A unit of tactile measure: the foot, the arm, the thumb. [from Le Jour et la Nuit: Cahiers de Georges
Braque (1917-1952)]
When I took up this blog in
earnest – well, more in earnest than
I had before – in 2011, one of the pieces I meant to write but didn’t manage to
get down on paper was my reaction to a workshop-performance of Steve
Lacy’s suite Tips by a trio
called The Open (Scott Thomson,
trombone; Susanna Hood, voice/dance; and Kyle Brenders, soprano saxophone),
augmented by dancer Alanna
Kraaijeveld, at the Guelph Jazz Festival in September that year. The trio
is a sub-configuration of The Rent, Thomson’s excellent quintet dedicated to
performing Steve Lacy’s music, one of a number of significant repertory bands –
including Ideal Bread and The Whammies – to have emerged after Lacy’s death. (Lacy’s
collaborator, trombonist Roswell Rudd, who has also been Thomson’s teacher and
mentor, has written a promotional blurb for The Rent’s 2010 recording praising
their many virtues: “The Rent has done the world a solid favor by rendering a
bouquet of Steve Lacy’s
compositions with precision, imagination and love. Thanks so much.”) Gratitude
is also something I feel when I remember, even now, the powerfully moving reading
of Tips the quartet gave that
September afternoon in the foyer of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre at the
University of Guelph. It was one of the highlights of the festival, and
continues to be, to my mind, one of the most artistically engaged and engaging
moments I have experienced as an audience member, as a listener.
In the autobiographical essay he wrote for Daniel Kernohan’s
anthology Music is Rapid Transportation
(2010), Thomson describes a shift in approach and attitude he underwent as he
began performing demanding improvisational music like Lacy’s:
[B]efore I started playing music, while I
certainly listened deeply, passionately and, indeed, differently
than most people I knew, I listened as an ostensible outsider and as a kind of
passive consumer. [...] Since I started playing, however, the tangible experience
of playing collaboratively (improvisation, composition, or both, it doesn’t
matter) has taught me how to listen as a participant in the music making
process whether performing or not, a change that has been profoundly rewarding.
Fundamentally, it’s the difference between listening
to and listening with.
The shift in prepositions is
significant, because it speaks to a practice of listening as active engagement;
Thomson is careful to note that this practice isn’t limited to musicians, but
that in his case collaborative musical performance is how he felt enabled to
begin to produce a bridging of intersubjective detachments through co-creative
experience, through some kind of shared aesthesis. It’s a sharing that appears
to consist, as well, both in and through not identification but mutual
difference – as opposed, perhaps, to mutual indifference.
What
I think I found truly uplifting about their version of Tips was that it seemed as if I had shared in a bit of that
bridgework; as an audience member, I felt as if I were somehow taking part in
the unfolding, present tense of sound and movement in front of me. The “open”
in the trio’s name suggests an openness – in approach, in conception and in
realization. Both despite and through their virtuosity, their “precision” as
Rudd puts it, these performers offer each other and their listeners genuine,
tangible openings onto a temporal and spatial immediacy, onto the textures of
what happens, of happening itself. (A video of the workshop performance, with question-and-answer session about their work, can be viewed here, on the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice website. If you look carefully, you can even catch me, on the left hand side, asking a question.) It may be a bit hard to sense or to glimpse
this collaborative vitality in the video recording that was made that
afternoon: we’re held at something of a remove by lens and electronic screen,
by the interface. The presence that informs a palpably successful live
performance is sometimes hard to catch second-hand. For me, there was something
powerfully affecting in the mesh of the instrumental lines, of Susanna Hood’s
voice and of Alanna Kraaijeveld’s kiltering, edgy movements that drew me in and
that held me, for a while. I wish I could explain it better. (“In art,” writes
Georges Braque in his diaries, the source for all the aphorisms and tips in
Lacy’s brief suite, “only one thing counts: that which cannot be explained.”)
Lacy’s music can sometimes seem a bit detached, a bit incisively formal, but
when this quartet took up Tips that
day they uncovered in its firmly unresolved tone-rows and intervals, in its
fricative melodic eddies and currents, a fleeting means to touch the
all-too-human fabric of our uneasy time. “Emotion,” writes Braque, “cannot grow
nor be imitated; it represents the seed, the work of art represents the bud.” A
pathos.
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