City Halls, Glasgow
Saturday February 22
Four stars
The idea of free
improvised music appearing as part of a BBC SSO programme would have
been unthinkable a decade ago except as a passing novelty. Such has
been the landscape-changing effect of left-leaning music festivals in
Scotland, from Free RadiCCAls and Le Weekend through to Instal, Kill
Your Timid Notion, Dialogues, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra's GIOfest
and the most recent additions of Counterflows, Sonica and Tectonics,
that it would seem remiss of longer standing institutions not to
embrace them.
So it was with this
thrilling bill of works that attracted an audience perhaps more used
to seeing and hearing such veterans of experimental music as
guitarist Frith, trombonist and electronicist Lewis and saxophonist
Mitchell in the low level confines of arts labs and other intimate
off-radar gatherings. Yet, despite their avant-garde roots, all three
men are major composers in their own right on scales great and small,
and can more than carry their own in more formal environments than
what the audience at least might associate them with.
Nowhere was this more
evident than in NONAAH, a piece originally composed by Art Ensemble
of Chicago co-founder Mitchell for solo alto saxophone in 1972. Over
the last forty-odd years the piece has been heard in an
ever-expanding variety of quartets and trios before receiving its
world premiere as a fully orchestrated work here as part of a
programme being recorded for BBC Radio 3's Hear and Now strand.
Possibly the most sophisticated contribution of the night, NONAAH
missed its composer's presence onstage, its sumptuous ensemble
arrangement made for an appealing if all-consuming alternative.
Following this, after
carrying his own amp onstage, Frith cut an initially understated dash
as he sat barefoot at the front of the stage, guitar clutched to
accompany a version of his 2003 piece, The Right Angel, receiving its
Scottish premiere. While the orchestra delivered it with a
wide-screen urgency off-set by piano, trumpet and flute underscores,
Frith thwacked his fretboard with shoe-brushes and paint-brushes with
a practised expertise that took things beyond novelty to an abruptly
truncated racket
Conductor Ilan Volkov's
between-set interviews with Mitchell and Lewis were charmingly chummy
affairs, with Lewis coming across as a donnish and avuncular figure,
who, when asked about his move into electronics, quoted fellow composer Anthony Braxton's maxim that “I want to stay interested in what I'm
doing” before Lewis described himself – and Volkov – as “a
cheerful post-genre radical. This was personified by Memex, a
retro-future evocation of artificial intelligence expressed through
the pushes and pulls of an altogether more physical means of
expression.
For all it's appeal, it
is nothing to the preceding improvisation by Frith, Lewis and
Mitchell performing together for a short set which one suspects was
the main reason many people turned out for the event. While Frith
brought his full box of tricks to bear, with even a mischievous
melody or two to play with, Mitchell squawked and honked his way
into overdrive. Seated behind his laptop, Lewis looked positively
serene as he lobbed sounds through the air while clutching his muted,
lavender-coloured trombone. As the trio erupted and cut across each
other, it sounded like an all too brief riot was going on before ever
so gently fading out of view.
The List, February 2014
ends
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