Liner Notes

Concerted Energies

The scope of Eddie Prévost's music can make you wonder if the nostalgic commentators currently pining for the Golden Age of Improvisation are paying proper attention. There are a number of British free players of the "first generation", so-called, who by dint of perseverance have taken the music forward, and whose work has grown in richness, breadth, depth, and profundity. Prévost is certainly one of them. As the 1990s wind down, the drummer is on a roll, mapping out areas of sound exploration with bright invention and imagination, ears keener than ever, it seems to me, and techniques finely honed and scaled to match the appropriate project. And yet, and yet...no sooner do I type these words than Prévost's own stern warnings from No Sound Is Innocent (Copula Books, 1995) swim into view: "The more assured and developed is the technique then the less flexible and malleable it might be. The meta-musician is free but must work to remain free, of certainties, of technique, approach and self-esteem."

Free of certainty? Free of technique? Is this the impression a listener will take away from these duets with Veryan Weston? Barely a paragraph into these notes and already I'm at odds with the artist, whose assurance and control as a player - whatever the context - are surely two of the qualities that have always defined his (very malleable) style. If Eddie Prévost is uncertain, then the bluff is more than persuasive! It is easier to agree with his judgement that "ultimately, the meta-musician's worth is measured by a willingness to embrace a wide range of musical approaches."

Recent documentary evidence on Matchless CDs has displayed Prévost's powers as improvisor very clearly in diverse settings. Loci of Change, for instance, his poetic solo album of 1996, is full of music of shifting focus. And the way in which the slowly-blossoming, amorphous or opaque sound-colours of "landscape" percussion are counterbalanced by the application (like paint from the tube) of snare drum rudiments is but one of the means with which it demands the listener's attention. There is not another percussion record like it.

Most Materiall (1997), a sprawling, almost epic encounter with fellow innovator Evan Parker, matches sounds of drums and reeds near seamlessly and sometimes finds its protagonists trading modi operandi, the saxophonist revealing his willingness to play "laminally" in neo-AMM mode, the percussionist - less frequently - moved to meet his partner in speeding, "atomistic" exchanges. Silence has a big role to play in Prévost's work, in Parker's a very minor role. This is another fundamental musico-philosophical distinction seeking resolution in the music.

Touch (1997) finds a special pathos in the not-quite-fully-formed-but-already-intriguing sound of Tom Chant's soprano sax (obviously influenced by Evan Parker and John Butcher, but drifting somewhere else) and John Edwards' sensitive non-jazz bass playing. Prévost's whispering brushes gently guide his young associates to group music of vulnerability and resilience, a highly exposed music whose very frailty is its strength. A touching record, indeed, and potentially a significant one in the larger picture of improvised music, indicating or implying some new pathways.

And then of course there is AMM, that soundworld unto itself, famously "there a few minutes before we thought of it" and - it can be guaranteed - echoing after the players have gone. Meanwhile, it has outlasted all other improvising ensembles and, Keith Rowe's demurrers notwithstanding, has changed quite considerably over the years. On both Before driving to the chapel we took coffee with Rick and Jennifer Reed (1997) and its predecessor From A Strange Place (1995, on the Japanese Modern Music label), harps of cloud-bound angels seem to hover around the improvisation, joining the flux and throb of motorway traffic, the sound of chairs stacked and floors swept, slammed doors, indeterminate transistor radios, and the other everyday minutiae that AMM tunes to the pitch of its particular mystery. Over time the ritual has become rather more inviting, or at least less punishing for the novitiate. (Indeed, John Tilbury now hears the music as "erotic": refer to Laminal liner note, 1996).

Such are some of Prévost's recent and/or enduring preoccupations. There have been other far-flung adventures, from the sublime to the preposterous: for instance with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and with Kevin Martin's noise-rock God band, to name just two extremes. How are all these diverse projects related to the matter at hand? Tangentially. The meta-musician may aspire to play "as if for the first time" in each improvised context but inevitably comes trailing clouds of experience. Even if that experience tells him what to omit from his playing in-the-moment, it belongs to the reservoir of knowledge drawn upon. Concert, v. with Veryan Weston ("The title refers to the verb meaning of the word 'concert'," Prévost says helpfully) doesn't resemble any of the aforementioned discs in detail, but its grammar is inevitably influenced by the way in which Prévost's skills have been reforged and rebellowed in the course of recent playing. And in that sense this recording is sometimes closer to Touch or Most Materiall than it is to the kind of music that Weston and Prévost made together in the Prévost Quartet of 1983/4.

Prévost's groups of the 70s and 80s had played a species of worthy, denim-sleeves-rolled-up workers' free jazz (the subtlest of them, dispensing most thoroughly with idiomatic signposts was called just Free Jazz Quartet), with a buoyant time feel that owed a debt to Blackwell and Higgins, and sometimes sounded like early Ornette minus the heads - which may have been halfway coincidental, since both Coleman and Prévost were inspired by the collective ethos of the New Orleans bands. Ornette is indirectly saluted on the present disc with the punning title and sensitivity of "Beauty as an Ear Thing".

