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«Nachdem ich die Schule verlassen hatte, arbeitete ich bei einem Architekten, der gotische Kirchen restaurierte. In England haben wir ein Ausbildungssystem, wo man sich einem Lehrmeister anschliessen kann. Man lernt bei ihm und tritt in seine Fussstapfen. Ich war also eine Art Assistent oder Gehilfe bei diesem Architekten. Mein Lehrmeister war ein ausgezeichneter Zeichner und kannte sich in der Kunst eher gut aus. Ich wollte damals eigentlich eine Kunstschule besuchen. Aber die Schule, die ich absolviert hatte, bot mir dazu die Möglichkeit nicht. Ich hatte auch das Wissen nicht, wie man so etwas anpacken könnte. Es war damals üblich, dass man nach der Schule Geld verdienen ging. Die meisten gingen in die Fabriken, von denen es in der Gegend zahlreiche gab. Ich hatte also Glück, dass ich zu diesem Architekten kam.

In dieser Zeit lernte ich Leute kennen, die sich mit Musik und Komposition beschäftigten. Einige studierten an der Universität Mathematik, sie kannten die verschiedenen Korrelationen von Musik und Mathematik. Wir taten damals sehr intellektuell, debattierten stundenlang, hielten uns in den Pubs auf und tranken. Das war etwa 1966. Es war eine sehr intensive Atmosphäre, es brodelte: die Flower-Power-Zeit, Vietnamkrieg; es schien damals, als ob die ganze Welt in einem Gärungsprozess steckte. Vielleicht tönt es nostalgisch, wenn ich auf die sechziger Jahre zurückblicke, oder beschönigend, wenn ich sage, wie aufregend die Zeit damals war. Aber wenn man das erlebt hat und diese Erfahrungen gemacht hat, dann weiss man, wie prägend dieses Klima war.

Meine Eltern waren überhaupt nicht musikalisch. Aber sie hatten viel übrig für Musik. Als ich einen Kontrabass wollte, um Jazz zu spielen, sagten die Eltern sofort: O.k., wir kaufen dir einen Bass. Meiner Zwillingsschwester kauften sie ein Klavier. Mein Vater war ein kaufmännischer Angestellter und arbeitete im Teehandel. In den Jahren, als in London die Docks verschwanden, verlor er die Stelle und war längere Zeit ohne Arbeit. Danach fand er einen Job in der Buchabteilung der BBC. Leider ist er mehr oder weniger gerade am Tag seiner Pensionierung gestorben. Aber zurück zu der Zeit, als wir begannen, Musik zu spielen. In einem Pub lernte ich Paul Rutherford kennen. Jemand sagte mir, dass er ein hervorragender Posaunist sei. In meinem Kompositionsunterricht schrieb ich dann ein Stück mit einer Passage für Posaune und Saxofon. Paul Rutherford lud den Saxophonisten Trevor Watts ein, um das Stück zu spielen. Später erwähnte jemand unsere Namen bei John Stevens vom Little Theatre Club. John Stevens lud mich einmal in den Little Theatre Club ein, und so trat ich dann dem Spontaneous Music Ensemble bei.

Es folgte eine unglaublich intensive Periode, wo erstaunliche musikalische Dinge passierten. Wir experimentierten sehr viel und machten neue Entdeckungen. Ich habe von den Musikern im Little Theatre Club viel gelernt. Wir wollten zum Beispiel mit unserer Musik nicht nur ständig Impulse des amerikanischen Jazz aufnehmen und wandten uns der europäischen Gegenwartsmusik zu. Wir wollten die Ketten brechen und uns von dieser sklavischen Haltung befreien, immer wieder die neuste John-Coltrane-Platte zu imitieren. Wir steuerten alle auf etwas noch Unbekanntes zu. In einem gemeinsamen Prozess arbeiteten wir darauf hin. Wir versuchten die Details zu klären, die verschiedenen musikalischen Disziplinen zu verknüpfen. Es ging auch darum, Formen eines musikalischen Diskurses zu finden, um mit den andern zusammen koexistieren zu können. Indem wir die traditionellen Kommunikationsmuster zertrümmerten, wollten wir ja eine intensivere Kommunikation erreichen. Wir wollten nicht in einer abstrakten, unehrlichen Weise miteinander umgehen. Wir wollten möglichst intensiv und dicht musizieren.

Ich hatte damals einen Freund, dem ich viel verdanke. Er war ein sehr engagierter Mensch, setzte sich aktiv gegen den Vietnamkrieg ein. Er war ein Vietnam-Experte, so einflussreich, dass selbst die britische Regierung ihn einlud, um sich bei ihm zu informieren. Später ist er unter mysteriösen Umständen umgekommen. Er hatte ein unglaubliches Charisma, das sehr viele Linke anzog. Das Erstaunliche war, dass er auch noch ein guter Kenner der zeitgenössischen Musik war. Wenn er Leute einlud, eine Party gab, wurde Musik gespielt; und zwar nicht nur Rock'n'Roll, sondern Jazz und zeitgenössische Musik. Ich hörte bei ihm zu Hause zum erstenmal in meinem Leben «Le Sacre du Printemps» von Igor Strawinsky, und ich hörte zum erstenmal «Threnos, Den Opfern von Hiroshima» von Krzysztof Penderecki. Von heute aus gesehen, ist es unglaublich, dass diese Musik an einer politischen Veranstaltung gespielt wurde. Aber es passte zum politischen Klima. Die meisten Leute waren int eressiert an dieser Musik.

Ich begann mich dann vermehrt mit zeitgenössischer Musik auseinanderzusetzen, hörte Zwölftonmusik, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, dann die Neuentwicklungen der späten fünfziger Jahre, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenaks É Die Arbeit beim Architekten und mein musikalisches Interesse kamen sich in die Quere. Ich benutzte meine ganze Freizeit, um Musik zu machen und Musik zu hören. Es zeichneten sich damals zwei wichtige Entwicklungen ab: Im Little Theatre Club entstand die britische Free Music. Da herrschte eine phantastische experimentelle Atmosphäre. Auf der anderen Seite begann ich die Welt der klassischen Musik zu entdecken. Ich war radikal und wollte genau herausfinden, was es mit dieser neuen E-Musik auf sich hatte. Ich wurde sehr aktiv, begann Konzerte zu organisieren, suchte nach Musikern, die diese Musik spielen konnten, und spielte auch selber. Ich war wie besessen, denn ich fühlte, dass ich spät dran war. Zum Glück lernte ich den Kompositionslehrer Buxton Orr kennen, der an mir Gefallen fand. Buxton Orr hat übrigens später das London Jazz Composers' Orchestra dirigiert. Orr entdeckte in mir eine musikalische Ader, und obwohl meine Ausbildung allen akademischen Erfordernissen entgegenliefen, sagte er: Diese Person muss an die Musikhochschule. Und er verschaffte mir einen Studienplatz. Da bekam ich die Chance, auch akademische Studien zu betreiben.

Das waren vier tolle Jahre. Es war wie ein grosses Fest. Natürlich kannte ich Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, aber ich hatte mich früher nicht ernsthaft mit Musik beschäftigt. Jetzt öffneten sich plötzlich all diese Möglichkeiten. Ich konnte mich mit der alten Musik auseinandersetzen, hörte Monteverdi, Tartini, alle diese hervorragenden Violinisten und Komponisten des Barock. Ich schwamm plötzlich in einem endlosen Meer musikalischer Möglichkeiten. Es war wirklich spannend und euphorisierend.

Ich hetzte in dieser Zeit von einem Ort zum anderen, um neue Erfahrungen zu machen, um aufzuholen. Jedesmal, wenn ich die Musikhochschule verliess, ging ich zum Little Theatre Club, spielte mit John Stevens, die Gruppe Amalgam von Trevor Watts wurde gegründet, später entstand das Trio Iskra 1903 mit Rutherford, Derek Bailey und mir.

Die Szene um den Little Theatre Club wurde von der etablierten Jazzszene als verrückt und gefährlich taxiert, weil wir zu viele Schranken herunterzureissen drohten. Denn wir kümmerten uns nicht um die traditionellen Standards, wir kümmerten uns nicht um Harmonie, Melodie und Rhythmus. Wer aber genau hinhört, wird feststellen, dass auch wir mit Rhythmus und Melodie arbeiteten, dies aber in einem anderen Sinn als der traditionelle Jazz. Wir waren unbeliebt, es herrschte die allgemeine Meinung, dass wir destruktiv seien, dass wir den Jazz kaputtmachen wollten. Aber wir hatten ein starkes kollektives Bewusstsein, das dem Druck der öffentlichen Meinung standhielt. Dazu gründeten wir auch eine Selbsthilfeorganisation, die Musicians Cooperative. Wir legten mit soviel Punch los, dass uns niemand etwas anhaben konnte.

In diesen Jahren entstanden auch Verbindungen mit Musikerinnen und Musikern anderer Länder. Wir entwickelten eine kosmopolitische oder internationalistische Vision von Musik. Ich erinnere mich sehr gut an den Moment, als ich zum erstenmal den deutschen Saxophonisten Peter Brötzmann hörte. Ich konnte es nicht fassen, dass mit einem Saxophon ein solcher Lärm gemacht werden kann. Ich stand vor meinem Bass und hörte den ganzen Abend von meinem Instrument keinen Ton. Man hörte nur dieses Röhren, dieses Brrrrrrrr, was unerhört faszinierend war. Ich dachte: Die Deutschen spielen ziemlich anders als wir Engländer. Die deutschen Musiker nannten unsere Musik «washing machine music». Sie wollten damit ausdrücken, dass sich unsere Musik endlos drehte. Unsere Musik hatte einen fliessenden, fast transparenten Charakter. Wir spielten nicht diesen harten Jazz wie die Deutschen, den wir «tank music» nannten.

1972 gründeten wir das London Jazz Composers' Orchestra. Rückblickend kann man heute die Entwicklung des Orchesters in drei Perioden einteilen. Die erste dauerte von 1972 bis 1976. In dieser Zeit ging es mir hauptsächlich darum, einen Weg von Koexistenz zwischen frei improvisierter Musik und Komposition zu finden. Ich suchte nach Möglichkeiten, die gegensätzlichen Momente von Freiheit und Kontrolle miteinander zu verbinden. Mit der Komposition «Ode» fand ich eine erste Lösung.

Die Free Music verfügt über eine immense Energie. Dieses Ausscheren und Weit-über-sich-Hinausgehen setzt Energie frei. Energie ist eines der zentralen Merkmale der Free Music. Für das Publikum geht es oft zu schnell, so schnell, dass die Leute gar nicht mehr hinhören können. In der klassischen Musik habe ich oft den Eindruck, dass die Musik immer langsamer und langsamer wird. Eine Ausnahme ist Xenakis. Er ist in der zeitgenössischen Musik einer der wenigen Komponisten, der ungeheure Energien freisetzen kann. Auch Boulez hat in seinen späten Jahren ein Stück geschrieben mit dem Titel «Responsorium», das sehr frei und energetisch klingt. Ich glaube, dieses Stück ist eines der wichtigsten Stücke dieses Jahrhunderts im Bereich der Komposition.

Ich versuchte meinerseits, mit den Kompositionen die Abläufe stärker zu kontrollieren, um die Energie, über die die Musiker verfügen, zu bündeln. Damit erhoffte ich, die Free Music noch kräftiger zu machen. Aber, wie sich herausstellte, war es der falsche Weg. Die Musiker rebellierten, da die Partituren immer komplexer wurden. Sie sagten: Wie können wir diese anspruchsvollen Noten lesen und plötzlich reinspringen in die total freie Improvisation, und das alles in einem ungeheuren Tempo. Wir entschieden uns dann im gegenseitigen Einvernehmen zur Trennung vom Dirigenten Buxton Orr.

