Rova Sax Quartet, 2010: Jon Raskin, Bruce Ackley, Steve Adams, Larry Ochs. Photo by Myles Boisen
|
Henry Kaiser, 2008
|
Greg Goodman, 1980?
|
Metalanguage
Free and Here to Stay
published in Jazz Forum (Warsaw) 77 (Aug. 1982)
A language beyond those already known, an open territory where familiar elements spin new meanings: Metalanguage, the musician-produced record label of improvised music and new compositional forms. Founded in 1978 by Larry Ochs, of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, and guitarist Henry Kaiser, the Berkeley, California-based company has issued in rapid succession around 20 albums, showing a spirited confidence in the strength of the new music.
The Rova Saxophone Quartet is the most accessible of the Metalanguage artists, in that most of their pieces are framed by composed chamber-like contexts from which extensive improvisations spring like vines. The structures often bear more kinship to the realm of classical music than to jazz, in their studied voicings and the passages through contrasting movements and counter-themes between the opening and closing heads. Yet the free improvisations that emerge are the bolder for it, because the blues is by no means their sole terrain.
Still, one can seldom be sure where the border lies between improvised and composed. On Rova’s first album, Cinema Rovaté (ML 101), their sound and methods are already firmly established. Larry Ochs’s “New Sheets” displays the group’s finely-geared sense of balance: each member gliding in and out of lead and supportive roles; the multiple perspectives of the four voices constantly reshaping the piece, almost mathematically, in buoyantly open lines. It is interesting to see, through the course of their albums, how the group becomes more venturesome, how the musicians better recognize the responsibilities and potentials of a given piece.
Rova is probably the most interesting of the saxophone quartets now playing, perhaps the only group of saxophonists to concentrate their energies predominantly in the work of the quartet. Their six albums in three years demonstrate a consistent exploration of forms, colors, interplay, and the expressive possibilities of the horns. Nor are they redundant in their searches; the versions of “Trobar Clus” on Cinema Rovaté and The Removal of Secrecy (ML 106) show just how their ear for improvisation has been extended. It is like learning a language: each time more can be said by memory of what has been said before.
Although Ochs is the group’s main composer, the others contribute distinctive compositions as well. Jon Raskin, the only conservatory-trained member of the quartet, offers a vast panorama for improvisations in his “Ride Upon the Belly of the Waters, Building Your Boats to Carry All” (from a line by William Carlos Williams), which takes up the entire second side of Cinema Rovaté. The form here seems at one with the images of the title, allowing the soloists a field as metaphorically varied as the sea. Their syntax changes like the weather, as do the moods of the piece, sweet tones warping into dissonance, proving already that the group can handle more extensive pieces.
Andrew Voigt’s “Kol Nidre,” on Rova’s next album Daredevils (ML 105), where they are joined by Kaiser on guitar, features Voigt on flute, playing almost shakuhachi-like at times in the timbre and duration of his attack, in the sure strokes of his phrases. Kaiser’s sparse electric guitar work sounds like starlight on the lush, meditative piece.
Ochs’s title tune is a step forward in his writing, with its eerie circus-like theme that choruses along behind the soloists as each takes a turn on the high wire, presaging his peculiar themes and playful choreographies in As Was (ML 118). Kaiser’s rare foray into a composed structure for his music, on his “Mal Qué Arroz” which fills the second side of Daredevils, thrusts Rova into a more abstract ground and allows them a more raucous range for their solos than normally employed.
On As Was, Rova’s most recent album, there is an unexpected gift in the form of Ochs’s excellent liner notes, describing in plain language how and where the pieces were derived and what is happening in them, particularly structurally. Bruce Ackley’s “Quill,” according to Ochs, sets up “static ‘foils’” through which Ackley on soprano “threads his way in a melodic, linear improvisation.” As the foils become more crafty, the soprano muscles around them until they meet and settle into a tableau.
When Rova does work in a head-solo-head pattern, it is again more complex, as in Ochs’s “Escape from Zero Village,” which employs “three improvised areas” between the opening and closing heads. One of Rova’s most urgent tunes, the horns share the task of spinning beyond the compressed force of the composition itself but are inevitably reined back in by the tune’s very premises.
Besides the intrigue of Rova’s pieces, the playing is inventive and alert. Ochs’s “Paint Another Take of the Shootpop,” dedicated to Olivier Messiaen and Otis Redding, consists of five sections that involve “the recoloring of the same scale or mode.” Here, as in other Ochs pieces, the heads crackle with a wry humor that nearly camouflages their emotionally subversive implications. Raskin’s wild baritone solo stands at the center of this amazingly protean piece, which gliding in and out of its composed and improvised areas allows no predictability.
Which all of Rova’s albums can claim: a consistently unforeseeable turn of the head, a sudden echo of the past or future. While As Was is Rova’s most exciting album, all their recordings brim with ideas and good playing.
More often than not, dissonance is the starting point for Metalanguage co-founder and co-producer Kaiser, who has recorded five albums for the company in solo, duo, and group improvised settings, as well as contributing to several other dates. Particularly masterful with all the resources of the electric guitar, he carves his own kingdom out of the universe opened by Derek Bailey. Unlike Bailey and most other of the improvising guitarists, Kaiser intermittently draws on the American rock idiom of the ‘60s and ‘70s as well: flashes of rattling or ruffling chords, a parenthetical bass line almost out of the Beach Boys, a duel with feedback.
