So last night’s show included three duo performances for piano and saxophone. The first came from Lexer himself in his ongoing, exceptional duo with Seymour Wright. This was the third or maybe fourth time I had seen them play in the last few months, and previous occasions were great experiences. This time I had only just arrived in the room, got my coat off and sat down when the music began, and I found myself taking in the grandeur of the hall and my surroundings rather than really concentrating on the music, so it took a few minutes to really engage. They were great again though, just so in tune with one another, to the point that much of the real power of their performance comes when one or the other deliberately tries to push the music out of its stride, turning things on their head. The last time I saw them, at the Freedom of the City Festival it seemed to be Seymour that took the provocative role more, but last night it seemed to be Sebastian, as several times he dramatically attacked his piano with sudden bursts of aggression right after periods of calm in the music.

Despite these moments of relative violence the performance was more subdued than I have heard the duo play before though. Lexer used a lot of live digital processing of his sound, particularly in the early stages of the set to create a drifty, floaty sound to his playing, which he then regularly undermined with sudden shifts. Wright began as I have noticed he always has done of late, with the main body of the saxophone on the floor in front of him. Generally speaking as a performance progresses he will tend to gradually put the sax back together and towards the end play it as “normally” as he ever does in this kind of group. Last night he was more restrained than I have seen him recently, still making the right decisions, picking moments for his sudden intrusions, but there just seemed to be a few less of them in this performance, as if allowing the resonance of the massive concert hall space to find its own room in the music alongside them. Certainly there were a few moments when Wright played with the acoustics of the room. Putting his sax down at one point on the wooden floor caused a light thud to echo around the place, so he used this to his advantage, rocking the instrument on the floor at one point, dragging it from one foot to the other on another. There was also a great moment midway through the set when a brief two-note xylophone sound came from somewhere. Anyway great stuff again, thoroughly engaging and captivating, very much an another chapter in an ongoing musical relationship.

There then followed an acoustic performance by John Butcher and John Tilbury. I was really curious as to how this would turn out, because although the pair have played together before, in AMM settings and also when Tilbury guested with Polwechsel, I am pretty sure this was their first duo. They played for a long time, at least forty five minutes, and throughout they moved through sections as if recording tracks for an album, though the pieces flowed together seamlessly. I am very happy to report that John Tilbury appears completely recovered from his bout of ill health. He played around 50% of the set stood up, working inside the piano with both hands. I can also report that he was at his best, summoning all kinds of sounds, percussive and tonal from the piano using just a tiny bag of preparations. As ever though, the sounds Tilbury made were only half of the story. Their placement, so patient, so well chosen was perfection in itself. John Butcher has been playing stunningly well of late as well, and last night was no exception as he blew, clicked, popped and whistled his way through a beautiful performance. The music was spacious, considered, and slow, never really drifting into jazz territory, but occasionally hinting at tiny specks of melody, with Butcher often picking out a couple of notes from the beginning of a Tilbury arpeggio and playing them back, using them as a springboard to take the music elsewhere.

This duo was such a joy to sit and listen to. The musicianship shown was incredible, and the way two such identifiable musical voices were able to adapt to each other and so simply, so easily, find a common music was something special. All three of the performances tonight put the musicians in a place where there was nowhere to hide, stood or sat right there a few feet from the audience, but Butcher and Tilbury seemed to revel in this, sensing the occasion and pulling out all the stops. Butcher looked more focussed, more attentive to what was happening around him than I have seen him before at dozens of other gigs. There were quiet, gamelanesque moments of stunning beauty, busier, expressionistic vignettes placed here and there and moments of silence. Neither player tried to rewrite any rulebooks, both played just how we know them to play but they did so with unbelievable sensitivity towards one another. Watching this performance was just so good.

