Liner Notes

When the Eddie Prévost Quartet's Continuum was first released in 1985, it was characterised in Jazz Forum (and later on the album sleeve) as showing the group's 'firm hold on traditional jazz essentials - rhythmic drive, strong melodic development, clearly developed improvisatory statement - at the same time as it seems to keep its permanently exploratory direction'. These qualities are amply illustrated in the recording of Continuum which represents the entire, forty-minute set played by the group at the 1983 Bracknell Jazz Festival. For this CD, four studio pieces, recorded in London in 1985, have been added, further illustrating the Quartet's originality, energy and stylistic variety.

The rare quality pin-pointed in Jazz Forum's critical acclaim for the Quartet stems from the fact that the group brought together an especially striking diversity of styles and directions within jazz and improvised music. That diversity derives in turn from immense experience, on the part of the four musicians, of playing and recording with virtually all the notable figures of the European free jazz and art-music scene of the time.

Before and alongside Continuum, Veryan Weston (piano) was extensively involved with Lol Coxhill and Phil Minton, with Trevor Watts's Moiré Music, and with his own Stinky Winkles, among other collaborations. Across the fifteen years since the recording he has performed and recorded both as part of local community projects and also internationally, including at major jazz festivals (being awarded a number of international music prizes on the way). Such performances and recordings have involved a variety of formats (solo; with his own trio; and with visual artists and mixed-media producers, contributing for example on one occasion to the soundtrack, performed with Lol Coxhill, of Derek Jarman's film Carravagio (1985).

Influenced by early musical experience as a performer and composer of bossa nova in Brazil, as well as later by the improvising environment of London's Little Theatre Club during the 1970s, by1985 bassist Marcio Mattos had become prominent among British improvising bassists for a wide range of performing and recording projects, including with John Surman, Evan Parker, Keith Tippett, Derek Bailey's Company, Tony Oxley, and the Elton Dean group, in some cases (as with the Extempore Dance Theatre Company or with Ballet Rambert) combining improvised music with theatre.

Saxophonist Larry Stabbins brought to the Quartet an equally rich jazz and improvised music experience, from years of working with Louis Moholo, Keith Tippett, Tony Oxley, Peter Brotzmann and very many other pre-eminent figures of the jazz and improvised music scene. Significantly, too, in the 1980s he was also centrally involved as arranger, band-leader, and composer (with Simon Booth) in the prominent jazz-influenced group Working Week, whose tours, singles, albums, and film and television music signal an influence on the Quartet from another direction: from styles and conventions of the contemporary popular music industry.

Much of percussionist Eddie Prévost's own work, for more than thirty years, has been undertaken with the concert-music oriented ensemble AMM, and performances of works by composers such as Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff and others. Known perhaps as much for his use of bowed cymbals, gongs, and found objects as for performing with a conventional jazz drum kit, Prévost continues to play in several groups involving major improvising figures of his own generation, while also recently forming a new trio with musicians roughly a generation younger than himself. Shaped by this mix of backgrounds and experiences, the music you hear on this CD has a distinct urgency and excitement. It moves forward in a complicated, constantly mutating web of stylistic references to musical precedents within jazz and twentieth century music, overlapped in a restless search for new textures, moods, dramatic interludes, and possible resolutions. Some listeners may feel - as others have over the years - that sections of the Quartet's music sound like be-bop heard at a distance or in a dream. There is certainly something in this perception. But the likeness never goes beyond mood or the resemblance of incidental allusion. Perhaps there are changes of the instrument temporarily foregrounded in the ensemble that are reminiscent of devices for handing over solos in jazz, including be-bop. But you need only listen to the rhythmic and harmonic mutations and uncertainties, or to the continuously re-defined relationships the four instruments enter into with one another, to be made aware that the music never becomes stylistic imitation or pastiche.

Already by 1965, Eddie Prévost had reacted against seeing jazz, which had earlier served as an inspiration, being treated as an exclusively American cultural phenomenon and as a form resistant to widening aesthetic concerns. So while the influence of jazz styles continues unmistakably in Continuum, nearly twenty years later, constraints of jazz forms are not respected at all in the performance, as the music rushes past them onto other destinations. As I put it in my sleeve note to the 1985 release, 'the relationships [between instruments] are of a kind quite impossible in earlier periods of jazz, continually overspilling the roles of soloist(s) and rhythm section. It is true that musical references are on occasion unmistakable; but they remain oblique glimpses, within textures of a music that juxtaposes and combines impulses and directions of many different kinds as it follows paths dictated by the musicians' own tastes and enjoyment.’