Besides his highly interesting duets with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo and percussionist Andrea Centazzo on Protocol (ML 102), and his refined and stunning collaborations with guitarist Fred Frith on With Friends Like These (ML 107), Kaiser has recorded two solo albums. The title track of Outside Pleasure (ML 111) presents a partial amalgam of his methods on electric guitar: odd chords and disjointed harmonics reminiscent of Bailey, use of delay, glissandi up and down the fretboard, hammering and plucking notes off the neck while scratching the strings on both sides of the bridge, setting up a dense web of loud rhythm guitar and somehow (recorded live) over it a searing psychedelic lead run, breaking to a single hollow note. After the wizardly electronic interplay of “Punctual as Actual,” Kaiser launches into the most Bailey-inspired piece on the album, “The Farmer In Heaven.” Yet, as ever, Kaiser manages to suggest a great deal melodically and harmonically (& rhythmically) of what has happened in American guitar styles, especially in California. In fact, Kaiser’s talent for melodic suggestion often adds an invaluable second or invisible voice to his playing. And on “The Stormy Present,” with its use of the radio as a foil of chance, Kaiser demonstrates a great ingredient of many free improvisers and especially those on Metalanguage: irony.
On Kaiser’s double-disc Aloha (ML 109), the company’s first digital recording, Kaiser’s intricate real time and multi-track explorations concern, as he writes in the liner notes, “language elements of attack, articulation, pitch bend trajectory and velocity, non-metric and elastic rhythm, timbre, and the blurry dividing line between a ‘sound,’ a ‘timbre,’ and a ‘chord.’” These, as well as his duo and trio performances on the final “rock and roll side” (with Captain Beefheart drummer John French, pianist Greg Goodman, and others), are well served by the greater clarity and spatial placement that digital affords. On these records, Kaiser’s work seems to approach closer than ever the associative power of abstract painting. His layering of qualities of sound, particularly on the multi-tracked “Aloha Gamera” (which begins with the guitar plucked like a koto), offers a dreamlike texture that may elicit lions, elephants, fires, screeching tires, or a blur of crickets. And the final side of the album—save for a beautiful hopping duet with Goodman, “Pale Flower,” that bends into a sort of fractured boogie at times—threatens to betray even the purists of free music, with the Hawaiian-influenced “Aloha Slack Key,” the classically electric blues-rock number “The Book of Joel,” and two smoky blues by Willie Brown and Son House, “Future Blues/The Jinx Blues,” Kaiser occasionally overlaying his distinctive squiggles, rasps, and crashing chords across them. However, these highly melodic efforts have always been another face of Kaiser, dating back to his early album Ice Death, which included two such morsels. Aloha is a voyage not to be missed, nor forgotten.
A third artist-producer has reinforced the ranks of Metalanguage in pianist Goodman and his associated label, The Beak Doctor, whose releases are joint ventures. A Similar Review (ML 103/BD 1), the first of Goodman’s three recordings under his own name, introduces an improviser of enormous energies in a solo performance at his Berkeley living room concert hall, Woody Woodman’s Finger Palace. Though he sometimes sounds like he’s playing the piano with Cecil Taylor’s fingers, in the rumbling phrases and tone clusters, he employs a greater range of colors and effects than Taylor, and is overall brighter, more playful and optimistic. In part this is conveyed by his extensive inside-the-piano work, with an attack that boasts as much force and imagination as his use of the keyboard. This resourcefulness proves an excellent premise for his outing with Evan Parker on tenor, on Abracadabra (ML 104/BD 2). But Goodman is also playful in a more literal sense: gesturing, theatrical, funny. On his latest album, The Construction Of Ruins (ML 113/BD 4), he ingeniously evokes a set of little stories by the use of an odd configuration of objects and a puppet-like use of his fingers, propelling him into long probing improvisations on repaired piano. In all, Goodman’s music spirals further and further with each new record.
It is to Metalanguage’s credit that it has recorded albums by two of the foremost innovators of free improvised music, Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, in their first dates for an American label. Evan Parker At The Finger Palace (ML 110/BD3), recorded in late 1978, is a tour-de-force solo performance demonstrating the saxophonist’s harmonic research on soprano. This is possibly one of the more difficult records of improvised music to listen to straight through. Parker’s amazing sustenance bears the kind of unsuspected metamorphoses that repetitive music provides, only at a white heat. Laying the lines, as it were, he builds into a rapid flickering stream of multiphonics as impermeable as a Mobius strip, fueled by long passages of circular breathing. At length he lets the stream vanish, retreading his attack with shorter beams of a more precise aim, whether timbral or harmonic, then weaves them anew into intensely brilliant wands of light. It is particularly helpful for understanding Parker’s work to hear him in other contexts; his blistering solos on Louis Moholo's triumphant Spirits Rejoice, as well as his part in the sweet ensemble playing, reveal how really comprehensive Parker’s sound can be. Equally, the more concise and localized solo investigations of Parker’s later Incus album, Six Of One, are a direct extension from the important testimony of the Metalanguage/Beak Doctor date.
A View from Six Windows (ML 114) carries Bailey’s Japanese-like sparseness, his attention to silences, to the evocative potential of individual sound qualities and how they are placed, into the rare context of a vocalist. Christine Jeffrey’s notes are ethereal and sustained. Her voice can open suddenly, from a pinched wail to a ratchety moan that seems to approximate Bailey’s own rubbing of the guitar strings; or unexpectedly, as in “Here Today... ,” she sighs enticingly close to our right ear. Bailey’s attack on the strings often anticipates, or is anticipated by, a corresponding attack with the voice; though they also employ a subtly diverse range of cross-textures, guided by instinct. If Jeffrey is birdlike, with her turkeyish gobble, for instance, Bailey’s guitar might (extending the metaphor) evoke the woods that the bird scratches among. This record is not as outwardly provoking as Bailey’s duets with Anthony Braxton or Dave Holland; still, Jeffrey and Bailey work splendidly together. They harvest a quiet crop in a patch of sun and, generally, give the listener time to come over and share some. Bailey, the pioneer of atonal improvised guitar, offers yet another challenging album here in Jeffrey’s company.
