CD notes

invenio ergo sum

In 1619, a young French scientist and mathematician was serving with Maurice of Nassau’s army at Ulm on the Danube. By his own account, he passed a particularly cold morning sitting in an oven or stove – more likely in a room heated by a stove – and, while his mind was momentarily taken off the discomforts of soldiering came up with what has become one of the foundational ideas of Western philosophy, and one of its most problematic. Almost everyone knows the phrase cogito ergo sum – it has the same iconic, unexamined quality as E=mc2 – and generations of philosophy students have battled with what it actually means. ‘I think, therefore I am’ has a silly obviousness when taken out of context – generations of philosophy students have enjoyed silly jokes like ‘I’m pink, therefore I’m Spam’ – and the absence of context tends to blur potential objections to the confident declaration that what defines us and underwrites our existence is thought: nothing else.

There have been many and predictable objections to this. First of all, there’s a logical objection that points out a missing element in the apparent syllogism, which seems to need some statement that thinking is a guarantee of existence. The British philosopher Bernard Williams suggests that introspection isn’t a good way of reaching any third-personal fact which would need some proof beyond the working of an individual mind. Others more straightforwardly suggest that the Latin original needs a fuller, in fact, mouth-filling translation like ‘I am thinking, on account of being’ or ‘There is a thought now, therefore I must exist’.

And so it goes on. Hair is split. Logic is chopped. In practical terms, we accept the cogito much as we accept gravity or the hardness of large rocks Even in vacant moments, gazing blankly out at the rain or at a pile of paperwork that hasn’t been done, we don’t forget that we exist; we just momentarily wish we didn’t.

Perhaps the simple answer is to find a less tendentiously empty verb to spark off or confirm our self-awareness. Is it thinking that allows us to believe we exist, or is it making? Or communicating with others? Or discovering? Or creating?

Invenio ergo sum. There’s a formulation that takes us briskly on to third-personal facts, or – as on this CD – three persons whose reciprocal existence is a process of discovery and learning: a heuristic process, in Eddie Prévost’s favoured term. It’s a process that can only be enacted in what Prévost has called the ‘extra-personal life of community’, by which he means not just the ‘collective’ but also the communities-at-large that define us as social as well as thinking animals. As an improviser with deep roots in jazz and other musics, Prévost has always been acutely conscious of a perceived tension between the apparently radical individualism of the ‘free’ improviser, who can seem bound up in sober introspection, and the philosophical fake-book of styles, genres, repertoire, a canon. He calls for resistance to any process which threatens to ossify rules of conduct into ‘self-deceiving patterns of conceit’. Anyone with even a vague grounding in Descartes will jump on one word there. ‘Deceiving’ is a strong echo – conscious or otherwise – of Descartes’ starting point, the possibility that God is a Great Deceiver and what we call reality a treacherous slide-show of substanceless images, the propaganda of non-entity. Cartesian doubt relieves itself by reminding itself that it’s thinking and therefore all’s well. Eddie Prévost’s music, whether as a founding member of AMM or as leader of other, more obviously jazz-inflected projects, is always in some sense communitarian in spirit – that is what most aligns it to jazz of the classic period – and egoless in approach. It is never conversational or phatic, rarely confrontational in the slacker construction of that word, which implies hostility, and never so obsessed with novelty that it loses sight of a lengthening tradition of discourse.

Arguably, Prévost’s most important work of recent years has been his weekly workshop in London, now in place for almost a decade and with a remarkable 250-plus musicians on its past and present roll. The present project sees him working with two of its alumni, now unquestionably claiming postgraduate status. Saxophonist Seymour Wright has emerged as the most important saxophonist of his generation. It’s tempting to suggest that he stands as successor/rival to Evan Parker and John Butcher, but it’s more accurate to suggest that in his recent practice and in his unfashionable insistence that what he plays is jazz, rather than ‘free music’ or any other niche definition, he represents an alternative to those senior Englishmen, whose respectively evolving languages perhaps dominate our sense of what creative saxophone playing sounds like. In his still thinly documented work – on the Matchless Hornbill set, on his own Seymour Wright of Derby and in collaboration with pianist+ Sebastian Lexer on blasen – Wright shows a command of the saxophone which in contrast to most ‘non-idiomatic’ playing – cynically translated as ‘make your saxophone sound like anything other than a saxophone’ – has deep roots in a tradition of playing that goes back to Frankie Trumbauer, Coleman Hawkins and Willie Smith. It’s quite possible that in a gaggle of younger players, Wright would be the only one to namecheck the first and last of these. As his SUM colleage Ross Lambert puts it, Wright is the encyclopaedist, historically astute, connected and engaged.

Lambert is from Ballygawley, a corner of Northern Ireland that, as he explains, offered few opportunities to hear jazz on any regular basis. While Wright certainly doesn’t sound like a man who carries his record collection on his back, Lambert is that rare individual these days, a jazz musician who doesn’t necessarily have any formal founding in the tradition. He admits to listening only to important records and then rarely, and considers a focus on the politics and practice of experimental music more important than documenting his work. If all this, and the fact that he plays guitar, which has often been a fifth column instrument in jazz, smuggling in energies from other forms, suggests a man who has declared his own Year Zero and separated himself from any existing performance practice, the impression is faulty and incomplete. Whatever its source, Lambert’s music belongs in a long community of practice on this hearing.

Some fifteen years ago, in his book No Sound Is Innocent, Prévost wrote that ‘Definition of self can only occur within voluntary limitations of activity and expression.’ For this project, those willed demarcations may seem like a step back towards what some might regard as ‘standards’ or ‘repertory’ playing. This isn’t in itself unusual. After a lifetime bleaching his music of metre, harmonic hierarchy or obvious melody, guitarist Derek Bailey returned late in life to standards and ballads, albeit played in a sufficiently jag-toothed manner to reassure his admirers that he wasn’t ‘doing a George Benson’. What was striking about the critical reaction to these late projects was the failure to recognise that just underneath Bailey’s lifelong practice was a tradition of playing that embraced Teddy Bunn and the Spirits of Rhythm, Charlie Christian and a thousand nameless bluesmen and music-hall accompanists. His ‘switch’ of style was no more than the merest change of angle, revealing a facet that had hitherto been in shadow, but which had never been absent. In the same way, one shouldn’t approach this record under the influence of an ‘AMM MAN PLAYS STANDARDS’ headline. There’s no headline, just a continuation of a long and thoughtful story whose chief premise is the denial of the single expressive self – though Prévost’s unaccompanied performances, like the solo tam-tam record Entelechy, are fascinating documents – in favour of a collective exploration that changes the case of cogito (or invenio) ergo sum to the plural. You don’t need to sit in a super-heated room to enjoy this epiphany. It comes out here, cool and alert, thinking music that relies on unspoken understandings and a shared commitment to jazz music as a moral and social imperative, not a branch of entertainment. None of these players would claim to be making a historic document, and one senses in them different kinds of diffidence to the act of making a record in the first place, but in its (mostly) quiet way the record you are holding, and one hopes listening to as well, marks a modest epoch in the evolution of a great music. It neither denies the past nor confers it with undue significance. It affirms freedom, but within consensual bounds. It comes out of, and returns to, a community of interest which does not pander to the lowest common denominator and in failing to do so, elevates us all to a position of aesthetic privilege. They create, therefore we are . . .

Brian Morton