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Posts tagged ‘Andrew Lisle’

Nov 5

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Back to Berlin

“A lot of people have died recently,” Otomo Yoshihide remarked to his Berlin audience on Sunday night, halfway through a set by his 16-piece Special Big Band. “This is for them.” The band’s marimba player, Aikawa Hitomi, began to trace out some quiet, limpid phrases, with a sound like pebbles dropping in a pond. One by one, her colleagues joined in. I don’t really know how to explain what was happening, whether or not it was a written composition or completely improvised, but each player added a layer of sadness to the piece until it gradually, and completely without ostentation, reached a critical mass of emotion.

It was amazing. The non-specific nature of Yoshihide’s introduction allowed the listeners — and the musicians, I guess — to direct their mourning wherever they wished. And having created something so sombre and profound, Yoshihide didn’t take the bandleader’s easy option by then lifting the mood with one of the absurdly entertaining rave-ups in which his band specialises, and with which they would eventually send the audience home smiling fit to burst. Instead his accordionist, Okuchi Shunsuke, squeezed out the gentle melody of “Années de Solitude”, a graceful composition by the great Astor Piazzolla. Soon the lonely accordion was joined the baritone saxophone of Yoshida Nonoko, before the other horns entered in a rich arrangement ending with hymn-like cadences.

After that, it was time to change the mood in a set that contained an unusually large proportion of the gamut of human emotions, from cheesy film and TV themes and a perky “I Say a Little Prayer” through a pretty version of Eric Dolphy’s “Something Sweet, Something Tender” and a suitably stirring reading of Charlie Haden’s “Song for Che”. The encore was a completely bonkers piece of Japanese pop music featuring the all-action singing and dancing of three of the group’s women — Hitomi, the electronics player Sachiko M and the saxophonist Inoue Nashie — with a kind of rap from Yoshihide.

For the closing performance of the 2024 JazzFest Berlin, Yoshihide’s ensemble was the perfect choice. Twenty four hours after the Sun Ra Arkestra had occupied the same stage in their tinsel and cooking-foil Afrofuturist costumes, recessing from the stage one by one with a chanted recommendation for Outer Spaceways Incorporated, the men and women of the Japanese band came dressed like refugees from a Comme des Garçons sample sale. Were they from the West, Felliniesque would be one obvious way of describing their presentation. With two drummers, a tuba and a very emphatic bass guitarist, and with the leader’s guitar sometimes throwing in some of the noise elements for which he is well known, they made me think of what might happen if you merged the Willem Breuker Kollektiev with the Glitter Band, with Carla Bley providing the arrangements.

One amusing thing they did in the up-tempo pieces was to have each member leap up to give cues and perhaps conduct a few bars before resuming their places: a kind of daisy-chain of instructions and cheer-leading. It made me think of something I’d seen that morning on stage at the Jazz Institut, where the festival’s Community Sunday, centred on the multicultural Moabit district of Berlin, began with a concert featuring children. While a young piano trio played, a group of kids, perhaps six to 10 years old, stood in front of them, giving the sort of signals — faster! slower! stop! start! — familiar from the techniques of conduction.

It was a good game, everyone enjoyed it, and it made me wonder whether, a few decades ago, someone had tried something similar in Japan, laying the foundations for Otomo Yoshihide’s Special Big Band. Almost certainly not, but there was the same sense of play at work, as it were. And if you give that opportunity to a bunch of kids, there must be a chance that it will open up a world for some of them.

The Moabit adventure continued with a mass walk through the streets, audience and musicians stopping off at various points for pop-up musical events. It ended in a church, where Alexander Hawkins played the organ and members of the Yoshihide band and the Swedish bassist Vilhelm Bromander’s Unfolding Orchestra took part, along with a young people’s choir and local musicians with various cultural backgrounds. The special project of Nadin Deventer, now seven years into her tenure as the festival’s artistic director, it proved to be a brilliant way to involve a community and its children, and deserves to become a permanent feature of an institution celebrating its 60th birthday.

For me, other highlights of the four days included Joe McPhee reading his poetry with Decoy; the French pianist Sylvie Courvoisier’s new quartet, Poppy Seeds, featuring the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Dan Weiss, playing compositions of great intricacy with superb deftness; and the trio of two British musicians, the pianist Kit Downes and the drummer Andrew Lisle, and the Berlin-based Argentinian tenor saxophonist Camila Nebbia, entrancing a packed A-Trane with warm gusts of collective improvisation. In the main hall on Saturday night there was also a moving ovation for the pianist Joachim Kühn, who made a speech announcing that, at 80, this appearance with his current trio would be his last at the festival, having made his first in 1966, aged 22.

