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music
Witness® @ Mercuric Visions II : THE SCROLL
New York City, 8 February 2001
by Jeff Schlanger
April 2001
Venue: Thursday night, February 8th, the 2nd annual mid-Winter
evening of 'AvantJazz' in the Mercury Lounge, well-known for its dense
schedule of music in the 'Rock' zone.
Location: Downtown on New York's Houston Street & Avenue A.
A few blocks east of the former location of the original Knitting
Factory; a few blocks south of Context, home base to the Improvisors
Collective in the mid-90's where musicians on the stand tonight would
regularly mount innovative presentations to often sparse but dedicated
audiences; around the corner from Norfolk Street with the old Orensanz
synagogue which housed the 2nd & 3rd Vision Festivals and the bubbling
club Tonic.
Organization: By Arts for Art, Vision Festival producer and
the mother of open improvising possibilities for music in combination
with dance, poetry and visual arts on a continuing basis despite the
obstacles. Instead of a series of formal sets, the musicians and dancers
improvised a series of groupings in a brief meeting just before the
performances kicked off. This resulted in eleven continuous sonic-sprints
of about twenty minutes each until midnight with very little setup
time between each episode.
Rob Brown, Roy Campbell,
Daniel Carter, Gerald Cleaver, Karen Borca, Whit
Dickey, Leroy Jenkins, Peter Kowald, Matthew
Shipp and William Parker were the Musicians for the evening
this year.
The Dancers : Patricia Nicholson and Treva Offutt.
The square Space was charged by three Visual Artists: Yuko Otomo
and Marilyn Sontag's extensions on the side walls, Jo Wood-Brown's
free-painted mylar banners hanging from the ceiling and their collaged
collaboration stretched across the stage wall behind the performers.
Starting with the musician's warm-up and continuing through the evening,
this music Witness® attempted to throw down a continuous graphic
image of the improvisations presented. A series of eleven panels conceived
as connected together to form a continuous vertical scroll resulted.
This Scroll can be viewed as a seismograph or EKG of the passages
of the performers and the flow of transmitted creative energy. The
handmade color original measures 24 feet long. Given the vertical
scrolling powers of a computer screen, it may be appropriate to check
out this Scroll format online for the first time: what do you
see in it?
Warmup: As each of the musicians began to set up a sonic flow
on their instruments in different corners of the room, a gently tantalizing
atmosphere of interactive awareness vitalizes the space. Shipp's warming
touches on piano are surprisingly featherlight as Jenkins fingerplucks
his violin into tune with the old upright in echoes of a Delta front
porch. Daniel Carter in the back corner setting up his saxophones
emits connecting lyric singing calls. Borca up on stage aligns a microphone
vertically above the column of her black bassoon and begins to sputter
and smolder through its double-reed. Campbell's brass horns move gregariously
about the central space, replying in conversation to each sequence
from the other instruments. The multiple eyelids of Mercuric Vision
are fluttering open.
Audience: Filled, standing, packed, eager. In a tight zone
around my drawing board, listeners have come from Russia, Germany,
Japan, Afghanistan. The Detroit delegation has flown in for the event
and the underground train brought a tall poet from the Bronx and a
short one from SoHo. As the opening Trio of Carter, Brown and Campbell
blew an introduction to the sonic Vision, MusicMargaret Davis who
does so much to get the word up on jazznewyork.org and out by word
of mouth is right there up front in bliss, receiving its blown blessings.
| 1) Trio BLESSINGS (Carter,
Brown,Campbell) |
2) On FOOT (Shipp, Campbell,
Offutt, Dickey, Jenkins) |
| 3) Faced FATE (Shipp,
Kowald, Nicholson) |
4) Backed-to-Back (Borca,
Kowald, Cleaver, Parker) |
| 5) Ratcheting (Kowald,
Carter, Cleaver, Jenkins) |
6) The TORCH (Brown, Cleaver,
Parker) |
| 7) Mixing it UP (Shipp,
Brown, Dickey, Offutt) |
8) BABY Dancin' (Offutt,
Cleaver, Nicholson) |
| 9) KAMIKAZE (Borca, Kowald,
Cleaver, Campbell) |
10) STRINNGS (Shipp, Kowald,
Parker, Jenkins) |
Dance : Open space onstage was supertight, but the two dancers
were leaping through the music exuding powerful and developed individual
auras. Expressive movements were weaving spatial vectors dynamically
connecting the entrenched stances of each musician/instrument figure.
