Roland Dahinden’s “Bird” on HAT HUT

This past October the Swiss HAT HUT label released one of its new albums, in contrast to the reissues that I have been following off and on over the course of this year. The new release consists entirely of a single composition, consisting of five movements, entitled Talking With Charlie: An Imaginary Talk with Charlie Parker. The composer is Roland Dahinden, who is also a trombonist specializing in innovative approaches to improvisation. While he was born in Switzerland, Dahinden’s serious training began in Austria at the Musikhochschule Graz, where he studied both trombone and composition. He then moved on to Florence, studying with Erich Kleinschuster and Georg Friedrich Haas at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole. He came to the United States as a graduate student at Wesleyan University, earning a Master of Arts degree through studies with Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier (both of whom would subsequently write compositions for him). He then earned his doctorate in England at the University of Birmingham, studying with Vic Hoyland.

Braxton and Lucier are only two of the many composers who have written for Dahinden. Other familiar names include John Cage, Joelle Léandre, Pauline Oliveros, Hans Otte, and Christian Wolff. However, Dahinden draws a clear distinction between his work as a trombonist playing the music of others, even when it involves improvisation or different approaches to indeterminacy, and his work as a composer. He has claimed, “One big difference is that when I compose, others are playing the music.” In that latter case, however, he may still serve as conductor, even if the number of performers is relatively small.

This would appear to be the case on this recent HAT HUT release. Gareth Davis leads a quartet in which he plays bass clarinet. This is a “low register” ensemble, whose other members are Koen Kaptijn on trombone, Dario Calderone on bass, and Peppe Garcia on percussion. Davis asked Dahinden to write something for his group; and “Talking with Charlie” was the result.

Back in 2009 I posted an article on this site entitled “Conversing with the Dead.” It had been inspired by Jeremy Denk having written a blog post about wanting to have a conversation with Leon Kirchner after Kirchner had died. I realized that I had experienced a similar situation regarding my first doctoral thesis advisor Gian-Carlo Rota, whom I would later drop in favor of Marvin Minsky. Rota may not have been interested in the research I wanted to pursue, but that did not prevent our having some highly engaging conversations (none of which had anything to do with my studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) after I had completed my thesis work.

Dahinden’s case, however, differs significantly from either Denk’s or my own. Dahinden was born in May of 1962, a little less than seven years after Charlie “Bird” Parker died. What Dahinden learned about Parker probably came from his exposure to Braxton and listening to recordings, and Braxton himself does not seem to have had any direct contact with Bird. It is thus a bit difficult to conceive of what sort of “imaginary talk” Dahinden had in mind.

In the liner notes of the recording, Andy Hamilton writes the following:

Talking With Charlie is a mixture of conventional and graphic notation – bebop-sounding phrases inspired by Parker are notated.

That makes for a pretty loose connection. Parker’s improvisations could venture off into some pretty remote places, many of which were unclassifiable. To call them “bebop-sounding” is simply to recognize Parker as a “founding father” of bebop practices. However, the phrases themselves are merely flesh. Anything Parker did that was captured on a recording is memorable for his sprit, rather than the flesh of the phrases themselves.

Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in the indeterminate nature of what Dahinden created and conducted and the inventiveness brought forth by the execution of Davis’ quartet. From a personal point of view, there is as much to draw my interest to this recording as there has been in the past in my approach to those Braxton recordings in my collection. As long as I do not waste any of my cerebral cycles trying to find a connection to Bird, I can take great pleasure in listening to this new recent recording.