At the beginning of this month Newvelle Records launched Newvelle Live, a weekly series of videos of live jazz performances. The project was conceived to provide “a novel way to support artists and institutions who are continuing the legacy of improvised music for a new generation.” A program of improvised jazz is launched every Friday of the month, and the Newvelle Live home page is set up for listeners to consider making a contribution to support the performers. Over the course of this month, twelve performers will each contribute to one of five Friday evening gigs. The total of all contributions (which is displayed on the Newvelle Live home page) will then be divided among those performers at the end of the month.
This afternoon I decided to check out the performance that was recorded this past Friday, which now has a YouTube Web page for viewing at any time. The performance, which was recorded at East Side Studios in New York, was a half-hour duo set bringing alto saxophonist Tim Berne together with Gregg Belisle-Chi on acoustic guitar. There is a certain irony in my having made this selection, since the last time I wrote about Berne, discussing the debut of his Snakeoil combo on the Intakt recording The Fantastic Mrs. 10, was only a couple of days before Mayor London N. Breed ordered that all public performances, events, and gatherings at the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center were cancelled in order to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
On that album Snakeoil was a quintet, rather than a duo; and the guitarist, Marc Ducret, was playing an electric, rather than acoustic, instrument. However, the album was produced by David Torn (who is also a guitarist); and it was probably not a coincidence that the first selection on Friday’s duo performance was dedicated to Torn (given the teasingly ambiguous title “DT’s”). I also found it interesting that none of the selections that followed were announced. After about 25 minutes Berne announced that he and Belisle-Chi had performed all the tunes they had prepared and would wind up the set with a free improvisation.
Tim Berne and Gregg Belisle-Chi explore free improvisation (screen shot from the video being discussed)
Truth be told (as they say), I am not quite sure just how many tunes preceded that improvisation. First impression listening proceeded along an almost smoothly continuous flow. To be sure, there were distinguishable shifts in the rhetorical framework, which included different approaches to interplay between saxophone and guitar. Nevertheless, there was a sense of journey across different performance strategies, both technical and rhetorical, that reminded me of my much earlier efforts to “parse” John Coltrane’s Ascension album.
The free improvisation, on the other hand, was a distinctively different beast. Berne seemed to lead by focusing on “extended techniques” yielding sonorities of breathing without vibrating the reed and the unconventional squeaks of remotely high harmonics. This then inspired Belisle-Chi to explore how his instrument could map its own territory of extended techniques. Some might argue that this half-hour set was more than mind could embrace; but, for my money, that is reason enough to revisit this recording a few more times!
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