Intakt Releases New Fred Frith Duo Album

courtesy of Naxos of America

While English guitarist Fred Frith, a major figure in the avant-rock movement half a century ago, has become an equally significant figure in the Bay Area, where, hopefully, he is still teaching composition in the Music Department at Mills College, I fear that I have not kept up with his work as I have with other local “bleeding edge” figures. He has accumulated a modest discography with the Zürich-based Intakt Records, but this site has accounted for only two of those releases. The earlier of these caught my attention due to the F-bomb in its title. The second, like the first, was a trio album with percussionist Jordan Glenn and Jason Hoopes alternating between electric bass and double bass entitled Closer to the Ground.

Both of these play out adventurous improvisations in which unconventional sonorities tend to take precedence over themes or motifs. Each album is neatly divided into tracks, but whether or not there is an audible break separating a pair of successive tracks is often left to the listener to discern. It would not be outrageous to suggest that Frith and his trio partners went into the studio to jam, capturing everything on the recording. When it came to pressing the CD, Frith may then have decided where he wanted the breaks to be and what titles he wished to assign to the resulting tracks.

This may also be the case with his latest Intakt album, A Mountain Doesn’t Know It’s Tall. This is a duo recording, which he made with Ikue Mori, who specialized in real-time electronic synthesis controlled by laptop software. They had originally partnered to record music for a radio play. However, after finishing that project, on January 24, 2015 they spend an extra day in the studio to record their first duo album; and the fifteen tracks on A Mountain Doesn’t Know It’s Tall constitute the results. What is interesting is that Frith plays electric guitar on only two of those tracks, “Nothing to It” and “Now Here.” Quoting from the back cover of the album, on the remaining tracks he plays “Home-made instruments, various toys and objects.”

One gets the impression that the spontaneity of improvisation owes much to the spontaneity with which Frith selects his “instruments” and the ways in which he elicits sounds from them. It is almost as if each of his choices initiates a new dialogue with Mori, possibly challenging Mori to “discover the right response” through the prodigious scope of his synthesis software. Thus, if the overall album does “parse” into distinguishable tracks, it is because those tracks are distinguished by the sound-producing materials involved.

The advance material that Intakt provided for this recording describes the overall album as “playful, poetic, mysterious and open.” I would endorse that description. However, I would also point out that “playful” is the first of the adjectives. This is one of those offerings that serves up what I like to call “the dual semantics of ‘play.’” “Play” is the verb that describes how one performs on an instrument; but, on this duo album, it also sets the tone for the playful social dynamics of interaction that results in a listening experience that is as engaging for the listener as it probably was for the two performers.

A Second Fred Frith Trio Album from Intakt

courtesy of Naxos of America

About two weeks ago the Zürich-based Intakt Records released its second album of the Fred Frith Trio. Like the first album, it consists of nine tracks without any separating breaks. Unlike the first album, the title, Closer to the Ground, is much less provocative (although, as I observed at the time of the first album’s release, neither Amazon.com nor Google seemed to be “provoked” by his use of an adjective with an F-bomb as its stem).

Once again, the trio’s approach to improvisation tends to focus more on sonorities than on the playing-out of riffs on easily detected themes or motifs. Frith has been teasing fascinating sonorities out of his electric guitar for as long as I can remember, which, for me, dates back to the Eighties, by which time he had become well established in what the English were calling avant-rock. Basically, Frith appeared on my radar when I began to listen seriously to the imaginative work of the likes of Brian Eno and John Zorn.

For his new trio album Frith occasionally departs from his guitar in favor of an organ, whose primary function seems to be to introduce chord progressions that would not fit so clearly on guitar. Once again Jason Hoopes alternates between electric bass and double bass, and Jordan Glenn avails himself of an imaginative assortment of percussion instruments.

