courtesy of Naxos of America
Yesterday this site wrote about the release of the debut album of the AUGE trio of pianist Aki Takase with Christian Weber on bass and Michael Griener on drums by the Zürich-based Intakt Records. That release coincided with another Intakt offering entitled Togetherness Music, the title of a six-movement composition by Alexander Hawkins, which escalates improvisation to an ensemble of sixteen musicians. The work originated with a commission from conductor Aaron Holloway-Nahum at the request of the Riot Ensemble, the string quintet of violinists Mandhira de Saram and Marie Schreer, violist Stephen Upshaw, cellist Louise McMonagle, and bassist Marianne Schofield. The request was for a work somewhat in the spirit of Alban Berg’s Kammerkonzert (chamber concerto) with soloists Hawkins on piano and Evan Parker on soprano saxophone performing with the Riot strings (rather than the thirteen winds of Berg’s concerto). In advance of his 40th birthday this coming May, Hawkins decided to record the results of this commission, adding eight additional performers to the mix: Rachel Musson (flute and tenor saxophone), Percy Pursglove (trumpet), James Arben (flute and bass clarinet), Neil Charles (bass), Mark Sanders (percussion), Matthew Wright (electronics), Benedict Taylor (viola), and Hannah Marshall (cello).
In the absence of any comprehensive liner notes, one can only hypothesize about the nature of the composition itself and the role of a conductor in its performance. Holloway-Nahum’s name does not appear on the Wikipedia page for Butch Morris and his conduction method (where the conductor is an improvising performer coequal with the instrumentalists (s)he is conducting). Nevertheless, there is a decidedly free spirit to the six tracks on this album, suggesting that Holloway-Nahum is doing far more than simply leading the ensemble through the score pages.
The resulting performance is as rich in invention as it is in the diversity of its instrumental sonorities. The titles of the individual movements range from delightfully playful (“Ecstatic Baobabs,” “Sea No Shore”) to the threshold of pretentiousness: “Indistinguishable From Magic” appropriates what is probably Arthur C. Clarke’s best known sentence: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” From a historical point of view, my own “first contact” with large-scale jamming came with from John Coltrane’s Ascension album; and I suspect that many readers would make the same assertion. Togetherness Music is more that a little more cerebral in nature, meaning that it may not go down particularly well with those insisting that “cerebral jazz” is an oxymoron. Nevertheless, however one chooses to classify the content of this new release, all six of its tracks will definitely reward any attentive listener willing to take them on their own terms.
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