speak out now and we'll even listen to you – but as we have just shown, you're depending on our mercy. Whenever we want, we can muffle you again.“ That's not freedom, that's paternalism at best. The social elements as depicted by the players in this tentet are not on par with each other.

In effect this concert has challenged my formerly unreflected idea that free improvisation is a more or less unmediated expression of and contribution to freedom. When I got back home after the festival, I started to dig a bit deeper, because this question kept moving me. And with the help of a review in the Eartrip magazine #5 I found the interesting book „Noise and Capitalism“, edited by Mattin and Anthony Iles (I have already quoted from it above). I found that the danger of chauvinism in improvised music was only something I haven't thought about yet, but others were well-aware of it. In the eartrip review David Grundy speaks about machism of noise music and goes even further:

„So: why are so many of the artists mentioned men, playing at gigs attended by men? Is there perhaps something – dare I use the word? – phallocentric about noise, about the whole rock and roll myth of the singer with his phallic guitar or saxophone? They don’t use the term ‘cock rock’ for nothing, and they might as well invent a similar term for less mainstream manifestations of ‘aggression’ and ‘energy’ in music.“

So is Brötzmann's Chicago Tentet the free jazz version of „cock rock“? Maybe... (though I must admit that in one way Grundy's quote doesn't really fit here, because there were enough women in the audience.) What was possibly lacking in this concert (or this group?) was what Mattin describes as the will to take risks: „

Improvised music is not progressive in itself, but it invites constant experimentation. When players feel too secure about their approaches, the experimentation risks turning into Mannerism. What I would like to explore here are the moments in which players leave behind a safe zone and expose themselves in the face of the internalised structures of judgment that govern our appreciation of music. These I would call fragile moments.” (Mattin & Iles, Noise & Capitalism, p. 20)

I didn't see any fragile moments in the playing of the ensemble as a whole. But well – didn't my descriptions of what I saw and heard from Lonberg-Holm and McPhee clearly reveil that there was fragility? What if it was all planned? What if these two players were assigned the role of breaking through mannerism and introduce fragility into the proceedings? I don't know. But even if that was the case: Is it fair to discharge one's own fragility by projecting it onto others? Sure not.
I have learnt something.

„Just as ‘noise’ is neither more nor less inherently subversive than any other commodifiable musical genre, so the categories invoked in order to decipher its political potency cannot be construed as inherently ‘critical’ while they remain fatally freighted with neo-romantic clichés about the transformative power of aesthetic experience. (Ray Bras­sier: „Gen­re Is Ob­so­le­te“, in: Mat­tin/Iles: “Noi­se & Ca­pi­ta­lism”, p. 69)

So, improvised music doesn't help me per se to become a better or freer person or doesn't help me to live in a better society. It's good to know that and will prevent future disappointments. But then again, maybe my view is too simplistic:

“The same is true of collaboration in performance, which can be both at once competitive and mutually validatory for participants.” (Bruce Rus­sell: „To­wards a So­cial On­to­lo­gy of Im­pro­vis­ed Sound Work“, in: Mat­tin­/I­les: „Noi­se and Ca­pi­ta­lism“, p. 92).

So, in order to dig deeper and get further in this question, I'd have to ask Fred Lonberg-Holm and Joe McPhee how they perceived their playing in this group. Maybe they felt "validated"? Maybe other people in the audience don't share my view (as usual) and didn't think there was any problem with the integration of Lonberg-Holm and McPhee? At least Ken Vandermark found it successful, as he writes on his Facebook diary:

„5/23: Another night of 2 hours of sleep, then 2 planes to Dusseldorf. In a panic about checking the baritone but it arrives safe. Unfortunately, Fred Longberg-Holm's cello does not- somehow Air France finds a way to break 2 tuning pegs made of carbon fiber. Short afternoon sleep and head to the Moers Festival to play. ...Once again the band delivers a strong concert despite the exhausted odds- a ferocious 50 minutes of music, but even in the density the Tentet remains clear. I believe that this was one of the best sets the band has played for a large (2000+) festival crowd in its career.“

I let Josh Sinton have the last word for now (though he wasn't speaking about this concert but the work of Steve Lacy in relation to „assault-like“ music):

„There was a time in jazz when dissonance like this [a recording of Steve Lacy] was much more the norm. So much so, that the aural landscape became over-saturated with ‘unlistenable’ sounds. It makes sense that the cultural pendulum has swung back the other way in the past several decades towards the side of ‘pretty’ music. Maybe it’s time for it to swing back. Not so much to a place of full-out assault, but to an egalitarian place where all sounds are treated and represented equally.“ (Josh Sinton: A Deathless Valley of Mysterious Motherhood)

P.S.: Nono, the very last word is given to my lovely wife. She always has the last word ;-) See her comment on my Carlo Mombelli concert review:

"one sees understanding, generosity, tolerance, cooperation from the atmosphere built up with their music minds, an atmosphere which could provide a healthy and cozy living of human being, or even other beings. (who knows)"

So, if my interpretation of the tentet concert here can stand as being valid, then we had both depicted on the Moers festival stage: the cooperative and "nice" society as well as the struggling and fighting society.

