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Area: “Mela di Odessa”

From the album Crac! (1975)

Active from 1972 to 1983, Area was a pioneering Italian group that creatively synthesized currents of American popular music such as jazz and funk with experimental tendencies in song form and sound production. Led by the Orphic incantations of vocalist Demetrio Stratos, Area featured a rotating cast of musicians anchored by the core group of Giulio Capiozzo (drums), Patrizio Fariselli (keyboards), Ares Tavolazzi (bass and trombone), and Paolo Tofano (guitar).

Crac! is Area’s third album, following Arbeit macht frei (1973) and Caution Radiation Area (1974). Although they disbanded within a few years of Stratos’ untimely death in 1979, the group’s early records earned them a spot on the legendary Nurse with Wound List, a hugely influential catechism of underground music circa 1980.

“Mela di Odessa” (The Apple of Odessa”) opens with a noisy burst of chirping electronic tones, atonal guitar noodling, and a raucous drum solo, leading into a driving jazz-rock texture topped by a piercing electric keyboard solo. Stratos’ trademark wordless vocalizations occasionally double the instrumental parts, leading through a frenzied labyrinth of improvised passagework. About halfway through, the mood changes quite suddenly, as the the drums and bass introduce a funky, off-kilter groove. Twittering electronic noise, Stratos’ spoken words, and brassy interjections—including a quotation of “Taps“—bring the track to a highly ambiguous close.

In his liner notes to the 1990 re-release on Cramps Records, Franco Bolelli writes: “To sink one’s teeth into the Area apple is to experience a taste which is neither the penitential taste of the avant-garde nor the tamed taste of the spectacle. Area has proven that the poetic and the experimental is not at all difficult and suffering. Indeed, it can be energetic and contagious.”

January 25, 2012, 9:39pm

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Henry Threadgill’s Zooid: “Do the Needful”

From the album Up Popped the Two Lips (2002)

Back in June, Ars Nova Workshop put on a fabulous festival called Great Black Music here in Philadelphia. The last concert of the bunch featured a piece for saxophone quartet called “Background” by the American composer, instrumentalist, and bandleader Henry Threadgill (b. Chicago, 1944). Performed with aplomb by the Collide Quartet, “Background” blasted me out my seat with blaring fusillades of quasi-vocal lamentations interspersed with precise, metronomic passages of demented machine music reminiscent of Iannis Xenakis’s contribution to the sax quartet genre, Xas. 

Threadgill, a chameleonlically versatile alumnus of the Chicago experimental jazz collective AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) has made music under the auspices of a variety of names and configurations over the last 40 years, including Air, The Henry Threadgill Sextet, and Very Very Circus. The most recent of these groups is a sextet entitled Zooid, comprising—along with Threadgill’s saxophone/flute—tuba, guitar, cello, drums, and bass.

Zooid’s music on Up Popped the Two Lips is angular, often atonal, and undeniably groovy. It’s as if the fleeting free-jazz passages in Mr. Bungle have been dilated to delicious, six-minute mini-symphonies. Too mercurial to have been composed, too damnably coherent to have been entirely improvised: how such a balance is struck—let alone maintained over the substantial length of Threadgill’s tracks—is a miracle of art that I strain to comprehend. 

July 09, 2011, 10:52am

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Guillermo Gregorio: “Tres”

From the album Degrees of Iconicity (2000)

Guillermo Gregorio has led two chronologically and stylistically distinct musical lives. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Gregorio got into jazz as a teenager.  He played cornet and clarinet before settling on alto sax. In 1958 Gregorio studied for several months with the composer Alberto Ginastera, who introduced the young musician to experimental tendencies in music such as Pierre Schaeffer, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and Anton Webern. Gregorio also had a strong interest in visual arts, and he studied architecture at Buenos Aires University from 1959 to 1966. Concurrently, in the mid-60s, he made his first experimental recordings, a number of pieces of “musique brut” a la Jean Dubuffet, empoying ready-to-hand objects and tape manipulation.  Gregorio called these pieces musicas caseras (homemade music). He also began exploring free improvisation, inspired in particular by such jazz pioneers as Lennie Tristano and Ornette Coleman. In 1969, after attending a concert by Larry Austin, Gregorio and several cohorts founded the Fluxus-inspired Movimento Música Más, a free-form performance collective in which Gregorio was involved until 1972.  Música Más sought to bring experimental music into public spaces, staging musical events in places such as parks and city buses. (These early efforts are documented in the album Otra Musica: Tape Music, Fluxus, and Free Improvisation in Buenos Aires 1963-70.)

There was a hiatus in Gregorio’s musical career from 1973-1980.  In the 80s he cam into contact with the Austrian jazz musician Franz Koglmann, with whom he made his first commercial recordings.  Gregorio left Buenos Aires in 1986 and eventually ended up in Chicago (via Cologne) in 1991, where he has established himself with a number of different ensembles and released a series of distinctive records exploring an idiosyncratic brand of avant-jazz. Not surprisingly, given his background, Gregorio’s music bears a strong influence to 20th-century visual arts, particular the branches of Constructivism and Concrete Art. Gregorio’s titles have included allusions to artists such as Theo van Doesburg, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Alexander Rodchenko, as well as to the Argentinian abstract art movement known as MADI. Further, he has notated a number of his compositions in the form of graphic scores whose aesthetic bears a striking resemblance to the visual language of geometric and abstract art. (See examples below.) Gregorio places the aesthetics of his work firmly in this tradition, stating that “the primary function of an artwork, musical or visual, should be to appeal to and make an impact on the mind. I know that my aim will be labeled ‘cerebral.’ But I prefer that rather than talking about ‘self-expression.’ The illusion of rendering the ‘self’ is typical of the tendencies that mystify any contact with reality…. What I inherit from Constructive Art is the opposition to the Romantic aesthetics of pure intuition, inspiration, or the ‘mystery of creation’ and ultimately, to the pretension of placing oneself above historical reality.”

