Ursel Schlicht Quartet at Side-On, 13 December 2003

This German-born composer, pianist, lecturer, teacher, is now resident in the US but remains a very international figure.

Her appearance at Sydney’s Side-On was organised in association with the Melbourne Women’s International Jazz Festival. Her festival appearances world wide indicate an acceptance in the areas of jazz, new music, world music, and a category called improvised music which would be hard for the outsider to separate from any of the forgoing categories. Don’t all these idioms include improvisation?

Usually. But they don’t really have to. A cluster of evolving styles is associated with each, and it would be possible to play, for a while at least, in any of these styles without improvising. Obviously it would be impossible to play improvised music without improvising. A committment to improvising as a prime element has created an approach which Schlicht referred to on the night as ‘organic’.

It is a somewhat problematic term. Organs grow according to a series of encoded directives, modified of course by external stresses. I suppose the point is that the plan of a building or a composition is usually externalised to a degree (with someone like Gaudi less obviously so, due to the lack of guiding straight lines and angles). There seems to be more of the mechanical and less of the so-called organic. Whereas, in ‘improvised music’ as a genre, structure grows from collective impulses moment by moment. In any case, when this ensemble essayed a completely free improvisation, it certainly felt organic in the way we have come to understand.

The ensemble, bandleader aside, was saxophonist Sandy Evans, bassist Steve Elphick and drummer Toby Hall. In Melbourne she had been magnanimously assured that this would be a great band, and in the event she was more than pleased.

Some of the programme rose from an area from which some of my favourite music still rises: the region where jazz has begun to flower in free music directions. A couple of pieces used composed lines in unpredictable phrase groupings – one in fact called Fragments - that recalled some compositions of George Russell (eg. the album Stratus Seekers) or Albert Mangelsdorf (Birds Of Underground), to give a couple of less obvious examples. But Hall and Elphick played much more freely than the Russell rhythm section cited above, and the prases played on horn and piano – sometimes in unison – were much more independant of each other. They came in a seemingly random succession – in fact they could it seemed be cued in in different sequences – and yet the momentum was great. The powerful implications of groove and pulse that rose from Elphick and Hall created a wonderful tension with the phraseology.

This feeling is really unique to a certain area of jazz. You can hear a great example on the two recordings made by Ornette Coleman – with bassist Charles Izenson and drummer – at the Golden Circle in Stockholm. It is often outside calibrated meter, yet it pulses mightily. The bass comes bulbing up through the smashing drum textures like pressure eddies or boils in a fast running river. Then the bass might step up high and walk around with seeming independance. Then drums and bass might simply stamp together, sounding a bit like a blues band. Needless to say, Steve Elphick has the best sound for this, and it is hard to think of anyone here, except Lloyd Swanton, who could bring so many resources to bear.

I might have chosen drummer Simon Barker for this job, but Toby Hall played so well that I forgot completely about alternatives.

Beyond this the band essayed a thoroughly free piece in which Shlicht altered the sound of the piano by distrtibuting objects – hard and soft, of metal, glass, polysterene, etc – on the strings. Her particular meaning of organic could not have been better illustrated. This is the effect you get from films in which the growth of plants or the evolution of a pelagic fish from its transparent life in the plankton is filmed at length and then speeded up. Toby Hall needed Schlicht’s stern Germanic directive to produce his glockenspeil I’m sure. Or maybe not. In any case it was very effective. The ensemble had reached the point where it seemed that anything could be absored. The quite respectable attendance was certainly absorbed. Quite magic, really.

For some of us who first heard ‘free improvisation’ on ‘free jazz’ albums, and liked it, this kind of performance was sort of a part of jazz. For some fans it was definitely not, and for some who vehemently left jazz behind it was not jazz either. I remember Rick Rue approaching me to say that, ‘Chris Abrahams is really getting away from that jazz thing’, maybe four years after Chris had made this intention clear. I couldn’t believe that Rick (no idea what Chris may have been thinking) was still concerned in some weird way about jazz. Love it or hate it, you may say, jazz has certainly drawn obsessives into its orbit.

Ursel Schlicht seemed quite free of such neuroses. She played an unambiguously jazz-styled piece she had composed years ago, without apology.

I have not mentioned Schlicht’s actual playing, nor Sandy Evans’s, because the music was so whole, or organic if you like. When playing in a fast swing, or at least implied swing, Schlicht produced running parallel lines that reminded me obliquely of Lennie Tristano. Cecil Taylor-like dissonance was certainly employed, but there was no sensationalism. You could once more say her playing was organic.

Sandy’s sound, sharpness of execution and ideas were just wonderful. Anyone who knows how she is playing right now will assume that.