Sacha Harlan, drums, Byron Wallen, trumpet, and Ben Harlen, bass clarinet.

The musical power of genre-fluidity

“I’ve heard it said before” began Max Baillie, “that composing is slow improvisation, and improvisation is fast composing.” A unique evening at Crown House, part of the St Leonards Concerts series, followed, five outstanding musicians in free fall but showing the opposite of what you might expect, a complete command of the extended possibilities of their instruments, writes Victoria Kingham.

One would have expected this evening to be trumpet-led: Byron Wallen is after all a jazz trumpeter of some celebrity on the jazz circuit who has been recording, touring, and teaching for 30 years. But though his trumpet lines were occasionally to the forefront and often very lyrical and spacious and reminiscent of mid-career Miles Davis, this was not the case. The fact is that all five of these were notable musicians across several genres.

Together, because all of them are boundary-resistant, they create something difficult to classify and even more difficult to evaluate, since evaluation implies a comparison and by necessity there cannot be one.

There’s been publicly performed freely improvised music in the jazz scene since the early 60s – it emerged as ‘Free Jazz’ in the States and most of the musicians who played it – Andrew Hill, Ornette, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Eric Dolphy, et al, were also politically radical, serious, hyper-intelligent. That movement went along broadly with the civil rights movement.

European and British audiences were receptive: saxophone players like Evan Parker (famed for his extended circular breathing) and the German trombone player Albert Mangelsdorff and guitarist David Bailey worked multiphonically, extending the possibilities of their instruments in terms of sheer variety of sounds produced.

Listening to these splendid players feeding lines and riffs off each other is akin to what it must have been like for art affiicionados when they first saw abstract art – what was it? Obviously not emotionally expressive portraits or sinuous animals, or the soulful despairing eyes of beautiful women or even exciting semi-industrial landscapes with trains. Quite suddenly, artists who had been painting vividly from life began to produce canvases that related only internally, asking, begging, for a whole different framework of appreciation.

Even today, abstract art work is often described in terms of its resemblance to natural forms – pattern and harmony arise from nature maybe – the most popular Jackson Pollocks for example are the ones that look more soothingly regular than the others, and much of his work has representative, concrete titles – The New Yorker, Seasons, Sleeping Effort. As humans we seem drawn to comparison with the world, natural or artificial, as we know it – what else is there after all?

So having strayed this far, I’d say that similarly, the second session of this concert, because it was a little more rhythmic, less atonal, more familiar-sounding, was enjoyed by this audience without reserve whereas the first session had elicited some bewilderment (and a couple of departures). The quintet had, in their rehearsal that afternoon, collectively written two new compositions and these were incorporated into the sessions, perhaps both generating different patterns of improvised sound.

It is often said that a band (any band) is only as good as its drummer. Award-winning drummer Sacha Harlan (nephew of the bass clarinettist, Ben Harlan), for someone so young, seems already to be at the top of his game, with an exceptional instrumental versatility and an extraordinary ear. This wasn’t, of course, the normal lead/rhythm section line-up at all, but at several points he turned the random sound patterns into something positive, driving, with an uplift.

Cellist Danny Keane and violinist Max Baillie worked mightily well together, providing often a bowed rhythm reminiscent of the music of Steve Reich (with whom Baillie has been on tour). Keane at one point introduced a synth and alternated acrobatically between that and his bowed or plucked cello, at another a lyrical phrase. Baillie produced occasional lines in an expressive minor, reminiscent of his Gypsy violin, Eastern European influences.

Ben Harlan produced marvellous sweetness of sound from that rather unwieldy instrument, the bass clarinet, and an impressive exploration of its range. Wallen’s trumpet sound is always mellow and he did once elegantly insert the first line of the Confederate tune Dixie several times, in ascending keys, just for fun. Both Wallen and Harlan at one stage used only their mouthpieces.

Improv sessions are not unknown – there’s a certain revival of free-form music at the moment, generated alongside the chaos of current global politics. But this was über-improv, made possible by the controlled, genre-fluid brilliance of all the players. “Welcoming of risk”, hoped Baillie. Fast composing? Lightning speed.

Also in: Music & Sound