Metalanguage has been open to newer voices as well. San Diego-based saxophonist Jim French, on his album If Looks Could Kill (ML 108), presents an almost incongruous variety of approaches, but manages to make them cohere. From the marvelous send-ups of “Nobody Knows You” and “Maple Leaf Rag,” to the adroit “Infrapolation” which sounds like a comfortable cross between New Orleans and Evan Parker, to the truly wolf-like “Wolftraum,” French packs the album’s first side with a rich display of mostly solo soprano performances. The second side, though, offers even greater surprises in his duo and trio improvisations with guitarist Kaiser and the incredible vocalist Diamanda Galas. Her ability to invoke at once the hair-rending catharsis of ancient Greek tragedy and the fractured urgency of contemporary communication, to suggest at will a storm’s whisper or a balmy cry or the crazed gestures of speech, mark Galas as a talent to watch, and her upcoming solo and multi-tracked vocal album (ML 119) promises breathtaking rewards. Other Metalanguage releases will feature Holland’s Maarten Altena Quartet, Canadian John Osborne on solo saxophone, Italy’s Trio Improvvisazione, and new Chinese music on the ch’in.
Finally, though hardly least, a sort of collective sampler of improvisations by Metalanguage artists can be heard in The Metalanguage Festival Of Improvised Music, 1980, wherein Vol. 1: The Social Set (ML 116/BD 5) offers an ensemble improvisation that includes the Rova musicians, Parker, Kaiser, Kondo, and Goodman; while Vol 2: The Science Set (ML 117/BD 6) presents various small groupings of the same pool of musicians with the addition of Bailey. What is most impressive about the ensemble date is the organically intuitive way in which the eight musicians improvise, not at all blowing their collective brains out, but hearing the ebb and flow of that music greater than its parts. The Science Set, recorded in concert in San Francisco, by contrast allows the listener to concentrate on the individual voices in more intimate dialogues and to hear the great variety of expression possible among different free musicians. Particularly interesting are the Kondo-Parker and Bailey-Raskin duets as well as the Kondo-Kaiser-Goodman trio, but all the selections are delicious.
Metalanguage is more than a tendency. With its excellent sound quality, its attractive covers, and its fearless artists, it is a company to rely on for new and provocative music.
* * *
Metalinguistics
published in The Wire (London) 8 (Oct. 1984)
“Music is our only path to the other world,” said an older Russian jazz critic recently.
He meant the West. He said it plainly in the still of the night in a parked car in Latvia. This happened in June 1983, and he was speaking with Larry Ochs of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the Metalanguage recording artists who are the first American contemporary music group to perform in the USSR.
Formed in 1977 in the San Francisco area, Rova has already done seven tours of Europe. Two years ago, Alexander Kan of Leningrad’s Contemporary Music Club sent them a private invitation to perform in Russia, saying that the group was number one in the USSR Jazz Critics’ Poll. However, there was no official funding available for such a trip.
Ochs, who is a co-founder of Metalanguage, and the other musicians of Rova—Jon Raskin, Andrew Voigt, and Bruce Ackley—helped raise the money themselves (with Eva Soltes), and embarked on their twenty-day tour (ten in Russia, ten in Rumania) with an eighteen-member entourage that included poets, writers, photographers, a sound engineer, and a video crew (Saxophone Diplomacy, by the production group Ideas in Motion, will appear nationally on American public television later this year).
In Moscow, Leningrad, and Riga, Rova drew enthusiastic audiences of up to 800 people. Word of mouth was usually the only publicity. Jazz, rock, and classical musicians traveled long distances to see them, and the Rova musicians were the highlight of jam sessions at every stop, playing with such Soviet artists as pianist Sergey Kuryokhin and members of the Ganelin Trio. Their stay was so short, says Ochs, that there was no time for politics, every conversation got down quickly to the essentials: people and music.
The Rova members were overwhelmed by the warm, personal response of the Soviet public.
“Sometimes the emotional level was so intense,” says Ochs, “that I had to walk away from it. It didn’t make sense that people would be moved this much. It wasn’t so much what we were doing, just the fact that we were there at all.” While in the United States, where work has never been abundant for them, Ochs explains, “our music has been virtually ignored by the music establishment and the mass media.”
Situating the group’s music is a big reason why many critics turn their backs, for Rova finds its inspiration in a wide range of musical sources, from Olivier Messiaen to Otis Redding to Steve Lacy and beyond. Their sparkling synthesis of composed and improvised elements gives a dynamic power to their sound; they manage to surprise constantly with their collective intuition and seamless changes. Any label falls below the level their music achieves.
On record, Rova just gets more interesting with each outing. On their first albums for Metalanguage--Cinema Rovaté, Daredevils, The Removal Of Secrecy—the group displays a solid understanding of their possibilities, given their diverse formations, rendering them with a fresh and sustained interchange of ideas and textures. Probably the most provocative of these dates is Daredevils, where Rova is matched with fellow Metalanguage founder, guitarist Henry Kaiser, whose musical researches have been nearly encyclopedic.
Though Rova’s sound is already highly developed on their earlier albums, by This, This, This, This (Moers Music) they seem to have taken a few steps further, foreshadowing their more commanding performances on As Was (Metalanguage) from 1981. The compositions get even more complex, the playing both more controlled and more adventurous: they know what they’re about more in these albums, and few groups can touch Rova for richness of music.
