Squall
The Sound Lounge
July 3
French horn player and composer Stephen Morley is perhaps the first to present the same band in the jazz-oriented SIMA programme and in that of the New Music Network. I can think of others who could also bridge these areas, but Squall is certainly a most suitable ensemble.
The recital started earlier than I had expected, so I arrived at the end of a piece and the programme began for me with Paul Cutlan’s arrangement of renowned British bassist Dave Holland’s Four Winds. This theme is undoubtedly jazz (or most would hear it as such), but with a European feeling that is Holland’s own; and Holland’s style is one of several that came to define the ECM record label. It swings in a subtle yet exultant way. The hints of a kind of blithe bucolic fanfare (or, rhythmically, even the beginning of a rondo) recur in the brief tune; skirling, beating with a soft call of awakening and some hint of the barley mow, and it is moved through a passage of mild, teetering complexity.
As with Holland’s famous version on the ECM album Conference of the Birds, the improvisations were free and often led to a clamour of loose contrapuntal interjections before dissolving instantly on repetitions of the theme. There was much bright, fractured detail and an idea from one horn was sometimes repeated in a lower register while the sharp bites and dying falls ran on above. It is my experience that mainstream listeners are sometimes perplexed by this kind of performance (though sometimes, to their own surprise, exhilarated), while free music advocates can dismiss a tyranny of rhythm and harmony. It fact it moved in and out of pulsed momentum-orientation and freedom, or as often played between the two, with bass, drums and piano providing both propulsion and free accents and textures.
I wondered how the New Music people would receive this.
They seemed to like it fine.
Original pieces that explored this general area were interspersed with those that were completely improvised by the ensemble – whose members are Morley, trumpeter Warwick Alder, Paul Cutlan playing alto saxophone and bass clarinet, double bassist Steve Elphick, pianist Alister Spence and drummer Toby Hall. The self-explanatory five-part Free Suite was an extended, largely arhythmic rest point, and it developed into the most compelling intersection of jazz and New Music. At times this was like contemporary chamber music. So felicitously were the strands of serene sound and the stinging, chattering interchanges woven that it could have been pre-composed. It was quite different and I think even better than the performance on the band’s eponymous CD. Some of the sounds have their source in modern classical music, and in the vocabularies of New Music, and some in the vast and rarely studied area of Free Jazz. Some are from so-called straight jazz, a tradition which itself introduced a range of colours and techniques that some classical composers admired but not classical music critics (rarely at any rate).
Effortless eclecticism – or natural synthesis more accurately – was displayed by all players. We will note in passing Steve Elphick’s use of staccato and droning bowed bass, which might have reminded some at times of a Bartok string quartet, and which led twice to plucked steps in a magnificent deep, dark undistorted tone. Pure tone and distorted sound perfectly integrated. Paul Cutlan’s bass clarinet also displayed these qualities, and as always the similarities and differences in the sonorities of these two instruments were wonderfully satisfying. We note also Stephen Morley’s use of classical horn sounds and those produced with semi-depressed valves and without the mouthpiece.
But the musician who always astounds in a context like this is trumpeter Warwick Alder , whose more usual habitat is bop and post-bop jazz, of which he is a master.
The more obviously rhythm-based pieces took on a new vitality in juxtaposition to the Free Suite. Morley played a glorious horn solo on his somewhat Eastern-inflected _Weave_, and somewhere along the line Alder played a trumpet solo of shining lyricism and passion. Alister Spence’s Metric Sheds (What say? Don’t ask) is based on the chords of George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm, which jazz musicians call “rhythm changes”. Take yourself back to Gershwin’s time and appreciate how ingenious and modern was the original. Spence made the changes ingenious and modern for today (with witty glances at the past). The tune jerks and jumps in a way that is somehow manic, gleeful and relaxed; but it resolves with a passage in which the horns pour forward irresistibly, like a big band in full cry.
This brought to the fore a particular sound and texture that is a love of mine. It is the combination of Spence’s piano, Elphick’s bass and Hall’s drums. The jazz drum kit – or indeed the rock kit – is a wondrous resource not always fully exploited. There are many ways of combining these instruments – “the rhythm section” – and that of Spence, Elphick and Hall is one of my favourites. I love the way it all rings and bangs!
A number of musicians in New Music began improvising through an enthusiasm for jazz. Some became alienated by certain purists and moved on; but recently some have enjoyed stepping back in jazz directions occasionally and finding that this most unusual tradition – where does it really fit in the spectrum of popular and classical musics? – still offers creative possibilities. A number of young jazz musicians have moved in both areas, choosing to ignore historic schisms. This is good, because it is all a very rich field.
I apologise that this review and that of the Aaron Goldberg Trio have appeared so late. I have had a heavy flu, during which only the Tour De France could engage my interest.