ARCHITECTURE BY PHILLIP JOHNSTON * CHRIS ABRAHAMS & THE ROIL FAMILY * ROBERT FROST * ROSS OR MAYBE MARK HANNAFORD * COPE STREET * HOLLYWOOD * CANON CANCRIZAN * WHERE PRINCESS MARGARET?
Complacancies of the peignoir and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
- Wallace Stevens
The peignoir as I recall is a kind of lounging robe. In the bottle brush outside my sunny windows the rainbow lorikeet arrive at some speed, then eat, some upside down. Last night at the Sound Lounge we heard Phillip Johnston’s soundtrack for _ A Page Of Madness_, a 1926 silent movie classic by Teinosuke Kinugasa, long thought lost. Johnston had played this, with the film, in New York and again in Australia. We heard it, sans movie, with his Australian Page Of Madness band: Chris Abrahams, Lloyd Swanton, percussion virtuoso Daryl Pratt playing vibraphone and Johnston on soprano saxophone. A connoisseur’s film, imagined, and connoisseur’s music. Do we feel elitist? No, nor even privileged or lucky; just absorbed without self-reference. I would happily sit in an audience of blue rinsed ladies or a room full of tramps circled by flies or even chartered accountants and listen to this. So long as they listened too.
The music is intricately detailed and often there are the textures of serial music but only some of the method, in the glittering chatter, the relays and overlaps and the almost accidental-sounding brief pools of still harmony: bright soft ringing and mysterious depths, a beautifully judged concordance of timbres: piano, vibraphone, bass and soprano, and due to Lloyd’s manipulations the illusion of percussion. In the second section the soprano led a kind of oriental march.
And later the soprano started a walking jazz motion, the bass just touching on that yet evoking a world, while the piano and vibraphone scurried simultaneously, almost horizontally and light as fallen leaves, as if a wind had suddenly blown through the music. Later, a stately soprano melody was followed by abrupt turmoils and sudden silences against a measured, continuous vibraphone solo. And later a Latin dance – tango as I recall but I had stopped taking notes – was there for a bar or so then gone; then returned a couple of times and each time the room was dancing for just that moment.
The playing was superb. “This band,” Johnstone remarked to me afterward. “It just doesn’t get any better than that.” He meant that no one plays better, not that that was the best they could do, if you follow me. I don’t.
In the second set we heard some jazz pieces by Johnston, Steve Lacy and the obscure and wonderful pianist Herbie Nichols (he recorded for Blue Note at the same time as Thelonious Monk, who was just as little known himself at the time) and we heard a brilliant jazz piano solo from Abrahams. The deftness and subtlety of the syncopations, the development …
“He’s got about the swingingest touch of anyone,” said Johnston. “We’ll have to use subterfuge, coerce him somehow to come out and play some more jazz.”
Well, I’d prefer to leave to exactly what he wants to do, but jazz once in a blue moon would be fine by me.
Which brings me to a piano solo album and a trio disc that I recently acquired. They are Polar by Mark Hannaford (Extreme) and Meaning by Roil (Rufus): Abrahams, bassist Mike Majkowski and drummer James Waples.
The younger Hannaford should be known to listeners for his performances (some recorded superbly for the Extreme label in Melbourne) with Scott Tinkler (a repulsive man but strangely attractive), violinist John Rodgers, drummer Ken Edie and bassist Phillip Rex. His solo recital sounds more studied than any of that and certainly more studied than Abrahams’s work on the trio. The title of the first track reinforces that: Canon Cancrizan at the Unison in Inversion and Augmentation.
Well, we all know what a canon is. A round is a kind of canon. The theme begins and in a moment there begins an imitation of it by a second voice or hand so that different parts of it play together simultaneously. In a cancrizan canon the theme and its imitation begin simultaneously but the imitation is played backwards. Well, it doesn’t sound like that at first but, as the title affirms, the unison is played after a brief prelude.
It is intellectually most satisfying, and – like all music, even the most abstract – sensually evocative, but in a special, you might say rarified way. Improvisation plays a larger role in the following short and long pieces. Hannaford’s hands move with remarkable independence and precision and his strong emphatic touch makes the piano ring superbly. Obviously such music repays deep concentration, but it also delivers a bracing satisfaction and indeed exhilaration when treated as background. One discovers this by getting up and going into the kitchen to pour the coffee, or even through hearing the music from the loo. I believe that Scott Tinkler always listens from the loo for his own obscure reasons. One also discovers, by writing while listening as I am doing now (I hate to mention it but Tinkler can neither read nor write), that its contrapuntal developments keep pulling you away from the task in hand. A most stimulating if not necessarily productive see-saw procedure.
Abrahams is as intellectual as Hannaford in his way, and as accomplished, but his playing with Roil is freer, dynamically, which does not necessarily mean better or worse. Of course this is group interaction, which means that everything you play is subject to reflexive change at any moment, which does not mean that a long complex figure cannot be held against rapid changes in the playing of the other two. This music rarely becomes as violent as the group music Hannaford plays can, but a terrific force can emerge from within, like thick congestions of lava, with a swollen tongue of bowed bass at its centre.
And of course the music is often delicate, ethereal, on the edge of silence.
In the sustained crescendos Abraham’s piano zings in treble glissandi, moves a trill through a wavering arabesque, broadcasts with hailstone brightness, transmitting like a polytonal Morse code, yet somehow singing like a voice. This is thrilling stuff. Majkowski is an extraordinary young talent with great strength and beauty of tone and an ever-expanding range of textural resources. Those who have heard the excellent drumming of Waples over predetermined structures, jazz or otherwise, will hear his freely interactive work as a revelation.
The Roil disc will be launched at the Sound Lounge this Saturday night (Aug 1), and on the Friday beforehand, the wonderful Reaston/Kay Effect, who have already launched their disc, will perform.
APOLOGIES
I have been asked to write a book of essays and stories and it has taken up a lot of my time, but it is running now and I am relaxed so I will be able to write about some of the other discs I have been sent very soon. I note that The Cope Street Parade has just begun a regular Thursday night (7pm start) at the Paragon Hotel on top of McDonalds, Alfred St, Circular Quay and that the great Hotel Hollywood venue is happening on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep
- Robert Frost
I am, yet what I am none cares or knows
- John Clare
I often see that line attributed to me, but I cannot remember writing it. It must have risen from the living sea of waking dreams. Where there is neither sense of life nor joys no doubt. But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems. Stop! Stop! Someone is channeling through me. Could it be Scott Tinkler?