Danach folgte eine längere Pause. Ich hatte überhaupt keine Ahnung mehr, in welche Richtung ich mit dem Orchester arbeiten sollte. Dazu kam, dass wir über keine Auftrittsmöglichkeiten und kein Geld verfügten. 1978 lud uns Jost Gebers, der Initiator der Berliner Free Music Production, ein, an seinem FMP-Workshop während fünf Tagen zu proben und aufzutreten. Das war der eigentliche Neuanfang der zweiten Periode. Quasi als Reaktion auf die komplexen Partituren und die Rebellion der Musiker sollten nun die Spieler mehr Verantwortung übernehmen. Die Erfahrungen der ersten Jahre öffneten die Tore in Richtung frei improvisierter Musik. Die Big Band als Free-Music-Orchester. Ich schrieb ein paar Partituren, welche die Musiker animieren sollten, die Abläufe weitgehend selbständig zu gestalten. Ich wollte aber immer noch den überblick haben über das, was musikalisch passiert. So fixierte ich gewisse Muste ur, um musikalische Kombinationen zu planen und die Zufälle zu limitieren.

Der nächste Schritt – und vorläufig der letzte – bestand in einer Umgestaltung des Orchesters. Neue Musiker kamen rein, andere verliessen die Band. Die Probetage im Herbst 1987 im Kulturzentrum Rote Fabrik in Zürich gaben uns die Möglichkeit, einen dritten Weg zu suchen. Die Kompositionen, «Polyhymnia» und vor allem «Harmos» sowie das später geschriebene Stück «Double Trouble», repräsentieren für mich ein neues Verhältnis zu den Musikern und zur Musik. Unsere langjährige Orchesterarbeit bedeutet einen immensen Zuwachs an Erfahrung und Reife. Wir haben viel gelernt. Wir wissen nun, wie wir die Dinge zusammenfügen müssen.

Als ich «Harmos» schrieb, entstanden einige sehr kraftvolle, ausdrucksstarke Melodien. In erster Linie wollte ich ein Stück für den Saxophonisten Trevor Watts schreiben. Ich suchte eine Melodie, die diesen wunderbaren Bogen spannt, den Trevor Watts spielt. Wenn ich ein Stück schreibe, stelle ich mir die Musiker vor. Es ist ein Charakteristikum meiner Kompositionen, dass ich versuche, eine musikalische Sprache zu finden, die auf die Spieler passt. Gleichzeitig versuche ich eine Komposition zu bauen, die kohärent ist. Eine Passage, die nur zu Evan Parker passt, und eine andere, die für Trevor Watts geschrieben ist, müssen durch die Konstruktion verbunden werden, so dass die beiden in einer einsichtigen Beziehung zueinander stehen. Um all die Materialien zu verknüpfen, brauche ich Zeit. Deshalb schreibe ich immer so lange Stücke.

Wie zur Zeit des Little Theatre Clubs arbeite ich auch heute in verschiedenen musikalischen Bereichen. Es bedeutet mir viel, auch klassische Musik zu spielen. Das hat nicht nur ökonomische Gründe. Vielmehr kann ich Neues entdecken, neue musikalische Ausdrucksformen, neue Klangwelten.

Ich weiss, es gibt wenige Musiker, die kontinuierlich sowohl im Bereich des Jazz wie der klassischen Musik arbeiten. Es gibt Leute, die meinen, die eine Spielpraxis schliesse die andere aus. Ich mache jedoch die Erfahrung, dass sie einander nicht stören, weil beide Richtungen vollkommen unterschiedlich sind. Wenn ich klassische Musik interpretiere, dann interpretiere ich. Spiele ich improvisierte Musik, dann improvisiere ich. Ich habe beim Improvisieren noch nie den Zwang verspürt, ein bisschen Mozart oder ein bisschen Bach zu integrieren. Diese Mixturen mag ich nicht. Ich habe da vielleicht eine etwas puristische Musikauffassung.

Mein Ansehen im Bereich der klassischen Musik erlangte ich durch langjährige Arbeit in verschiedenen Kammermusikensembles. Christopher Hogwood, der Leiter der Academy of Ancient Music, bat mich dann vor etwa zehn Jahren, Mitglied seines renommierten | Ensembles zu werden.

Wenn wir mit der Academy auf die Bühne gehen, ist es, als ob man für uns einen Teppich ausrollen würde. Wir haben ein riesiges Publikum. Das hat damit zu tun, dass Hogwood ein hervorragender Kenner und Interpret alter Musik ist und wir inzwischen zahlreiche Platten produziert haben. Gleichzeitig ist das Renommee dieser Musik sehr gross. Wenn ich an die Europatournee denke, die wir kürzlich beendet haben, dann ist es natürlich ein schönes Erlebnis, erfolgreich zu sein und immer vor vollen Sälen spielen zu können.

Ganz zu Unrecht fehlt leider der improvisierten Musik dieses hohe Ansehen und dieses zahlreiche Publikum. Eine wesentliche Diffenrenz zwischen beiden Musikbereichen liegt darin, dass die öffentlichkeit sie vollkommen unterschiedlich bewertet. Die klassische Musik wurde über Hunderte von Jahren aufgebaut, gesponsert und unterstützt.

Improvisierte Musik ist jung, sie ist noch stark in die aktuelle Situation involviert, so dass es noch Jahre brauchen wird, bis ein grösseres Publikum diese Musik verstehen kann. Zudem: Diese Musik kennenzulernen ist Arbeit. Eine wunderschöne Arbeit. Aber man muss sich darauf einlassen und kann nicht einfach konsumieren. Wenn man sieht, über welche Vermittlungsapparate die klassische Musik verfügt und wie bescheiden die improvisierte Musik daherkommt, dann ist es ja ein grosser Erfolg, wenn das London Jazz Composers' Orchestra letztes Jahr in Zürich und Basel vor mehreren hundert sehr aufmerksamen Leuten auftreten konnte.

Quelle: Patrik Landolt, Ruedi Wyss: Die lachenden Aussenseiter. Musikerinnen und Musiker zwischen Jazz, Rock und Neuer Musik. Die 80er und 90er Jahre. Ein Buch der WochenZeitung im Rotpunktverlag, Zürich 1994.

Information zum Buch: http://www.intaktrec.ch/store.htm

The Perfect Match

Jane Dorner

In March, bassist-composer Barry Guy's new five-stringed bass made its concert debut at St. Paul's Cathedral, London, in the world premiere of John Tavener's The Last Discourse. Though wired with a Schertler pickup in case of need, in the event the instrument proved to have such ample acoustic resonance and to so naturally demonstrate its soloistic qualities that Tavener decided against electronic amplification.

For UK luthier Roger Dawson, the premiere was a public baptism for an instrument that was three years in progress, the result of a tailor-made commission for Guy. Dawson – who works out of an atelier in Greenwich, a leafy south London suburb – viewed it as an ideal commission since his client had very clear ideas concerning the sonorities he wanted to achieve. Guy knew – almost to within millimetres and grammes – the size, weight and feel with which he would be happy. He wanted an 'athletic' instrument, a marathon runner of a bass. Its prime requirements were endurance combined with a physical immediacy and responsiveness to the sort of pyrotechnical playing a jazz musician and improviser of Guy's pedigree requires. Lightness – in terms both of weight and touch – were born in mind at every stage of the making.

Throughout history, instruments have required adjusting to cope with advancing musical technique and innovation. When Boccherini in the 18th century wrote virtuoso passages in thumb position, something had to be done about the 30–31cm string length cellos of his day which were simply too big for the player to comfortably cope with flights in the higher registers.

Musically speaking, the stimulus for virtuoso double bass playing has been slower to develop than for the violin or cello. But with innovative demands from original players, all that is changing. The result of player-maker collaborations can be a creation that combines art with functionality, beauty with resonance and craftsmanship with playability. And the Guy-Dawson partnership has produced an instrument that may well take its history forward into new dimensions. The fifth string on the new instrument is a high C rather than the more usual bottom C or B (the latter common in the Berlin Philharmonic bass section). To match Guy's specifications of weight and feel, the scroll area was kept as light as possible with separate machine heads to keep the weight down. The plates are shaved to within the maximum safe thinness – around 9mm in the middle and as thin as 4mm round the edges.

Dawson, however, warns that a maker must never sacrifice structural strength to immediate big sound: 'If you try to produce an instant-sounding bass by making the plates too thin, then there is a danger that in five or ten years time it will dry out and stop functioning well,' he explains. 'So I always work within the norm. The way I learned was to get within the textbook correct measurements and then proceed by feel. Your eye and hand are the best judges of sound, and the tap tones on the front are more instinctive than a measurement gauge,' he insists.

Dawson is one of a growing band of dedicated double bass makers and repairers. He started in the trade at the age of 15 when he joined the well-known firm of Withers in 1963 when the shop was under the proprietorship of Stanley Withers. Dawson – apprenticed under Mr. A. 'Jimmy' Jones who previously worked at Harts – was addressed as 'boy', the respectful level to which master craftsmen rose in those days. Dawson stayed until 1969 when he joined Guiviers. In 1977 he moved to Thwaites of Watford for two years, by which time he had decided to specialise in bass making a repairing. 'I felt an affinity with the larger instruments,' Dawson recalls, 'and the beauty of the double bass is that you never see two basses the same. They all have a highly individual character.'

In due course, Dawson set up his own workshop in the south London district of Rotherhithe before moving to nearby Greenwich. He's been there ever since. Many players only know his as a repairer, an aspect of his craft for which he is much in demand. 'It's very satisfying to make an instrument sound better,' he says. Nevertheless, through repairs and restoration occupy a large part of his time, the Guy-Dawson instrument is his twenty-second bass. Simple mathematics suggest that, with such an output, having this one bass on the go for three years doesn't make logical sense.

'Well, of course it didn't take three years to build, but there were various things that held it up – other repairs, some health problems and so on,' he elaborates. 'But the real delay was trying to get the right wood for it. I ordered the spruce for the top and maple for the back and sides from Bosnia and, political troubles aside, it is now very difficult to get a fine figured piece for the back. The major hold-up on this instrument was that I had to send back two pieces of maple before I could even start work. The first was so riddled with woodworm, I couldn't get it out of the workshop fast enough. The second had a windshake in it and was not suitable. And then I had to wait because the German buyers who get the wood from Bosnia tend to cut up big trees for fiddles as they can make more money that way. Nowadays you have to be willing to spend more than £2,000–£3,000 on wood for a bass.'

While the finished instrument – composite of swell back with the flat-back bend at the top – is inspired by Panormo, the detailing and outline are Dawson's own design. The centre bouts are slightly deeper than Panormo's and the top bouts are slightly narrowed with sloping shoulders for maximum comfort. The instrument has nice big cusps on the corners, which Dawson likes while recognising the need to draw a line between what looks elegant and what is practical to play.

Since Dawson has been looking after Guy's basses throughout the latter's playing career, the marriage of practicality and aesthetics presented no problems. The ancestry of the new instrument developed out of three others. Guy had a French bass (Gand, 1894) which had a resonance he wanted to replicate. Dawson made him a copy of a Gasparo de Salo violone, which provided a rich fund of bass information on which to draw. At the same time, Guy was using a chamber bass for baroque music and enjoying the tessitura capabilities it had.

'I think he was surprised that a modern instrument could sound so resonant,' comments Dawson, 'and it was out of that discovery that the five-stringed bass grew.'

'It just seemed to me that a modern instrument ought to be able to combine the best of those three instruments so that I would only need to carry one around with me,' Guy points out. 'By extending the range upwards, I thought I would be able to achieve the chamber qualities while replicating the resonance of the Gand. I wanted the same swell back and neck dimension that had the same look and feel.' The neck is thicker, inevitably, but is basically tailored to match so that the player can move seamlessly from one instrument to another.

As a jazz bassist [Double Bassist No.1, p.10], Guy had several requirements that were unique to a new type of playing he was inventing for himself and a new set of sounds that his own compositions and jazz improvisation made desirable.