With Invisible Frames (Fore Records), this deepening of the group’s identity is reaffirmed, such that in their newest album, Favorite Street (Black Saint), a breathtaking tribute to the music of Steve Lacy, Rova manages to endlessly open Lacy’s tunes further, as Lacy has done with Monk’s music, while still sounding thoroughly Rova. An upcoming album of concert performances from their Russian tour, to be released on Hat Hut, promises not only their ambitious new piece “Terrains,” but their first live album in the most exciting of circumstances.
Metalanguage itself has gone international as well. Founded in 1978, the company began by featuring improvising musicians from California mostly. Soon, though, it was releasing important albums by such new music pioneers as Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, from England, as well as Kaiser’s own collaborations with Toshinori Kondo, Andrea Centazzo, and Fred Frith. Now, over twenty albums later, Metalanguage has bloomed into the label “for contemporary improvised musics, some structured, some free,” that Ochs envisioned along with Kaiser and the third co-founder, pianist Greg Goodman, with his joint venture The Beak Doctor.
Goodman is not as well known as he should be. His music is very fluid, very alive, jumping constantly, it hops, it happens. He seems to have been born with a smile, and a bit worried about that too. He likes the percussiveness of the piano, to toy with dense sounds and with delicate sounds, to roll things around inside over the strings. And he likes to wear masks, to make up stories about them, pull objects out of a sack and make them play also. His every performance is an event, an occasion for chance objects to come together and have their say; Goodman may be the Lewis Carroll of the piano.
Nearly all of Goodman’s albums are recorded in concert, he prefers the feeling. From his first album, A Similar Review, to his next, improvised duets with Evan Parker, Abracadabra, less than three months have passed (in late 1978), but Goodman seems to have opened up his playing considerably. Though this may be conditioned partly by Parker’s presence, Goodman also sounds much closer to his sources on the first record; as a duo, they are a fine match of concentrated energies, compelling each other out of themselves, and the result is marvelous.
Goodman’s most recent record, The Construction Of Ruins, consists of pieces developed along his 1982 Australian tour, with Kaiser and Australian violinist Jon Rose assisting on most of the second side. Goodman’s playing is fuller still on this date, as the solo tracks here particularly attest: “Notes,” which closes the album, is a lovely and masterful tribute to Lennie Tristano with Goodman at his most mercurial.
For more than six years, Goodman has also been the driving force behind Woody Woodman’s Finger Palace. At the instructions of his extraterrestrial alter ego, he knocked down the living room wall of his Berkeley home to make room for a concert hall. Numerous albums have been recorded there, by Metalanguage artists as well as others such as saxophonist Henry Kuntz (former editor of Bells). The Finger Palace has been host to many visiting musicians too, though this spring it features the American premiere of Goodman’s own solo performance art work, “Dino-Opera-Saur” (the world premiere was held in Vienna last year), the latest of his ingenious hybrid pieces that blend theatrical elements into his concerts. He will probably be bringing the work to Europe later this year.
Then there is Henry Kaiser, a guitarist with an impressive ear. As he did on the more expansive Aloha, Kaiser offers a fair range of his musical pleasures on his latest release, Who Needs Enemies?, with guitarist Fred Frith. The music here is more contained and in another direction than their completely electric collaboration of four years earlier, With Friends Like These.
They are an exciting team and on the new record they both get down home, with a couple of beautiful Skip James blues tunes, and also into an area that borders on New Wave sometimes, yet is different still. They take all the music that is their heritage and then some, but with new thinking, their own. Kaiser shows here, as on all his records, that there is a music that can assimilate the whole range of sources, from rock & roll to Hawaiian to Derek Bailey, and that it can fit in many places.
Three of the newest releases from Metalanguage show just how broad is the company’s commitment. Perhaps the most spectacular is Diamanda Galas’s long-awaited eponymous album consisting of two long pieces, “Tragouthia Apo To Aima Fonos (Song of the Blood of Those Murdered),” dedicated to the victims of the Greek junta, and “Panoptikon.” Galas is only using her voice—with a few mikes and usually a lot of studio manipulation (though her voice is often most chilling when it is least tinkered with)—but her work is so powerful that casual listening is almost impossible.
She screams mostly, or chatters on hysterically, yet hearing her is to enter into the ancient origins of speech itself, she is incredible. While her first album, Litanies Of Satan (Y Records), already seemed to be at the razor’s edge of madness, the more sophisticated treatment of her newer pieces on Metalanguage would almost suggest that the healing is precisely there, at the edge, in an urgent catharsis.
The most beautiful music to come out of the company recently is Ali Akbar Khan’s Halfmoon. The Bengali master of the sarod offers here two magnificent ragas, one of which, “Rag Malashri Gat,” is very rarely heard, as it is unique among some 75,000 ragas in that it has only three notes, rather than the normally minimal five. Khansahib develops both ragas so lovingly that you literally bathe an eternity in listening to them. This record marks an interest as well, on the part of Metalanguage, in producing improvisational music from other cultures too; hopefully, their projected album of new Chinese music for the ch’in will be out soon.
But Metalanaguage is open to musical currents anywhere. The Trio Improvvisazione from Genoa, Italy, had been sending the company tapes until they received one they especially liked, Like a Breath. With the oddly appealing combination of viola, piano, and oboe, the Trio Improvvisazione creates a music that lets in the spaces, shaping them, curious. Other Metalanguage projects currently in the works include records by Holland’s Maarten Alteena Quartet, the Canadian Music Collective, and possibly the English Improvising String Quartet.
