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Improvisation

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Egyptian Music

Improvisation Inside a Twelve-Piece Machine

Maurice Louca’s Elephantine was recorded in Stockholm with a twelve-piece ensemble containing two percussionists, bass, vibraphone, saxophones, bass flute, tuba, clarinets, voice, oud, violin and Louca himself on guitar and piano. Released in 2019, the record moves between written composition and improvisation while drawing musicians from Egypt, Iraq and several European countries into one ensemble.

That line between composition and improvisation interests me.

With twelve players, complete freedom could easily become chaos. Write everything down, and the individual personalities might disappear. Louca seems interested in the unstable area between those extremes, where enough structure exists for a large ensemble to move together but enough space remains for musicians to change what happens inside it.

Electronic production has a similar problem. A sequencer can organise almost everything with absolute precision, but precision is not automatically life.

Sometimes the most interesting musical system is not the one with the most control. It is the one that controls exactly enough.

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Australian Music

Three Musicians Without a Map

The Necks consist of Chris Abrahams on piano, Lloyd Swanton on bass and Tony Buck on drums. That sounds like one of the most conventional line-ups in jazz. What happens when they play is much harder to categorise.

Their live performances are built through long-form improvisation. The musicians do not begin by performing a predetermined composition. A small figure may appear, repeat and slowly attract other sounds. Rhythm can settle into something almost hypnotic, then change so gradually that it becomes difficult to identify the exact moment when one musical state became another.

What I find remarkable is the trust required.

In a conventional arrangement, structure tells each musician where everyone should be. Here the structure has to be discovered while the music is already happening.

That changes repetition too. A repeated piano figure is never simply looping because bass and percussion continually alter the context around it. The same notes can slowly acquire another meaning without changing themselves.

A sequencer can repeat something indefinitely.

Three musicians listening closely can make repetition behave like evolution.

Press Kit

#TheNecks #Improvisation #AustralianMusic #ExperimentalJazz

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