Liner Notes

Double album, double solos of two distinctive musicians, becoming duets in a relatively rare space between solo playing and ensemble. Reed and percussion start at different places, the one working through breath, the other pulse of materials being struck, one typically characterised by line, the other by attack, producing in the first pitch configurations, in the second beat patterns (Prévost doesn’t use the specifically pitched mallet instruments). Each player comes with a distinctive sonic identity, but they’re frequently crossing. The main intersection is sonority. The saxophone can splutter, click and gesture, notably in the extreme registers and the rapid shifts between them, with just sound. Prévost makes long, sustained attackless sounds by bowing his cymbals and gong, and his invented string drum tosses up melodic fragments. Percussion drives and saxophone sings, but Parker can drive just as hard and Prévost make a singing sound. Sometimes you can’t tell which of the two’s sounds you’re hearing. There’s a lot of music here, like a long book, on eight tracks, each with with particular sound and overall shape, but all parts of a large, continuous process, coherent.

The ingredients of the coherence are various and in-process. The impulse of the playing is free, improvised, discovering, but the playing is always in sharp focus, clearly etched, completely attentive; nothing’s casual, there’s no drift. The production of single sounds, extended continuities, streams of sound is exact - at high speeds, at slow and searching, when the sound is scattered and spaces open up, when it’s meditative or rhapsodic, or wherever in between it may be. Always the playing fuses this focused discipline (exercised, incidentally, on remarkable virtuosity) with impulse which rides the controls, and foci, of breath (with Parker often circular, uninterruptedly sustained) and pulse, the processes of producing the sound. With sound production at source and center, melodic, harmonic and rhythmic structures are resultants. This may seem to give the music a rather abstract, distanced feeling. But what could be more immediate than this closeness to the sounding process itself? The making of the sounds is a way of finding, letting loose melodic tracings (often close to pentatonic and overtone series-related pitches), cohering and dissolving rhythmic patterns, and the larger structural shapes of whole pieces (cuts). The latter seem to me particularly transparent, and so, affecting, in a rhythm of transformation, back and forth and forward, between slower and faster, scattered and driving and flowing, variegated and reduced, absences and presences - no drums, only drums, persistence in a register of the sax, in a mode (color) of playing; timbral shifts making structural shapes. The harmony is in the interplay and balancing of the players’ sonorities, and occasionally, surprisingly, pitch-related, the pitch of a drum tuned to by the sax (say, towards the end of track 4 of CD 2). The sax too has its multiphonic chords (grounded in the instrument’s physical, acoustic construction) or, when rapidly shifting between registers, implies, as in Bach’s writing for solo instruments, two or more vertically related sound layers. And Prévost’s bowing on metal produces rich harmonic sonorities.

Though the music of these duets might appear abstract, avoiding obvious epiphanies, the quality of the sound-making persists at an unfalteringly high level of attention, where at almost any moment there may be surprise and discovery. As listener you too, then, have to be a discoverer. For all the edge and drive the music’s not aggressive, not at your throat. It’s more matter-of-fact (as John Cage said of Satie’s music, that it was simply in-your-face), It’s tempting to say that these performances are masterful too, the music of two masters - meaning nothing pretentious, just technically, in the sense of accumulated and sustained craft and invention, experience and renewal.

Christian Wolff
c. August 1997

Notes: 1. The titles for all the pieces are quotations from Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
2. Djebel Nefousa 1993 (front cover painting by Brenda Mayo). The Djebel Nefousa are nomads who inhabit central North Africa. They have developed a particular system for the construction of their tents, a system of supporting poles and enveloping cloth. A place is designated as interior, for a while at least, until the tent is dismantled, transported and once again reconstructed in a perpetual cycle of wrapping and release. The tent as threshold defines interior and exterior in such a way as to render equivocal the very nature of within and without.

Track listing:
CD A:
1. Double truth (of reason and revelation) (19.51)
2. Knowledge is power (13.36)
3. Rejecting simple enumeration (13.46)
4. That more might have beene done, or sooner (29.00)

CD B:
1. Nil novum (12.01)
2. Skill gave rise to chance, and chance to skill (09.26)
3. Not so much for the sake of arguing as for the sake of living (12.24)
4. Let us attend to present business (11.19)
5. Chastise me, but listen (16.42)

Recorded at Gateway Studios, Kingston, England on 23 February 1997 (CD A and B1) and 13 April 1997 (other tracks).

Front cover painting (reproduced above) Djebel nefousa by Brenda Mayo, 1993.