Translated material
Utopia of unity
German Jazz September in Moscow
For the 20th anniversary of the reunification of Germany, the German Cultural Center named after Goethe (Goethe Institute) supported several jazz events in Moscow: two concerts at the Territory festival that returned to the capital from Perm, the opening of a musical season at the School of Dramatic Art, where, among other things, a new agency Improve presented two expensive projects with the participation of pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, a veteran of the European jazz avant-garde in the Old World - solo and in a trio. On the same days, the Dom center, at its own risk, brought the cult trio of the so-called psychedelic jazz Kammerflimmer Kollektief. The rather easily predictable new age of this trio from Karlsruhe, mixed with ambient electric guitar, almost jazz bass and Indian harmonium, especially appeals to lovers of post-rock sound mysticism like Angelo Badalamenti. But among professionals, however, it does not evoke much sympathy.Fortunately, this “German decade” (and at the same time the Improve cycle “Sound Measurement”) was opened by another trio, an international composition of free jazz classics: the already mentioned Berliner Alex von Schlippenbach, his compatriot from Aachen, drummer Paul Lowens and British saxophonist Evan (Evan) Parker.
Almost forty years ago, these three formed the core of the “team of the free jazz world”, assembled to perform Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity - “General Unity”. They remained together, the team continues to meet regularly under the brand name “Orchestra of Universal Unity”. The name easily caught on: in those “youth-countercultural” years, the term sounded not only and not so much as purely professional (after all, two dozen “free improvisers” from the Old and New Worlds), but rather in the spirit of left-wing radical utopia. Well, the word “global” has not yet acquired a modern political meaning.
The program of both concerts - Schlippenbach's trio and solo - was, however, by no means hippie-utopian. From the point of view of free jazz form, the trio’s program corresponded, imagine, to the “death of Boris” episode from the legendary film “The Cranes Are Flying,” which amazed Schlippenbach’s generation. The filmmakers themselves do not quite correctly call it a “zeit loop”: the sound of a shot (the sudden blow of Lovens’ bass drum), the whirl of a birch forest against the sky (an almost non-stop continuo of a pianist and drummer), memories and play of imagination in Boris’s fading consciousness - tenor saxophone Evan Parker, who once used the rare technique of “circular breathing”. Now many people have mastered this technique of seemingly stopping a moment, but few people use it for its intended purpose (pauses, during which the wind players take in air, return at least to physiological reality)... It is possible that for this concert the experts will be at the end of the year will vote as the best.
The next day, Schlippenbach gave a solo concert. Among the piano “fleetnesses” and “aphorisms” in the spirit of Prokofiev and early Schoenberg (Schlippenbach is a composition student of Schoenberg’s follower, the author of the monumental opera “Soldiers” by B.A. Zimmerman), as well as encores on rarely heard, conventionally jazz themes of the classic Thelonius Monk the pianist performed his famous composition “The Morlocks”. He recorded it 15 years ago with the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra with the participation of his wife, Japanese pianist Aki Takase, and played a lot before and after that: in particular, on the new disc of the same trio “Take Gold Where You Find It” (by the way, good advice for adherents of spontaneous improvisation) under the significant title “Three in One”.
The pianist depicted a large jazz orchestra by placing tin sheets on the strings of the piano, and their clanging recalled the main theme of at least one of the genres of jazz - boogie-woogie, the theme of the movement and stopping of a train.
The 32-year-old pianist Michael Wolny also performed at the decade, looking like a romantic first-year student, which emphasizes the difference in musical generations - the free-jazz avant-garde of Schlippenbach and the “post-postmodernism” of Wolny.
The solo piano in both classical and jazz (especially new) has always developed according to its own laws - sometimes even in the era of dance swing it was difficult to understand what it was: jazz or academic music. The academic environment finds, to put it mildly, “naive” those piano compositions/improvisations of jazzmen in which the ear does not catch the usual jazz, and at the same time does not follow Pushkin’s injunction to judge the artist according to his own laws. Both Schlippenbach and Wolny demonstrated that it was Eurojazz (primarily German) that mastered the “exclusion zone” between jazz and classical. Americans followed Eurojazz, which they don’t really remember when listening to, say, the chamber jazz of Chick Corea or Brad Mehldau.
In fact, it’s time to look for words to describe this “borderline” phenomenon. While they are not there, one can call Schlippenbach an expressionist like Alfred Schnittke, and Volny, accordingly, an impressionist in the spirit of Edison Denisov.
Moreover, both pianists are not alien to the German aesthetics of, say, Schoenberg. But if the veteran Schlippenbach from jazz chooses Monk's standards, then the young Volny chooses Björk's choirs from the album "Medulla". In Schlippenbach, despite all the delights, the free jazz piano works as a percussion instrument. In Volna, the typically jazz “small technique” in the center of the keyboard gives way to an almost Rachmaninovian scope and such processing of the extremely upper registers as Olivier Messiaen was forced to use in the historical “Quartet for the End of Time.”
Volna's program was built into a kind of cycle: a piano concert in three movements from his famous compositions. But with such an extensive spontaneous introduction (called “Moscow, September 20, 8 pm”), which gave the entire program the scale of a classical four-movement symphony. Connoisseurs, of course, noticed Volna’s Schubertian motifs (they had previously sounded in the “Schubertiad” suite). However, for Volna, Schubert was more likely to be the author of soundtracks for some exquisite thrillers like Dario Argento.
And finally, about drummer Gunther “Baby” Sommer from Dresden, who performed in Moscow for the first time. In 1979, Sommer released the first solo album in the history of all of Eastern Europe on a solo drum kit. The disc was released simultaneously by two companies: West German FMP and GDR Amiga. And therefore it was available in the USSR. Now Sommer has shown us a kind of autobiographical journey into the history of jazz: it included “Africa”, and “The Old Spaniard”, and retro jazz with drummer Armstrong - in the 1920s, Baby Dodds (“From him,” the maestro explained, - my nickname"), and the puzzling waltz of Max Roach, beloved, among other things, for the political pathos of the suite “Freedom Now” (We Insist: Freedom Now!).
The maestro, like many drummers, is an actor: he began by depicting the game with gestures in the air. Then he added a voice imitating drums and cymbals, and then played real drums, and managed to simultaneously hold a harmonica in his mouth. And he left the stage with the same gestures in reverse order.
The Goethe Institute decided to implement the idea of “universal unity” by inviting Moscow pianist Maral Yakshieva, known for her jazz improvisations, to the second part. Maral is a certified composer, she does not know jazz standards (in any sense), which, along with a prestigious education, conservatory piano training and exotic appearance, appeals to avant-garde jazzmen, especially African-Americans. For Maral, improvisation is a monologue, the rest must agree, although the main achievement of jazz is the equality of improvisers, parity, even when there is the first among equals (like Schlippenbach in his trio). For the first five minutes of the Russian-German duet, it seemed that “universal unity” had been achieved, but then the utopia turned into, if not dystopia, then realpolitik.