Like much of his music, “Tres” features the juxtaposition of free-flowing jazzlike melodies and blocks of relative stasis in which time is dilated by means of sustained tones, silence, and extended instrumental techniques. The form of the piece is derived from a geometrically-inspired manipulation of the notes of the first motif (played by the cello in the first bars). “Geometry is used as a structural force so as to bring creative imagination into an orderly system,” Gregorio writes. “Constructive artists have always understood that rational developments, based on mathematical or geometrical reasoning, may lead to results that border on the paradoxical and the unexpected.”

Examples of Gregorio’s graphic scores

February 20, 2011, 9:50am

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Miriodor: “Funambule” (“Tightrope Walker”)

From the album Jongleries Élastiques (1996)

Formed in Quebec City in 1980, Miriodor is a Canadian band that has been based for most of its existence in Montreal.  The group has undergone numerous personnel changes since its first album, Rencontres, released in 1986.  Pascal Globensky (keyboards, acoustic guitar) and Rémi Leclerc (drums) are the only two members to have participated in every Miriodor release.  In 2009, they finished their seventh album, entitled Avanti!.

Miriodor fuses jazz virtuosity and prog-rock ambitiousness with a certain playful and fantastic quality which I hope I will be forgiven for hearing as quintessentially French.  Their music has a polished, MIDI-fied sheen that may be a turnoff for those who didn’t grow up listening to video game music.

This should appeal to fans of previous Acousmata features Hellebore, Magma, and Univers Zero (for whom Miriodor recently opened at the Sonic Circuits festival in Washington DC).

November 04, 2010, 2:48pm

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Hellebore: “Film de ripratoria”

From the album Il y a des jours (1985)

How is it that we can imagine musics that we have never heard?  What begins to explain the phenomenon of ideal music, that premonition of a world of sound long before it is encountered?  Why this unmistakable feeling of déjà vu upon hearing certain music for the first time, as if we apprehend something inexplicably pre-existent, something that elicits both a prelapsarian delight in pure perception and an uncanny recognition of the product of some cosmic hypothesis: in a universe such as this, this music must exist.

The music of Hellebore approaches an ideal form that has long haunted my imagination, an ideal which I could not express in words, and even now eludes description.  For now it may suffice to call it a music of deadly playfulness.

Hellebore was a French quartet composed of Jean Cael (bass, synthesizer), Alain Casari (alto sax, clarinet, flute), Antoine Gindt (guitar, synthesizer), Daniel Koskowitz (drums, percussion), and Denis Tagu (piano, organ).  Il y a des jours (“There are those days”), recorded in 1983-84 and released in 1985, was their only album.  Produced in a run of just 1000 copies, the album is now something of a collector’s item among aficianados.  But through the magic of the internet and the devotion of an anonymous blogger (bless their hearts), it can be yours.

October 08, 2010, 8:50pm

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Anthony Braxton: “Open Aspect #4”

From the album Open Aspects (Duo) (1982)

In a prolific career in which he has collaborated with innumerable musicians and released over 100 recordings, Anthony Braxton has staked out a unique stylistic position between the post-bebop/free jazz tradition and the experimental and improvisatory approaches to music associated with the Euro-American avant-garde. His work is representative of the collapse of conventional boundaries of musical genre in the second half of the twentieth century, but it also testifies to the enduring power of these boundaries: avant-garde listeners are unlikely to encounter Braxton in standard texts or class syllabi, while many jazz musicians and aficionados disown his work as beyond the pale.

In addition to being a composer and multi-instrumentalist, Braxton is also an intrepid writer and theorist.  His understanding of his role in the musical macrosystem is expressed in the three categories of “tri-vibrational dynamics”: traditionalism, stylism, and restructuralism.  Traditionalism is based on the maintenance of old cultural forms, as exemplified by most museums and symphony orchestras.  Stylism is the attempt to “perfect” past experimental tendencies, making them palatable for mainstream cultural consumption.  (Braxton compares “stylists” to technocrats.)  Finally, restructuralism is the effort to fundamentally reshape and evolve the artistic medium.  Although Braxton aligns his own music with the last of these categories— “My music, my life’s work, will ultimately challenge the very foundations of Western value systems, that’s what’s dangerous about it”— he believes that a balance of all three is necessary for a well-ordered cultural ecosystem.

Open Aspects is a set of pieces in collaboration with composer Richard Teitelbaum, formerly of the free improvisation collective Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), with whom Braxton played briefly in 1970.  On this album, Braxton plays alto and sopranino saxophone, accompanied by Teitelbaum on Moog synthesizer and microcomputer.  All the pieces are completely improvised. In this example, the relationship between these two sound elements is ambivalent: while Braxton’s playing is undeniably in the foreground, Teitelbaum’s electronics provide a textural dimension that is at once supportive of the solo part and strangely indifferent to it.

September 03, 2010, 10:17am