Review: Peter Evans, Okkyung Lee, Evan Parker

Peter Evans, Vortex, November 2011
Drawing by Geoff Winston. All Rights Reserved.

Peter Evans, Okkyung Lee, Evan Parker
(Vortex, Monday 21 November 201. Review and drawing by Geoff Winston)

Evan Parker's opening remark that "the future of music is sitting either side of me" would also have been the perfect endnote to an utterly compelling performance by this extraordinary trio.

Parker, seated centrally onstage, was the perfect guide and foil to the two classically trained "youthful people" (as he put it) alongside him, who both gravitated to New York, cellist Okkyung Lee from Korea and trumpeter Peter Evans after graduation from Oberlin Conservatory, in 2000 and 2003, respectively. They had first played together as a trio in 2009 as one of the 20 performances of Parker's historic residency at John Zorn's The Stone in New York, which leaves no doubt as to the high regard in which Parker is held on the other side of the Atlantic.

Together, over two sets, they brewed up intense conversations, revealing a mesh of internal and external dialogues.

There was a telepathic closeness in the way they read one another. Within this format of commonality, each had the freedom to pursue their own trains of thought, pushing their instruments through a variety of sound barriers, dispensing with conventionally imposed constraints to offer highly individual readings of the harmonic and textural routes which evolved. There was an astonishing fecundity to the deviations from the mean, yet the intuitively held balance was maintained without fail. The rules were stretched and broken but nothing was gratuitous.

Evans was perhaps the most overtly deviant - rapidly switching between instruments, detaching the mouthpiece to blow air through the trumpet without mediation. He used the mute and the flat of his hand to dramatically change the sound and to escalate the volume to an ear-splitting screech. Lee skated over the notes, slithered along the fingerboard and found rasping, grated tones as she manipulated the bow with both hands, and paused to slide repetitively on a single note. Parker restated nervously emphatic trills on soprano to keep up the energetic chatter, echoed Evans' stark, breathed phrases and, with exultant momentum, filled the room with the tenor's resonance. Soft acoustic passages glowed with detail. The merest sounds were built up to form complex rhythms and allowed to decay.

The timbres would get blurred - Evans and Lee even took on woodwind sounds at different times. And with Evans spinning off at ultra-high energy on his left, and Lee going from matt to gloss tones on his right, Parker steered the ship, not into port, but through the only passage all evening that would count as a straight jazzy run before heading for a final Futurist aerodynamic whine and dive.

One moment of mild humour - when a mobile alarm bell went off, thankfully between numbers, and not exactly complementing the siren sounds and alarms mimicked during the performance, Parker quipped, "Electro-Acoustic ... missed your chance!", referring to his long-standing and fluid Ensemble which Evans joined in 2009.

Dramatic, captivating and fascinating to watch. Another Vortex highlight.

Current releases:

(1) Parker/Lee/Evans: ‘The Bleeding Edge’; CD on PSI (recorded in Whitstable)
(2) Peter Evans: ‘Beyond Civilized and Primitive’; limited edition vinyl LP on Dancing Wayang – 500 numbered copies – first 100 get bonus mini-CD.

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.

Saluting and celebrating the London Jazz Orchestra at 20

Vortex Sunday 22nd May, 4pm - featuring the music of Noel Langley
Vortex Sunday 26th June 4pm - Featuring the music of Scott Stroman

Congratulations to the London Jazz Orchestra on reaching the grand age of 20. The next two dates (above) are celebratory concerts. They will feature music by the Orchestra's two co-founders.

The LJO at the Vortex is probably (any other contenders please speak up ) London’s longest-running residency*. Noel Langley and Scott Stroman started the LJO in 1990.

Scott writes: "after 6 months (!) of rehearsals with members including Kenny Wheeler, Ian Carr, Chris Biscoe, Norma Winstone, etc. We did our first gig in the QEH in 1991, and started our Vortex residency the same year." Scott also remembers his wrangles with the Home Office to get leave to remain in the UK from this time.

(*) Pedantic footnote (I know you lot): it has not been completely continuous - there was a hiatus, as this review from John Fordham from January 2009 makes clear.

www.vortexjazz.co.uk

Review: Big Air

Myra Melford

Big Air
(Vortex, 2nd May 2011, review and drawings by Geoff Winston*)

This could have been the Big Air tenth anniversary tour - it is ten years since this formidable transatlantic quintet were first brought together by the foresight of what was to be an award-winning BBC commission. Intelligent polyphony is the rich seam which runs through their material.