“So it’s smoking,” as Ochs says, “a lot of really good things.” And Metalanguage is finding that there is an audience, one that’s growing and adventurous.
Free and Here to Stay
published in Jazz Forum (Warsaw) 77 (Aug. 1982)
A language beyond those already known, an open territory where familiar elements spin new meanings: Metalanguage, the musician-produced record label of improvised music and new compositional forms. Founded in 1978 by Larry Ochs, of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, and guitarist Henry Kaiser, the Berkeley, California-based company has issued in rapid succession around 20 albums, showing a spirited confidence in the strength of the new music.
The Rova Saxophone Quartet is the most accessible of the Metalanguage artists, in that most of their pieces are framed by composed chamber-like contexts from which extensive improvisations spring like vines. The structures often bear more kinship to the realm of classical music than to jazz, in their studied voicings and the passages through contrasting movements and counter-themes between the opening and closing heads. Yet the free improvisations that emerge are the bolder for it, because the blues is by no means their sole terrain.
Still, one can seldom be sure where the border lies between improvised and composed. On Rova’s first album, Cinema Rovaté (ML 101), their sound and methods are already firmly established. Larry Ochs’s “New Sheets” displays the group’s finely-geared sense of balance: each member gliding in and out of lead and supportive roles; the multiple perspectives of the four voices constantly reshaping the piece, almost mathematically, in buoyantly open lines. It is interesting to see, through the course of their albums, how the group becomes more venturesome, how the musicians better recognize the responsibilities and potentials of a given piece.
Rova is probably the most interesting of the saxophone quartets now playing, perhaps the only group of saxophonists to concentrate their energies predominantly in the work of the quartet. Their six albums in three years demonstrate a consistent exploration of forms, colors, interplay, and the expressive possibilities of the horns. Nor are they redundant in their searches; the versions of “Trobar Clus” on Cinema Rovaté and The Removal of Secrecy (ML 106) show just how their ear for improvisation has been extended. It is like learning a language: each time more can be said by memory of what has been said before.
Although Ochs is the group’s main composer, the others contribute distinctive compositions as well. Jon Raskin, the only conservatory-trained member of the quartet, offers a vast panorama for improvisations in his “Ride Upon the Belly of the Waters, Building Your Boats to Carry All” (from a line by William Carlos Williams), which takes up the entire second side of Cinema Rovaté. The form here seems at one with the images of the title, allowing the soloists a field as metaphorically varied as the sea. Their syntax changes like the weather, as do the moods of the piece, sweet tones warping into dissonance, proving already that the group can handle more extensive pieces.
Andrew Voigt’s “Kol Nidre,” on Rova’s next album Daredevils (ML 105), where they are joined by Kaiser on guitar, features Voigt on flute, playing almost shakuhachi-like at times in the timbre and duration of his attack, in the sure strokes of his phrases. Kaiser’s sparse electric guitar work sounds like starlight on the lush, meditative piece.
Ochs’s title tune is a step forward in his writing, with its eerie circus-like theme that choruses along behind the soloists as each takes a turn on the high wire, presaging his peculiar themes and playful choreographies in As Was (ML 118). Kaiser’s rare foray into a composed structure for his music, on his “Mal Qué Arroz” which fills the second side of Daredevils, thrusts Rova into a more abstract ground and allows them a more raucous range for their solos than normally employed.
On As Was, Rova’s most recent album, there is an unexpected gift in the form of Ochs’s excellent liner notes, describing in plain language how and where the pieces were derived and what is happening in them, particularly structurally. Bruce Ackley’s “Quill,” according to Ochs, sets up “static ‘foils’” through which Ackley on soprano “threads his way in a melodic, linear improvisation.” As the foils become more crafty, the soprano muscles around them until they meet and settle into a tableau.
When Rova does work in a head-solo-head pattern, it is again more complex, as in Ochs’s “Escape from Zero Village,” which employs “three improvised areas” between the opening and closing heads. One of Rova’s most urgent tunes, the horns share the task of spinning beyond the compressed force of the composition itself but are inevitably reined back in by the tune’s very premises.
Besides the intrigue of Rova’s pieces, the playing is inventive and alert. Ochs’s “Paint Another Take of the Shootpop,” dedicated to Olivier Messiaen and Otis Redding, consists of five sections that involve “the recoloring of the same scale or mode.” Here, as in other Ochs pieces, the heads crackle with a wry humor that nearly camouflages their emotionally subversive implications. Raskin’s wild baritone solo stands at the center of this amazingly protean piece, which gliding in and out of its composed and improvised areas allows no predictability.
Which all of Rova’s albums can claim: a consistently unforeseeable turn of the head, a sudden echo of the past or future. While As Was is Rova’s most exciting album, all their recordings brim with ideas and good playing.
More often than not, dissonance is the starting point for Metalanguage co-founder and co-producer Kaiser, who has recorded five albums for the company in solo, duo, and group improvised settings, as well as contributing to several other dates. Particularly masterful with all the resources of the electric guitar, he carves his own kingdom out of the universe opened by Derek Bailey. Unlike Bailey and most other of the improvising guitarists, Kaiser intermittently draws on the American rock idiom of the ‘60s and ‘70s as well: flashes of rattling or ruffling chords, a parenthetical bass line almost out of the Beach Boys, a duel with feedback.