The speed of reaction of notes is particularly important in improvisation,' Guy emphasises, 'where you are responding in microseconds to your partners and your anticipation skills need to be complemented by the flexibility of the instrument. I particularly wanted a long sustained pizzicato. The E-string resonates for a glorious 22 seconds – I've timed it.'

Another requirement was that the instrument should respond well to Guy's range of sound extensions – sticks, beaters and brushes threaded over and under the strings at various points along the fingerboard (rather like a guitar capo) which changes the relationship of the strings and gives a new and exciting range of sound possibilities. The fifth string acts as a 'spare' open string at the top or the bottom. The bridge (made by Dawson) has adjusters in the feet so Guy can vary the string height according to the humidity of a local climate. 'It is wonderfully responsive to all my needs,' says Guy, 'I love the sound it makes and I love the warm colour and glow of the varnish. And it's also wonderfully responsive with the bow, very even throughout.'

It's clear that the product of the marriage between player and maker is an outsized and well loved infant. Guy caresses and nurses the bass in his arms as he speaks, wanting it to grow up and bear the marks of life but at the same time being protective of the as yet unblemished dark varnish. Dawson is unfussed, though.

'People create a mystique about varnish,' he says. 'I found something years ago that works – a basic spirit varnish with a proprietory pigment of oak or light oak – and I just get on with it. Why experiment with oil varnishes that dry to slowly that workshop dust is bound to stick to it? The way I was taught to varnish was to get a brown-yellow ground on straight away. It's very exciting applying that first coat because at first it comes out all tiger-striped. But gradually it settles down and over about six coats, rubbed down between whiles, it acquires an attractive variegated texture. To be frank, varnish is there to protect the wood. I think natural wear and tear enhances the look of the varnish; there's no need to be precious about it.'

And Dawson's further ambitions? If he is so drawn to the large members of the violin family, does he want to make a giant octobass? 'I have thought of it, actually,' he confesses, 'but one has to be practical. Who would play it?' – confirming that player demand is what furthers the development of an instrument.

The Dawson five-stringed-bass

String length		1055mm
Back length		1130mm
Bouts (top)		530mm
Bouts (bottom – at widest point)		695mm
Neck length (from bottom of button to underside of nut)		400mm
Head length (from underside of nut to top of scroll)		300mm
Rib depth		222mm
Sound holes (at nicks)		22mm
Table length		1095mm
Peg Box (maximum width at top nut)		70mm
Inner peg box – maximum		45mm
Inner peg box – minimum		25mm

Double Bassist – No. 6 Summer 1998, reproduced with permission of Orpheus Publications Ltd.

Free Agent

Nick Kimberley

How do you bridge the opposing worlds of free jazz and New Music? Ask bassist Barry Guy.

We have a musical culture capable of redeeming the irredeemable, yet as far as I know no one has ever managed to deify the English trad jazz bands of the 1950s and 60s. If nothing else, trad can be credited with fostering the talent of bassist Barry Guy, currently one of the most prodigious and mercurial figures in both the European Improv and New Music scenes. As Guy recalls: "At school we had a military band and there was also a trad band. I started on trumpet in the military band, slipped down to valve trombone. When I joined the trad band I moved from trombone to one-string bass, the tea-chest bass, which my colleagues thought a bit simplistic, so my parents bought me a four-string bass. The other people in the band told me what to play: 'Put this finger there, that finger there.' I had a piece of cardboard behind the strings to show me where all the notes were."

Great oaks from tiny acorns: in 1994 alone, Guy's output has been overwhelming, with the albums After the Rain, Portraits (recorded with the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra, which Guy founded in 1970), Imaginary Values, an improvising trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lytton, and Study/Witch Gong Game 11/10 by the NOW Orchestra containing some of the most compulsive music to be heard all year.

Guy's formidable skill no doubt owes a lot to having to make one string do all the work. This being the 60's – Guy was born in 1947 – there was interplay between different musical styles. Guy took formal music lessons at Goldsmiths College where, he recalls, "We had to write a composition at the end of each term. I wanted to write a cadenza for trombone and alto sax, so we brought in Trevor Watts and Paul Rutherford to play it. As a result I was invited to join The Spontaneous Music Ensemble. At that time, in the late 1960s, there was a strange night life going on between the Little Theatre Club and the Old Place: the foundations of the free music scene where being laid, important liaisons forged, positions formulated."

There is neat irony in the fact that composing brought Guy into contact with the free music scene. Positions may be less rigidly held than once they were, but for many on both sides of the divide the two procedures are incompatible. improvisors suggest that score-led performers have lost their musical imagination, interpretative musicians may echo Pierre Boulez: "Improvisation is a personal psychodrama." Barry Guy happily embraced both disciplines: "I didn't find any conflict between composition and improvisation. One is intense discipline at the table, one is intense discipline in the live situation."

Through the 70s and 80s, Guy continued to work as improvisor, interpretative musician and composer. Boulez himself conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra's 1974 premiere of Guy's D; later works have been played by Kronos, London Sinfonietta, City of London SInfonia, Gemini, and he has provided pieces for London Contemporary Dance Theatre.

When composing, Guy prefers to know who he's writing for: "Most of what I've written has been commissioned by players who want to enlarge the repertoire of their instrument. In 1984 I wrote Circular for the oboist Robin Cantor who wanted something different from the work of Heinz Holliger, with whom he'd studied. I went through Holliger's music, checking all the Holligerisms I shouldn't include, and wrote the piece from there. It was like making a suit: you make the piece around the personality."

Recently, Guy has composed pieces which provide notation as well as space for improvisation. The first of these was Bird Gong Game, written in 1992 for the painter Alan Davie, also a talented pianist. "Alan asked me for a piece: he didn't want to read any music, he wanted to improvise, yet he also wanted a straight ensemble. I thought, 'How do I write a piece where I have absolutely no idea what he's going to play, nor how long he might want to play, but still get an ensemble in there which is totally flexible?'"

Guy found a solution in Davie's painting, which provided a series of symbols suggestive of sounds or musical procedures. Guy incorporated these in the score, as well as transferring them to cards which the conductor – Guy himself – could hold up to the ensemble musicians, individually or together, indicating which section of the score they could go to, or instructing them to improvise with or against the soloist. He has adapted the technique to works for the NEW Orchestra and for the Rova Saxophone Quartet, producing not only striking music but also scores of great visual beauty.

Guy admits, "Generally I keep improvisation and composition separate but there are some classically trained players willing to enter into the spirit of the thing. Where it doesn't work is if you say, 'OK group, play free'. You have to create the space, provide suggestions as to how people move in that space. With the performances of Bird Gong Game with Gemini, I offered the option of going with or against the soloist. I've never found they go against – they leap on the soloist like a pack of dogs so that when, for example, Evan Parker sets up his circular breathing thing with some rapid soprano sax work, and the oboe, clarinet, flute emulate that, getting inside his sound, you get some lovely textures."

Barry Guy: Freedom in Restraint

Kees Stevens

English improvisers like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and Paul Rutherford were welcome guests among a small circle in the Netherlands around 1970, even though they performed now and again. The Dutch audience and the Dutch press were, despite the rise of European improvised music, still too heavily orientated towards American jazz. Han Bennink's fire-and-brimstone sermons on how nothing good was coming out of America anymore were conscientiously made note of, but it was out of the question that European music, Dutch included, was truly embraced by the public at large. One musician is missing from the row of English guests: Barry Guy.

After high school Guy went to work in an architect's office which was engaged in the restoration of Gothic buildings, while studying double bass and taking composition lessons at Goldsmiths College. At the same time he played swing music in the style of Benny Goodman and bebop in trumpet player Dave Holdsworth's sextet. His first contact with improvising musicians came about through his compositions. When he wrote a piece featuring a trombone, somebody suggested to him that he use Paul Rutherford. Through Rutherford he got to know saxophonist Trevor Watts and percussionist John Stevens, who in turn invited Guy to the Little Theatre Club, the place where it was happening in London in the sixties.

In the Little Theatre Club Guy met Howard Riley for the first time. After a stay by Riley in the United States at the end of the sixties, Guy set up a trio with Riley which initially made music which could be traced back to Bill Evans' trio concept. In an interview with Rudy Koopmans in Jazzwereld (Jazzworld), May 1970, Arjen Gorter describes it as follows:

All the right ingredients: an intellectualistic fine-fingered pianist, a busy-bee drummer and that kid Guy who shifts through in a terrific way, in huge leaps.

It was the first time, to the best of my knowledge, that Guy's name appeared in the Dutch press. That trio recorded 5 albums with varying percussionists, among whom Tony Oxley and John Stevens. With Oxley, who broadened the sound spectrum of his percussion with electronics, playing in tempo was largely brushed aside. In the 1979 trio with Stevens and Guy the ensemble blossomed out. The intense collaboration in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, one of the leading initiatives in the area of English improvised music, also yields rich rewards in this trio. But we are getting ahead of history.

Guy studied double bass as well as composition at the Guildhall School of Music at the end of the sixties. It was there he first learned about Igor Stravinsky's music, notable Le Sacre du Printemps, and Lamentation for the victims of Hiroshima by the Polish composer Krysztof Penderecki. From there he delved back into history. After completing his course Guy remained working as a practising musician and improviser. He was active as bass player in Christopher Hogwood's Academy of Ancient Music for twelve years, an ensemble which had the role of pioneer in the field of early music. Among other things he was a member of the Monteverdi Orchestra, the London Bach Orchestra, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and the London Sinfonietta. He was also active as composer. Under none other than Pierre Boulez his composition D had its premiere with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1974. Compositions followed later for the Kronos Quartet, the London Sinfonietta, City of London Sinfonia and Gemini. He also wrote ballet music for the London Contemporary Dance Theatre which was played live during the performances.

These activities in the 'classical' world which often took him to America whilst his colleague improvisers were displaying themselves on the mainland, were time-consuming. That is the reason why Guy was so rarely heard as improviser in the seventies. That was also why he was unable to give his full attention to the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra (LJCO). Barry Guy set up that orchestra in 1970, following the example of the Michael Mantler's Jazz Composers' Orchestra from New York. In the LJCO, next to such prominent free improvisers as Trevor Watts, Paul Rutherford, Evan Parker, Tony Oxley, Paul Lytton and Derek Bailey, are gathered, among others, the saxophonists Mike Osborne, Bernhard Living and Alan Wakeman and the trombonists Mike Gibbs and Paul Nieman. I give this list in order to indicate the cross-links in the London jazz scene. For example Osborne worked together with Rutherford and Parker in Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, while Living, Gibbs, Nieman and Wakeman were associated with Mike Westbrook. Rutherford has also played frequently with Westbrook. Within the circle of free improvisers there were also various cross-links. I limit myself here with a reference to Guy's role in Amalgam with Watts and Stevens, S.M.E., in Oxley's own groups and in the legendary trio Iskra 1903 with Rutherford and Bailey.

Guy's compositions for the LJCO should absolutely not be connected with 'The Third Stream music'. He even calls his compositions anti-Third Stream. The LJCO gives him the opportunity to seek a balance between improvisation and written material. Since his first composition for the LJCO Guy has always taken the improvisatory capacity of his orchestra members into account. In his Ode for Jazz Orchestra, in which he was inspired by Olivier Messiaen's Chronochromie, he places duos, trios, and quartets before the orchestra. In part six of Ode, in which Bailey is central as soloist, Iskra 1903 and the Howard Riley Trio turn up in such a way.

There are three periods to distinguish in the 25 year-old history of the LJCO. At the beginning the music scores were very detailed. They also worked with a conductor, Buxton Orr, Guy's composition teacher. Due to the constant refinement on the compositional side and radical abstraction, Guy alienated musicians from himself. For example Bailey left the orchestra because he absolutely could not feel at home with such an approach. In the second period he invited his fellow musicians to write pieces for the orchestra. Kenny Wheeler, Rutherford, Riley and Oxley delivered contributions. The orchestra also played a piece by conductor Orr, whilst in the repertoire of that period there was also a piece which Penderecki had written for the Globe Unity Orchestra. That repertoire offered a broad spectrum of complete,written scores, through the looser ones from Rutherford to the more graphic ones of Tony Oxley. Furthermore, the 'orchestra's composers' saw the business from the other side.

