2×2, João Madeira / Bruno Parrinha (4DARECORD)
Waterproof? Annemarie Roelofs / Paul Landsiedel (Scatter Archive)
River Monsters, Derek Bailey / Tony Bevan (Scatter Archive)
Talking about his work, Portuguese bass player João Madeira has said ‘for me, music is all about musicians and genuine expression! It doesn’t matter the genre neither the instrument per se’. Listening to 2×2, his latest release with tenor sax player Bruno Parrinha, I know what he means: both musicians have an unselfconscious fluidity when it comes to genre. I’m reminded of Paul Klee’s – probably over-quoted – observation that ‘a drawing is simply a line going for a walk’. Both these musicians do something similar with their musical lines: yes, it’s rooted in free jazz, but what happens next flows unselfconsciously from what precedes it – there’s no conscious effort to ‘sound like’ anything. The end result is a spacious music that’s as at ease with shaping melodic lines as it is with sculpting noise. One of the great things about improvising with others is that, at its best, you get the feeling that you’re connecting with them on an intuitive level far more closely than you ever could with words. When you listen to Madeira and Parrinha playing together you get a real sense of this happening. They’ve been working together, I think, for around a decade which surely goes a long way to account for it.
Waterproof? owes its existence to the curiosity of German sound engineer Paul Landsiedel. Interested to see a new reservoir being built for the town of Oberursel, he visited it before it was filled and discovered it had a thirty second echo. Not wanting to miss the opportunity, he cleared it with the authorities to record there. He contacted one-time-Henry Cow trombonist, Annemarie Roelofs. She described what happened next: ‘We had the day of our lives. It was a place so surreal… All instruments were recorded one after another on Paul’s DAT recorder. Live overdubbing was impossible due to the echoing … I played tuba, trombone and voice separately with a metronome, without sound, just the light.’ The recordings languished in Roelofs’ archives for seven years before she dusted them down and released them as a CD album 2008. Karl Berger added a vibraphone contribution in the studio and Roelofs’ friend, Paul Depprich, added shakuhachi and shortwave radio. Depprich, as Roelofs’ father, had been, was an airline pilot. Roelofs’ father, Fekko Ant Eltjo Roelofs, had died in 1958, when his plane crashed into the Atlantic. Roelofs dedicated the album to his memory. Thanks to Scatter Archive, it’s now available in digital format.
Listening to the music with its spacious echo and knowing the story of Roelofs’ father, it’s impossible – if you know the piece – not to think of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic. In many ways, they’re very different, but there’s a definite overlap of mood. What Roelofs plays is not closely documented on the Bandcamp page, but she talks about – and you can hear her – playing Pachelbel and Bach. I also spotted some Prokofiev (from Peter and the Wolf), too. I’m sure there are more pieces to spot, if you know them.
Some albums are good, some very good. However, every now and again, you come across one that sidesteps such everyday estimations of quality. To achieve this, it’s not enough to press all the right musical buttons: the music has to grab the attention by the way it resonates with the world of the listener. Waterproof? certainly resonated with mine.
Derek Bailey passed away on Christmas Day, 2005. To mark the twentieth anniversary of his passing, Scatter Archive have released River Monsters, a compilation of recordings of duets with sax-player Tony Bevan, taken from Bevan’s personal archives. It’s hard to think of anything more appropriate, as Bailey made his last UK appearance with Tony Bevan’s Bruise in 2004 (Bailey spent his last years living in Barcelona).
Track 4 (‘undated cassette letter’), is a Bailey solo in which he reads the text of his letter to Bevan over the music. It’s a delight. It begins: ‘Thank you Mr B for letting me hear your cassette. I enjoyed it, but, as you notice, the saxophone is not my favourite instrument…’ To quote more would be a spoiler – suffice to say it’s a masterpiece of dry wit – although I will say that, later on, there’s a fleeting quote from Glenn Miller’s Moonlight Serenade.
As for the other tracks, the sort of music Bailey and Bevan make together is dense, intense and unrelenting, even when it finds a point of stasis. There are moments of lyricism, almost, but they’re few, fleeting and invariably – and expertly – compromised. Quick-fire chords, stabbing harmonics and flurries of notes from Bailey are matched by skronks and fragments from Bevan, building up into full-on frenzies of neutron-star density. Even on the odd occasion when the pace falls off, it’s as if to let up for even a moment would risk either one or both of them being banished from the Zone. And the whole is intensified by a real sense of common purpose: it’s as if both musicians were trying to achieve similar ends, only one found himself holding a guitar, the other a sax.
I don’t know where the title came from, but the music these two men make has a monstrous beauty to it, and it flows with the full-on intractability of a river.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
2×2: https://joaomadeira.bandcamp.com/album/2-x-2
Waterproof?:https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/waterproof
River Monsters:https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/river-monsters