When I wrote about the first album, I tried to single out individual tracks as a “parsing” of the entire session. On Closer to the Ground I felt less inclined to do so. Indeed, I would seriously conjecture that the album began with a recording session at which the trio jammed for a little longer than 50 minutes. Tracks and titles came later. Indeed, I would also conjecture that track definitions were the result of the entire group listening to the full session and agreeing on where boundaries made the most sense.

As to the titles, I found myself reflecting on when I had interviewed the choreographer James Waring back when I was writing about dance for Boston After Dark. We were in a room with a table, and Waring asking to sit at one end of the table and write a list of ten questions. He then sat at the other end (where he could not see what I was doing) and wrote a list of ten answers! He then said that I just had to align the order of the answers with the order of the questions, and that would be the interview.

By way of a variation on that technique, I would conjecture that, once the trio had decided that there would be nine tracks, they came up with a list of nine titles (two of which happened to be in German). Each was written on a slip of paper, and all of those slips were tossed into a hat and shaken. They were then taken from the hat, one by one; and the order of their removal became the order of the track titles.

In other words all that really signifies is that this is an album “about” 50 minutes of free jazz improvisation. There is never any doubt that, over the course of those 50 minutes, all three players are aware of what they are doing and how it relates to what they are hearing from the other players. Whether or not there is any alignment between what the listening experiences makes of it all and what the performers were making of it while creating it is probably not an issue. The listener comes to these 50 minutes of music the same way a visitor to a gallery might come across a completed abstract sculpture or mobile. Personally, I see no reason to ask for anything more; and I shall be more than content to return to this “document of jamming” for future listening experiences.

The Lab to Host Major Evening of Improvisation

Once again The Lab has announced a significant event that deserves advance notice before it is due to show up in the weekly Bleeding Edge article. The program is entitled simply An Evening of Improvisation. However, the evening will bring together five participants, all of whom have strong reputations for their highly imaginative approaches to invention. To the best of my knowledge, the program will be a two-set evening with a duo in the first set and a trio in the second.

The duo set will be of particular interest because it will entail a visit to San Francisco by French bass player Joëlle Léandre. Léandre performed with the Ensemble InterContemporain back when it was still being led by its founder, Pierre Boulez. She championed new music in her recitals, and both John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi composed works for her. However, she has a long-standing interest in genre-independent free improvisation that dates back at least as far as 1983. For her visit to The Lab, she will be joined by saxophonist Philip Greenlief, whose adventurous approaches to improvisation have been performed at any number of venues here in San Francisco, including the Center for New Music.

Guitarist Fred Frith (right) playing with two of his colleagues, percussionist Nava Dunkelman (left) and violinist gabby fluke-mogul (center) (courtesy of The Lab)

The second set will feature English guitarist Fred Frith, who was a major figure in the avant-rock movement half a century ago. He continues to pursue adventurous approaches to making music and now teaches in the Music Department at Mills College, where he is Professor of Composition. He will be joined by two adventurous improvisers of the current generation, who often perform as a duo. They are violinist gabby fluke-mogul and percussionist Nava Dunkelman.

This concert will begin at 8 p.m. on Sunday, October 14. The Lab is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street, which is a short walk to the east from the corner of Mission Street. This is particularly good for those using public transportation, since that corner provides bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel as well as a BART station. Admission will be $15, and there will be no charge for for members. Seats may be reserved through a login Web page for members and a guest registration Web page for others. Doors will open at 7:30 p.m., and it is usually the case that a long line has accumulated before then.

Intakt Releases Another Frith Recording Session from Last Year

This past December this site wrote about Intakt Records’ release of a free jazz improvisation album with the provocative title Another Day in Fucking Paradise. The album was based on a recording session that took place in Oakland in January of 2016, where guitarist Fred Frith led a trio whose other members were bassist Jason Hoopes and percussionist Jordan Glenn. The album involved an uninterrupted session lasting about 50 minutes, which was then “parsed” into thirteen tracks.

