Review: Eugene Chadbourne

Eugene Chadbourne
Drawing by Geoffrey Winston. All Rights Reserved

Eugene Chadbourne
(Café Oto, 3 November, 2011. review and drawing by Geoff Winston)

Eugene Chadbourne has played and recorded with many significant out-there jazz luminaries - among them, Derek Bailey, Han Bennink, Toshinori Kondo, Paul Lovens, Willem Breuker and John Zorn and more recently, Marc Ribot, Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone.

He collaborated notably with the pathologically eclectic Camper Van Beethoven, and has traced his disregard for boundaries back to the radio stations he listened to when he was growing up when "there was much less separation [of genres], and that's what I supposed musicians were supposed to do, was to go a sort of a journey ... no matter how weird it was ..." (from interview on Jazz on 3, November 2010).

The last time I saw him play he was in the company of ex-Zappa drummer, Jimmy Carl Black and accordionist, Ted Reichman, weaving a wonderfully subversive spell over the not yet so trendy Hoxton. At Café Oto he played solo. The only accompaniment to his voice was from his 5-string banjo and, occasionally, 6-string guitar. His large personality needed nothing else.

The two sets were marked out by Chadbourne's versatility, the poetry of his lyrics, his quirky humour and state-of-the-art political perspective. Much of the focus was on his latest album - 'Stop Snoring' - according to the booklet, recorded in November, but September is the date given on his Chadula site - and sold in gloriously hand-made packaging. His only prop was a large lectern, laden with a sheaf of battered scores, which he would rifle through between songs, accompanied by comic expressions of dismay.

Chadbourne is a great songwriter and a true banjo virtuoso. His inclination to experimentation draws on his love of traditional country and bluegrass. The way he can scoop up techniques and then have them resurface in unexpected guises is part of what made his performance so engaging.

His studied changes of pace allowed him to spin from introverted desperation to trenchant political comment. He dived in to intense bouts of improvisation, using fingers and elbow on the banjo's body, and mesmeric cascades of runs and strums, far from the formalities of conventional technique.

The power of the word is central to Chadbourne's craft. He has a poet's understanding of their potential for suggestion and allusion, and coaxes out imagery and narratives through unlikely, sometimes uncomfortable, juxtapositions. "Patience is abrasion, patience is corrosion, don't expect a magic potion...", from 'Patient One', early in the first set - what a relief to find a songwriter who doesn't succumb to cliché.

For Chadbourne, narrative and reflection are perhaps the key. Following the idiosyncratic, traditional "I'd Rather be a Mole in the Ground" ("A railroad man will kill you when he can, And drink up your blood like wine."), he tuned up as he deftly picked out a country blues, and launched into a favourite from his own songbook, 'The Old Piano' - "The old piano nobody can play ... the old tombstone covered with weeds, the old Torah nobody can read ... those old knees worn out from kneeling...", poignant metaphors for "love that's lost its feeling".

Chadbourne is also a master of the cover, and was equally at home with the magic and melancholy of Sandy Denny's 'Who knows Where the Time Goes' and a viscerally articulated version of Johnny Paycheck's 'Pardon Me, I've got Someone to Kill'. Mawkish sentimentality was never in contention.

His musing on the conservative underlying fear of NPR in 'National Propaganda Radio', "favourite target of the right wing", was just one of the political strands woven into his repertoire. The whimsical 'Theme of the Stargazers' was a gentle mix of surrealism and science fiction which cast a comment on the destructive forces of technology spreading to outer space. He bowed out on Merle Haggard's 'That's the news' ("politicians do a lot of talking, soldiers pay the dues"), with a final energetic foray on the banjo pulling together the threads he'd spun in a fascinating and entertaining evening.

cafeoto.co.uk

Review : Black Top

Orphy Robinson, Steve Williamson
Photo credit: Roger Thomas

Orphy Robinson, Steve Williamson
(Cafe Oto, September 22nd 2011. Review by Roger Thomas)
There was both disappointment and excitement at Café Oto as Thursday's billing of  Pat Thomas, Orphy Robinson, and Steve Williamson - Black-Top - appeared as a duo. They were  minus Pat Thomas, his gadgets and lap-top (from which the trio derived its name). Pat Thomas had had to rush abroad at short notice to visit his ailing mother. Black-Top are, apparently, already booked for a future trio performance at Café Oto.

As it was, however, Orphy and Steve wooed and mesmerised an audience. In the dimly lit but cozy surroundings of Café Oto it was still easy to notice the coterie of musicians in the house. For each improvisation Steve would do most of his work on tenor sax with short forays on soprano. Over a bed of chords and patterns laid out by Orphy's marimba he feeds ideas that are quickly snatched by Williamson who then explores, digests and regurgitates new interpretations.

I was transfixed, found I simply didn't want to miss anything. I was also told that this was the first occasion in a very long time that Steve had taken his tenor sax from its case and played it. Amazing.

Review: Lean Left

Lean Left
* Image copyright Geoffrey Winston. All Rights Reserved.

Lean Left
(Café Oto, Sunday 11 September 2011 - night 1 of 2 night residency. Review and drawings by Geoff Winston.)