Many things have changed, of course, in the nearly fifteen years since Continuum’s original release. Within the British improvised music scene, there is arguably far greater self-confidence, with the music more recognised as an art project and less viewed as an idiosyncratic offshoot of energetic but maverick imagination from the jazz scene. There are closer affinities with European avant-garde concert music (drawing on resemblances with other avant-garde compositional initiatives, including aleatory composition). At the same time, there is less obvious connection with the jazz world, especially as 'neoclassical' or retro jazz forms became popular, though at serious risk of trivialising jazz culture, during the 1980s.

Within musical culture more generally, however, there have also been major shifts. Music technologies have been transformed, for instance, with the extensive adoption of digital recording and reproduction. As an indirect result, the role and significance of 'live' performance has taken on different, as yet unresolved, meanings in relation to other artistic practices: precisely what performers are doing in the mysterious, to a large extent unconscious, process of engaging with, responding to, and being shaped by an ongoing flow (or 'continuum') of auditory sensation is open to fresh and more focused reconsideration. Different possibilities for recording and distribution have allowed smaller, niche-marketed projects and companies, as well as more diverse music sub-cultures, to thrive, so expanding the range of available, culturally represented musics. Meanwhile, fresh challenges have been presented, by the almost world-wide collapse of Marxism as a vision or political force, to the sorts of presumed linkage between aesthetics and politics which characterise a number of modernist art traditions.

Given the scale of these various changes, a new vocabulary for and critical conception of experimental musical activity is needed to sustain what Prévost has interestingly described as 'meta-music', or musical performance which foregrounds the art-theoretical issues with which it engages. It is interesting in this respect that each of the four musicians in the Quartet has at one time or another been involved in music education or broader cultural and philosophical debate. Notably Veryan Weston has taught piano and composition at London universities and other educational institutions; Larry Stabbins currently teaches philosophy besides performing; and Eddie Prévost himself remains perhaps Britain's most eloquent advocate of free music, publishing magazine articles and running workshops both in Britain and internationally (Prévost's full-length study of the musical practice implicit in his longstanding association with AMM, No Sound is Innocent, was published by Copula in 1996).

Fifteen years on since my original sleeve note, I continue to find Continuum as exciting and enjoyable as anything I know in British improvised music. The CD release presents not only a new format but also a new mix. Its reproduced sound and balance are noticeably better, while the urgency of the original live recording is retained. The four added studio tracks present a range of moods, textures and references, from the slow, ballad-like first piece, largely a vehicle for Stabbins' tenor, through the spiky contrapuntal playing exemplified by the beginning of the third piece, to sustained textures or continua realised often by extended techniques especially between piano and bass.

What I continue to enjoy particularly is the album's messy, kaleidoscopic rush of textures, melodic fragments, and anticipated references, which seem to predominate over what has become the other main aesthetic aspiration of contemporary improvised music: an apparent desire for the significance and historical position of abstract expressionism and related movements in painting, based on new textures and sound-scapes as well as other overtly painterly or design attributes. Perhaps what is most interesting about Continuum is its almost unique quality of holding these two aesthetic aspirations in some kind of tension - a dialectic or dialogue - with one another.

All very well, you might say. But even so there's still one important question you have to ask about this 1999 release: In a lively scene of new music based on an aesthetic of interaction and continuing production (celebrating event rather than reified composition), why would anyone release a fifteen-year old improvised recording already available in another format? I think there are two main responses worth considering.

The first acknowledges an understandable wish to write, in a new form, one small part of the local (and not well-known) history of improvised music in Britain. If the term 'classic' seems too grand for Continuum, then the recording might still be considered at least a historical document very worthy of preservation in the new, global digital archive (to which Matchless Recordings has already made a useful contribution).

The second response - one I incline to more - is that Continuum captures, almost uniquely, the specific possibility of a particular period within the history of British improvised (and 'free jazz') music. Wonderful performing and a lively scene continue, and are judged by many to be richer, more vital, and exciting than ever. But in its excited grappling with divergent elements of jazz and concert-music traditions at the same time, Continuum captures a potential - never resolved between those traditions - for redefining British musical culture not only by challenging conventional musical idioms but also by challenging given cultural and aesthetic categories. The excitements of that moment - from perhaps the emergent political formations of the late 1960s through to the 1980s - were followed by a period of relative retrenchment, during which both jazz and concert music worked largely within and served to reinforce given aesthetic and formal categories rather than challenging them.

If the second of these responses holds, then what makes Continuum remarkable still is the extent to which it holds out the possibility of new kinds of engagement between jazz and concert traditions, prompted (in this case) by the specific conjunction in that earlier period of modernist art practice, contemporaneous reworkings of what constitutes popular music, and a range of forms of political engagement and cultural activism. In this respect, and in the moment-by-moment urgencies of its playing, the recording communicates musical questioning, exploration and desires as much or more in 1998 as it did in 1985.

Alan Durant c.1998