Patricia Nicholson soloed as a courageous woman out of classic Greek
drama—exposed to the screaming sounds of Fate, responding to
its bumps and drops with intense emotion, demonstrating her depth
of feeling in the unique face of each moment.
Treva Offutt, long-limbed and supple, embodies an astonishing quality
of active response to the expressive power of the whole sound while
simultaneously responding and mixing it up into the movements of each
individual musician. Leaning into Roy Campbell's power stance as his
breathing leaned into the air moving through his trumpet, fingering
the piano and kneading Shipp's characteristic neck & shoulder slant
while moving to his skittering sounds, flailing dervish-like with
an extra pair of Whit Dickey's brushes on his cymbals, she was also
bending low to scrub this scroll in time with the movements of its
two-hand scrawl.
Together, these dancers demonstrate a thrill of total listening to
inspired live music as it pours through each unique human body. The
dancers' motions dynamize a static stage, speaking out into the space
silently amplifying the rhythms of the music. They are bringing home
to the naked core of each person present a vivid awareness of the
unique natural movement articulation inherent in each individual human
animal.
Soundscape : Those strings singing so high are astoundingly
joined up by Campbell's pocket trumpet in the stratosphere. Parker's
bass harmonics ignite like stars or independent galactic bursts of
color in the air. Jenkins is ratcheting the whole audience up into
roaring applause with powers honed over fifty years on the edges of
music's possibilities. Carter's three horns bow, arch and pray to
the approach of the goddess of melody.
Borca's blown bassoon sets up deep sacrumnal spine vibrations backed-to-back
against cascading glissandos down Kowald's powerfully fingered bass.
Cleaver's prime percussion empowers each player with emphatic sensitivity
to their sound, complemented by the whirling shimmer of Dickey's dry
cymbals ringing. The upright torch of Brown's burning alto cry is
rooted deep into center stage. Campbell's kamikaze brass roars urgently
out through the night with top priority mail confident of its guaranteed
delivery. Daring delivery to listeners in the room and beyond is the
genuine gesture these searching interactivists have mastered live
for 2001, a pivot year in which we all could use some real good news.
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Mercuric Jam |
Moving On : After a final jam, as the still-vibrating space
empties and instruments are being packed up, it becomes clear that
Kowald and Cleaver will be down here tomorrow at Tonic with Assif
Tsahar. Parker, Shipp and Cleaver meet again Saturday on the flight
to California for a tour. Roy Campbell, of course, blows through this
City incessantly: the Pink Pony on Ludlow tomorrow, the Brecht Forum
on 27th Street Saturday, the Lenox Lounge off 125th Monday night.
At Roy's request, The Scroll is spread out fresh under a downlight
in the middle of the Mercuric floor. He reads out a poem just passed
to him by Al Mais, who had written it just last Sunday after the Other
Dimensions in Music plus Joe McPhee played two ferocious sets to a
standing room crowd overfilling the Knitting Factory Old Office and
stacked up on the stairs:
"The Witness"
"With dancing
hands he paints the bands
Moving rhythmically to music so grand
Exquisite colors continuous animation
Incredible artistic blends of pictorial improvisations
The music soars with resounding delight
As the Witness paints the musicians in flight
Bassist, drummer, trumpeter, tenor
Brilliant portraits amidst the colors
As the performance ends with standing ovations
The Witness' true work of art
Will forever be of true inspiration."
"The Witness" poem—© Al Mais 2001
The words of the tall poet softly and assuredly are carriers of the
joy we all share together. That joy is what we have to give. The word
is out !
The SCROLL—© Jeff Schlanger 2001, music Witness®
( for Esther)
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