Schneeweiß und Rosenrot live at Moers Festival 2010

(again I cannot provide a good photo - but the festival site can)

Another talented young group presented in Moers, Schneeweiss und Rosenrot, expressedly not referring to the Grimm brothers fairy tale. The line-up looks like a piano trio plus vocals, but they're not sailing in these waters. They're rather a pop group that knows about jazz than a jazz group that knows about pop. They're a broken pop group, though. They dare to lean out of the window, go atonal - or at least dissonant - for short moments. In these moments I imagine Irène Schweizer might have played like that if she had become a pop musician. But as I said, that's the short moments. For the longer moments they're somewhere in the realm of the latest Bad Plus album with singer Wendy Lewis, plus some very dreamy chamber-like moments, plus some occasional Brian Viglione-like rockout from the drummer. A nice mixture, indeed. And I agree with Josef Woodard of the Santa Barbara Chronicle: the pianist Johanna Borchert was the element that made the whole group something special. Quote: "nimble, new-sounding pianist Johanna Borchert (with the tart, fresh and alluring art-pop-jazz band Schneeweiss und Rosenrot)". Another positive point was the fact that Schneeweiss & Rosenrot had the most interesting picture projections on the curtains at the back-wall of the stage. They went very well with the mood of the music.

Georg Graewe's Grubenklang Orchester live at Moers Festival 2010

(If you want to see good photos of the concert, check here)

I think I have a soft spot for left-wing imaginary folklore. This big band was something to hit this spot. I've never heard the original version of Grubenklang Orchester from the early 1980's so I cannot compare this 2010 Moers incarnation with the earlier music. This is regrettable, because the past 30 years have surely brought a big transition in the "Gruben" (pit, i.e. coal mine) areas in Germany. (Note: Moers where the festival takes place is just a few kilometres east of the biggest German mining area, Ruhrgebiet, and while the closing down of mines has already started in the 1950's, at least there still were around 130,000 mining workers employed in the early 80's - nowadays the number has been reduced to below 40,000 - according to wikipedia that is.) So, though I know about the transition that is taking place in German coal mining, I cannot tell about the transition taking place in Georg Graewe's orchestra work during the same period of time.
How does this orchestra work sound like in 2010? Well, it's predominently collage work, taking traditional coal miner's songs as a source, enhancing it with chorale compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, Gil Evansian big band arragement work and some freer soloing passages. Due to the working class theme there sometimes was a bit of Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester spirit spreading in the tent, though in the case of the Grubenklang orchestra the musicians were certainly all professionals, not amateurs as in the SLB.
Graewe is mostly conducting, only adding piano two or three times during the set. Among the musicians of the band I remember the two bass players to catch a lot of my attention, though I must admit, that I mixed them and only found out in the very end that the one who I thought is John Lindberg was actually Dieter Manderscheid - and vice versa. (For those who want to know who else played in the band, check the festival website. Sure Gratkowski was good, sure Tramontana was good, sure Vatcher was good, etc...)

A Jon Rose / Paolo Angeli duet at Moers Festival 2010

That was breathtaking! The concert conditions were not ideal for us - only because we were too stupid to go up to the gallery and watch down on the musicians, but sat down on a normal bench in the main nave of the church. So we didn't see much of what Angeli and Rose were doing. (Just like you wouldn't see much from our as usual very blurred photos.) But what we heard them doing was terrific. The one-hour set was containing two duo improvisations and one solo of Jon Rose - rightly called a teufelsgeiger by Lutz Eitel. He also described the instrument better than I could because he obviously has seen more - I wasn't even aware of the foot pedals which couldn't be seen from my point of view. However, I certainly recognized the mechanical appliance for plucking the strings, that way doubling the hands of Mr. Angeli. This guitar/cello was becoming a kind of modern orchestrion, mostly used by Angeli for creating dense soundscapes and unusual noises. I've heard a few Jon Rose recordings that left me relatively unimpressed. I was very much looking forward to hearing him live, because I knew he's a great musician and a live contect can open up ways of musical understanding that a record can't. And it really worked as expected. The concert has opened my eyes concerning how he creates sounds but that wouldn't be enough. It also gave me an idea about why he creates sounds - though I couldn't put this idea into words yet. The improvisational interplay between the two (who had announced that they hadn't played together for 17 years) was great and in his solo piece Jon Rose proved to be a wonderful story-teller. This concert was another highlight of the whole festival - it is quite interesting that many of my favorite concerts were taking place in smaller settings, not on the main stage.

