thu 28/03/2024

Trouble Tune: Bass Clef, Geiom, London Improvisers Orchestra | reviews, news & interviews

Trouble Tune: Bass Clef, Geiom, London Improvisers Orchestra

Trouble Tune: Bass Clef, Geiom, London Improvisers Orchestra

Electronic-improv collaborations deftly avoid pitfalls

There are occasional days when the Royal Festival Hall really feels like the people's palace it was always meant to be – and yesterday, with its free concert of live improvisation mixed with dubstep and electronica in the RFH bar, was absolutely one of them. Rave kids, pensioners, parents with babes in arms and some particularly energetic school-age children all proved that given the right context music the border between “challenging” music and entertainment is more porous than some might like to believe.

And it was rather impressive how challenging the curators of the event were willing to make the music. In particular, two sets by Matt Yee-King with Swedish producer Click Nilson explored the brand new territory of “livecoding” - writing sound-generating computer programmes from scratch on giant screens – creating sounds and rhythms by turns so sparsely abstract and so dense with information that they tested even the sternest avant-gardists' definition of music. And to be sure, the crowd thinned during these sets; but the children present reacted with glee to the accumulations of clatters and honks, cartwheeling and rave-dancing across the floor, as they did also to massively amplified playbacks of minimalist works by Steve Reich and Terry Riley, made visual by a gigantic wide-screen strobing piano keyboard.

It wasn't just the children who responded to the main part of the concert, though. It was a brave move to bring together producers essentially of club music together with seven musicians from the London Improvisers Orchestra, given the inauspicious history that jazz / electronic dance collaborations have – but it worked, for a number of reasons. First, both producers – Kamal Joory aka Geiom and Ralph Cumbers aka Bass Clef – operate in and around dubstep, a genre which is extraordinary flexible in its rhythmic templates, and which thrives on wide open spaces in its structures, into which musicians can place themselves. Second, both Joory and Cumbers are flexible and innovatory even within the genre's standards and have a history of working with live instruments. But most importantly, it worked because the live musicians offered no quarter, forcing the electronic producers to meet them on their own terms.

Joory's set was first, and he warmed up with an evolving series of percussive beats at the tempo of house music – clearly inspired, like many of his recent tracks, by the current pirate radio staple sound of 'UK funky'. It was lacking in melody by his usual standards, but showed very much that he was operating live, as he darted between his electronic boxes, building patterns one upon another. When the Improvisers unceremoniously took the stage and began to play, however, he cut his sound back dramatically, the beat almost disappearing and only a regular video game-like chirrup and whirr remaining clearly audible. This sounded at first as if it could be disastrous: the Improvisers went in hard, building up a rich and glorious racket, and to begin with it felt like Joory's synthetic sounds, as so often when sequencers and improvisation collide, would be merely an unwelcome metronomic presence intruding on their controlled chaos.

Joory's appraoch, however, was thankfully far more subtle than that. What he was doing, as the Improvisers connected with one another and built a sound themselves, was holding his ground and finding his own space to occupy, so when he began to fade up his own rhythmic elements again – this time a rolling, tumbling beat of woody sounds – it locked perfectly into what was going on around him. From this point in, he was truly part of the ensemble, and what evolved was neither jazz/improv with electronic dance embellishments nor vice versa, but a triumphant sound all of its own. It is very, very rare indeed that I feel like I am hearing something without precedents, but as the improvisation built inexorably to a peak with Shabaka Hutchings and Jason Yarde's twin saxophones sounding like imperial horns atop it all then died away into a dazed afterglow, this truly felt like a group of musicians creating a new and very clear identity for themselves before our eyes.

A second improvisation began with an electro beat from Geiom, with space for more spatterings of synth melody from him; the musicians instinctively took the techno elements here and ran with them, Hutchings's morse code toots in particular sounding like they emerged from a funky machine rather than human breath. This too built to a climax, although a sharper, swifter one this time, exploding into a broken-up rain of sounds. A third piece was less successful, despite starting promisingly with the breathless ecstasies of rave/house music chords: when Joory's beat proper kicked in, the rhythms clashed and crashed and despite the best attempts of the players to make their melodies dance around them, it felt generally like a misfire. The finale, though, showed that a tough beat could work, Joory finally bringing the huge bass “whoomph” of dubstep into play, and the Improvisers responding in kind by showing the density of sound they could create without obstructing or obscuring his sounds. Rather than taking a linear course as before, this burst into several flavours of chaos, constantly searching for resolution then pulling into a new glorious disarray but eventually collapsing into sheer noise before ceasing suddenly and dramatically to a joyous response from the crowd.

Cumbers took an almost entirely contrasting approach to Joory. His initial solo pieces were structured songs rather than evolving dance tracks, with him playing trombone riffs and processed percussion instruments over the sequenced backing. And when the Improvisers joined him he had none of Joory's tentativeness but began combatively, giving them a loud and hefty UK funky beat that they had no choice but to align themselves to. As a result there was far less of the initial abstraction of the previous set, the tone here being set by BJ Cole's pedal steel guitar which glid over the beats, leading the saxes into a sense of airborne rapture. With this sense of submission to the beat, the musicians adopted dance music's tricks to make their own presence felt: replacing steady evolution of sound with sudden drops and switches, shifting into choppy and riff-based playing then back to gliding textural episodes.

Because the regularity and weight of Cumbers's beats pushed the players into much more of a jazz idiom, and because his beats and sounds had something of pre-rave electronics about them – something of the Blade Runner soundtrack, in fact – this set sounded rather more rooted in the familiar than what came before. Nonetheless the interactions between producer and musicians were as intricate, the climaxes were almost as intense, and when the regular beats ended the sense of the musicians being let off the leash was palpable as they entered a whirling frenzy before circling gently back earthwards and back into the groove.

The audience – by this time not only tightly packed into the auditorium area but leaning over the surrounding railings too – applauded spontaneously, warmly and regularly: it was clear that while neither clubbers, older jazz fans, cartwheeling children nor casually interested punters drawn in from the food fair outside or simply sheltering from the winter evening chill had the co-ordinates completely to process this music, this meant that they had to deal with it on its own terms. And on its own terms, it was just occasionally perplexing, but for the most part a glorious celebration of very much living musical forms. A final warm and subtly psychedelic DJ set by Bristol's Laurie "Appleblim" Osborne served to remind us of dubstep's spaciousness without the addition of instruments - and so of how many wide open possibilities still remain in the form.

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Absolutely on the money Joe - this was an amazing event, props to the musicians and the organisers. I had to pinch myself at times: a Sunday afternoon on the South Bank and I'm listening to dubstep? Thought the Geiom set with the improvisers was the pick of the day, his spacious percussive style seemed to give them a bigger canvas on which to work, with phenomenal results. I've posted a load of photos from this event on the review over on my website.

We are organising an improvised Jazz & Electronica event on the 20th June 2010 as part of a 24 hour jazz jam session in Buckhurst Hill, North London. From Midnight to 2am there will be a session hosted by the saxophonist and electronica artist Johnty Wilks. This is a jazz & electronic "chill out" jam, and a jazz jam focusing on ambient jazz, and electronica jazz ballads. Musicians and djs are welcome to particpate ,(need to book before hand) although places are limited. Proceeds are going to a cancer charity. Stay all night if you want to! For more information see: www.myspace.com/johntywilks

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