A warm climate has returned to Australian improvised music that reminds me of the heady era in which Mark Simmonds, Chris Abrahams, Miroslav Bukovsky, Sandy Evans, Roger Frampton, Paul Grabowsky, Ian Chaplin and many others bloomed. They bloomed exotically and in hard, spined and thorned avant-garde directions. The music went everywhere. They were inspired by large underground movements in American and European jazz and improvised music generally to expand the vocabularies, colours and textures of the music that had drawn them and which many of them studied in institutional courses that did not exist for previous generations of jazz musicians. While imparting much knowledge and discipline, those courses also presented an established order to be reacted against.
When we are tempted to call Ornete Coleman the last of the great jazz innovators, we forget that not only Sonny Rolllins but also Cecil Taylor and Pharoah Sanders are still playing. They were not part of jazz course canons. Without throwing the term great innovator about too freely, we should also include such significant and intriguing figures as Oliver Lake, Anthony Braxton, Archie Shepp, and indeed Wadada Leo Smith, who will be here for a series of concerts from March 25-30. He will lead a band of internationals and young locals, and it is a very good time to do so.
Today we have many young musicians of brilliance who are steeped in the jazz traditions but also reach into areas that are related to jazz only through a complex of cross influences. New Music has dropped much of its haughty upper middle class attitude to jazz, and jazz exclusivity is confined to factions we can afford to view with indulgence. So vital and various is the movement to which I have alluded that we can easily forget some its intriguing figures. Sometimes young musicians rediscover them for us. Wadada is one such. That is the climate.
I write, having heard over the past few weeks Ornette Coleman; a beautifully weighted trio (Roil: Chris Abrahams, Mike Majkowski and James Waples) , full of delicacy, mesmerising accumulations of detail and engulfing power, an overwhelming performance at the Sydney Opera House Studio by Simon Barker, Carl Dewhurst, Phil Slater and Matt McMahon played with Korean Pansori singer Bae il Tong and drummer Kim Dong-Wan, and most recently a performance at the Sound Lounge by Gest8, in which the soundscape was expanded by Satsuki Odamura’s koto and Greg White’s electronics. Playing behind me is a Leo Smith ECM album.
Along with the force and excitement of the New Thing, to use an ancient term for the music I have referred to, are limpid fields of tranquility in which the pulse is so slow the music seems spellbound. This is something I have heard in some of our current local music. It differs somewhat from the floating sensations evident in, for instance, Miles Davis. If we think of such albums as Nefertiti and The Sorceror, we might feel that the languor that is played so intriguingly against fierce energy is sometimes taken into something we might hear as ennui, knowingness or world weariness: a dry spice of sophistication we might associate with, for instance Fellini (La Dolce Vita is probably the best example). The kind of sophistication that might have attracted us in youth and which we have possibly outgrown.
Not that the music has lost its appeal. Far from it. Art that catches with such felicity the ethos of a time never loses its appeal. But that sweet and sour blending – a specifically jazz feeling that may repel some and intrigue others – gave way to a pure tranquility in the music of the New Thing with its spiritual concerns and black power connotations. The Leo Smith album I am listening to is called Divine Love. Yes, it was that time.
Leo Smith plays with a beautiful, clear and often tranquil trumpet tone, interspersed with brittle bright skittering and stabbing. The vibraphone is used in the field of sound as it might be in a classical music. This is a classical music. In my review on this site of the last Jazz Now Festival I mentioned that Dale Gorfinkel’s vibraphone and Nick Garbett’s trumpet reminded me how much I loved this combination, and I cited Shorty Rogers and Teddy Charles (Theodore Cohen) and Booker Little and Cohen. Gorfinkel will be playing here with Smith, as will Peter Farrar, who was also in the ensemble (Divine Dialects) that I heard at Jazz Now. Farrar, a very distinctive young saxophonist who has played with Mike Nock as well as in New Music contexts, is actually bringing Leo Smith out here. This is a remarkable thing. Farrar sought Smith out in America and was about to take lessons from him when circumstances forced him to move on.
The full ensemble, which will vary slightly in some states, is as follows: Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet, leader, composer; Yusuke Akai (from Brisbane), guitar; Peter Farrar (Sydney) saxophone; Dale Gorfinkel (Melbourne), vibraphone; Sam Dobson (Sydney), bass; Alex Masso (Sydney) drums; Cor Fuhler (Amsterdam), piano; Erkki Veltheim (Melbourne), violin. I think we can expect some utterly involving compositional improvisation, and no doubt some beautiful compositions. Not to mention some glorious trumpet tones. A further note: because the current music is in a constant state of expansion it is hard to imagine a great innovator emerging to change everything at a stroke. I do not hunger for one. The music is mutating all the time in a kind of punctuated evolution.
Smith, in case you have forgotten this important and unusual contributor, has played with many of the leading figures of contemporary music in America and Europe. On the Leo Smith album playing behind me are Charlie Haden, Lester Bowie, Kenny Wheeler and others. Smith has studied a variety of musc cultures (African, Japanese, Indonesian, European and American) and has developed a Jazz and world music theory, and a notation system to express this synthesis, which he calls Arkhrasmation. In the past he has also referred to rhythm-units and Ahkreanvention. These ideas are worth mentioning, not for their exotic terminology but because they signal a serious movement towards a different world of sonic/rhyhmic relationships. There is no doubt of this when the music is physically there in the air before you. I cannot overemphasise the importance of these concerts.
Dates
FRI, APRIL 25 Wollongong Conservatorium
SAT 26 Sound Lounge
SUN 27 Kings Cave, Linden, Blue Mountains
MON 28 Sydney Con (workshop)
TUES 29 Bennetts Lane, Melbourne
WED 30, NMIT, Melb (workshop).