The decision to drop the conductor marked the third phase of the orchestra. According to Guy an orchestra with a conductor causes you to write for an orchestra with a conductor, and he wanted to get away from that. He advocated a looser approach, in which a few directions are sufficient and the musicians are responsible for taking initiative. He was very aware that a working method of that sort could not be achieved in a few years, but the construction of the orchestra has barely changed in the last ten years, so that everybody knows what they can expect from each other. There are still meticulously notated passages. That;'s how he, for example, will work out riffs, but in contrast to the orchestra's first period, the result heard is more supple, more natural.

By restricting his classical activities – he left Hogwood's ensemble because the emphasis lay more on making records than making music- he was able to pay more attention to his improvisatory sides.

Since 1987 the LJCO has found a permanent home at Intakt records in Zurich. Intakt is releasing, to celebrate the 25th anniversary, Ode and Stringer, an FMP/SAJ record from 1980, together with a new performance of Study, as a CD box. The LJCO is no 'working band'; the members are too occupied with their own groups, but the orchestra is project orientated. A part of these projects will be performed at the Taktlos Festival in Zurich, which again is closely associated with Intakt Records. That explains the relationship of the LJCO to Intakt Records.

After the double album Zurich concerts, in which the orchestra performed Guy's Polyhymnia next to pieces by Anthony Braxton, Taktlos changed over to the CD format: Harmos, Double Trouble, Theoria with Irene Schweizer as leading part and Portraits, which appeared last year. It is difficult to express a preference for one of these albums. Guy keeps on reaching his goal: a combination of structures and his fellow musician's freely taken initiatives. I cannot refrain from naming the saxophone section: Watts and Parker were there from the beginning, but the saxophonists Simon Picard, Peter McPhail and Paul Dunmall, all of whom came in the eighties, appear one by one to be incredibly inventive wind players. In Portraits the Evan Parker part is called Triple, a reference to one of he most interesting combinations of the last ten years: the Parker Guy Lytton Trio.

Apart from the LJCO, Guy hardly worked together with Parker and Lytton in the seventies. As we have seen, Guy was part of Iskra 1903. The percussionless construction gave a great clarity to the music. Stylistically the group fits into what is termed the English research into sound. That is an image of English improvised music which some still see before them, but such persons are evidently not aware of a trio such as Amalgam. Here Guy, Stevens and Watts make music in which the achievements of Ornette Coleman are linked with an individual expressiveness, playing in tempo alternates effortlessly with free rhythmic passages. Out of this music an insouciance and inspiration speaks which knows no equal. That is also a facet of the versatile English improvised music.

Barry Guy has always been the bass player for Evan Parker. He invited Guy to the improviser's Symposium during the Pisa Festival in 1980. The following year the gentlemen performed in Berlin combined as duo, a performance captured by Free Music Production. Performances with the addition of Lytton are scarce in the early eighties, especially in Holland. I remember a concert in Amsterdam from 1983 with George Lewis, trombone and electronics, as guest. Guy and Lytton also availed themselves with electronics; Guy possessed an extensive amount of pedals with which he could influence the sound, while Lytton operated his do-it-yourself apparatus. That use of electronics did not produce the powerful lines running through the music which distinguishes the trio now, but the tension running through was completely present. The trio went almost completely acoustic halfway through the eighties. Parker and Guy have since brought their solo playing to the highest form of perfection. by his means the acoustic possibilities have grown so that within the context of this trio the electronics could be abandoned. Parkers use of multiphonics makes it seem as if sometimes three wind players are at it, while Guy is by means of his extended techniques effortlessly able to double his lines. The trio can alternate explosive passages, in which the dry, cracking percussion from Lytton gives an extra dimension, with a pastoral peace of delicate flageolet-tones. Every note gets an intense physical charge. It is a miraculous threesome. Unimaginable, if you have never heard it.

A characteristic pronouncement by Barry Guy about his bass playing is that he attempts '...to make the instrument extremely small'. That is not a statement about his music, but it is about his way of playing. Guy seems to want again and again to get the whole instrument to resound in one go. A beautiful way to achieve this is a bow between the strings which he sweeps up in one tug. While this is vibrating away, he is busy somewhere else. He can get thin flageolet-ones from his strings with a brush. Using his bow he manages a fine, full sound which transforms into a biting tone. A graceful pizzicato can be transposed over the entire length of the strings in one lightning movement. Such a movement is characteristic of Guy's playing. It is the result of a thirty-year old conscious engagement with the instrument: between Guy's musical ideas and the resulting sound there are no barriers.

Fizzles is his latest solo CD; this was released on Guy's own label Maya Recordings. The title Fizzles is derived from a series of short prose pieces by Samuel Beckett from 1976. According to Guy Fizzles represents a moment in Beckett's writing '(...) where a more pronounced minimalism was in sight'. On the CD Fizzles is the collective name for five miniatures which he dedicates to Beckett. Minimalism and Guy seem an unlikely combination, but Fizzles sheds a whole different light on the exuberance which marks Guy's playing. In this way there appears to be a surprising similarity in a stripped grating noise by Guy and the stripped-to-the-bone prose by Beckett. Research into musical-rhythmic similarities would demand a separate article.

Barry Guy is highly conscious of the differences between composed and improvised music. Freedom in composed music is no way as great as in improvised music. With the LJCO he has found a fine balance between composition and freedom. In pure improvised music is every freedom, through this freedom becomes as he himself says '(...) tempered by vocabulary, wisdom, experience and the other players'. Such an attitude reveals a true musician. And that's what Barry Guy is, to the tips of his fingers which bind his mind to his double bass.

A Guy Apart

Michael Dervan

Article appeared in Irish Times on Thursday, November 13, 1997

The double bass is most familiar in one of two guises, as either the solid, none-too-agile lowest member of the symphony orchestra's string family or through the freer, nimbler, plucked bass lines of jazz. The profile of Kilkenny-resident, British bassist and composer Barry Guy, 50 this year, is however, in other areas. On the orchestral scene he has worked in chamber orchestras and early music bands. He's also one of the finest interpreters of the most demanding solo pieces produced by contemporary composers. In jazz he's renowned for his work in free improvisation. And his compositional output ranges from works for conventional orchestras and ensembles (he received the Royal Philharmonic Society's Award for Chamber Music Composition for 1991-'92) to pieces for the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, of which he is founder and artistic director.
It all started, he says, with the descant recorder in primary school and in the school military band in secondary school. Here he tried everything from trumpet to tuba and beyond, settling on valve trombone. More interesting than the band itself, however, seems to have been the Dixieland band that was formed within it. " 'the naughty boys' band,' we used to call it. They wanted a little bit of bass line, not on the trombone but on something that thumped, so I took up the tea-chest bass, you know, one pole and a line, a reflection of the skiffle thing that was happening at the time."

The little group turned out to be quite successful, getting gigs in working men's clubs (Labour not Conservative) and this led to the purchase of a real double bass, with the luxury of four strings, and major problems of where to put the fingers (solved by marking cardboard and putting it under the strings!).

Later, as the Peter Robinson Hot Four, Guy and his friends used to go to jazz clubs and play the interval, sometimes heading off after the show for late-night jam sessions with well-known blues and jazz performers. It helped that the place they headed off to was an off-licence. In spite of all of this, Barry Guy's main interest was not music at all but 'drawing art' and when he left school he spent three years in an architect's office "working with three elderly gentlemen who taught me how to draw churches, do Georgian restoration and the like". At the same time, though, "there was a saxophone player in the band who knew a lot about the American avant-garde, John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg. I don't know where he accumulated this knowledge. He persuaded me to go along to take composition classes he was taking at Goldsmith's College. It set in motion a quest for research, finding new things."
Eventually, he decided to study music on a full-time basis. He recalls his audition at the Guildhall. When asked to continue a given fragment in Mozartian style, he launched into "a screaming improvisation" which impressed one of the professors, Buxton Orr, enough to guarantee him a place. "Since I'd been working for three years, I felt it was a great privilege to be allowed to study music full-time. A lot of people came straight from school and I found them wasting their time more than anything, because it was an extension of school."

At college, "everyday was a great discovery". He was, he says, "almost like a vacuum cleaner" sucking in everything from Monteverdi to Stravinsky and Xenakis. And at the same time, he had moved out of swing into bebop and modern jazz and was involved in the early experimentalism of the Little Theatre Club in St. Martin's Lane, "the workshop for the new, free music".

The impetus here was to move away from Afro-American jazz, "to find some European way of playing improvised music. We had to discard some of the old models, to break down the old buildings, to build something fresh. It was like going into a dark tunnel with no real way out, necessarily. But we knew it had to be done in order to find a new type of discipline. Once you drop a lot of the conventional and routine things of the song form, like regular recurring harmonies, certain rhythmic aspects, the melodic aspect, we wanted to find new ways of defining how we play. It was exciting and scary at the same time. "In this scenario, the first sound would be the moments of creativity. Where that note or sound arrived or how it arrived in space, the qualities of that sound, the intentions of the player that made the first sound, all of these things were a type of evaluation that had to be dealt with at the time.

"It's incremental, the way that the whole language is built up. And for me that's why I'm so interested in this aspect. It's a form of communication which is pure between people. I always call it an intensely socialist type of music, because you're having to play this music without composition. What you're dealing with is human beings. You're actually getting right to the heart of how people communicate with each other. There's always the sense of finding something new about somebody."

He counters the let-it-all-hang-out, soul-baring view of the free improvisation with a caution that "there is an intellectual process". He quotes Cartier-Bresson to the effect that the thinking should be done before and after taking a photograph, not while taking the photograph. "A lot of the way we interact in this type of music has to be intuitive but, at the same time, it has to have a huge back-ground knowledge to make the thing work. If you go on stage and let it all hang out, that's sloppy discipline, like talking to your therapist or something.

"What is interesting for me in free improvised music is that you're creating a cogent argument, a music which makes sense to the intellect as well as the heart. It's this amazing fine balance of human endeavour. If you do it right and infuse it with energy and commitment, I think the music can come over as being as solid and as convincing as a piece of composition. But it's different, because you're not dealing with composition in the normal sense of the word. You're dealing with creation, creation at the moment. I don't see that as a lesser music than writing something down on paper. After all, I'm a composer as well as a performer. It just means that two musics happen in different spaces, in different time spans.

Erkundungen im Grenzgebiet

Improvisator, Interpret und Komponist – die drei Leben des englischen Bassisten Barry Guy

von Christoph Wagner

Manchmal führen nur Umwege ans Ziel. Das gilt zumindest für den englischen Bassisten und Komponisten Barry Guy, dessen Karriere alles andere als geradlinig verlief. Guy gehört zur seltenen Spezie musikalischer Grenzgänger, die sich mit gleicher Sicherheit in verschiedenen musikalischen Gattungen bewegen. Der 1947 in London geborene Musiker hat sich zuerst als Freejazz-Improvisator einen Namen gemacht, bevor er sich als Interpret Alter Musik profilierte, um danach als Komponist zeitgenössischer Musik Anerkennung zu finden. In seinem neusten Projekt, einer Kooperation mit seiner Lebensgefährtin Maya Homburger, einer renommierten Violinistin der internationalen Early Music-Szene, wagt Guy erstmals den Brückenschlag zwischen Alter Musik und Neuer Musik, Komposition und Improvisation, Freejazzbaß und Barockvioline.

