Fire, Stephen Grew (Discus Music)
Black Box, Stefan Keune / Steve Noble / Dominic Lash (Scatter Archive)
Improvising musician Stephen Grew has been playing piano and keyboards for four decades. Over that time, he has evolved his own distinctive, atonal style of playing. He has worked – and still works – with many musicians from the free improvisation scene, but has focused particularly in the last ten years on solo playing. As he says, ‘my solo piano music … is made using large musical shapes, these shapes inhabit a longer time frame than the shorter phrases and musical gestures ordinarily associated with Free Improvisation.’
Discus Music have released three albums of Grew’s solo work, of which this, Fire, is the latest. On it, he plays the Lancaster University Steinway D piano. In the notes that go with it, he extols the virtues of the instrument, with good reason. It has a deep, resonant bass, and a clarity of tone in the high register that really brings out the detail in Grew’s more complex passages.
The music itself has a mercurial quality and an understated lyricism. The fact that it’s improvised immediately puts one in mind of jazz (especially in the faster passages), but it’s more helpful, I think, to listen to it – as far as possible – free of any association with a particular genre. Listening to it alongside conventionally-notated 20th century classical atonal piano music, I was immediately struck by the fluidity of Grew’s playing and how the demands of musical notation can restrict the ways we make music. Growing up in a musical tradition that tends to revolve around the conversion of dots on a page into sound – and, if not that, the creation of structures that mimic written music – it’s easy to forget that improvisation is music’s natural state. And that, in a way, is one way of describing what Grew makes: music in it’s natural state. It merely demands that we listen.
The recent Scatter Archive release, Black Box, sees sax player Stefan Keune playing together with regular collaborators Steve Noble (percussion) and Dominic Lash (bass). Regular, in this case, doesn’t mean frequent, although the fact that they do keep coming together suggests there’s a real chemistry between them. As Keune says, they meet ‘rarely, unfortunately, but whenever the opportunity arises; there is a great familiarity and security.’
The album consists of tracks from two sets, which the trio played at Black Box, a performance space in Münster, Germany, in 2024. Densely-packed, fast moving sections dissolve into solos. Fragmentary interjections from the others build into passages of intense ensemble-playing. A scratchy, staccato conversation can suddenly turn into three musicians pursuing fast moving, independent legato lines towards an imaginary conclusion. Some of the sparser, slow moving textures are strangely reminiscent of whale-song (I’m not suggesting there’s some crude attempt to create that impression going on: what resemblance there is, I’m sure, is purely coincidental). High points include the third track: although short, it packs a lot of rich, varied music into a few minutes. Another is the fourth, the main track taken from the second set. Spaced fragmentary ideas resist coalescence at first, gradually becoming more sustained. Lash dominates quietly. Three minutes in, the music starts moving but remains restrained, the bass still at the centre of it all. Five minutes in, it goes up another gear. By ten minutes in, the music has settled down to a more intimate conversation although – I’m not quite sure why – it always, still, seems to be about the double bass. Inevitably, the sax and drums drop away and we’re treated to a long, often haunting, bass solo from Lash before the conversation is resumed, with Keune and Noble now more to the fore, although, when it subsides, the last man standing is still Lash.
It’s easy to see what Keune meant when he talks of ‘familiarity and security’: more than once, in the more conversational passages, I found myself feeling as if I were listening to an intriguing alien language, perfectly understood by the participants, to be appreciated as music by the rest of us.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
Fire 192CD (2025): https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/fire-192cd-2025
Black Box: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/black-box
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