The arrival of Veryan Weston on piano changed the balance of Prévost's group music. Perhaps more of an "all-rounder" than some of the drummer's earlier associates, Weston had already been through several stylistic upheavals of his own. Arriving on the London scene from Cornwall in 1972 to eke out a living as a jazz pianist, he was drawn to that forcing house of improvisation the Little Theatre Club, a venue that spelled doom for anybody's commercial ambitions. He disappeared for a while to work on a book about piano improvisation, and resurfaced as Lol Coxhill's pianist. With Coxhill's work frequently blurring distinctions between music, performance art, and surreal humour, it was perhaps unsurprising that Weston's own interests would move towards the mixing of media. There can't be many improvisors who have accompanied a potter, but Weston did this for Liz Fritsch in 1979, and also worked with visual artist Stephen Cochrane, further confounding expectations by launching a post-fusion group, the unfortunately-named Stinky Winkles, showered with prizes from international arts associations during its brief lifespan. Round about the time that he joined Prévost, Weston also joined Trevor Watts's group. In fact the moiré in the original Moiré Music, the shimmer in the motion of things, was in good measure attributable to the patterning of Weston's keyboard. Weston employed motoric, pulsating phrases at the heart of the music that prompted some critics to make comparisons with the Reich/Riley/Glass school of mesmeric minimalism.

On Continuum, the vintage '83 Prévost Quartet recording due for imminent reissue on Matchless, there's a great deal of energetic jostling-for-space, as saxophonist Larry Stabbins howls for the moon, determined to articulate everything he couldn't say in his period pop band Working Week. Weston seems to cut and shuffle the keyboard by way of response, dealing out endless permutations of styles, a kind of speeding post-modern pianistic procession that tosses out fragments of possibility from Ives to Cecil Taylor via Monk, Bley and the romantics.

This ability of Weston's to slip into and out of roles helps explain why he is so highly regarded by fellow musicians and also why his name isn’t more widely known to the little public-at-large that is the jazz and improvised audience. His versatility is comprehensive yet there are few gestures to be singled out as quintessentially "Westonesque". Apparently ambivalent about his stylistic loyalties he has also, in various periods, emphasised the composed and the improvised, the prepared and the unprepared, in his solo and group playing. His ongoing work with Lol Coxhill and with Phil Minton has benefited from his chameleon adaptability, as purely musical roles metamorphose into character acting and narrative. The association with Minton in particular has chalked up some impressive recorded landmarks, including Songs From A Prison Diary based on Ho Chi Minh texts - which won the Cornelius Cardew Memorial Prize, and Mouthful of Ecstasy, featuring truly inspired free settings of passages of Joyce from Finnegans Wake. The latter recording strikes me as the most thoroughly convincing amalgamation of text and music (detail answering to detail) to have emerged from the improvisors' corner.

But back to Concert, v. and its concerted energies. Prévost, who questions everything as a matter of habit, overturns here the convention that persists, even in free music, of drums necessarily assuming an accompanying role in duo playing. Presumably, this is why he lists his own name first on this recording (and how often has the drummer had top billing since the Milford Graves/Don Pullen album Nommo ??), to indicate that the nature of the musical relationship is different from that to be encountered on an earlier Matchless piano/drums set with Marilyn Crispell. Discussion of improvisation in and out of jazz centres on the model of music as conversation, but it takes only a moment's thought to register the fact that participants in a conversation rarely, if ever, have equal input. We expect exchanges to take place, but someone will inevitably dominate - either the most strident individual, or the one with most knowledge, wit, authority and experience. At the end of Concert, v. Weston and Prévost are hammering home the same message with equal power. In Part One there are long stretches where the piano follows the lead of the drums, often casting itself into the net of percussive accents to consider what may be detailed from this unorthodox perspective.

Veryan Weston has acknowledged, in interviews, that working with Prévost has influenced his musical thinking. I interpret that to mean that he has taken to heart the drummer's determination to boil off super-abundant excess and reduce the music to essentials. This is nowhere more evident on the present recording than on the sequence of pieces that develops out of "Beauty as an Ear Thing" through "Clustered", "Fingers and Drums" and "Hammer and Tonic". It's almost as if the "concert" that is Concert, v. finishes with the boldly-phrased exchanges of "Sticks and Tones", and an encore is launched with "Beauty", that flowers into a suite. "Beauty as an Ear Thing" is a meticulous exploration of texture, full of soft explosions, the reverberant ring of spinning metals, and overtones that glow like embers, dying into silence: this music wouldn't be misplaced on an AMM disc. "Clustered" rebuilds something out of the emptiness. The dislocated rhythmic feel is like an abstraction of something Monk and Max Roach might have played together. "Fingers and Drums" also conveys the sense of inventing almost from scratch, asking "what is this material?" and digging into it to find out. Finally "Hammer and Tonic", a roaring thing, leaps from the starting gate as if all questions were resolved long ago...

And note how well this music in its changing moods is registered. A word of praise for the engineer is overdue. One day a music journalist with an ounce of newspaperman's curiosity - there must be one left somewhere - will start asking questions about the great-sounding recordings of improvised music issued in the 1990s. Eddie Prévost albums, Evan Parker albums, Barry Guy albums, Louis Moholo albums, Phil Minton albums, John Butcher albums, many others. And, following the trail of small-print on tray-cards, our reporter will end up at the studios attached to a Kingston music school, where Steve Lowe has so often captured this detailed improvisation with uncommon fidelity.

Steve Lake
c.1998

Track listing:
Part 1:
1. Pinna (02.52)
2. Malleus (05.56)
3. Symphony of surfaces (11.08)
4. Finger the fine needle (04.32)
5. Tympanic (05.50)
6. With greazie aprons (08.05)

Part 2:
7. Brush up (07.32)
8. Sticks and tones (07.20)
9. Beauty as an ear thing (08.43)
10. Clustered (05.30)
11. Fingers and drums (03.36)
12. Hammer and tonic (06.41)

Part 1 recorded at Gateway Studios, Kingston on 5 June 1998; part 2 recorded same location on 29 June 1998; produced by Evan Parker.
Front cover from a painting Undulation by Berrenice Benjellon.