Daß Barry Guy überhaupt die Musikerlaufbahn einschlug, war eher Zufall. Ursprünglich hatte er anderes vor. Nach dem Schulabschluß beschäftigte er sich intensiv mit moderner Malerei und mittelalterlicher Architektur. Drei Jahre arbeitete er im Büro eines Restaurators gotischer Kathedralen und trug sich mit dem Gedanken, die Kunstakademie zu besuchen. Erst als diese Pläne scheiterten, rückte die Musik wieder ins Zentrum seines Lebens.

Schon im Blasorchester der Schule war er in den Bannkreis des Jazz geraten. Mit ein paar „bösen Buben“ formierte er eine Dixieband, mit der er in Skiffle-Manier mit Zuberbaß in Arbeiterclubs und Pubs auftrat. Das warf genug Geld ab, um sich einen richtigen Kontrabaß zu kaufen, mit dem sich Guy bald Richtung Bebop davonmachte.

Die rebellische Attitude des modernen Jazz paßte in die Zeit. An den Universitäten gärte es. Die Studenten probten den Aufstand. Es wurde gegen den Vietnamkrieg demonstriert. Hippies und Kommunarden schreckten ehrbare Bürger auf. Traditionelle Werte wurden verworfen. Durch die Gesellschaft wehte ein frischer Wind.

Die Künste blieben davon nicht unberührt. Im Little Theatre Club in der Londoner St. Martin´s Lane trafen sich die jungen Wilden der englischen Jazzszene, die einer gemeinsamen Vision folgten: Sie wollte über Hergebrachtes hinaus! „Die etablierte Jazzszene glaubte, wir seien verrückt, weil wir alle Schranken niederrißen,“ erinnert sich Guy. “Wir spielten nicht mehr die bekannten Jazzstandards, sondern verabschiedeten uns von Harmonie, Melodie und Ryhthmus. Man war allgemein der Meinung, daß wir den Jazz kaputt machen wollten.“ Im Little Theatre Club fanden regelmäßig Sessions statt, organisiert vom Schlagzeuger John Stevens, der Barry Guy einlud, im Spontaneous Music Ensemble mitzuwirken.

Inspirationen strömten damals von vielen Seiten ein. Barry Guy hatte sich am renommierten Guildhall College in London im den Fächern Komposition und Kontrabaß eingeschrieben und jeder Studientag wurde zu einer Entdeckungsreise. Guy verspürte Nachholbedarf und sog alles auf wie ein Schwamm - ob Monteverdi, Strawinsky oder Xenakis. „Ich schwamm plötzlich in einem endlosen Meer musikalischer Möglichkeiten“, beschreibt er die neue Situation rückblickend. „Es war wirklich spannend und euphorisierend.“

Rückwirkungen blieben nicht aus. Mehr und mehr versuchte man sich im Little Theatre Club von den amerikanischen Jazz-Vorbildern zu lösen. Ideen und Konzepte der Neue Musik kamen dabei sehr gelegen. Guy begann sich intensiv mit Zwölftonmusik und seriellen Kompositionstechniken zu beschäftigen. Zudem organisierte er Konzerte mit Neuer Musik und führte selbst Werke der Avantgarde auf.

Aus dem Kreis des Little Theatre Club schälten sich nach und nach verschiedene Ensembles heraus und meistens war Barry Guy als Hausbassist mit von der Partie. Er wurde Mitglied im Trio des Pianisten Howard Riley, spielte mit Trevor Watts´ Amalgam und in der „Open Music“-Formation von Bob Downes. Sein Radius begann sich mehr und mehr zu weiten. Er nahm an Bandprojekten des Schlagzeugers Tony Oxley teil, um selbst im Juni 1970 mit Paul Rutherford (Posaune) und Derek Bailey (Gitarre) das Trio Iskra 1903 aus der Taufe zu heben, benannt nach Lenins Exilzeitschrift „Iskra“ (=Funke), was sowohl politisch wie musikalisch als Programm zu verstehen war.

Zielstrebig erweiterte Barry Guy seine Ausdruckspalette. Er bearbeitete die Baßsaiten nicht nur mit unterschiedlichen Bögen, sondern schlug sie mit verschiedenen Stöcken und Stäben an, ließ sie knarren, quietschen, scheppern und gegen das Griffbrett knallen. Eine eigene musikalische Handschrift nahm langsam Gestalt an, die durch eine fiebrige Unruhe, dynamische Ausbrüche und kaskadenhafte Tongirlanden gekennzeichnet war.

Die Gründung des London Jazz Composers Orchestra 1972, die Barry Guy maßgeblich betrieben hatte, stimulierte die Phantasie. Experimentelle Kompositionsverfahren und freie Improvisation sollten in dieser Großformation, die aus der Creme der Londoner Jazzavantgarde bestand, unter einen Hut gebracht werden. „Energie ist eine der zentralen Kategorien der Free Music. Ich versuchte mit den Kompositionen, die Abläufe stärker zu kontrollieren, um die Energie, über die die Musiker verfügen, zu bündeln. Damit hoffte ich, die Free Music noch kräftiger zu machen,“ verdeutlicht Barry Guy seine Intentionen.

Das Gegenteil trat ein. Einige der Musiker fühlten sich als Pendler zwischen zwei Welten überfordert und ließen sich nicht ans Gängelband festgelegter Parts und ausnotierten Passagen legen, was als Affront gegen das Freejazz-Ethos der totalen Freiheit verstanden wurde. Nach vier Jahren wurde das Projekt zeitweise auf Eis gelegt, um erst 1980 mit verbessertem Konzept und teilweise anderer Besetzung wieder zu neuem Leben erweckt zu werden.

Barry Guy hatte allerdings die Auszeit genutzt und sich als Komponist zeitgenössischer Werke einen Namen gemacht. 1974 wurde seine Komposition „D“ von Pierre Boulez und dem BBC Symphony Orchestra uraufgeführt. Im gleichen Jahr entstand auch das Orchsterwerk „Flagwalk“ , danach „Eos“, das 1977 bei den Donaueschinger Musiktagen, gespielt vom Radiosymphonieorchester des Südwestfunks unter Ernest Bour, seine Premiere erlebte.

Seitdem ist das Werkverzeichnis von Barry Guy auf über 40 Kompositionen angewachsen, deren Spektrum von Kammer- über Theater- bis zu Filmmusik reicht, wobei die prominentesten Auftraggeber die Gruppe Fretwork, das Kronos Quartet und die Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields waren, für deren Cello-Ensemble 1991 das Stück „Look Up!“ entstand.

Weil ihm auf die Dauer die Existenz als Freejazzproletarier und Gelegenheitskomponist zu unsicher war, verschaffte sich Barry Guy in den 80er Jahren ein drittes Standbein. Er bewarb sich um die Stelle des Bassisten in Christopher Hogwoods Academy of Ancient Music, einer der profiliertesten Early Music-Formationen auf der Insel, und bekam den Job. Zahlreiche Tourneen und Schallplattenaufnahmen absolvierte er mit Bravour, wodurch sein Name in Early Music-Kreisen langsam einen guten Klang bekam. Er avancierte zum gesuchten Spezialisten für die tieferen Register, ob mit The English Consort oder The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

Das Hinabtauchen in die Musikgeschichte entwickelte eine eigene Faszination. Was anfangs aus finanziellen Erwägungen begann, wurde zu einem festen Bestandteil seiner musikalischen Existenz. „Es bedeutet mir viel, auch klassische Musik zu spielen,“ bekräftigt Barry Guy. „Das hat nicht nur ökonomische Gründe. Für mich beinhaltet es, daß ich Neues entdecken kann, neue musikalische Ausdrucksformen, neue Klangwelten.“

Über einen Mangel an Arbeit brauchte sich Guy nun nicht mehr zu beklagen. Er mutierte zum musikalischen Hans Dampf, der bis zu drei Sessions pro Tag absolvierte. Morgens Beethoven-Orchesterprobe, mittags Monteverdi-Plattenaufnahmen, abends vielleicht ein Freemusic-Gig mit Evan Parker und Paul Lytton. Dafür war blitzschnelles Umschalten erforderlich. Untergründige Verbindungslinie wurden sichtbar. „In der Barockmusik gibt es ebenfalls improvisatorische Möglichkeiten in den Sonaten für Cembalo bzw. Violine, oder was Ausschmückungen und Verzierungen anbelangt.“

Trotz dieser Paralellen macht es für Guy wenig Sinn, die Barockmusik zum Jazz des 18. Jahrhunderts umzumodeln - im Gegenteil. Seine Intentionen zielen vielmehr darauf ab, Stilgrenzen nicht zu verwischen und Unterschiede zu kultivieren. „Manche Leute meinen ja, die eine Spielpraxis schließe die andere aus,“ erklärt Guy. „Ich habe dagegen die Erfahrung gemacht, daß sie einander nicht stören. Wenn ich klassische Musik interpretieren, dann interpretiere ich. Spiele ich improvisierte Musik, dann improvisiere ich. Ich hab´ beim Improvisieren noch nie den Zwang verspürt, ein bißchen Mozart oder Bach zu integrieren. Diese Mixturen mag ich nicht. Ich hab´ da eine puristische Musikauffassung.“

Die Erforschung historischer Aufführungspraktiken hat den Klang revolutioniert. Neben der Wahl der richtigen Saiten, des Bogens und der Stimmung rückte die Frage nach dem adäquaten Instrument in den Mittelpunkt. Über die Jahre hat sich Guy ein Arsenal von sieben Kontrabäße zugelegt, die aus verschiedenen Stilepochen stammen und alle ihren speziellen Ton besitzen. Für die authentische Spielpraxis der Early Music steht ihm ein Instrument aus der Werkstatt von Gasparo da Salo von 1560 zur Verfügung, von dem es nur noch ein paar wenige Exemplare gibt. Seine feinnervigen Freejazzimprovisationen klingen dagegen besser auf einem Modell vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts. „Die Spannung der Saiten war im 16. Jahrhundert viel geringer. Damals besaß der Baß sechs Saiten und der Steg lag um einiges tiefer, was zusammen einen vollkommen andere Ton ergibt,“ bringt er die Diskrepanz auf den Punkt.

Auf einer Tournee mit der Academy of Ancient Music lernte Barry Guy 1988 seine Lebensgefährtin Maya Homburger kennen, eine Züricherin, die acht Jahre mit der Camerata Bern musiziert hatte, bevor sie Mitte der 80er Jahre nach England übersiedelte, um Barockvioline bei Trevor Pinnocks The English Consort und den English Barock Solists von John Eliot Gardiner zu spielen, mit dem sie als Solistin zahlreiche Hauptwerke der Barockliteratur aufnahm.

Die Partnerschaft Guy/Homburger führte in den letzten Jahren zu einigen spannenden Kollaborationen, die mit den Möglichkeiten der Kombination von Alter und Neuer Musik experimentierten. Mehrere Kompositionen für Barockvioline und Kontrabaß entstanden, wobei Barry Guy selbst ein paar Stücke beisteuerte. „Für uns war es eine ganz natürliche Entwicklung,“ erklärt Maya Homburger . „Da ich als Barockgeigerin laufend Bach, Telemann und Biber übe, ist Barry, seit wir zusammen leben, laufend dieser Musik ausgesetzt. Daraus hat sich ergeben, daß wir beide Stile einmal zusammen in einem Konzert präsentierten. Barry hat ein Ohr für diese Klänge entwickelt und wie sie am besten in zeitgenössische Kompositionen einzubauen sind.“

Im Gegensatz zur Hektik und Sperrigkeit seiner Baßimprovisationen, zielt Guy darauf ab, die Stärken der Barockvioline voll zu Geltung zu bringen. Seine Kompositionen heben die Ausgewogenheit und die Schönheit des Klangs von Maya Homburgers Meisterinstrument hervor, das 1740 in der Werkstatt von Antonio della Costa in Treviso entstanden ist und sich bis heute in seinem Originalzustand befindet. „Barry hat seine Stücke rhetorisch so konzipiert, daß sie der Barockgeige wie auf den Leib geschnitten sind,“ sagt Homburger. Das war kein Kinderspiel, macht doch die unterschiedliche Stimmung der beiden Instrumente das Komponieren zu einer kniffligen Angelegenheit. Da die Barockgeige einen halben Ton tiefer gestimmt ist, mußte Musik entworfen werden, bei der sich nicht eine der beiden Stimmen fortwährend in einer ungewöhnlichen Tonart befindet.