The evening ended with the French duo of Bertrand Gauget (sax) and Frederic Blondy. (piano) I think in any other company, on any other occasion I would have been raving about this duo. Blondy was great at the piano, starting slowly but emphatically with big swoops of almost orchestral sound which he achieved by tucking the hair removed from a violin bow under the strings of the piano and then, holding each end of the hair pulling it back and forth, so each string touched rang out as if bowed with a very long bow. Later in the performance he became far more percussive, energetically pouncing in and out of his instrument and throwing streams of small sounds out in vaguely rhythmic patterns. I liked Gauget’s playing a lot also, leaning towards the drying, fluttery, whooshing sounds rather than hard notes. His playing reminded me a lot of another Bertrand, his compatriot Denzler, as each seem to find it easy to produce a wide range of sounds with only limited means as both pair down the palette of sounds they work with. Inevitably as Blondy’s piano pyrotechnics came thick and fast Gauget took to placing lines of sound behind them, as if providing a bed of sound for the smaller, faster piano sounds.

So yes they were very good, and if they had not just followed the Tilbury / Butcher performance it wouldn’t matter, but it was inevitable that their playing would be compared, if only in my head. For me then, there was just a little bit too much reliance on the same sounds for too long. The rhythmic circles of technically great piano gymnastics that Blondy used to end the set went on for just a bit too long and Gauget’s restrained response didn’t change very much. As Butcher and Tilbury’s performance was a beautifully timed conversation the Blondy/Gauget was more of teeming rush of technique. It seemed to lack a little subtlety, which is probably very unfair, but perhaps inevitable when you follow musicians of the calibre we had heard. Still, another great night and three strong performances, at least one of them being superb. I imagine this won’t be the last Interlace event I make it along to.

Interlace

Goldsmiths College,

London March 9, 2002

This review first appeared in Coda No. 304.

By Tom Perchard

This was the first in a series of concerts of (mostly) improvised music at Goldsmiths College, an institution which is known in the UK for its commitment to experimental art of all kinds. The evening was organized by pianist and Goldsmiths graduate student Sebastian Lexer , and he brought together a group of performers with a number of shared associations: two thirds of AMM were here - pianist John Tilbury gave a realization of a John Cage piece, while drummer Eddie Prévost brought his trio - and most almost all of the other performers have been members of the informal improvisation workshops that Prévost has been running in South London for the last couple of years.

One workshop member is John Lely. On the night, he gave a solo set, sitting at a table that was piled high with instruments - little Casio keyboards, a reed-organ, turntable, and various other objects, including an electric toothbrush. While, in the end, the only role that the toothbrush played was to fall on the floor, it was easy to see how the sound of its motor might have fitted into the music: Lely built his performance by stacking up layers of microscopically detailed mechanical noise, and, showing minimal interest in "instrumental" gestures, he left the technology to run, and to sound like itself. As if in anticipation of the prepared piano sounds that would feature later in the evening, Lely provided a sort of low-culture alternative, ripping open and short-circuiting his keyboards so that they emitted uneven but static loops. These were joined by loops of static from a doctored turntable, whose needle Lely set skating over a 7-inch record. After assembling this quiet, texturally complex structure, the performer set about dismantling it, and the music ran itself down into silence.

Next was Lexer, whose piano and electronics were joined by Li Chuan Chong's laptop and Denis Dubovtsev's soprano saxophone. As a collection of improvisers, their formal strategies were inevitably less focussed than Lely's had been, but the push and pull of the trio was interesting in itself. Dubovtsev kept a low profile, largely limiting his soprano to percussive effects and high-wailing false tones, occasionally beginning and then shying away from more complex lines. He established a relationship with Lexer, whose approach was in direct contrast to Dubovtsev's: the pianist's playing was often flowing and melodic, eminently traditional, and he processed his sweeps and arpeggios into an electronic murmur that hid under the main body of sound. It was Chong, though, who defined the performance's emotional pitch. His laptop created complexes of glitches and faults that threatened to overpower the acoustic instruments. Musically, Chong's was a rather eccentric presence (and physically - he sat resplendent in what looked like some sort of national dress, but turned out to just be a dress), although the music was all the more stimulating for it. Chong and Lexer worried their electronics into a mass of paranoid noise, but the sound eventually dispersed into isolated radio hums and clicks.

