Edwin Prévost (better known as Eddie) has done as much as anyone to put Improvisation back at the heart of musIc making. As the drummer and percussionist since the mid--60s of the legendary group AMM, not to mention his jazz-based groups of the 70s and 80s or as an organiser (one of the key people behind the recent resurgence of the London Musicians' Collective), he has always been at the centre of things. Yet as he would be the first to InsIst, Improvised music is nothing If not a collective phenomenon — a network that has gone on making new connections for more than three decades. What does mark Prévost out is that, like Derek Bailey, he has staked out his position not just through his musIc but through writing, raising his voice consistently against the hostility — or, worse, the smug silences — of successIve musical establishments.
Unlike Bailey (whose 'Improvisation Its Nature and Practice In Music' is perhaps the essential companion to this book), his thoughts have until now been scattered in obscure places. So It is to be welcomed that some are collected here, along with the nine 'meta-musical narratIves' (improvisatory meditations on the key Issues In Prévost's and AMM's aesthetic) that form the core of the book.
Someone once called all art 'ways of world-making', the phrase could have been made for Prévost. He is unashamedly transcendentalist "in art we make the world, he writes. The Important questions of how you find your Individuality are never purely technical (avoiding doing this or that), they are always personal and socIal. When musicIans play, the question he wants them to ask is "What kind of world would be sympathetic to the music we feel must be made?"
He manages to bring off an original combination an ascetic personal philosophy of "perpetual self questioning" and self-discipline, with a biting sense of the sordid way the musIc industry works (he is scathing about the self-serving blindness of the classical music establishment and the feathered luxury of the PRS multi-millionaires).
The reason the combination works is because his anger at the way creativity is stifled in our society (by 'technocracy', by dlrectlonless 'economics') is fed straight back into his determination to hold onto a vIsion of a different way of doing things He rarely wastes time on polemic for Its own sake.
There is, he Insists, no basIs for sermons; there are no 'rules.' And this, perhaps, is the point that underlies his use of the slightly mysterious term 'meta-musIc'. Meta-music is a way of making music that "reveals a new way of looking at the world" — not through some overblown 'grand vision' (one of Prévost's biggest bugbears is Wagner), but through standing apart from receIved musical notions of what comes easily ("I am not that") by refusing "to own or to be owned."
I know of no one else addressing these questions so unflinchingly (If they're out there, I'd like to read them). This more than makes up for two faults that run through the book. One is minor: an occasional lapse Into portentousness (but most of the time, the style is clear and hits Its targets). The other is more serious: sometimes there is a jarring Intolerance of other musIcs (especIally rock) that perhaps operate by different rules from those Prévost has set for himself, but deserve at least the chance to speak for themselves. If there is one way of 'resisting, there are surely others too. Anyway, Prévost sounds no more convincIng than Adorno did In condemning regular rhythm or harmony as automatic sell-outs to capitalism. Here he judges musIc-making from the outside, a mistake he never makes elsewhere.
It's a small fault, however, to set beside the book's virtues. This is an Inspiring, modest and (to use a word that Prévost is not ashamed to use) beautiful book. Nothing in It is more beautiful than his own cry of resistance: "I am something other than what you tell me I am."
Nick Couldry
The Wire April 1996
This book was published this past autumn, In time to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the group AMM, a small group of experimental improvisers sharing a common goal — to re-discover and re-create music afresh with every performance. In 1965, the group consisted of drummer Eddie Prévost, saxophonist Lou Gare, guitarist Keith Rowe and bassist Lawrence Sheaff. A year later the composer Cornelius Cardew joined the group around the time they were performing his mammoth graphic score Treatise. The American composer Christian Wolff joined in 1968, for one year. Since 1980 the core has been Prévost, Rowe and pianist John Tilbury, with a few others joining in from time to time. The staying power of AMM is remarkable considering the fact that it was destined, almost by definition, to lurk on the fringes of the music scene. Countering the tendency of our technocratic society to make music into a definable, measurable commodity, AMM musicians shun the conscious repetition of "successful" musical configurations for commercial end. "The intention is making music, and listening to it, as if for the first time." Sounds are Investigated, meanings explored, but intentions, hierarchies and goals are avoided. As with the "cloaked but pregnant acronym" AMM, meaning is left open and undefined. And as for form:
"
...an improvisation has no perfect form to which it can aspire. If a commensurate sense of perfection exists for a free improvisation, then it Is in the clarity of musical perception and execution. For the musician it is like being in the eye of a storm, a subtle stillness within a maelstrom — -an assured presence of mind at the point of playing."
Besides an historical introduction and two previously published essays (one by the British Journal of Music Education), the main part of the book consists of a series of short "Meta-Musical Narratives", organised into nine chapters. The tone is sometimes humorous, sometimes biting and angry, sometimes plain and practical, sometimes whimsically poetic. Prévost manages to maintain a delicate balance as he treads between the inevitable contradictory aspects of freely improvised music making. A musician practises to achieve skill. The nature of a skill is to be able to repeat a task effectively at will. But in "meta-musical" improvised performance, the musician aims not to repeat what he has learned to do, but rather to "make music as if for the first time". This is a central paradox for the improvising musician. (Can we will not to will?) He answers such questions in a Zen-like way — declining to answer them with rational argument. Instead, he works his way back to the same problems over and over again, from different angles, until some sort of truth starts to emerge. In fact, the method of writing itself serves as a metaphor for the investigative dialogue ("dialogical heurism", as he puts it) of AMM music making.
Lines are drawn, nevertheless, when it comes to certain ethical questions. And here is where a lot of readers who value the tradition of the "work of art" may get upset. He argues that there are "lurking contractual relationships and moral imperatives" underlying the performing of written works, reflecting the consumerist, technocratic society in which they are (/were) written. This may sound, on the surface, like Marxist jingoism — especially when quoted out of context, but Prévost's thinking is more independent and open-minded than that. I urge classical musicians, (who I venture to say lie generally more to the right of the political spectrum), not to flee in horror, but to consider the arguments. Concerning the question of composed music vs. Improvised music, I would argue that it is partly the way society views works and not the works themselves, or the act of performing works that is the problem. Compositions, "fired into the future" (as he quotes Cornelius Cardew) also have the potential to liberate. The idea of the performer of a written work as technical executor, or as a kind of curator (as Brendel puts it), precludes the possibility of free dialogue. If musical works could be perceived less as marketable or sacred objects, and more as possible views of the world on which to reflect, greater freedom might develop. Eddie Prévost's book, with great skill and imagination, provokes the reader into contemplating such questions.
Douglas Finch
Piano Journal May 1996