Erkenntnisgewinn gab es auf beiden Seiten. Auch Maya Homburger hat von der Zusammenarbeit profitiert. „Ich hab´ mehr von Barry und seine Freejazz-Kollegen über die Interpretation barocker Musik gelernt, als je zuvor in meinem Leben. Seit ich mit Barry zusammen lebe, spiele ich diese Stücke von Jahr zu Jahr freier. So nähern sich die beiden Bereiche einander an.“

Aktuelle Neuerscheinung:

– Barry Guy/Maya Homburger: Ceremony. ECM New Series 1643/453847-2

Auswahldiskographie Barry Guy:

– Spontaneous Music Ensemble (mit Barry Guy): Withdrawal (1966–67). Emanem 4020 CD.

– Barry Guy, Even Parker, Paul Lytton: At the Vortex (1996). Emanam 4022 CD.

– Barry Guy/London Jazz Composers' Orchestra: Portraits. Intakt CD
035/1994

– Iskra 1903 (Barry Guy/Paul Rutherford/Phillip Wachsmann): NCKPA. Maya Recordings MCD 9502.

Auswahldiskographie Maya Homburger:

– G.P.H. Telemann: XII Fantasie Per Il Violina Senza Basso 1735. Maya Recordings MCD 9302. (Carrickmourne, Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny, Ireland)

– J.S. Bach: 6 Sonatas For Violin & Harpsichord (Malcolm Proud). Maya Recordings MCD 9503 (2 CDs).

Improvising the Score

Bill Shoemaker

(a version of this article appeared in Jazz Times April 2001)

Barry Guy and Maya Homburger have been moving bit by bit into their new home in County Kilkenny, Ireland, taking much longer than they ever expected. The process has been repeatedly delayed by their respective touring schedules. Guy is a bassist and composer whose credentials run the gamut from early music to improvised music; Homburger is a Baroque violin specialist who has branched out into what the British call contemporary music, and beyond. Luckily, their schedules have increasingly meshed since forming the duo featured on <<Ceremony>> (ECM New Series), a luminous program of solo and duo readings of works by Guy and 17th Century composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber. Still, it was only during a recent lull before delving into a series of projects – concerts with conductor John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage and commissions for Nova Scotia's Upstream Ensemble and the Munich-based International Composers and Improvisers Forum – that Guy was finally able to retrieve some books from storage. Serendipitously, he came across Elias Canetti's <<Crowds And Power>>; having formed the Barry Guy New Orchestra in 2000 after 28 years at the helm of the groundbreaking London Jazz Composers Orchestra, Canetti's treatise prompted Guy to reevaluate some of the fundamental premises of his work.

"It made me realize that I have a crowd of musicians to contend with," Guy said of the 10-piece BGNO, which includes such acclaimed improvisers as pianist Marilyn Crispell and saxophonists Evan Parker and Mats Gustafsson. For Guy, rereading Canetti "also brought back the old specter of command and implementation, and fascism and freedom, as it relates to composers and improvisers." Such issues were front and center in the polemical English improvised music scene of the '60s and '70s, when Guy worked with Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Iskra 1903, and pianist Howard Riley's trio (all of which are represented by Emanem CDs). In a way, Guy's LJCO Intakt recordings comprise a teflon-like argument for the legitimacy of the composer in improvised music, as his works are casebook studies in the integration of improvisation and predetermined materials, and the empowerment of improvisers to substantively shape the work.

Since "it could be said that I am exercising some kind of politically incorrect power over them by writing a score, however loose," Guy tested the relative freedoms of his scores against the minimally scripted performances of Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, of which Guy is a charter member. "Prior to a performance, Evan hands us what I would call a mini-score, which is not much more than a list of events, so we have a clear idea of who comes in where, who goes out where, and where there are crescendos and overlaps," Guy explained, detailing his longtime colleague's methods (Guy first played with Parker in a '67 edition of SME; but, it is through their ongoing trio with percussionist Paul Lytton that the two are most commonly associated). "While the implementation of his score is much less specified, the basic tenet of Evan's scores and mine are the same: these are the structures to be followed over the course of the performance," Guy concluded.

"Given that there's an element of command even in (Butch Morris') Conduction method of using gestures and body movements," surmised Guy, whose contemporary music compositions have been performed by the ECM-affiliated Hilliard Ensemble and the iconic conductor-composer Pierre Boulez, "I suppose that the most a composer can do is develop an organic process with an ensemble so that there is a seamlessness between materials the composer brings to the situation, and the language the composer and the ensemble articulates together through improvisation." That was Guy's agenda for debuting BGNO as part of the 2000 Mostly Modern series at The Bank of Ireland Arts Centre in Dublin. Over a four-day period, Guy programmed lunchtime and evening concerts featuring BGNO members in solo, duo, and trio settings, while holding open afternoon orchestra rehearsals. The culmination was the premiere of Guy's album-length composition, <<Inscape – Tableaux>> (the Intakt CD is from a subsequent studio recording).

"I didn't have to play in every concert, so I was able to listen to the various improvisation-based languages being used within the band, and use the process to build the piece from constituent parts," Guy related. "One of the impulses of putting together the band was to bring together acquaintances I've made in duo and trio situations – within the band, you have the Parker/Guy/Lytton trio, my trio with Mats Gustafsson and (drummer) Raymond Strid, and the trio with Marilyn Crispell and Lytton, which is intense and ongoing," he explained. "The process of having these concerts and rehearsals together in such a concentrated way caused these various languages we have articulated over the years to converge as we built the piece, which I thought was very apropos of the word 'Inscape', which means an unique inner quality or essence of an object shown in a work of art."

Almost immediately, Guy confronted the differences between LJCO and BGNO. "There were obvious trade offs," Guy explained. "With the LJCO , I had amazing sonorities available in terms of orchestration, and to go down to ten pieces has given me some headaches in some ways; but, in many respects, the music really takes off in ways and feeds upon its own energy with ten pieces." Yet, the biggest difference was Guy's ability to delegate conducting chores among members of BGNO. "Since I want to concentrate on playing the bass as much as possible, I set up strategies so that I don't end up flailing my arms about all the time," said Guy, who conducted all but the earliest LJCO recordings. "So, I'm passing some vital things over to the players. In the beginning of <<Inscape – Tableaux>>, the placement of the brass unisons is determined by the musicians. They get it together on their own. There is one section of the piece where the band is split down the middle – five and five – and Mats directs one half while I direct the other. That's something I couldn't have really done with the LJCO. Five and five are manageable numbers in a graphic area."

For Guy, graphic notation is an important tool for the composer walking the tightrope of empowering musicians while retaining some sort of personal imprint on the composition. Pulling out a book by Scottish painter, Alan Davies, whose work he refers to in his graphic pieces, Guy quoted, "'I work with the conviction that art is something basically natural, an activity motivated by a faith in the actuality of existence, which is outside and beyond knowing.'" "For me," Guy continued, "that sums up quite a lot of what I'm trying to get at. There's the conviction of actually doing it, that it is natural, and that it is out of my control beyond a certain point." Guy acknowledges that it is the composer's role to catalyze music into that otherness to which Davies refers, but only if there is "a real chemistry within an ensemble. I must say that chemistry is not just this magical spark; it is the ability to solve problems, because there are always a number of predictable and unpredictable problems that arise in creating a piece like <<Inscape – Tableaux>>. That's what I like about this band – they go beyond the score and make things happen. They take the parts I write to that otherness, that newness. That is how the power is shared more evenly, I think."

Usually, the phrase "collective statement" is applied to music which has no clear compositional guidelines. Yet <<Inscape – Tableaux>> is a thoroughly collective statement, despite being liberally peppered with the compositional signatures Guy has employed since LJCO's landmark 1972 recording, <<Ode>> (Intakt) – intrusions of advanced jazz-informed, jabbing staccato figures, wisps of bluesiness, and glints of English pastoral lyricism. However, these materials do not function not as a static superstructure, but as flexible vertebrae, moving with the unfolding of improvisation-based events. Subsequently, each member of BGNO – including trumpeter Herb Robertson, trombonist Johannes Bauer, tuba player Per Ake Holmlander, and reed player Hans Koch – repeatedly shapes the piece.

Luckily, Guy's bass is heard to much better effect on <<Inscape – Tableaux>> than on LJCO's discs; not only did the dual chores of conducting and playing limit his options, but there was also one or two other bassists of the caliber of Dave Holland and Barre Phillips on the gig. Throughout the program, Guy's lightning runs, surreal bursts of textures (which are often achieved through means that have to be seen to be believed), and time-stopping glimpses of beauty, confirm his complete command of the instrument and his status as a starkly original artist. Still, the full range of Guy's bass playing cannot be comprehensively conveyed through a single recording, which makes the imminent release of <<insert title>> (Intakt) with Crispell and Lytton all the more timely. Longtime listeners will savor their reworkings of such LJCO works as Harmos and Double Trouble II, as well as compare their reading of Guy's lovely ballad Odyssey, which is woven into <<Inscape – Tableaux>>.

'It's very intriguing, the way Marilyn, Paul, and I work as a trio, Guy reflected. 'There's something very special about the way Marilyn voices the piano. Marilyn likes to work harmonically and motivically, with a lot of long scale development. She builds lines that can really take your head off with their complexities, and then do something very delicate.' Guy also likes the interaction between Crispell and Lytton, a percussionist who 'can play tiny little sounds for seems to be ages and then suddenly roar. You can never be quite sure of what he's thinking. Both Marilyn and Paul have the capacity for creating these really dramatic contrasts, which is something I have been very involved with in both my writing for LJCO and BGNO.'

'For this album, I didn't want to do the obvious thing – have a head, do the improvisations, and go back to the head again,' Guy continued. 'On the piece I originally wrote for LJCO – Harmos – we began to improvise with the goal of reaching the tune, but not knowing exactly how we'd get there. I like the idea of reaching a moment where it seems to be the right decision to move into the tune.' For Guy, this method 'introduces a certain mystery, because nobody knows when exactly it will happen. It's a more organic process than everybody nodding their heads at the same time to go into the tune. It's feathered, which is a quality I tried to give the tunes themselves, to sound improvisational. Marilyn is wonderful at this, making it seamless from she goes from a song to an improvisation, or back again. I think the reason she can do this, and all of the other amazing things she does, is that whatever her soul is telling her, she lets it out.'

As for his own approach, Guy acknowledged that 'compared to the early days with Howard, there's a world of difference in what I'm doing with the instrument. Old age has given me some understanding. I'm more expressive, the chops are better, the fluency is better, and I've opened up the coloration.' Guy credited his new five-string bass, which 'has opened up a new dimension to my playing. It's so resonant that it invites you to play a hanging note, and it's good with the bow, as well. Having this new instrument is one of those moments in life where a door opens up and you go, "Wow!"'

Gearbox:

Barry Guy's five-string bass was made in 1997 by London instrument maker Roger Dawson. It is equipped with Thomastick strings and a Schertler pickup. Guy owns two amplifiers: a custom-made Yseult and a Walter Woods.

Listening Pleasures:

Igor Strawinsky: Rite of Spring, Ritual Dance:
Pierre Boulez, Cleveland Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon)

Charles Mingus: Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (Impulse!)