A festival with an ending, then, in more than one sense, but also full of beginnings and new possibilities, just as the visionary jazz critic and impresario Joachim-Ernst Berendt envisaged 60 years ago when he persuaded the West German government that its slice of Berlin, marooned in the GDR, needed something with which to demonstrate a sense of vibrant modernity to the world, and that thing was jazz. In very different circumstances, it still is.

Aug 5

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On Kit Downes

One night a few weeks ago I was at the Vortex, listening to a hour of free improvisation performed in the downstairs bar by the pianist Kit Downes with the saxophonist Tom Challenger, his familiar colleague, the drummer Andrew Lisle, and two names new to me; the guitarist Tara Cunningham and the bassist Caius Williams. It was a lovely set, full of lyricism and surprises. Downes, Challenger and Lisle are entirely at home in such an environment; it was a pleasure to hear the contributions of Cunningham, making an intriguing adaptation of the innovations associated with Derek Bailey, and Williams, who produced not just supple and responsive lines but the loveliest tone I’ve heard from an upright bass for ages.

Then I went home to resume listening to a new CD sent to me from Amsterdam, where the celebrated Bimhuis club had recorded Downes’s multinational 10-piece band playing an extended piece titled Dr Snap — one of a series of four “composition assignments reflecting the current zeitgeist” commissioned, under the overall heading of Reflex, from four different composers — and to Outpost of Dreams, Kit’s new album of duets with Norma Winstone on the ECM label.

Recorded live at the Bimhuis in November 2022, Dr Snap consists of seven pieces by Downes, one by Challenger and two by the bassist Petter Eldh. It begins in a deceptively mild manner — twitchy rhythms, knotty woodwind themes — before broadening and deepening as it goes on, opening out to expose exceptional work from the trumpeter Percy Pursglove, the saxophonists Ben van Gelder and Robin Fincker, the flautist Ketije Ringe Karahona, the guitarist Reinier Baas, the bassist Petter Eldh, and the drummers and percussionists Sun-Mi Hong, James Maddren and Veslemøy Narvesen, Plus, of course, the composer’s piano.

Like a lot of today’s jazz writing, it requires 11 fingers on one hand and seven on the other if you want to try and decipher the time signatures. But no such technical analysis is required for a simpler enjoyment of the music as it passes by, hastening without rushing, guided through its endless twists and turns by the highly inventive rhythm section.

There’s a lot of variety here, from passages of hustling density to a lovely stretch of serenity in “Pantheon 4”, a feature for Karahona, via the use of free-jazz techniques behind Pursglove on “Snapdraks”. The solos arise naturally, part of the overall design — as they did, for instance, in the recordings of Steve Lehman’s octet. Three-quarters of a century after what became known as the Birth of the Cool sessions, this kind of jazz for medium-sized ensembles continues to evolve in a very stimulating way.

Downes’s duo with Winstone is a meeting of minds as well as generations (he is 38, she is 82). His tunes join those of John Taylor, Ralph Towner and Adam O’Rourke as vehicles for her lyrics, which are full of elegant, often wistful references to nature and the seasons, to sky and light and wind and their effect on the senses. There are also fine versions of “Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair” and of a traditional tune arranged by the late Bob Cornford, titled “Rowing Home”. From the latter, was there ever a more ECM-evoking opening to a lyric than “Upon the lake in winter sun / A sun that bleaches the sky…”?

As further evidence of Downes’s scope, there’s a forthcoming trio LP called Breaking the Shell on which he plays pipe organ with the guitarist Bill Frisell and the drummer Andrew Cyrille. A track called “Este a Székelyeknél”, released on Bandcamp by the Red Hook label this week, suggests that this, too, will be a notable addition to the body of work being assembled by one of the most consistently stimulating musicians of our time.

* Dr Snap is on the Bimhuis label and Outpost of Dreams is on ECM, both albums out now. Breaking the Shell is released by Red Hook on September 27. The photograph of Kit Downes with the Dr Snap band was taken at the Bimhuis by Maarten Nauw.