The landlady provided sandwiches and pork pies, homemade by the landlord. Unprecedentedly gracious treatment of free improvisors.
Unbornbundygein (Karl DSilva – alto sax & clarinet; Ben Woodrow – guitar; Gwilly Edmondez – SU10 & dictaphone) opened the night with a meandering 15 minute set, consumed in one go, that conveyed a cataloguer’s terse rendering of emotionally tampered itineraries. There was also a distinctly episodic character to the way the trio delivered each texturally defined lasagnitude. Woodrow was a revelation particularly, his vocabulary finding surprising new concatenations, while the increasingly broad fridge of his reference (like DSilva) proposes recontextualizations of alarming grace.
A duo followed of Jez riley French and Charlie Collins. This was the first time I’d seen Charlie playing other than sax. He sat, his beard as magically realist as ever, on a small bar stool, central, with the waterphone between his legs and began to conjure a ghostly throb, a watery depiction of bare commuter anthropology. Jez was almost out of site, tucked away on this sideboard thing by the arena of the corner of the space. No-one could see what he was doing, but he looked interested and sounded gorgeous through the amp. In direct contract to the restless nailing of expressive territory expounded by the previous group, Collins and Jez kept their eyes on the mysterious recess, only occasionally showing us the glow of a fag tip, or the occasional shard of torch bars when Collins bowed his fingerly crown. Eventually we were drawn inside to witness for ourselves the glistening folds of their ancient, tide-ravaged surfaces. This is music that neither thrusts out nor denies self, but simply immerses itself in a sensual engagement with the properties.
Then 7Hertz came on with something much more made out of sticks and paper, and graphite scribbles that contain accidental insights. [???] The trio of … on bass clarinet, … and … on violins built extraordinary mock palaces and mausoleums on and around Seth’s double bass. They did four tracks, the first two of which were filmed, each one steeped in narratives ribbed by austere and quirky harmonies, now teased out of the Arnold Schoenberg Real Book, now from an Eric Dolphy Compendium of Western Appropriation. 7Hertz seem to work from a knotted, gnarled glossary of encounters with the other, whose reflexive disenchantment with the signifier has been left achingly in tact, offered inflamed.
The closing set was immense. The Navigators (John Jasnoch – guitar, ukulele, oud; Charlie Collins – vibes & assorted Metal crafted resonancies; Beatrix Ward - violin, handheld perc & theremin) played it. Their set was an assuredly brave departure into pitch-lattice discourse, sparked by a lone, angular hexachord from Collins’ vibes, which the others responded to with an almost serially disciplined concurrence. What followed, though, was a mischievous parlay between the atonal and the modal, Ward’s violin seeming to act the paranoid arbiter that fails to keep its cool in the moment of fiercest antagonism. At around four minutes the trio descended into an all-out scrapping that yielded a far more boisterous set of currents, as if there was carpet, then cleavage and now, to the end of the set, chorus, which initially came over as a kind of balsa wood Steve Reich, then an adolescent AWOL, before Collins insisted on deconstructing the trio to introduce a contrapuntal pooh-party of scatological breadth.
Ward was a astonishing, hopping from erudite, earnestly pitch-driven bowings, through an adventure in Moorish percussives, to a ten minute exposition of spell-binding and utterly pertinent theremin airplay that had the audience’s nose open, and wags from the front of the house stopping in to video her manoeuvres on their mobiles, giggling in text.
The trio probably meant to play through without a break, but there was a moment after 26 minutes when it seemed they’d finalled a joint and Gwilly screamed ‘Yeah!’ (Schrimshaw style), triggering embarrassed applause from the most of the rest who could see (while Gwilly couldn’t) round the recess wall, that Collins was taking up the reign with (probably) another he-he-hexachord. This tearing up of a set precipitated Jasnoch’s excursion on the oud, supported by Ward’s castanets, a languidly undisciplined awning from Mediterranean mode-shells, so fresh you could sup the bromide.
Best part apart from the music and the surprise catering, was the stress-free and overkill-free set-up of no PA, lots of acoustic instrumentation among which the electronics were borne across small, stand-alone amplification. I told David De La Haye about this later, and he told me about healthyconcerts.com. But I was thinking also of Irene Moon, and of Lightning Bolt’s Lubbock, Texas kitchen date.
It was all good: you see, Karl had went and invited a bunch of Sheffield’s hardest improvisors to play in York. And we all know Sheffield is like the Vatican in the improv community, which makes the current pope either Mick Beck or John Jasnoch. Probably Mick, although John is utterly mentholated. Watch the chimneys, anyway. Whatever, you can’t have Martin Archer because he’s always too prone to go off on one, right? Kaoss Pad etc. Plus, when he came to play the Rebol IMF some while back, he set up all his kit then handed us a 2-foot long phono lead which clearly wouldn’t reach the desk. We had to move the whole set-up to right next to where he was.
Anyway, DSilva set this up and then asked Edmondez to get a venue. Who promised to find one and told him to tell the musicians it was definitely on. City Screen, Judges Lodgings and Black Swan (the three regular spots) were all booked. Edmondez remembered Nathan McWinnie going on about The Spread Eagle during the Poemgranite days. Landlord said, ‘How much is it going to cost me?’ ‘Nah, nah, it’s a DIY thing we just want a place to play,’ so he said, ‘Fine.’
Turned out to be the back bit of the ground floor, the bar – surprisingly, Jasnoch was amazed to be playing in what he called ‘the body of a pub.’ No upstairs room or function suite. And it was really cramped in there, but cosy, too. I spoke to one of the women from 7Hertz and she said she’d looked the pub up on the net and it said Thursday night was ‘jazz night’. Great. About 8 people came to watch the event expressly – no publicity at short notice – and about 15-20 regulars came round from the front in twos and threes to see what jazz had become since last week. There was no aggro, except for the barmaid, Janet, making mildly antagonistic comments between sets. The landlord apologised for this, saying, ‘That Janet’s on her last warning.’ Well, we wouldn’t want to threaten her livelihood.
I would like to suggest that this was the first Pocket of Potential Madness, a series of nights (or afternoons) (or mornings) starting from next September (07), which are much scaled down from the Rebol IMF evenings – no PA, small, informal spaces (including kitchens, front rooms, bedrooms). Acoustic meets electronic on level terms. Maybe we should join healthyconcerts.