Iannis Xenakis: Pithoprakta and Metastaseis: Maurice le Roux, Orchestre de l'O.R.T.F. (le chant du Monde)

Albert Ayler: Spiritual Unity (ESP Disk)

Claudio Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610: John Eliot Gardiner, English Baroque Soloists (Archiv)

J.S.Bach: Six sonatas for violin and harpsichord: Maya Homburger (violin) Malcolm Proud (harpsichord) (Maya Recordings)

John Coltrane: The Heavyweight Champion – The Complete Altantic Recordings (Rhino)

Anton Webern: Complete Works: Pierre Boulez et al (Deutsche Grammophon)

Bill Evans: The Complete Riverside Recordings (Riverside)

Eric Dolphy: Out to Lunch (Blue Note)

Seeds of Sound

Declan O'Driscoll

Music is sound. Sound is mystery. Unseen but felt (it can make you do the strangest things). Improvisers play music for the mind (from their fecund, instantly responsive minds) and for the body too and the spirit (wherever it may reside). The emotional impact of their music – it's felt feeling – is too often ignored, but it's there in the giving and in the receiving. It is quite moving to see, and hear, musicians transforming the weight of their being into truth-bearing sound; reaching for a level of expression they understand to be crucial. There is no other reason for doing it, for being there.

When the Barry Guy New Orchestra played for the first time, at a concert in Dublin, more than a few of those present – in a capacity-straining, adulatory, munificent audience – felt almost overwhelmed by what they heard when Inscape – Tableaux was given it's premier performance. A fervent complexity, an immediate communication. A beautiful sound that relocated the locus of beauty (or what is considered to be beautiful). "Much that is beautiful must be discarded/So that we may resemble a taller/Impression of ourselves."*

Nothing about the composition, nor the many improvisations latticed through it paid regard to fashion. The distancing defences of post-modernism – it's pasteurised lack of resolve – were ignored, thwarted by the simple statement of unselfconscious seriousness and an absolute commitment to the importance of the continuous now. "That their merely being there/means something."* It spoke of vitality, it blossomed. Seeds of sound germinated and grew before us, revealing the colour and shape of their inherent energy.

The music that night suggested so many possibilities. It's astonishing blast still resonates. When it ended we were suddenly bewildered, left shaking our heads; trying to think of words that might catch the music's echo. We moved around the room, uttering the word 'amazing' to faces we knew as our pulse rates gradually regained their normal beat.

*Quotations from poems by John Ashbery.

Behind Barry Guy's New Orchestra

By Greg Buium CODA Magazine, March-April 2002

When the Barry Guy New Orchestra reassembled in Vancouver last June for just its fourth concert, its first in over a year, the improvised music set couldn't believe their luck. It was, by any standard measure, a coup. Considering the ten-piece group's lineup, an exceptional gathering of European and American improvisers, and the sheer size of its signature piece, Guy's seven-part composition, Inscape – Tableaux, finding a festival for its first (and only) North American appearance wasn't easy.

"We've got so many amazing players in this band we can present almost anything," Guy told me in the middle of the group's four-day whirlwind through town. "It's very hard to persuade a festival organizer to utilize the potential of the group. To say, 'Well, look: Other than the big band we actually have the [Evan] Parker Trio, we have the Guy /[Mats] Gustafsson trio. Or you can have the Marilyn Crispell Trio. And more.'"

But the Vancouver International Jazz Festival didn't need much convincing. Breaking off into a variety of duos, trios, and quartets, the orchestra blanketed the festival's first few days. In some respects, the BGNO (as Guy is given to calling it) simply recreated its first performances in Dublin last year. To debut the new group Guy set-up four days of music, plotting out a compelling network of groupings and daily rehearsals, culminating in the premiere of Inscape – Tableaux. For some of the players it was the first time they'd ever met.

"The process that took place in Dublin was actually quite important," Guy explained. "One thing I wanted to do was to acquaint us all, and the audience, with the voices in the band. Kind of lay the skeleton bare before we ever came around to playing the final piece. And it was a very interesting process not only for the audience but for ourselves because all the players always listened to everybody else. So we were informing ourselves of the way the players interacted in different groupings."

It was a masterstroke – and, for Barry Guy, something not unfamiliar. For nearly thirty years with the London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO) he's tackled the often problematic relationship between composition and improvisation, a lifetime trying to make improvised music work in large group settings. "Guy's LJCO recordings," Bill Shoemaker recently suggested, "comprise a Teflon-like argument for the legitimacy of the composer in improvised music, as his works are casebook studies in the integration of improvisation and predetermined materials and the empowerment of improvisers to substantively shape the work." Indeed, the BGNO fits snugly into this tradition. Built on the questions (and problems) posed in the LJCO, Barry Guy's New Orchestra was born out of its predecessor's unwieldy economics.

"The genesis of the new group, I suppose, came out of the fact, the horrible reality, that getting work for the London Jazz Composers Orchestra was actually getting more and more difficult," Guy recalled. "The LJCO was always a large animal to deal with, to keep it moving. There was no such thing as funding. We funded it basically by selling instruments over the years. I suppose I can put my Baroque music days as the progenitor of the LJCO."

After the LJCO's last concert at the 1998 Berlin Jazz Festival (with Marilyn Crispell and Maggie Nicols as guests) – "a remarkable evening," Guy recalls, "because the band was on absolutely top form" – the prospects looked bleak. "The months passed after Berlin, we tried to get some more work, and basically the information coming back to us was that nobody has any money for big bands, unless you have government support. Patrik Landolt from Intakt wanted to do another album and he said, 'Look, why don't you think of a smaller band.' Which to me was the unthinkable because in a way that's my baby, the LJCO, with the size of it – the orchestration, the understanding how I could write for it. A ten-piece band seemed a proposition that was untenable. However, it was suggested as a financially easier option."

Landolt persisted. "He said, 'Why don't you just give a thought to who you'd want in the band.' That was the difficult thing because I had all the guys that were in the LJCO who'd I'd worked with for years. But I decided to just let that be, to push that to one side and find the reasons for putting a ten-piece band together – and who to get into it. It seemed to me that the best way of doing this was to almost get back to the first principles that I had with the LJCO: to gather around under this umbrella a group of players that I had recently been working with in small groups, in duos, trios. And also players that had played with each other in various groupings over the years.

"So the Parker Trio was the obvious starting point because I love working with Evan and I love working with Paul [Lytton]. And of course then there was the Swedish trio with Mats Gustafsson and [drummer] Raymond Strid. So there were two, for me, very interesting trios: one younger one, and the other established but dealing with trio music in a completely different way. I thought that would be quite an interesting focus, and axis point. And then I had been working with Marilyn in trio formations, either with Gerry Hemingway or Paul Lytton, so it would seem to be a necessity to get Marilyn in. And I was wanting to write some things for Marilyn anyway – some ballads, slower things – since she was interested in that area. And she had also made records with the Parker Trio and the Gustafsson Trio.

"I wanted a band that was reasonably international, which reflected my experiences over a period of years. I had done some excellent duos with Hans Koch and wanted a bass and contrabass clarinet sound in this ensemble because I realized that once you're coming down from the seventeen-piece to a ten-piece, coloration is quite important, absolutely vital to this orchestration.

"But I wanted to keep a strong brass section. [Trumpeter] Herb Robertson had played with the LJCO in America and Berlin. He came in and I thought he was an excellent player, kind of revitalized the brass section in a way. And he had made an album with Paul Lytton, so there was that connection. Then [trombonist] Johannes Bauer. I'd done quite a lot of duos with him in Germany, on and off. We kept on meeting. And I thought he had a very positive attitude to improvising and reading music. He's a very good reader, strong sound, and also a really nice guy, as well. I was also interested in the chemistry of the group. What I didn't want was a lot of superstars in the ensemble who would just get on each other's nerves. So I tried to find this arcane balance: to get not only the music to work but the people to work with each other, as well."

And tuba: Per Åke Holmlander, a Swedish player that played in Mats's big band. He was such a good player, very powerful, good improviser, really nice guy, knew the Swedes well, of course. So that was the Viking Trio, in a way (with Raymond Strid on drums), a very special dimension.

"The other thing was, I had to devise music in which I could play bass instead of conducting all the time. You see, I do some conducting in this piece but also I had to imagine a piece in which I could actually step back and let the direction of several parts of it take place within the band itself. So I had to have people who had good initiative. Mats had directed his own orchestra so there was already a fellow traveler. If I needed somebody else to go, 'OK, guys, mobilize here,' he could be relied upon to do that."

Having, as Guy characterized it, "accepted the ultimatum that this was going to be a reality," he began to write – or to at least think about writing. "For quite a while I didn't necessarily do anything on the piece," he recalls. "But there were moments, when I was walking somewhere or sitting at the drawing board working on something else, I would suddenly visualize the BGNO and how it could come together, just sound-wise, as an ensemble. There was a period of gestation: I was having to adjust to the possibilities, the sonic expectations, compared with the LJCO. But there came a point where new things started to stir, reducing the larger orchestra down to a compact aural scenario in my head, but at the same time I was realizing that because they're singular instruments a new sonority started emerging in a very subtle and nonspecific way. An idea was forming itself in my head about clarity and sharply defined gestures. For instance, 'OK, there is one trombone. But that one trombone is powerful and it can actually have a very important and decisive effect within an ensemble.' Whereas the three trombones in the LJCO were used in a strategically different way.

"It was a slow and not very scientific way of forming the sounds of the band. But as these things were happening I found myself more and more making marks on paper, like an artist with a paintbrush. Even before this all started coming into place I'd just get excited by the imagination of a particular instrumental grouping, or one player playing against a construct. And I would just make a mark, or a series of marks, not actually writing notes even. Just a very soft pencil, just digging the paper in a way. It's almost like cavemen making marks on rocks, just images to remind you exactly what you want to do. But in the context of the other things that might have been accumulating, they made sense: something to do with a density of sound, or tailing off to a lightness. I would even change pencil thicknesses sometimes to give a sense of density change."

While a number of the drawings were eventually discarded, specific ideas began to emerge. "As I went through this process they started shaking themselves out into numbers, if you like. This is where the aural imagination, which had been just thinking of grouping, started to enter the drawing facility. I would just put 'Marilyn,' or something like that, at the end of a sequence of lines. That would indicate to me a certain type of activity ending in Marilyn, or, for instance, a specific logical meeting point of certain instruments to support this moment.

"In the early part of Inscape – Tableaux I wanted the exposition to present the two powerhouse trios of Parker and Gustafsson. Before that, however, I wished to present the brass players in short vignettes that would gradually accumulate in energy to the point where they would come together and comment on the progress of the trios as they made their way to a sonically elevated level.

"Then there was this memory of hearing Marilyn and Evan doing a circular stream of activity, and that was the first release point, where the focus changes: from the grand to the specific. And then through that process, and a little short ballad section, we actually pick up pretty much where we left off with the whole band, with the background thing coming to the foreground picking up everybody on the way. This rounds off the first section.

"For me it was important after that to dramatically change the architecture, where suddenly you've got one person in an open space. There you have Marilyn. Having exposed the whole band, I just remember having the, 'This is the Marilyn moment.' It goes right down to one instrument and that's her.

"The whole tension has changed here; the focus has changed. In some ways I think of it as highly architectural but with some cinematics. I'm not a great cinema buff but it's always interesting the way films have the ability to show the bigger vista, then they pan and bring the focus to one specific detail: it could be an eye, or it could be a hand, or it could be a small gesture. But I'm interested in how you can focus the sound. You're channeling everybody into a particular way of listening.

"The other thing that I did at this initial stage was put all the names on a list and connect up who, to my knowledge, had played with whom. There were the obvious trios and parings that had featured in my musical life. But what about Johannes Bauer, for instance. There evolved this very complex, spaghetti-like diagram. And then I started looking at the diagram to realize who hadn't played with somebody in a particular situation. So not only were there the familiar groups, but also the unfamiliar, as well – which became a useful tool to evaluate structural procedures.

"What I try to do is also think of the possibilities of it going wrong as well as right – if it deviated into an area which wouldn't be appropriate. But then you have the trust of the players. I always have the complete trust in the improvisers: they instinctively know where in the creative process it should go. There's a kind of mystery in this, as well, about how these things might work. But I try to assess the probabilities of where they might go. And it can come up with massive surprises, but on the other hand, its creativity is assured."

