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Posts tagged ‘Sha’

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.