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Posts tagged ‘Nik Bärtsch’

Nov 22

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Almost like a scientist

“Almost like a scientist.” That’s what someone says near the beginning of Ingredients for Disaster, Julian Phillips’s new 67-minute documentary about the music of the Swiss composer, pianist and bandleader Nik Bärtsch. Almost like a scientist. Well, yes. When Bärtsch talked after a screening in London this week, words like “architectonics” and “topography” entered the conversation. And Phillips chooses to illustrate the polymetric structures of the music through cunningly devised computer graphics that actually illuminate the interior design of pieces which tend have the four players working in different time signatures simultaneously.

On the other hand, not like a scientist at all. Not in effect, anyway. Listening to Bärtsch’s bands, either the “Zen funk” of Ronin or the “ritual groove music” of Mobile, can be a profoundly emotional experience, particular when he gives one of his shouted cues and the whole band changes gear like a sudden shot of adrenalin.

But it’s certainly complex music, particularly in its layered polyrhythms. He made me laugh yesterday when he briefly turned the conversation to good old 4/4. If you work all the time in less conventional metres, he said, then you decide to play something that superimposes 4/4 on, say, 5/4, it’s 4/4 that ends up sounding odd, implying that it gives you something new to work with.

In the film, he talks about some of his influences: the pianists Lennie Tristano (whose polymetric “Turkish Mambo” he recorded on one of his early albums), Ran Blake and Monk, and Stravinsky. In the discussion after the film there was also mention of James Brown’s band and of Zigaboo Modeliste, the drummer with the Meters (drummers are important to Bärtsch; that’s how he started out). But his great success is to have metabolised his influences so thoroughly that they became invisible as, over the years, he developed a music of true and complete originality.

This month marks 20 years since he began his Monday night sessions at the Exil club in Zurich, where the music has taken gradually shape. Ronin currently consists of Sha (Stefan Haselbacher) on bass clarinet and alto saxophone, Jeremias Keller on bass guitar, and the drummer Kaspar Rast, with whom Bärtsch has been working since they were nine or 10 years old. Each of them has something illuminating to say in the film, none more so than Sha, master of the bass clarinet, who demonstrates how one of the parts written for his instrument can lead, as the piece unfolds in its long narrative, to variations such as “ghost notes” and percussive tapping.

Like the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, the MJQ, the MGs, Astor Piazzolla Quintet and the Chieftains, Ronin is a band with a highly evolved, distinctive and patented character. There’s a new album by the basic quartet, called Spin. With the addition of three horns and a guitar, it becomes the Ronin Rhythm Clan, which performed at Kings Place in London a few years ago. I liked that line-up very much, and Bärtsch guided me to a couple of tracks released on Bandcamp earlier this year.

I wrote about Nik when he performed with the London-based visual artist Sophie Clements at the Barbican in 2019, and when Ronin played a night at Ronnie Scott’s last year. Tonight I’m going to see him playing piano duets with Tania Giannouli at the Wigmore Hall, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. He’s one of the most interesting musicians around, and it’s a pleasure to keep up with him.

* Ronin’s Spin is released on November 24 on the Ronin Rhythm Records label. The film Ingredients for Disaster will be available to stream on Amazon Prime and Apple+ from November 29. Bärtsch’s book Listening: Music Movement Mind is published by Lars Müller Publishers.

Aug 15

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Ronin at Ronnie’s

Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin at Ronnie Scott’s (photo: Robert Crowley)

Somewhere between an “oh!” and an “ow!”, the abrupt vocal command with which Nik Bärtsch cues his musicians for a shift in musical pattern is the polite zen-funk equivalent of James Brown’s exhortation to take it to the bridge. The reaction is immediate, the players switching from one polyrhythmic cell to another in perfect unison, reframing not just the abstract geometry of metre and tempo but the weight, tone and landscape of the music.

If you own any of the Swiss pianist-composer’s albums, on ECM or his own Ronin Rhythm label, you’ll know that his pieces all go under the bland title “Modul”: “Modul 17”, “Modul 44”, “Modul 55” and so on. I find it rather refreshing not to be primed to think about whether or not a particular piece is a successful portrayal of a nightingale singing in Soho Square. You can just get on and listen to the notes, free from baggage.