Besides his highly interesting duets with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo and percussionist Andrea Centazzo on Protocol (ML 102), and his refined and stunning collaborations with guitarist Fred Frith on With Friends Like These (ML 107), Kaiser has recorded two solo albums. The title track of Outside Pleasure (ML 111) presents a partial amalgam of his methods on electric guitar: odd chords and disjointed harmonics reminiscent of Bailey, use of delay, glissandi up and down the fretboard, hammering and plucking notes off the neck while scratching the strings on both sides of the bridge, setting up a dense web of loud rhythm guitar and somehow (recorded live) over it a searing psychedelic lead run, breaking to a single hollow note. After the wizardly electronic interplay of “Punctual as Actual,” Kaiser launches into the most Bailey-inspired piece on the album, “The Farmer In Heaven.” Yet, as ever, Kaiser manages to suggest a great deal melodically and harmonically (& rhythmically) of what has happened in American guitar styles, especially in California. In fact, Kaiser’s talent for melodic suggestion often adds an invaluable second or invisible voice to his playing. And on “The Stormy Present,” with its use of the radio as a foil of chance, Kaiser demonstrates a great ingredient of many free improvisers and especially those on Metalanguage: irony.
On Kaiser’s double-disc Aloha (ML 109), the company’s first digital recording, Kaiser’s intricate real time and multi-track explorations concern, as he writes in the liner notes, “language elements of attack, articulation, pitch bend trajectory and velocity, non-metric and elastic rhythm, timbre, and the blurry dividing line between a ‘sound,’ a ‘timbre,’ and a ‘chord.’” These, as well as his duo and trio performances on the final “rock and roll side” (with Captain Beefheart drummer John French, pianist Greg Goodman, and others), are well served by the greater clarity and spatial placement that digital affords. On these records, Kaiser’s work seems to approach closer than ever the associative power of abstract painting. His layering of qualities of sound, particularly on the multi-tracked “Aloha Gamera” (which begins with the guitar plucked like a koto), offers a dreamlike texture that may elicit lions, elephants, fires, screeching tires, or a blur of crickets. And the final side of the album—save for a beautiful hopping duet with Goodman, “Pale Flower,” that bends into a sort of fractured boogie at times—threatens to betray even the purists of free music, with the Hawaiian-influenced “Aloha Slack Key,” the classically electric blues-rock number “The Book of Joel,” and two smoky blues by Willie Brown and Son House, “Future Blues/The Jinx Blues,” Kaiser occasionally overlaying his distinctive squiggles, rasps, and crashing chords across them. However, these highly melodic efforts have always been another face of Kaiser, dating back to his early album Ice Death, which included two such morsels. Aloha is a voyage not to be missed, nor forgotten.
A third artist-producer has reinforced the ranks of Metalanguage in pianist Goodman and his associated label, The Beak Doctor, whose releases are joint ventures. A Similar Review (ML 103/BD 1), the first of Goodman’s three recordings under his own name, introduces an improviser of enormous energies in a solo performance at his Berkeley living room concert hall, Woody Woodman’s Finger Palace. Though he sometimes sounds like he’s playing the piano with Cecil Taylor’s fingers, in the rumbling phrases and tone clusters, he employs a greater range of colors and effects than Taylor, and is overall brighter, more playful and optimistic. In part this is conveyed by his extensive inside-the-piano work, with an attack that boasts as much force and imagination as his use of the keyboard. This resourcefulness proves an excellent premise for his outing with Evan Parker on tenor, on Abracadabra (ML 104/BD 2). But Goodman is also playful in a more literal sense: gesturing, theatrical, funny. On his latest album, The Construction Of Ruins (ML 113/BD 4), he ingeniously evokes a set of little stories by the use of an odd configuration of objects and a puppet-like use of his fingers, propelling him into long probing improvisations on repaired piano. In all, Goodman’s music spirals further and further with each new record.
It is to Metalanguage’s credit that it has recorded albums by two of the foremost innovators of free improvised music, Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, in their first dates for an American label. Evan Parker At The Finger Palace (ML 110/BD3), recorded in late 1978, is a tour-de-force solo performance demonstrating the saxophonist’s harmonic research on soprano. This is possibly one of the more difficult records of improvised music to listen to straight through. Parker’s amazing sustenance bears the kind of unsuspected metamorphoses that repetitive music provides, only at a white heat. Laying the lines, as it were, he builds into a rapid flickering stream of multiphonics as impermeable as a Mobius strip, fueled by long passages of circular breathing. At length he lets the stream vanish, retreading his attack with shorter beams of a more precise aim, whether timbral or harmonic, then weaves them anew into intensely brilliant wands of light. It is particularly helpful for understanding Parker’s work to hear him in other contexts; his blistering solos on Louis Moholo's triumphant Spirits Rejoice, as well as his part in the sweet ensemble playing, reveal how really comprehensive Parker’s sound can be. Equally, the more concise and localized solo investigations of Parker’s later Incus album, Six Of One, are a direct extension from the important testimony of the Metalanguage/Beak Doctor date.
A View from Six Windows (ML 114) carries Bailey’s Japanese-like sparseness, his attention to silences, to the evocative potential of individual sound qualities and how they are placed, into the rare context of a vocalist. Christine Jeffrey’s notes are ethereal and sustained. Her voice can open suddenly, from a pinched wail to a ratchety moan that seems to approximate Bailey’s own rubbing of the guitar strings; or unexpectedly, as in “Here Today... ,” she sighs enticingly close to our right ear. Bailey’s attack on the strings often anticipates, or is anticipated by, a corresponding attack with the voice; though they also employ a subtly diverse range of cross-textures, guided by instinct. If Jeffrey is birdlike, with her turkeyish gobble, for instance, Bailey’s guitar might (extending the metaphor) evoke the woods that the bird scratches among. This record is not as outwardly provoking as Bailey’s duets with Anthony Braxton or Dave Holland; still, Jeffrey and Bailey work splendidly together. They harvest a quiet crop in a patch of sun and, generally, give the listener time to come over and share some. Bailey, the pioneer of atonal improvised guitar, offers yet another challenging album here in Jeffrey’s company.
