Freedom of the City 2007
The Evan Parker, Eddie Prévost, Martin Davidson curated Freedom of the City festival returned this bank holiday weekend for two days of ‘radical and improvised music’, at the Red Rose, Finsbury Park, London. Two days, two sessions a-piece, featuring twelve groups and many musicians, drawn mostly from London and the UK, but with a couple of international visitors… A great way to spend a slightly miserable bank holiday weekend, but also great to see condensed, perhaps, a good cross-section of ‘the scene’ and to catch up with a few names and faces that I’d only heard about or seen on record. A live-primer, of sorts…
There were so many groups coming thick and fast that some aspects have fallen out of my head already… So this won’t be a very intelligent discussion, but I’ll try and cover what I can remember coherently! I’ve stuck a few of my more interesting photos here… Didn’t get too many that were decent one way or the other (and most of them are from Monday, so scroll down…), but the rest I’ll put up on flickr at some point. This is also quite a long post, so I’ll reserve the right to continually fiddle, and reorganise things at a later date.
Sunday Afternoon
A slightly varied first day, kicked-off by the outstanding trio of Eddie Prévost (percussion), Joe Williamson (double bass) and Alan Wilkinson (saxes). Only Wilkinson had I seen before; he usually plays pretty intense and free, but this trio was actually pretty jazzy. I think the main jazz pulse came from Prévost, whose drums were pretty swinging, in the more conventional sense. Joe Williamson played some nice jazz-like lines, while Wilkinson sort of sprawled around fierily, on top… Didn’t plump for their trio CD, but got a Wilkinson/Prévost duo recording, although I haven’t listened to it yet (getting access to the large Psi/Emanem/Matchless/etc record stall at the back of the room was a worthwhile aspect of the festival itself!).
The second act was a largish group, Unit, which, from their ages, looked like it was probably something made up of music students. It was ok, kind-of overlapping melodies, but would have been better with a bit of structural editing; it got a bit too repetitive and could have been cut down a bit in length…
The afternoon finished with some nice textural stuff from a trio of Matt Milton (myspace), Bechir Saadé (his site) and Matt Davis. The instruments were all used ‘unconventionally’: Saadé making scattering, flattering, breathy sounds on bass clarinet; Matt Milton scratched away on a violin, initially using it as a sounding board for some bowed sticks, etc… Matt Davis spent the first half of the piece spending as much time as possible blowing a trumpet whilst not actually producing the sound of anything approaching that of a trumpet, and for the latter parts switched to laptop effects, perhaps processing and bringing back things that he had played earlier (that’s what it sounded like, but it was hard to tell…). It had a nice delicate, natural-sounding rhythm; essentially a collection of pure sounds, really. Dry and slow-paced, but it came together very well, with the trumpet-to-laptop switch breaking the piece up nicely, preventing it from burning out…
Sunday Evening
The evening was filled by outings of the London, and Glasgow, Improvisors Orchestras (separately, and together). On my return at 8 o’clock, The Red Rose was straining to fit in all of the LIO; I didn’t count but there were probably about 25–30 musicians crammed onto the stage, spilling out into the audience. It was a pretty monumental and impressive sight; after his introductions Martin Davidson almost ran from the stage… Itself, the music seemed to start off like an explosion, everyone playing at once, as a massive ensemble but one without real centre… After a while, Philipp Wachsmann put down his violin and emerged to the front, baton in hand, and proceded to conduct the form, by drawing in (or pushing out) various sections of the group (strings, horns, percussion), or by indicating individual players; this was repeated with another three ‘guest’ conductors who appeared, in turn, at various points throughout the performance (after Wachsmann: Alison Blunt, Ashley Wales, and Terry Day). This created some variation in the piece, but there was no real obvious structure; Ashley Wales tried to bring in some patterning to his conduction, but it ended up sounding a bit obvious and twee. Generally, it was just taking a massive maelstrom, and then making parts of it go away, or play louder; the conducted fragmentation didn’t really create anything specifically new, just altered the dynamics a bit… Having said that, Terry Day‘s contribution revolved around a sort-of anti-poem, Day crying out line after line, bringing the orchestra up into a sort of call-and-response. A lot of the musicians suddenly seemed to start beaming with suppresed laughter; maybe they were getting ‘into’ it, or maybe it was just the more formalised structure, but it seemed to come together to make something at that point. Hmm…
Some reviews (here and here) of their recorded works seem to draw a common observation: that it might be better with a bit more formalised composition, rather than kicking off a melee, and then trying to draw out structure afterwards; some alternative to trying to rely on self-organisation in a fist-fight. Maybe it was just too big? The Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra (their site and myspace) was a much smaller group; 14 people (see the photo above) and, then, there was less of the massive duplication of instruments found in the LIO. They played two pieces that were said to have been composed (I think ‘organised’ might have been the exact term used), whatever that meant in reality… And they sounded pretty good! Like something you’d hear on Hear and Now (that’s a bit vague, isn’t it?). They finished their own set with a free improvisation that started off pretty wicked, but I think soon decended into slight chaos. But having individual players rather than the sections of instruments made it a little more transparent, and easy to follow, than the behemoth that was the L.I.O.. The third part to that evening was supposed to see parts of LIO and GIO come together, but I had to leave early, to wrangle with engineering works on the Portsmouth line, so I missed that and can’t say what happened. I’d be interested to listen to some more of LIO on record—to see if I was just overwhelmed by the imposing live-presence—or give them another try live… (Supposedly, they play at the Red Rose on the first Sunday of every (?) month). Anyway, it’s pretty fantastic that such a group (as the LIO) exists, and it is a pretty incredible experience, but I remain to be convinced that it’s not just the musicians who are actually getting anything out of it; for this night, and for this man in the audience, I think Scotland won…
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