But although it may be programmed, there is nothing cold about it. Bärtsch’s music is sometimes attached to such categories and minimalism and systems music, but it’s too abundant to qualify for the former and too warm-blooded for the latter. Any superficial impression of austerity is profoundly misleading. To hear one of his bands live is to share an audience involvement that expresses itself at the end of each long and intense set in a roar of pure exhilaration.

That’s what happened when Bärtsch returned to Ronnie Scott’s Club last week with Ronin, currently a quartet with Jeremias Keller, a relative newcomer on bass guitar, joining the stalwarts Kaspar Rast on drums and Sha on bass clarinet and alto saxophone. Ronin was assembled in 2001 and plays every Monday night at Exil, Bärtsch’s club in Zurich, its members applying their virtuosity to perfecting what their leader calls “ritual groove music”.

I’ve heard Bärtsch’s music in several environments: with Ronin in churches in London and Bremen, solo (with a light artist) at the Barbican, with a horn section at Kings Place and with the Frankfurt Radio big band, orchestated by Jim McNeely, in Berlin. In the set I heard at Ronnie’s, they played the six pieces from their latest ECM album, Awase, blended together into two long sequences, plus an encore. Compared to those earlier performances, this sounded mellower, less edge-of-the-seat, a little more lyrical and reflective, particularly in something like the swooning chordal descent of one section of “Modul 36”.

Even in its gentler moments, however, it was still imbued with that characteristic sense of coiling and uncoiling while still held in tension. And the quality of the playing of all four was extraordinary, with Bärtsch delving into the grand piano’s innards to pluck, strum and damp strings, occasionally striking its frame with a stick, the devoted Sha in the role of Jimmy Lyons to his Cecil Taylor, Rast tireless in nailing down the complex metres and displaced beats, and Keller’s alertness and agility fitting in so well that he might have been with them since the beginning rather than a mere three years.

It was great to see a big crowd assembled to hear this music. Of course the majority of the audience knew exactly what they had come for and received their reward. But also it was interesting to watch the more casual type of customer, the sort who basically turn up for a night at a famous jazz club, as their initial scepticism turned to curiosity and then to intrigue and ultimately to delight, shared with the rest of us.

Jan 3

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ECM at 50

manfred-eicher

By the end of the 1960s, jazz had gone right out of fashion. If it was by no means dead in creative terms, it was no longer good business for the music industry. So the arrival of a new jazz record label was quite an event, which is why I can remember quite clearly the first package from ECM arriving on my desk at the Melody Maker‘s offices in Fleet Street, and opening it to extract Mal Waldron’s Free at Last. I knew about Waldron from his work with Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and others. But an album from the pianist, recorded in Europe and packaged with unusual care on an unfamiliar label based in Munich, came as a surprise.

Pretty soon it was followed by Paul Bley with Gary Peacock, and then by Marion Brown’s Afternoon of a Georgia Faun. Before 1970 was out further packages had included an album by the Music Improvisation Company (with Evan Parker and Hugh Davies) and Jan Garbarek (Afric Pepperbird). It became obvious that something special was happening under the aegis of ECM’s founder, Manfred Eicher.

I guess it was in 1971, with solo piano albums from Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, Terje Rypdal’s first album and two albums of duos teaming Dave Holland with Barre Phillips and Derek Bailey, that the label’s character really became clear. Eicher stood for jazz with a high intellectual content, saw no reason to privilege American musicians over their European counterparts, and set his own high standards in studio production and album artwork. All these things — particularly his fondness for adding a halo of reverb to the sound of acoustic instruments, inspired by how music sounded in churches and cathedrals — were eventually turned against him by the label’s critics. The sheer volume of great music produced over the past 50 years is the only counter-argument he ever needed. His greatest achievement has been to make us listen harder, deeper and wider.

ECM’s golden jubilee is being marked by events around the world. On January 30 and February 1 there will be a celebration over two nights at the Royal Academy of Music in London, featuring the pianists Craig Taborn and Kit Downes, the bassist and composer Anders Jormin and the Academy’s big band playing the music of Kenny Wheeler with guests Norma Winstone, Evan Parker and Stan Sulzmann. I thought I’d add to the festivities by choosing 20 ECM albums that have made a particularly strong impression on me since that first package dropped on my desk half a century ago; they’re listed in chronological order. Although there are many other contenders, I stopped at 19; the 20th is for you to nominate.

