liner notes

Sixty years ago, in Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann's Leverkuhn says "Music turns the equivocal into a system". Improvisation fights against that. It rejects system and in the process demonstrates that equivocation is not necessarily a bad thing, but instead a locus for thoughts, yearnings, philosophical quiddities that have not yet any clear end in view. As one of the players here once put it: no sound is innocent; but by the same token, improvised sound refuses to submit to the lockstep of "experience" or system.

The other half of this duo expressed himself more pungently: sod good taste. It's generally accepted that taste is the enemy of art, in that taste avoids extremity, avoids ambiguity and runs in fright from complexity. The sounds you are listening to do not pursue any of these qualities as an end in itself. The music Eddie Prevost and Alan Wilkinson are making here is neither extreme, nor ambiguous, nor is it self-consciously convoluted. Indeed, in comparison to much of what passes muster as commercial music, it is devastatingly straightforward and approachable. But it constantly allows for the possibility of other states. It trembles with potential, and thus never exhausts its unequivocal possibilities.

Almost every artistic form, whether it is the five act tragedy or the string quartet, has one work which ranges across it like the Great Wall of China, magnificent but also an obstacle to those who presume to follow. Hamlet or King Lear might serve in the first case; one of the late Beethoven opus numbers in the latter. By the same token it is hard to think of an album of saxophone and percussion duos without thinking of John Coltrane's and Rashied Ali's Interstellar Space. It is a magnificent piece of music, and a constant challenge to those who have followed. But it also acts as a barrier, not necessarily to musicians, certainly to those who listen to and cherish music. Coltrane's late opus numbers were the product of a spiritual quest that seemed tinged with a Faustian urge to know everything. The association with Ali took him out beyond the basic time-codes of jazz, then Western music, then any other systematised metrical language.

To some extent, without in any way explicitly addressing Interstellar Space Prevost and Wilkinson have responded to it by bringing their language back into a human realm, to a space in which the specifics of making a particular sound at a particular moment is more important than the metaphysical import of those sounds, and to the excluded middle of what can only be called "ethical" music-making. That is not to say, music with a moral function or conclusion, but rather music that addressed itself to the fundamental ethical question, which is how we address each other, how we communicate needs, desires, concerns and ambitions, and how we make that language available to others as an ongoing discourse.

Prevost is a "free" musician whose freedom is grounded in a deep understanding of time-playing, of other musical traditions (as far afield as Korean court music) and of the wider vibrational import of sound. He is neither elitsist nor populist, but genuinely democratic. Wilkinson, who includes time spent with the late Matthew Coe (aka Xero Slingsby) among his more confrontational associations, is perhaps more obviously thirled to ideas of music as encounter and provocation, as a dramatic act. Put the two men together, though, and their common disposition becomes more obvious.

There is no equivocation here in the usually accepted sense, but there is certainly an equality of voices and a shared understanding that no fixed system can circumscribe the act of improvisation. What sets its boundaries is again that sense of music as a branch of human ethics. This is brave music because it is egoless, and it is beautiful music because it is brave, and it is important music because it is beautiful . . .

Brian Morton