Metalanguage has been open to newer voices as well. San Diego-based saxophonist Jim French, on his album If Looks Could Kill (ML 108), presents an almost incongruous variety of approaches, but manages to make them cohere. From the marvelous send-ups of “Nobody Knows You” and “Maple Leaf Rag,” to the adroit “Infrapolation” which sounds like a comfortable cross between New Orleans and Evan Parker, to the truly wolf-like “Wolftraum,” French packs the album’s first side with a rich display of mostly solo soprano performances. The second side, though, offers even greater surprises in his duo and trio improvisations with guitarist Kaiser and the incredible vocalist Diamanda Galas. Her ability to invoke at once the hair-rending catharsis of ancient Greek tragedy and the fractured urgency of contemporary communication, to suggest at will a storm’s whisper or a balmy cry or the crazed gestures of speech, mark Galas as a talent to watch, and her upcoming solo and multi-tracked vocal album (ML 119) promises breathtaking rewards. Other Metalanguage releases will feature Holland’s Maarten Altena Quartet, Canadian John Osborne on solo saxophone, Italy’s Trio Improvvisazione, and new Chinese music on the ch’in.
Finally, though hardly least, a sort of collective sampler of improvisations by Metalanguage artists can be heard in The Metalanguage Festival Of Improvised Music, 1980, wherein Vol. 1: The Social Set (ML 116/BD 5) offers an ensemble improvisation that includes the Rova musicians, Parker, Kaiser, Kondo, and Goodman; while Vol 2: The Science Set (ML 117/BD 6) presents various small groupings of the same pool of musicians with the addition of Bailey. What is most impressive about the ensemble date is the organically intuitive way in which the eight musicians improvise, not at all blowing their collective brains out, but hearing the ebb and flow of that music greater than its parts. The Science Set, recorded in concert in San Francisco, by contrast allows the listener to concentrate on the individual voices in more intimate dialogues and to hear the great variety of expression possible among different free musicians. Particularly interesting are the Kondo-Parker and Bailey-Raskin duets as well as the Kondo-Kaiser-Goodman trio, but all the selections are delicious.
Metalanguage is more than a tendency. With its excellent sound quality, its attractive covers, and its fearless artists, it is a company to rely on for new and provocative music.
* * *
Metalinguistics
published in The Wire (London) 8 (Oct. 1984)
“Music is our only path to the other world,” said an older Russian jazz critic recently.
He meant the West. He said it plainly in the still of the night in a parked car in Latvia. This happened in June 1983, and he was speaking with Larry Ochs of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the Metalanguage recording artists who are the first American contemporary music group to perform in the USSR.
Formed in 1977 in the San Francisco area, Rova has already done seven tours of Europe. Two years ago, Alexander Kan of Leningrad’s Contemporary Music Club sent them a private invitation to perform in Russia, saying that the group was number one in the USSR Jazz Critics’ Poll. However, there was no official funding available for such a trip.
Ochs, who is a co-founder of Metalanguage, and the other musicians of Rova—Jon Raskin, Andrew Voigt, and Bruce Ackley—helped raise the money themselves (with Eva Soltes), and embarked on their twenty-day tour (ten in Russia, ten in Rumania) with an eighteen-member entourage that included poets, writers, photographers, a sound engineer, and a video crew (Saxophone Diplomacy, by the production group Ideas in Motion, will appear nationally on American public television later this year).
In Moscow, Leningrad, and Riga, Rova drew enthusiastic audiences of up to 800 people. Word of mouth was usually the only publicity. Jazz, rock, and classical musicians traveled long distances to see them, and the Rova musicians were the highlight of jam sessions at every stop, playing with such Soviet artists as pianist Sergey Kuryokhin and members of the Ganelin Trio. Their stay was so short, says Ochs, that there was no time for politics, every conversation got down quickly to the essentials: people and music.
The Rova members were overwhelmed by the warm, personal response of the Soviet public.
“Sometimes the emotional level was so intense,” says Ochs, “that I had to walk away from it. It didn’t make sense that people would be moved this much. It wasn’t so much what we were doing, just the fact that we were there at all.” While in the United States, where work has never been abundant for them, Ochs explains, “our music has been virtually ignored by the music establishment and the mass media.”
Situating the group’s music is a big reason why many critics turn their backs, for Rova finds its inspiration in a wide range of musical sources, from Olivier Messiaen to Otis Redding to Steve Lacy and beyond. Their sparkling synthesis of composed and improvised elements gives a dynamic power to their sound; they manage to surprise constantly with their collective intuition and seamless changes. Any label falls below the level their music achieves.
On record, Rova just gets more interesting with each outing. On their first albums for Metalanguage--Cinema Rovaté, Daredevils, The Removal Of Secrecy—the group displays a solid understanding of their possibilities, given their diverse formations, rendering them with a fresh and sustained interchange of ideas and textures. Probably the most provocative of these dates is Daredevils, where Rova is matched with fellow Metalanguage founder, guitarist Henry Kaiser, whose musical researches have been nearly encyclopedic.
Though Rova’s sound is already highly developed on their earlier albums, by This, This, This, This (Moers Music) they seem to have taken a few steps further, foreshadowing their more commanding performances on As Was (Metalanguage) from 1981. The compositions get even more complex, the playing both more controlled and more adventurous: they know what they’re about more in these albums, and few groups can touch Rova for richness of music.
