clarino oscura, Inclusion Principle (Discus Music)
Muitos Pássaros, Bruno Trchmann / Morgane Carnet (Scatter Archive)
A New Awakening – Adventures in British Jazz 1966-1971, various artists
3-CD box set (Cherry Red Records)
clarino oscura is the second in a series of EPs being released this year by Martin Archer and Hervé Perez to celebrate twenty years of them making music together as the duo Inclusion Principle. They insist on billing them as EPs, but, if the two releases to date are anything to go by, they boast as much content as a lot of albums. There again, IP albums are nothing if not generous with their content, often coming in at well over forty-five minutes. EPs, then, by IP standards.
The music begins with morse code ‘x’s along with a string of ‘n’s and ‘g’s among other things. (I annoy myself, but I can never help trying to decode what’s going on when people use Morse code off short wave bands in music, as, as a radio ham, I have from time to time contributed to the goings-on there myself! Long live the magic). These gradually become submerged in a slow-moving, largely electronic soundscape, sometimes melodic, sometimes noise-based. The overall effect is evocative of something ill-defined but slightly discomforting. If somebody made a TV drama series based on J.G. Ballard short stories, these guys could do the music. Approaching eleven minutes in, the texture picks up a drum beat. Towards the end this drops away, to be replaced by a haunting shakuhachi melody.
Going right back to their eponymous first album (released in 2006 and still an engaging listen), there is something deeply original about the way Inclusion Principle put their music together. It’s as if two creative musicians have been let loose in a studio with a whole lot of resources they’d not heard used before and discovered all sorts of original, creative ways to deploy them (perhaps that’s where the name comes from: if something sounds interesting, or apt, it gets included). As I said, this is the second release in a series. I can’t wait for the third.
The first – the longest – track on Muitos Pássaros (‘Many Birds‘) was recorded at last year’s Festival de Música Criativa (CHIII) improvised music festival in Brazil. French sax-player Morgane Carnet had been invited to join the Brazil-based performer, Bruno Trchmnn. Carnet works across a range of genres, from pop to free jazz and has a particular interest in free improv. She has also collaborated, in the past, with poets, dancers and story-tellers. Trchmnn is an improvising musician who is interested in the structures and forms of popular music from around the world. Here, he’s playing two traditional Brazilian instruments, the rabeca (a fiddle) and the zabumba (a bass drum). I like the cut of his jib – writing about the rabeca in the album notes, he says: ‘For a few years I have been tuning it to a very rudimentary system of just intonation, based on 60hz (the electric hum). Fortunately, I ended up discovering that this frequency (a slightly out of tune B) works very well with saxophones’.
The title of the first track, ‘Depois da Chuva, Tudo Vazio’, translates as ‘after the rain, everything is empty.’ Emptiness is a theme that runs through Trchmnn’s album notes. He writes about how Brazil is so huge, it can be difficult, living there, to get your head round it. The performance took place at the Sala dos Toninhos in Campinas, a disused railway station which has been repurposed as a performing arts venue,. The acoustics are great, although there is a poignancy to this, a resonance with the theme of emptiness. (Brazil’s rail-network is virtually non-existent: what there is is primarily used for freight, although there are a few short-distance local passenger services). As Trchmnn puts it in his notes, somewhat poetically, ‘the combined sound of our instruments filled the entire space like a heavy rain.’
The music begins with a drone, a point of stasis. Carnet, though, using small diatonic groups of notes, tries to break away. Trchmnn’s drone shifts. It feels as if Carnet is always trying to pull the music away from the centre, Trchmnn always attempting to bring it back. Their performance evolves from this tension, although as it develops, the roles become less clear-cut. At times, there is a definite Middle Eastern feel to the sound-world, an interesting vibe, I’d say, to bring to an abandoned Brazilian railway station.
There is what one could almost call a ‘bonus track’, a seven-minute collage of performances from a previous festival. We’re not told much about it, but, just like the more substantial first track, it’s a great listen.
The title of the triple CD, A New Awakening – Adventures in British Jazz 1966-1971 might mislead some. Just so we’re clear, it’s not an exploration of how the experiments of the likes of Albert Ayler and John Coltrane influenced British musicians: rather, it sets out to document the influence of jazz on British rock music during that period. As Duncan Heining puts it in the notes that come with it, it ‘tells the story of how rock and jazz connected and made radical new sounds together’. What you consider ‘radical new sounds’ to be probably depends on how you first interpreted the title of the set, but what we have, certainly, is an overview of a benign collision between two ways of making music.
When making a list, as soon as you define criteria, you just know things you might want to see in it are going to get left out. Where, for example, is Jimi Hendrix? Perhaps he ought to be considered to be more blues- than jazz-influenced. On the other hand, he was interested in the work of jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery and owed a debt to Coltrane. His absence from these CDs has something of an elephant in the room feel to it. (It would’ve been nice to see, say, ‘Rainy Day, Dream Away’). Then there’s the things that find there way in. Joe Harriott’s ground-breaking, truly adventurous experimental work has been overlooked: what we get, instead, is his later, indo-jazz fusion work, which is less well thought-of by many, although, I guess, if you’re creating an overview of the way two styles connect, the clue here is in the word ‘fusion’. There again, there are other tracks here which may be by jazz musicians who’ve influenced rock but which, as tracks, have very little or no connection to rock. And for all the big band-feel to the backing, Georgie Fame’s ‘No Thanks’ owes at least as much to The Doors (whose ‘Come On Baby Light My Fire’ came out three months before it) as it does to jazz. The perils of making playlists.
Nevertheless, there are some great, well-chosen tracks and artists here, too. Davy Graham (the guy credited with the popularisation of DADGAD tuning) makes the cut, with ‘Watermelon Man’. Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll are well-represented as are Graham Collier, the Dankworths, Tubby Hayes, Manfred Mann and If. Don Rendell gets a look-in, with ‘One Green Eye’. Then there’s John McLaughlin’s ‘Binky’s Beam’ (a tribute to jazz bassist Binky McKenzie). It’s great to see the New Jazz Orchestra included (‘Angle’), an ensemble which operated through most of the 1960s and which involved a swathe of leading London jazz musicians who were around the the time. Wynder K. Frog’s ‘Harpsichord Shuffle’ just had to be in there, as did post-psych band Jasper’s ‘The Beard’.
A New Awakening should appeal to people for a lot of different reasons. If, like me, you have an old CD player in your kitchen, say, and are always on the look-out for background music for whatever you do in there, you might find it’s just the thing (me, I’ve been cooking to old Sun Ra albums for a while now and am on the lookout for something new). However, more seriously, if you’re interested in the music of the period, it’s not only a great listen but a good starting point for searching the internet for artists you might’ve overlooked. The album notes that come with it are well-written and informative, too: a pithy, mini-encyclopedia of British jazz in the 1960s.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
clarino oscura:
https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/clarino-oscura-9011dl-2025
Muitos Pássaros:
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/muitos-p-ssaros