1 Terje Rypdal: Terje Rypdal (1971) The guitarist’s debut was an early sign of Eicher’s determination to capture and promote the new sounds coming from northern Europe, and from Norway in particular. Rypdal was one of the first to present himself as a wholly original voice.

2 Paul Bley: Open, to Love (1972) For my money, the finest of ECM’s early solo piano recitals, with Bley examining compositions by Carla Bley (“Ida Lupino”), Annette Peacock (“Nothing Ever Was, Anyway”) and himself.

3 Old and New Dreams: Old and New Dreams (1979) Don Cherry, one of Eicher’s favourites, is joined by Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell in this homage to the music of their former colleague, Ornette Coleman. The 12-minute “Lonely Woman” is astonishingly lovely.

4 Leo Smith: Divine Love (1979) The trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith was among the squadron of American innovators who arrived in Europe at the end of the ’60s and whose influence gradually became apparent in the ECM catalogue. Divine Love is a classic.

5 Bengt Berger: Bitter Funeral Beer (1981) A Swedish ethnomusicologist, composer and percussionist, Berger put together a 13-piece band — Don Cherry being the only famous name — to record this strange and compelling multicultural mixture of jazz and ritual music.

6 Charlie Haden / Carla Bley: Ballad of the Fallen (1983) Fourteen years after the historic Liberation Music Orchestra, Haden and Bley reunited for a second studio album featuring music of resistance.

7 John Surman: Withholding Pattern (1985) A solo album in which Surman developed his skill at overdubbing soprano and baritone saxophones, piano and synths, this opens with “Doxology”, in which Oslo’s Rainbow studio is turned into an English church.

8 Bill Frisell: Lookout for Hope (1988) One of several guitarists whose careers were nurtured at ECM, Frisell recorded this with a lovely quartet — Hank Roberts (cello), Kermit Driscoll (bass) and Joey Baron (drums) — before moving on.

9 Keith Jarrett Trio: The Cure (1991) Includes an eight-minute version of “Blame It on My Youth” in which Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette achieve perfection, no matter how many times I listen to it in search of flaws.

10 Kenny Wheeler: Angel Song (1996) In a dream line-up, the Canadian trumpeter is joined by the alto of Lee Konitz, the guitar of Bill Frisell and the bass of Dave Holland.

11 Tomasz Stanko: Litania (1997) The Polish trumpeter interprets the compositions of his compatriot and sometime colleague Krzysztof Komeda. A wonderful group features the saxophonists Joakim Milder and Bernt Rosengren, with a core ECM trio — Bobo Stenson (piano), Palle Danielsen (bass) and Jon Christensen (drums) — as the rhythm section plus Terje Rypdal’s guitar on two of the tunes.

12 Trygve Seim: Different Rivers (2000) Most ECM music is for small groups, but here the Norwegian saxophonist and composer permutates 13 musicians in an exploration of subtle textures and gestures. The great trumpeter Arve Henriksen is among the soloists.

13 Manu Katché: Neighbourhood (2005) Ever listened to Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” and wished there had been more post-bop jazz with that kind of relaxed intensity and melodic richness? Here it is. Tomasz Stanko and Jan Garbarek are the horns, Marcin Wasilewski and Slawomir Kurkiewicz the pianist and bassist.

14 Masabumi Kikuchi: Sunrise (2012) Kikuchi, who was born in Tokyo in 1939 and died in upstate New York in 2015, was a pianist of exquisite touch, great sensitivity and real  originality: a natural fit with Eicher, who recorded him with the veteran drummer Paul Motian and the quietly astounding bassist Thomas Morgan.

15 Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin: Live (2012) The label that released Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians in 1978 is the perfect home for the group led by the Swiss pianist and composer, who explores the spaces between minimalist repetition and ecstatic groove, between gridlike structures and joyful improvisation.

16 Giovanni Guidi: This Is the Day (2015) With equal creative contributions from Thomas Morgan and the drummer João Lobo, the young Italian master leads a piano trio for the 21st century: always demanding close attention but never short of refined lyricism.