With Invisible Frames (Fore Records), this deepening of the group’s identity is reaffirmed, such that in their newest album, Favorite Street (Black Saint), a breathtaking tribute to the music of Steve Lacy, Rova manages to endlessly open Lacy’s tunes further, as Lacy has done with Monk’s music, while still sounding thoroughly Rova. An upcoming album of concert performances from their Russian tour, to be released on Hat Hut, promises not only their ambitious new piece “Terrains,” but their first live album in the most exciting of circumstances.
Metalanguage itself has gone international as well. Founded in 1978, the company began by featuring improvising musicians from California mostly. Soon, though, it was releasing important albums by such new music pioneers as Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, from England, as well as Kaiser’s own collaborations with Toshinori Kondo, Andrea Centazzo, and Fred Frith. Now, over twenty albums later, Metalanguage has bloomed into the label “for contemporary improvised musics, some structured, some free,” that Ochs envisioned along with Kaiser and the third co-founder, pianist Greg Goodman, with his joint venture The Beak Doctor.
Goodman is not as well known as he should be. His music is very fluid, very alive, jumping constantly, it hops, it happens. He seems to have been born with a smile, and a bit worried about that too. He likes the percussiveness of the piano, to toy with dense sounds and with delicate sounds, to roll things around inside over the strings. And he likes to wear masks, to make up stories about them, pull objects out of a sack and make them play also. His every performance is an event, an occasion for chance objects to come together and have their say; Goodman may be the Lewis Carroll of the piano.
Nearly all of Goodman’s albums are recorded in concert, he prefers the feeling. From his first album, A Similar Review, to his next, improvised duets with Evan Parker, Abracadabra, less than three months have passed (in late 1978), but Goodman seems to have opened up his playing considerably. Though this may be conditioned partly by Parker’s presence, Goodman also sounds much closer to his sources on the first record; as a duo, they are a fine match of concentrated energies, compelling each other out of themselves, and the result is marvelous.
Goodman’s most recent record, The Construction Of Ruins, consists of pieces developed along his 1982 Australian tour, with Kaiser and Australian violinist Jon Rose assisting on most of the second side. Goodman’s playing is fuller still on this date, as the solo tracks here particularly attest: “Notes,” which closes the album, is a lovely and masterful tribute to Lennie Tristano with Goodman at his most mercurial.
For more than six years, Goodman has also been the driving force behind Woody Woodman’s Finger Palace. At the instructions of his extraterrestrial alter ego, he knocked down the living room wall of his Berkeley home to make room for a concert hall. Numerous albums have been recorded there, by Metalanguage artists as well as others such as saxophonist Henry Kuntz (former editor of Bells). The Finger Palace has been host to many visiting musicians too, though this spring it features the American premiere of Goodman’s own solo performance art work, “Dino-Opera-Saur” (the world premiere was held in Vienna last year), the latest of his ingenious hybrid pieces that blend theatrical elements into his concerts. He will probably be bringing the work to Europe later this year.
Then there is Henry Kaiser, a guitarist with an impressive ear. As he did on the more expansive Aloha, Kaiser offers a fair range of his musical pleasures on his latest release, Who Needs Enemies?, with guitarist Fred Frith. The music here is more contained and in another direction than their completely electric collaboration of four years earlier, With Friends Like These.
They are an exciting team and on the new record they both get down home, with a couple of beautiful Skip James blues tunes, and also into an area that borders on New Wave sometimes, yet is different still. They take all the music that is their heritage and then some, but with new thinking, their own. Kaiser shows here, as on all his records, that there is a music that can assimilate the whole range of sources, from rock & roll to Hawaiian to Derek Bailey, and that it can fit in many places.
Three of the newest releases from Metalanguage show just how broad is the company’s commitment. Perhaps the most spectacular is Diamanda Galas’s long-awaited eponymous album consisting of two long pieces, “Tragouthia Apo To Aima Fonos (Song of the Blood of Those Murdered),” dedicated to the victims of the Greek junta, and “Panoptikon.” Galas is only using her voice—with a few mikes and usually a lot of studio manipulation (though her voice is often most chilling when it is least tinkered with)—but her work is so powerful that casual listening is almost impossible.
She screams mostly, or chatters on hysterically, yet hearing her is to enter into the ancient origins of speech itself, she is incredible. While her first album, Litanies Of Satan (Y Records), already seemed to be at the razor’s edge of madness, the more sophisticated treatment of her newer pieces on Metalanguage would almost suggest that the healing is precisely there, at the edge, in an urgent catharsis.
The most beautiful music to come out of the company recently is Ali Akbar Khan’s Halfmoon. The Bengali master of the sarod offers here two magnificent ragas, one of which, “Rag Malashri Gat,” is very rarely heard, as it is unique among some 75,000 ragas in that it has only three notes, rather than the normally minimal five. Khansahib develops both ragas so lovingly that you literally bathe an eternity in listening to them. This record marks an interest as well, on the part of Metalanguage, in producing improvisational music from other cultures too; hopefully, their projected album of new Chinese music for the ch’in will be out soon.
But Metalanaguage is open to musical currents anywhere. The Trio Improvvisazione from Genoa, Italy, had been sending the company tapes until they received one they especially liked, Like a Breath. With the oddly appealing combination of viola, piano, and oboe, the Trio Improvvisazione creates a music that lets in the spaces, shaping them, curious. Other Metalanguage projects currently in the works include records by Holland’s Maarten Alteena Quartet, the Canadian Music Collective, and possibly the English Improvising String Quartet.
“So it’s smoking,” as Ochs says, “a lot of really good things.” And Metalanguage is finding that there is an audience, one that’s growing and adventurous.