Inscape – Tableaux may be a monument to Barry Guy's ingenuity and these improvisers' singular skills, but it will be a balancing act to keep the BGNO a viable affair. While a number of national arts councils have generously supported the band, it's been difficult just getting everyone in the same place. "In reality, of course, it's been the biggest nightmare ever," Guy explains referring to the logistics. "The old days of meeting the London Jazz Composers Orchestra at Heathrow Terminal 2 was not to happen anymore." Still, the BGNO regroups in Nickelsdorf, Austria this August. Then there's a three-city Scandinavian tour in the fall. And next spring it seems the group will be in Paris and in Mulhouse in the summer.

With the LJCO on hold, Guy is committed to making the New Orchestra an ongoing project. Not only is he hoping to produce more music, but Mats Gustafsson has plans to write for the group, as well. And after this second spell of gigs, one might expect "Inscape-Tableaux" to still find its place in the band's book. "Could be," Guy responds. "Since the piece is actually taking on a good feel, people are relaxing into the music now.... The thing that I definitely want to present to an audience is something which is organic and growing in front of you. I want the process to be joyous and energizing – to breathe."

Ungestümer Strukturalist

Barry Guy ist einer der spannendsten und fleissigsten Komponisten zwischen Freier Improvisation und Neuer Musik. DLF über den Briten, der «nebenbei» auch noch Bass spielt.

Die Frage taucht selbst im Kreise versierter Jazzfans immer wieder auf: Ist das Komponieren von Werken für Freie Improvisation nicht ein Widerspruch in sich? Keineswegs, entfalten doch gerade Musiker dieser Szene in der Regel meterlanges Notenpapier, ehe sie loslegen. Doch wer sich solche Blätter aus der Nähe ansieht, wird daraus selten schlau. Freie Improvisation funktioniert weniger mit konventioneller Notation und linearen Abläufen als mit Mustern und komplex konstruierten Strukturen.

Freejazz im Barockgewand

Barry Guy ist ein Meister solcher Strukturbauten. Die Werke des 54jährigen Ex-Architekten aus London zeichnen sich aber nicht nur durch ihre Komplexität aus, sondern insbesondere durch die Vielfalt der «Baumaterialien». Ausge gangen vom europäischen Freejazz der wilden 60ties, hat sich Guy stetig der Neuen Musik angenähert. Mehr noch: Guy liebt Barock- und Renaissance-Weisen und integriert selbst solch streng geregelte Klangelemente in sein Schaffen. Die Kombination aus ungestümer Free-Mentalität und der ins Mathematische tendierenden Präzision Neuer Musik macht das Schaffen von Barry Guy einzigartig. Welch glückliche Fügung, dass er ein Workaholic ist, der sämtliche Aspekte seiner musikalischen Weltsicht auszuloten scheint. Guy konzipiert und schreibt und spielt was das Zeug hält – ohne qualitative Reibungsverluste wohlgemerkt. Sein Album «Inscape-Tableaux» ist nicht nur von Bert Noglik (WoZ) und Christian Rentsch (Tagesanzeiger), sondern auch vom renommierten französischen Magazin «Jazzman» zum Jazzalbum des Jahres 2001 gekürt worden. Eine Sensation angesichts der marginalen Stellung Freier Improvisation im weitläufigen Jazzkosmos.

Stammgast in Zürich

Für «Inscape-Tableaux» hat Guy zehn der spannendsten Köpfe aus den USA und Europa zu seinem New Orchestra zusammengesucht; darunter auch den Bieler Saxophonisten und Klarinettisten Hans Koch. Zur Schweiz hat er naturgemäss eine enge Beziehung, lässt sich die hiesige Impro-Szene doch hören (siehe nebenstehenden Bericht). Er spielt regelmässig mit Schweizer Musikschaffenden, ist Stammgast bei der «Fabrikjazz»-Reihe in der Roten Fabrik und gibt einen guten Teil seiner Alben beim Zürcher Label «Intakt» heraus.

Und dies mit unterschiedlichsten Formationen. Barry Guy – obendrein ein meisterhafter Bassist – ertastet mit Duos und vor allem Trios, was er mit Grossformationen zur voluminösen Perfektion bringt. Mit seinem 1970 gegründeten London Jazz Composers Orchestra hat er das «Klanggefäss» Big Band schlicht neu definiert. Er schreibt aber auch für klassische Orchester wie die City of London Sinfonia oder die London Sinfonietta, sowie Kammermusik für Kronos Quartet oder Hilliard Ensemble.

Unter dem Titel «Die Verwandlung der Schwerkraft» unterhält sich DLF-Redaktor Michael Engelbrecht mit Barry Guy über Komposition, Improvisation und Fusion.

Frank von Niederhäusern

Freitag, 22.05 Uhr
JazzFacts, DLF

Service:

Aktuelles: Zahlreiche von Barry Guys Alben erscheinen beim Zürcher Label Intakt (www.intaktrec.ch), so auch:
Barry Guy New Orchestra: Inscapa-Tableaux
Barry Guy/Marilyn Crispell/Paul Lytton: Odyssey (beide 2001).

Inscape-Tableaux

Intakt CD 066

Just as the European Union (EU) and the Euro have begun to win over Continental rivalries and local currencies, so composer, orchestra director and bass master Barry Guy has decided to put together a new international aggregation that's showcased on this exceptional disc.

After 28 years leading the mostly British, usually 18-piece, London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LCJO), the now Ireland-based Guy has organized an all-star tentet to perform this multi-faceted composition which took two years to perfect. As multinational as the EU, the Barry Guy New Orchestra (BGNO) features only two other Englishmen, as well three Swedes, two Americans, a German and a Swiss national.

Most have worked with the bassist before – some extensively like Evan Parker and Paul Lytton. All are at the top of their form. It would be stupid to say that the colors brought forward by the LJCO's additional eight to 10 players can be equaled by BGNO's fewer musicians. But together these improvisers are so proficient on so many instruments and so cognizant of so many techniques that what they produce easily has the resonance of a larger band. Though scored, Guy's Inscape-Tableaux leaves plenty of space to take advantage of each individual's talents.

Especially noteworthy is pianist Marilyn Crispell, who as well as being integrated into the ensemble, is featured in three keyboard-centered interludes between the larger orchestral sections. Sometimes pastoral, as in the beginning of "IV" – practically a duet for her and Guy's flying fingers – sometimes powerful, Crispell seems to bring her classical chops to the fore here. Distinctively unique, her playing no more resembles that of Cecil Taylor – as some lazy commentators have suggested – than Jesse Helms' politics resemble those of Jesse Jackson's.

Trombonist Johannes Bauer's showcase comes on "V," an exploding comet of cacophony, which harkens back to the earliest days of large ensemble free jazz. Here and elsewhere his vocalized, guttural cries simultaneously suggest New Orleans tailgate and outer space. "V" also features some of Herb Robertson's best Maynard-Ferguson-meets-Cootie-Williams explosions. With only three valves, the American trumpeter is able to produce the sort of multiphonics saxophonists need many keys to generate.

Speaking of saxophonists, how can a band go wrong with a section made up of Parker's circular breathing, Mats Gustafsson's lung bursting blowouts, and on "VI," Hans Koch's top-to-bottom bass clarinet forays?

Still, this Ellington band-like aggregation of stylists shouldn't obscure that the BGNO is very much a composer's vehicle, with echoes of European New music and on "II" Charles Mingus' scores for mid-sized ensembles. Listen again to an interlude in "V" and observe the perfect clarity of Per Åke Holmlander's tuba making its way like a hippo across the Veldt as the untamed wild birds that are the horns vocally leap and frolic overhead. Like Ellington and Mingus, Guy writes with the idiosyncrasies of his players firmly in mind and the score sounds that much the better for it.

One could go on and on appending extended examples of sophisticated and eventful writing and outstanding solos, but how many more superlatives can be heaped on this groundbreaking disc of modern music? Suffice it to say that Inscape-Tableaux deserves to be heard by anyone at all interested in modern composition and the state of 21st century orchestral sound. We can also hope, that sometime in the future, this Valhalla of improvising giants will tour in this formation.

Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Inscape-Tableaux Part 1; Part II; Part III; Part IV; Part V; Part VI; Part VII

Personnel: Herb Robertson, trumpet; Johannes Bauer, trombone; Per Åke Holmlander, tuba; Evan Parker, tenor and soprano saxophones; Mats Gustafsson, tenor and baritone saxophones; Hans Koch, tenor saxophone, clarinet and bass clarinet; Marilyn Crispell, piano; Barry Guy, bass; Paul Lytton, Raymond Strid, percussion

Hitting the Strings

Graph talks to Barry Guy and Maya Homburger

The one who has been developing the musical and technical possibilities of the double-bass for several decades. The one who played in various early music groups and the one who has composed in a contemporary idiom for groups like Fretwork or the Hilliard Ensemble. There's the one who has just brought out an unusual, deeply meditative CD called 'Ceremony' in collaboration with the outstanding baroque violinist Maya Homburger. Then there's the one in the long-standing jazz trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lytton, and who has also played with Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Marilyn Crispell, Mats Gustafsson and in numerous other formations and combinations. This is not to forget the one who leads and composes for the startlingly energetic London Jazz Composers Orchestra, nor indeed the one who has written many works for chamber orchestras, chamber groups and solo players.

A selection of these Barry Guys was interviewed by Barra O Seaghda. After a time they were joined by Maya Homburger to discuss the couple's current and future projects. They are currently based in a house near Thomastown in Kilkenny while conversion work continues on their own future residence.

Maya Homburger brings analytical clarity and intense commitment to her music as well as her other activities. Her recording with Malcolm Proud of the Bach Sonatas for violin and harpsichord is among the works she and Barry Guy have issued on their own Maya Recordings label.

Graph: You said once that you could imagine the cumbersome double bass as tiny as a grain of sand – a mind-boggling notion. Could you unboggle it?

BG: The double bass is seen as an unwieldy instrument, generally expected to thump along below the other instruments. A long time ago when I was at music college, there was a point when problems to do with its size and how to get around it and the articulations needed to make it sound were facing me. I found that playing improvised music gradually helped me to get over those barriers, some of them caused by learning the instrument from manuals. The other thing that affected me was playing with dancers – the London Contemporary Dance Theatre – on stage. It seemed to me that they could do almost impossible things. I could see the preparation for a movement, the muscles working. It had to do with the rhythm of preparation and accomplishment. The energy was all channelled into the very moment of creation.

These two things gradually came together to make me aware that the playing of the double bass was no longer something to be negotiated. The instrument didn't exist- it was a voice only, a communicator. The more I rid myself of this idea of a large unwieldy resonating box, the clearer the ideas would become. The holding and articulation of the bow, the ends of the fingertips, creativity, the sound concept – all these things finally came down to a tiny contact point, a little grain of sand. It's like black holes, which contain huge amounts of energy to be harnessed.

Graph: You employ all kinds of techniques in your playing, including the use of sticks, mallets, brushes and other objects. The effect can be quite theatrical. Are you aware of that or is it a side-issue?

BG: It is a side-issue, but on the other hand performance is performance. I've been involved in quite a lot of theatrical work, which I enjoyed very much. In 'Valentine', a piece originally written by Jacob Druckman for the Joffrey Ballet, I dressed up in a red leotard and looked sexually rather ambiguous, with lipstick and slicked-back hair. The piece had a new dimension on the concert stage. So I'm aware of the possibilities of theatre. In reality, one has to apply a certain complex technique to pull sounds out of the instrument. You're so conscious of the function of these things – they're not just add-ons.

All of this started about twenty years ago when I was playing with a drummer friend, Tony Oxley – who was apt to throw a stick at you if he didn't like what you were playing. On this occasion, he simply let it go by mistake. I saw it flying through the air, caught it and immediately hit the strings and various other bits of the instrument with it. That was my first acquisition for what I call