Free music with direction
Large ensembles defying genre labels and intent on collective improvisation are unusual but not entirely new; there’s a nearly 50-year history of them just in the East Village. But a new movement of improvised orchestration is upon us, exploring the balancing act at the heart of the art of jazz: How much collective organization vs. how much personal liberty bring the best results?
Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris and Karl Berger, who conduct Monday night workshops/performances in the East Village at Lucky Cheng’s and The Stone, respectively, are leaders of these investigations. Elliott Sharp, Greg Tate, Adam Rudolph and Walter Thompson are activists, too. Each takes a different approach to directing the dozen or two individualists under his baton, but everybody’s trying to guarantee freedom with structure toward wonderful ends.
The suite-like performances that have emerged from Berger’s eight-month stand at The Stone, for instance, have a warm, buoyant vibe issuing from brief folkloric-like motifs and the low-key, common-sense guidance he offers his players. They are mostly veteran musicians from avant rock and world music as well as jazz scenes, and can expand on simple themes paying utmost attention to dynamics and each other.
The collective’s intuited communication has attained a high point since weekly shows began last March and will be tested in a season finale incorporating iconoclastic sax soloist John Zorn, who comes to the project cold for concerts Dec. 5 at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Berger hopes to resume activities next spring in a location yet to be determined.
Morris imposes structure more strictly on his younger minions, whose strings and reeds instrumentation resembles that of a conventional chamber orchestra. There’s percussion but no jazz drum kit, saxophones or jazz brass—though Brandon Ross’ electric guitar does add edge. The players use no score and themselves come up with pitches, gestures and accents in response to Morris’ commands for long tones, repeats, shifts to softly articulated “ghost notes” and development.
The company has absorbed his system of hand gestures—as a body it can switch swiftly from lyricism to funk and back. Morris treats his orchestra as a tool for instant composition; when asked, “How did you write that?” he answers with pleasure, “I didn’t.”
These ensembles aren’t like jazz big bands (the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, the Mingus Big Band), which favor arrangements of fixed compositions that open for solo improvisations but don’t allow all hands to shape the music spontaneously. The present drive for more organically grown group expression may date from the Jazz Composers Orchestra, which was founded in 1965 and involved musicians associated with Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Carla Bley in daylong programs at the Public Theater. Public afternoon rehearsals preceded evening performances.
Berger was involved in the JCO, and in the mid ’70s he established his Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, propounding the “making music is easy” philosophy he professes today. Several participants in The Stone sessions attended his Woodstock school.
In the ’80s and ’90s, East Village composer-performers sought ways to organize large groups without dictating to them. Zorn came up with intricate games in which improvisers reacted to signals with the sounds they liked. Sharp designed works based on natural or mathematical forms, like the Fibonacci series, for his Orchestra Carbon, coming Dec. 8 to Roulette in Brooklyn.
Morris, a neighbor of Zorn and Sharp, unveiled his concept in “Conduction Number One: Current Trends in Racism in Modern America” at The Kitchen in Soho in 1985, and since then has introduced conduction to diverse ensembles around the world.
Morris is a direct influence on guitarist-writer Tate, whose moveable feast Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber gigs weekly on Sundays during December at the Boom Boom Room in Tribeca and at a benefit for the Jazz Foundation of America at Tammany Hall Dec. 7. Rudolph, the percussionist/composer/improviser whose multi-culti Go: Organic Orchestra was a hit at the old Roulette in Soho and came to Roulette-Brooklyn Nov. 21, once taught at Berger’s Creative Music Studio.
Thompson, who independently invented a hand gesture conducting system he calls “soundpainting,” was also at CMS in the ’70s. Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies present Thompson and Morris in a “Conversation with Composers” Nov. 30. Large-scale improvisation, “free” but with direction, may be a topic of the moment because, as with loosely knit but ostensibly cohesive political movements, everyone’s curious: “What’s next?”
Reach Howard Mandel at jazzmandel@gmail.com.