A Sunday morning session at Moers Festival 2010

After we had been so highly enthused about Saturday's morning session, we didn't get an early enough start on Sunday and only arrived on the festival site when the sessions had already started. We did a bit of session-hopping at first, peeking into this or that concert room. My wife wasn't satisfied with a trio improvisation of Eve Risser, Justin Veloso and Esra Dalfidian (we're a funny little family: whenever there's trouble, it's mostly caused by the drummers) and waited outside, where she met Borey Shin, the piano player and accordeonist of Super Sea Weed Sex Scandal, who smiled at her. (Later that day she exchanged a smile with Takumi Fukushima, too. It's interesting: While East Asians - my wife is Chinese - don't smile much at each other in their home countries, they would stick together and exchange smiles when they're in the western countries. On the other hand, when I'm travelling in China I think I don't smile at other western faces that I meet there - while I might smile at some people in my home country sometime. Sorry for that long aside...)
We ended up in the morning session where our beloved Tobias Klein was playing for the second half of the set. Yuko Oshima proved in this session that she can be more versatile at the drum set than what she had shown the other day on the main stage. She played a very funny and fierce duo argument with Super Seaweed Sex Scandal's tenorist John Stanesco. Viljam Nybacka was treating the electric bass again - he was always coming together with Tobias Klein, or vice versa. He had some especially good moments in a rock setting (with guitar player Paul Wheeler). The trumpet player of the session was Eiríkur Orri. I think he wasn't bad, but I don't really remember him too well. To see the Super Seaweed Sex Scandalists (Stanesco and Wheeler in this case, Veloso in the one that we had left) in these freely improvised settings with other musicians was also arousing some thoughts on the booking politics of the festival. In these improvising settings there were moments where they lacked a bit of self-confidence. Yet where else should they develop this if not by being confronted with situations that allow them to experiment in front of an audience? And the mentioned Stanesco/Oshima duo was really a killer.
Summarizing this morning's session experience, Tobias Klein reinforced our first impression of him: He was again our star of the set, we loved every move he made.

Dobet Gnahoré live at Moers Festival 2010

We didn't even take a photo of Dobet Gnahoré. She was on the one hand the dance-act for this Saturday night - and as such she was much better than Miss Platnum the night before. She was also more related to the Moers tradition, which used to have an African Dance Night in the old days, curated by Francis Gay, getting artists like Baaba Maal to Moers. The African Dance Night started used to start even later than this year's concert of Dobet Gnahoré. But after 12 hours of interesting, attention-grasping and thought-provoking music, our minds had their fill. After we had heard four or five songs, we started our way back to our hotel. We had heard a good, versatile and strong singing voice, a very powerful athletic way of dancing and hopping on stage, some accompaniment that seemed a bit unbelievable (virtuoso guitar-player and and dense enough sound from just a guitar-bass-drum backline and strong background singing from the instrumentalists). I once had a glimpse at the official Moers Festival's website guestbook and there was some controversy going on, if there was some playback involved. But that's not really a question. It was an enjoyable set of a strong West African pop singer. And there was definitely less playback then when The Residents played in Moers in 2001.

Another voice

On the whole my reviews of Moers seem sometimes a bit too critical to me. I think I haven't made it clear enough yet how much I enjoyed the festival, even if I am criticizing a detail here and there. It is a massive gathering of the finest and most creative musicians one can imagine and utterly enjoyable. So, as I haven't expressed that enough yet, I let the Jazztimes speak for me. Take over, Josef Woodard.

Bill Frisell, Eyvind Kang & Rudy Royston live in Moers 2010

For a German it is a bit disturbing how similar Bill Frisell and Harald Schmidt look like. They even smile in a similar way. So, I cannot really guarantee that I saw Bill Frisell on stage in Moers, maybe he was covered by Schmidt as a "stunt double"...
As I have already said before, this gig didn't impress me. It started in a rather free, abstract, atonal and promising way and turned into a fusion / jazz-rock jam after about 20 minutes. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against fusion / jazz-rock, but Frisell seemed a bit lazy to me. When once he has spontaneously invented (or recalled) a riff, he kept playing it over and over again for too long, with hardly any variation. His handwriting remained still Frisell-ish from the point of view of sound. After the rocking had started, Eyving Kang on the other hand sounded quite like the famous fusion violinists of the 70's, Jean-Luc or Don-Sugarcane. If there were no chairs indicating that this was a listener's rather than a dancer's concert, the whole thing might have been better. But possibly even the musicians themselves didn't know in advance that they were going to rock away the way they did. While from the microscopic point of view (e.g. the aforementioned riff repetitions of Frisell) the concert seemed not spontaneous enough, I believe that on the macroscopic scale of the players' interactions not too much was discussed in advance. I guess they were letting things flow and surprising the audience and themselves with the results. Yes, improvisation.