This review originally appeared at Green Man Review.
There’s a place where it all overlaps. Maybe it does more than overlap — it blends. I suspect that holds true of any human art form, at least conceptually. It’s easier to find examples in music, in my experience, which leads me to the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble’s The Moment’s Energy.
Evan Parker is known as a saxophonist and an important advocate of improvisation in music, which does not stop him from composing as well. However, the roles of composition versus improvisation become fairly murky here. The ensemble for this recording was composed of fourteen members playing a mix of acoustic instruments, live electronics, and sampling. (Yes, they were really “playing” the samples.)
The Moment’s Energy was commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and although it incorporates a couple of sections from the actual performance, the bulk was recorded the day before — all of which leads to the question of what constitutes “live” recording, particularly for music such as this. What happens is a blend of sound that makes it hard to figure out who exactly is doing what, what’s electronic and what’s acoustic, what’s an edit being replayed and what’s actually “live.”
Although Parker’s work is rooted to a large extent in free jazz, it goes beyond that. Listening, I’m reminded of some of the edgier examples of contemporary avant-garde art music — quiet interludes that recall Takemitsu’s November Steps, more intense passages that bring to mind the music of Penderecki or even Edgar Varése. The seven sections of the main offering build a rich, textural sound punctuated by solo passages that emphasize the colors of various instruments and the ways they combine — picking out Ko Ishikawa’s sho from Parker’s saxophone or Ned Rothenberg’s clarinets and shakuhachi is not necessarily that easy. Even Agusti Fernández’ piano and prepared piano are sometimes subsumed into the mix.
It’s really about sound, not instruments, even though the various sections tend to feature various soloists. I mean “sound” as a category, a set of wavelengths that usually carry tonal colors that mark for our ears the characteristics of different instruments. That’s not so important here, and I think that rests on the use of electronics. The live electronics have not been programmed to imitate anything else, and the samples come back altered, not necessarily beyond recognition, but to occupy a territory that is more abstract than that occupied by, say, a violin.
There’s a certain circularity in this work — this is not a particularly linear composition. There’s a lot of decision-making going on in the course of this performance which I think affects that, as the decisions by various performers feed into the next decisions made by other performers, all of which calls to mind the patterns one finds, for example, in the classic gamelan of Indonesia. (I’m not ascribing an influence, necessarily, just pointing out a parallel.) This marks a fundamental conceptual difference from the traditions of Western music, both art music and jazz, in which performers generally progress from point A to point B in more-or-less predictable ways. There’s nothing predictable here.
The disc closes with Incandescent Clouds, a piece strongly evocative of the music of Edgar Varese or Morton Subotnick from the 1960s or ’70s. As it happens, this piece was recorded “live” during the concert, and carries a distinctly different texture than most of The Moment’s Energy (with the exception of Part IV, which is also from the concert. I don’t know if that says anything or not).
I have to confess that my main engagement with this music is intellectual, which is not something I’m necessarily looking for. Is it important? Probably. Is it challenging? Most definitely. Is it enjoyable? Mmm — frankly, most of it, like the early serial minimalism of Riley, Reich and Glass, sets my teeth on edge. I suspect I would do better seeing it than only listening to it. (That happened with Philip Glass — I could watch the ensemble perform and be absolutely enthralled. When I listened to the recording of, say, The Photographer, I stood a good chance of breaking a tooth.) This is not to say that there are no sections with emotional appeal, because there are, but the main thrust seems to be head, not belly, which means The Moment’s Energy is not going to be on my current playlist anytime soon. But it is really worth knowing about, and I suspect those whose taste runs to esoteric jazz are going to be delighted.
(ECM Records, 2009) Personnel: Evan Parker, soprano saxophone; Peter Evans, trumpet, piccolo trumpet; Ko Ishikawa, sho; Ned Rothenberg, clarinet, bass clarinet, shakuhachi; Agusti Fernández, piano, prepared piano; Barry Guy, double bass; Paul Lytton, percussion, live electronics; Lawrence Casserley, signal processing instrument; Joel Ryan, sample and signal processing; Walter Prati, computer processing; Richard Barrett, live electronics; Paul Obermayer, live electronics; Marco Vecchi, sound projection.
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