17 Michel Benita + Ethics: River Silver (2016) Led by an Algerian bassist, a quintet including a Japanese koto player (Mieko Miyazaki), a Swiss flugelhornist (Matthieu Michel), a Norwegian guitarist (Eivind Aarset) and a French drummer (Philippe Garcia) create music that incarnates the ECM ideal of reflective, frontierless beauty.

18 Roscoe Mitchell: Bells for the South Side (2017) A double album recorded live in Chicago in 2015, featuring Mitchell with four trios — including the trumpeter Hugh Ragin and the percussionist Tyshawn Sorey — who finally come together in a memorable celebration of the legacy of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

19 Vijay Iyer Sextet: Far From Over (2017) Knotty but exhilarating compositions, solos packed with substance from Graham Haynes (cornet), Steve Lehman (alto) and Mark Shim (tenor): a statement of the art as it moves forward today.

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* The photograph is a still from the 2011 film Sounds and Silence: Travels with Manfred Eicher, by Peter Guyer and Norbert Wiedmer. There’s a chapter containing further thoughts on ECM’s place in the evolution of modern music in my book The Blue Moment: Miles Davis and the Remaking of Modern Music, published in 2009 by Faber & Faber.

Nov 16

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Nik Bärtsch at the Barbican

Nik Bartsch Barbican

This is how is began, with a seven-foot Steinway marooned on a dais in a lagoon of water installed on an enlarged stage at the Barbican Hall, silhouetted against a rhombus of light projected on to the back wall. As the house lights dimmed to blackness, the Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch, as usual shaven-headed and dressed in the black robes of a ninja monk, emerged from the wings and made his way to the instrument across a causeway which was then removed by stagehands. Bärtsch settled himself before launching into an hour-long piece called When the Clouds Clear, a “light and sound poem” created in conjunction the London-based visual artist Sophie Clements.

Bärtsch’s music is utterly sui generis: a highly personal version of minimalism that is most often expressed with the other musicians of his quintet Ronin, a project developed over almost 20 years at weekly sessions in a Zurich club that he co-owns. Each of his compositions is titled “Modul” and given a number. This mirrors the seemingly industrial precision with which they are conceived and performed, based on small melodic cells and exacting rhythmic overlays whose teasing syncopations generate tension, but it gives no idea of the emotion generated when, on a sudden shouted cue, one locked groove instantly gives way to another, the intensity rising exponentially.

All this was reflected in his unaccompanied playing last night, opening with a single repeated note tested for overtones and modified for attack and decay before evolving through an hour of contrasting moods and densities, often displaying his highly personal use of the prepared-piano techniques now common among those of his and subsequent generations of acoustic keyboard improvisers. Bärtsch can stun a note so that it acts like a rimshot from Philly Joe Jones or Clyde Stubblefield, laying it against a frantic weave of arpeggiation or letting it punctuate in a moment of silence. Sometimes he reached inside the instrument to make it hiss or growl, before building fantastic cataracts of sound that forfeited all note-definition and seemed about to burst the walls of the auditorium.

Sophie Clements’ lighting and projections began with minimalistic monochrome geometries creeping across the set before she introduced backdrops of waves and skies, washed in blue or grey. This seemed worryingly literal — waves of water, waves of sound — but only for the briefest moment until it became apparent how beautifully the visuals and the music were creating (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens) something beyond them, but themselves. Towards the end, drops of water began to fall from the roof into the lagoon: an illusion of the elements invading the music. (There was some wry amusement about this afterwards, given that parts of Britain had spent the week battling floods.)

The  austere, almost hieratic air of Bärtsch’s music and self-presentation is utterly deceptive; its end product is human warmth, and the prolonged ovation he shared with Clements was generated by art that, for all its refinement of technique and conception, communicated on the most immediate level. I’d be surprised if there were a soul in the hall who, having absorbed a genuinely extraordinary experience, wouldn’t have been happy to sit through it all again straight away.

* Nik Bärtsch and Sophie Clements were appearing on the first night of the 2019 EFG London Jazz Festival. This was the second performance of When the Clouds Clear, which was co-commissioned by the Enjoy Jazz Festival and the Barbican and received its première in Mannheim earlier this year.