Lean Left are a lethal combination of radical commitment, sonic intensity and breathtaking fluency from four musicians who, between them, have rarely strayed from the outermost borders of jazz and punk.

We knew we were in for a tough night when guitarist Terrie Hessels ominously took to the stage with a screwdriver gripped firmly in his jaws. Hessels and Andy Moor, the guitarists from punk vanguard band The Ex, have honed to perfection their distinctive approaches to the guitar, and provided a driving, pneumatic wall of sound from the left and right flanks of Café Oto's stage. Hessels applied screwdriver and drumstick to the pickups, strings and body of his Mad Max-battered brown customised guitar, used his fingers instead of the traditional bottleneck in slide guitar passages, to leave a trail of continual invention in his wake. Moor, equally energetic, was a constantly vibrating body of energy, red T-shirt, red guitar body, mixing a relentless chordal onslaught with brief acoustic touches.

Ken Vandermark set off at a blistering, supercharged pace, coaxing an astounding expressive range from his tenor, recalling his duets with Peter Brötzmann earlier in the year, and later used the clarinet to carve out sputtering patterns while Hessel held his guitar head to the floor, like a geiger counter, sending metallic vibrations through the instrument. Paul Nilssen-Love's complex brew of articulated post-punk-jazz percussion consistently maintained the rhythmic backbone with ferocious technical aplomb.

The relentless flow was reinforced as they each bounced ideas off each other with disarmingly telegraphic reflexes. There was genuine sense of enjoyment as they perhaps surpassed their own demanding standards, characterised by a parity and unity in both intensity and invention. It felt like being right at the working coal face - only the coal dust was missing. Amidst the industrial tension riffs surfaced and evaporated. The echoing bells and buoys of Hendrix's '1983 ... a Merman I should turn to be' were evoked in an abstract passage from Nilssen-Love at the end of the first set, giving an almost surreal, nautical twist to the proceedings.

Lean Left * Image copyright Geoffrey Winston. All Rights Reserved.

For the second set they were joined by master saxophonist Ab Baars, whose searing, whistling runs saw the ever-generous Vandermark take a back seat to allow Baars the freedom to build his own carefully wrought structures. Their ensuing high octane tenor duet was followed by a brief solo spot where Baars's dexterity and nuanced playing was given that bit of extra breathing space, before the ensemble built up an emphatic final crescendo.

The density, clarity and balance maintained throughout the two sets was a breathtaking reminder that this stormy, industrial territory is where many of the most pressing questions are asked of the structure and content of jazz today.

Ken Vandermark (tenor saxophone and clarinet)
Paal Nilssen-Love (percussion)
Terrie Hessels (guitar)
Andy Moor (guitar)
Guest: Ab Baars (tenor saxophone)
www.cafeoto.co.uk

Review: Axel Dörner, Phil Minton, Mark Sanders

Axel Dörner. Drawing: Geoff Winston(*)

Axel Dörner, Phil Minton, Mark Sanders
(Café Oto - second night of a 2-night residency - 18th June 2011. Review by Geoff Winston)

Axel Dörner brought a calm focus and varied colour to three improvised sets - duos with Mark Sanders and Phil Minton, respectively, and the trio to round off the evening. Dörner facilitated an impressive range of responses from Sanders and Minton, with whom he has played occasionally over the last 15 years. Their sets ventured into a relatively restrained zone that saw a progression from the more musically literal to tenuously abstract areas of sound exploration.

Dörner played a rarely seen 'Firebird' slide trumpet, with an angled bell to allow the functioning of the 4-stop short slide - the original was built for Maynard Ferguson, but that's where all affinities with the Canadian trumpeter and bandleader begin and end.

The electronics which Dörner uses include a form of valve synthesiser which is detachable from the trumpet, plus a foot pedal for samples and other effects. The mutes were wafted in front of the trumpet bell to create air flows, and he would also move from side to side in front of the mic which caught the sounds of his exhaled breath. Muted washes and rushes served as a foil to intermittent piercing brass blasts.

Mark Sanders' contribution on percussion was pure acoustic invention; his flattened drum rolls, light scrapings and fine brushwork set in motion Dörner's sequences of mechanical hisses, jet engine rumbles, an unnervingly invasive aero-copter intrusion and the near silence of steam and breath. With Minton, both were seated, as if to emphasise the conscious restraint in their delivery.

Vocalist Phil Minton's light cooing and imputed engagement with both the core and periphery of language blended with Dörner's faintly audible hisses and escapes of air - a sense of leaky valves and drifting vessels. Minton's clusters of coughs, sniffs, and faint whistles, his rasps and passages of air and almost-found words were the prelude to a spellbinding silence near the close of their duet.

In trio format the activity was more exercised, Sanders opening with gongs and a metallic tone, using ultra-thin sticks to tinkle a tiny bell. Dörner brought in radio interference, mixing with Minton's feral exclamations and receding voices. Sanders tapped his drumstick through a broken hand-held drumskin from which a metal spring dangled in something of a quasi-Dada gesture. Dörner ran the mute around the bell as Sanders swept the air with his bow - all sounds which would be picked up on the recording which was being made. The concluding passage had the feel of a Kabuki soundtrack, minimal whacks and swipes, to confirm a commitment to the abstract realm. Dörner's careful, lightly inspiring presence was always opening up possibilities, greatly appreciated by a faithful turn-out at Cafe Oto.