Marianthi Papalexandri contributed a short, semi-improvised performance. Wearing a labcoat with contact microphones attached, she circled the room and audience in stylized movements, exploring sounds inherent to the performing space. Brushing her amplified hands over the room's features, and over various sound-producing contraptions that she scattered around, Papalexandri produced isolated sounds that were entirely of the context, yet seemed oddly decontextualized through amplification. She seemed to want to outline the acoustic presence of the space itself; however, acoustic presences of other spaces interjected, including the club next door and the practice rooms down the corridor. But that, I suppose, was part of the point.

John Tilbury performed Cage's Electronic Music for Piano , with the technology provided by Lexer. We watched and waited in silence while Tilbury prepared the piano. As he placed dampening objects under the instrument's strings, at the same time conferring with his technical assistant through muted and sometimes perplexed gestures, the operation took on something of the character of the Beckett plays that Tilbury has recently been performing. The piece itself was similarly ineloquent, centring as it did on the processed decay of solitary notes. If the music had a rather fragile character, that was rudely challenged by two ear-splitting screeches from the electronics, which may or may not have been entirely intentional, and by Tilbury's scraping a drumstick across the piano's lid. The resultant banshee wail helped the performance reach a surprising level of intensity, given the piece's economy of material.

Eddie Prévost came with his main working unit (outside of AMM), a trio that features soprano saxophonist Tom Chant and double bassist John Edwards. This date marked the trio's fifth anniversary, and they have grown into a remarkably powerful and intelligent force. The group's first performances tended to root themselves in a latter-day free jazz style, catching speed with nets of saxophone notes, cymbal figurations and running basslines. These days, though, the group rarely works itself up into the headlong rush of free jazz, and it now thrives on quickness of ears rather than fingers; the complexity of the musicians' interaction generates its own pace. This evening, the trio's sheer collective confidence was apparent from the first second, when Edwards dug in and was answered immediately by both saxophonist and drummer. The group's approach centres around this sort of quick-witted trialogue, but the players are rarely directly imitative of one another. Instead, they often seek to temporarily occupy the same sort of sonic space as one another, approximating each other's soundworlds on their own instruments. Prévost has long been a master of this sort of communication, and he adapts his regular jazz kit to converse with the high and low instruments, scraping his toms with a mallet, sometimes bowing bowls on his snare. While the drummer's identity is pretty much in place, the strategies employed by Tom Chant, a much younger player, seem to be changing very quickly. In the space of a year, he has abandoned his formerly sweet tone and Lacy-like tumbling, as exciting as they could be, for something much more nebulous and decentred. At times tonight, he seemed to be exploring the difference between the extremes of a full-bodied tone and pitchless air, investigating different enunciations of the same sound. Several octaves beneath Chant was John Edwards, whose playing was about as elemental as it possibly could have been. Characteristically, the bassist's bodily involvement with his instrument is total, and yet the impressive physicality of his music is matched by the mobility of his mind; Edwards never seems to repeat himself or resort to bass idiomatics, and communicates with the other musicians by striving to reinvent his instrument with every passing second. Like the trio in general, his instrumental command goes beyond the virtuosic, as the extreme complexity of his approach always remains subordinate to formal logic and shape. Nearly all of the evening's performers will be featured during the freedom of the city festival, London, 3-6 May 2002. Details can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3.

Selected discography:
Lely/Charaoui/Wright, 396 , Matchless Recordings MRCD42
John Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew Piano Music 1959-70 , Matchless Recordings MRCD29; Morton Feldman - All Piano [END ITALICS], London Hall do 13
Eddie Prévost Trio, The Virtue in If , Matchless Recordings MRCD43; Touch, Matchless recordings MRCD34

© Tom Perchard, 2002