Whether from the Brits - Oren Marshall's rasping tuba, and the scintillating brass/reeds duo of Chris Batchelor and Steve Buckley reunited from their Loose Tubes days, or the Americans - Myra Melford, one moment punishing the keyboard, the next caressing it, and drummer Jim Black, beady eyes on everybody, laying down the funk and changing gears effortlessly - there is rigorous poise in their invention, and a deep care for their musical craft.

Borrowing humorously, they opened with 'All Good Things', a dead ringer for a jumping Mexican brass band - military drum rolls, high brass and knowingly hesitant bass clarinet, with Marshall's pumping tuba plotting the foundations - it could have been festive Oaxaca.

The second set opener also borrowed, respectfully - this time from Ornette's phrasing and alto tones - before Marshall's solo took off in to an other-worldly tundra, with only amplified breath to define the landscape, and Jim Black chipping in invisibly to lubricate the sound. Melford's solo was both cerebral and physical - lightly skipping from note to note then drenching the keyboard with chordal runs at breakneck speed, right hand in freeform cartwheel mode.

Steve Buckley and Jim Black

Buckley's authority and precision on both alto and skinny bass clarinet, was a perfect foil to Batchelor's deft, Spanish-toned hints of Miles. Somehow, after the crazy histrionics of an escalating, distorted tuba solo they all managed to wind down into a mellifluous restatement of the theme of 'Hole in the Pocket', Black's sticks just glancing the cymbals. Encoring on 'One Way Only', the rangy Buckley knelt down to the mike with penny whistle, mimicked momentarily by Batchelor on mute, to an assured backdrop of driving, syncopated rhythms, and a big-band arrangement pulled out of nowhere.

The same sense of enjoyment all the way through was shared by the musicians and by their appreciative Bank Holiday Vortex crowd.

Personnel: Chris Batchelor: trumpet; Steve Buckley: alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Myra Melford: piano; Oren Marshall: tuba; Jim Black: drums

Big Air's CD is on Babel

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

Review: Han Bennink

Han Bennink Trio and Steve Noble
(Vortex, Friday 22nd April 2011, review and drawings by Geoff Winston*)


Han Bennink (above left) and Steve Noble (right) are both drummers who can play it absolutely straight or wheel off at a tangent.

Their sprightly snare drum duet saw Bennink set a hard, metallic tone, using his sticks on the chair and drum body, then his booted foot on his drum. He whistled nonchalantly, brushes in action, while Noble tapped a massive tuning fork resting on his snare. Noble added a small hand held cymbal and a maraca to vary the range, with a short, hard-headed mallet scraped slowly across the drum skin to produce an eerie, wailing sound. Never to be outdone, Bennink put one stick in his mouth, hitting it with the other, and in their short, final piece ended by hitting the piano strings.

For the Trio's single 40 minute set, Bennink sat behind his full kit, brushes setting a good, driving pace, and then fell back to let his his young cohorts map out the ground. There was a feel of the wartime night club as they manipulated and extended the centrepiece of the set, Charles Trenet's 'La Mer' (apparently written on toilet paper on a train by Trenet!).

Pianist Simon Toldam was deliberate and lightly restrained on the Vortex's Steinway which, earlier in the day, had been appreciated for its rich sonority by Roedelius. Joachim Badenhorst was similarly withdrawn on B flat and bass clarinet - which he often played in its higher register - and tenor sax which he pushed into trills and gargles as Toldam brushed light chains on and off the piano strings. Bennink, ever the showman, threw his sticks out of their plastic bag which he promptly absorbed into his repertoire, clattered a structural steel column, sat on the floor to play one of the venue's marble-topped tables and returned to his snare front of stage onto which he hoisted a bentwood chair before the trio ended on a subdued note with clarinet in Giuffre mode and Bennink raising his sticks to his head in antler style!

New arrivals were, not unreasonably, nonplussed when turned away at ten o'clock, on being told it was all over for the evening.

*Drawings copyright Geoffrey Winston 2011. All Rights Reserved

www.vortexjazz.co.uk