(*)Image copyright Geoffrey Winston. All Rights Reserved.

Review: Okkyung Lee (Cafe Oto and Vortex)

Okkyung Lee, Steve Beresford, John Butcher and Christian Marclay
(Cafe Oto, Saturday 21 May 2011)
Okkyung Lee, Phil Minton and Mark Sanders with Steve Noble and Alex Ward (Vortex, Sunday 22 May 2011). Reviews and drawings* by Geoff Winston


This was Okkyung Lee's Dalston weekend. The New York-based Korean cellist showcased her formidable talent with a mature confidence in two different contexts, alongside musicians drawn from the cream of the free-improv scene.

First she was heard in a quartet that has performed together once a year at Cafe Oto for the past three years - Christian Marclay, a frequent collaborator, Steve Beresford and John Butcher; and at the Vortex, coinciding with the launch of her studio album with Phil Minton - 'Anicca' (Dancing Wayang, vinyl only) - playing with him in public for the first time, joined also by Mark Sanders.

Lee is an improviser of acute sensibility, and in the range of her execution and interplay she gave the lie to her frequent casting as a dark, brooding, noise-oriented player. To each of the ensembles she brought a refreshing energy and clarity of musical vision, rooted in her classical background which she sensuously exploits in combinations of contrasting abstract and conventional techniques. She was, in this formidable company, both catalyst and complement.

At Cafe Oto each musician was pushed to the limit in duets and with the full quartet. Marclay was at his most intensely oblique, treating his turntables and array of LPs as one instrument to extrude peripheral glitches and dense washes of sound. Crackles and echoes coalesced in dramatic style, with glimpsed recordings of orchestral strings and florid piano providing uncanny juxtapositions with Lee's drawn, stretched and anguished cello.

Beresford, at one with his armoury of multifarious tabletop gizmos contributed elastic chameleon changes to the panorama - a fairground organ's chimes, springy bloops out of the 60s, a chunky hip-hop beat, interference, a distant radio signal. Butcher parped, lightly gargled through his soprano sax, tapped the mouthpiece and the keypads of his tenor and took his part in a melee of high-pitched cicada-like activity.

Marclay, in response to the heat generated, picked up two LPs and waved them, fan-like by Butcher to create a breeze and a rare moment of laughter, before all four joined in clattering rhythmic dialogue and a tense passage of delicate creaks, odd signals, scrapes, chimes and washes, ending with a final hovering breath.

At the Vortex, a stirring, focussed set from Alex Ward and Steve Noble set the tone for Lee's trio. Ward wrenched out the notes and flew all over the registers, forcing squealing echoes from a separated mouthpiece; Noble, in his element, slick, then bumping and grinding, changing mallets to utilise unconventional interfaces of materials, a constant dynamo.

Playing seated, the Lee/Minton/Sanders trio eschewed stillness, their two-number set a statement encompassing the underplayed, the distant, the underheard, with the visceral and the hauntingly immediate. Minton is about exertion, and the forging of languages - animal, human, the almost human - a vocal shaman, a sounding board for the emotions and the troubled landscape of the times. Lee caressed the body of the cello with fingers and hands, applied her bow in sweeps and light vibrating bounces, darted up and down the fingerboard, responding in kind to Minton's whistlings, gulps, intakes of breath, whooshes, muted cries and whispers. Sanders was inspired, intensely alert and engaged. He tinged tiny bells, pattered brushes, and found needle thin sticks to drag over the skins, ceaselessly filling out the rhythms with obscure percussive accessories, the perfect foil to Lee and Minton.

In a momentous passage they conjured up the ominous approach of an indefinable storm - from the disquiet of barely audible sound, Minton introduced a light breeze from the back of his mouth with Lee lightly rumbling in the deeper registers. Sanders struck a tambourine placed on the large cymbal. The threatening air brooked no relaxion; a natural and terrible vox emerged - sounds which found a coherence in those close to incoherence.

The rapt audience at the Vortex was treated to music deserving of 'sold out' signs, rounding off this short season of precariously balanced chemistry.

Images copyright Geoff Winston 2011. All Rights Reserved.

A Tentet of Drawings of the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet

Geoff Winston produced this series of ten drawings(*) which stand as a unique record of the visit to London last week of the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet to Cafe Oto. Geoff attended two of the three nights, and also reviewed for us.

Per Åke Holmlander (Tuba)



The Tentet




The Tentet



Michael Zerang, Jeb Bishop, Paal Nilssen-Love



Ken Vandermark and Peter Brötzmann being interviewedby Jez Nelson



Kent Kessler




Left to right: Joe McPhee, Kent Kessler, Peter Brötzmann



Mats Gustafsson and Peter Brötzmann



Joe McPhee



Johannes Andreas Bauer and Peter Brötzmann duelling

(*) All images copyright Geoff Winston 2011. All rights reserved.