Last month Intakt released You Are Here, the result of another Frith session from last year, this one taking place in November and involving only one other performer, wind player Hans Koch. This one runs about the same duration; but it consists of seven separate and well-defined pieces, whose respective durations run from about one and one-half minutes to about thirteen minutes. As the Editorial Reviews on the Amazon.com Web page observed, Frith and Koch have known about each other since the Nineties.

This was a time when Frith was taking a rather unique approach to working with graphic scores. His album Stone, Brick, Glass, Wood, Wire involved live performances from scores that were basically photographs; and the title of the album summarized the sources of those photographs. Koch contributed to five of those tracks, taken from a performance at the Kulturzentrum Dieselstrasse in Esslingen (Germany) in October of 1995. This was also the time when Koch led a trio with cellist Martin Schütz and percussionist Fredy Studer for the Intakt album Hardcore Chambermusic.

“Hardcore” is definitely not an appropriate adjective for You Are Here. This album offers a far more intimate listening experience as both of the performers explore the sonorous possibilities of their respective instruments. In Koch’s case this includes a wide variety of blowing techniques, which may explain why “spit” is included on the list of instruments he plays, the others being bass clarinet and both soprano and tenor saxophones. One might almost call this an album of exploratory conversations, where the duration of each track is basically a matter of how far the “topic of conversation” can be taken. This is an album whose tendencies toward quietude invite highly focused listening, and those willing to make that commitment will most likely find themselves highly rewarded.

Fred Frith Goes Back to Jazz Improvisation (in his own way) on his Latest Intakt Release

I feel a bit guilty for not having written more about Fred Frith. Checking my records, I see that the only time I wrote about him at length was when Other Minds released a digital download of a performance by his Normal duo with electro-acoustic artist Sudhanshu Tewari that had been recorded during Other Minds Festival 11 on February 25, 2005. In that article, which had appeared on my Examiner.com national site, I described Fred Frith as “the English rock guitarist,” which I fear was selling him unduly short, particularly in the context of the sorts of improvisations that he had cooked up with Tewari. Anything else I had previously written was simply a citation of a song he had contributed, first to the album On Cold Mountain: Songs on Poems of Gary Snyder and more recently for his participation in the They Would Have Been So Beautiful project produced by Paul Dresher and Amy X Neuburg.

However this past June Intakt released a new recording in which Frith went back to the basics of free jazz improvisation, leading a trio whose other members were Jason Hoopes, alternating between electric bass and double bass, and percussionist Jordan Glenn. The title of the album (which does not seem to have made any provocative waves with either Amazon.com or the Google search engine) is Another Day in Fucking Paradise; and, if all of the background and review pages about this album that I found through Google did not make a big deal out of the provocative adjective, than neither should I! The album consists of thirteen tracks without any separating breaks, suggesting that the entirety was captured a single improvisatory session. (Recording took place this past January in Oakland, California, engineered by Scott Evans.) The longest of these tracks, “Yard with Lunatics,” is about eleven and one-half minutes; and it is followed by the six-minute “Only Light and Shadow.” All of the other tracks are less than four and one-half minutes in duration; and three of them are less than two minutes. The overall impression is thus one of an adventurous exploration that can be “parsed” into a sequence of episodes, some of which entail more opportunities for improvisatory invention than others.

Frith’s technique in improvising around sonorities, rather than thematic or motivic “seeds,” reminded me, somewhat painfully, of just how short-sighted that “English rock guitarist” description was. Indeed, what is most compelling about this album is how few of those sonorities coming from any of the trio members amount to tropes with any familiarity whatsoever. (That includes some of Frith’s vocalizing, which may or may not have involved a text in Japanese.) The “Editorial Reviews” material on the Amazon Web page cites any number of familiar sources, including Pink Floyd, George Harrison, Muddy Waters, and Tony Williams’ Lifetime. Those who know any of those sources will probably recognize their connection; but, as is the case in botany, they are seeds that in no way can predict the nature of the plant that will grow from them.

This is an album for whose who like their free jazz improvisations out on the bleeding edge; and it is best appreciated as a session that fills the entire disc, rather than through isolated listening to individual tracks.