[I’m typing this up in Cork several days later, however….]

My initial idea for this report, fueled by my less-than-wonderful playing with Paul Dunmall (Paul, of course, is never less than fantastic) [info on this performance…], was to write about the tightrope balancing act between playing something—crafting something—‘musically’ satisfactory (however you gauge ‘musicality’) versus taking what Steve Lacy called ‘the Leap’ (Bailey, 1992, pp. 57–58). Playing with Paul, it seemed a shame that I didn’t throw in the kitchen sink; after all, there’d be nothing I could do that Paul (with those extra two decades or so experience) wouldn’t have been able to handle. I’m not going to be too hard on myself (I did have a pretty bad cold on the day of that performance), but a lost opportunity is a lost opportunity however you cut it.

Witnessing Filippo Giuffrè’s playing at the November Lab, I thought I heard a… familiar voice; someone with a sound (in that Afrological sense—an approach to musical construction and to the instrument) (Lewis, 2002, pp. 241-242) that I could parse with… ease. Every little gesture, I could almost hear the footnotes: yes, I know that technique, I know that lick, I know that gesture. And though there were elements that are part of Filippo that are not part of me (the shadow of Rowe and touch of Reichel), and probably vice versa (not much sign of Frisell in Filippo’s playing on that night), there was a significant overlap between us. And any exclusion zones (the Rowes, the Reichels) were nonetheless familiar to me (as a listener, if not a practitioner).

Like I said, I could almost hear the footnotes.

Okay, my reaction may have not been a million miles away from that ‘I can do that too’ reaction when Mike Hurley performed at the July ’08 Lab, but the effect was different. Perhaps that difference stemmed from my hoped that being in a crowded space with Filippo would slingshot us into new socio-musical spaces.

In the event, that didn’t happen. As enjoyable and as invigorating as that on-stage encounter may have been (and it’s a shame that it failed to be recorded), we seemed to occupy the same space. ‘Musically,’ I think it worked, but I, for one, failed to take ‘the Leap.’

Anyway, like I said, I’m sitting in London writing this, and another issue is on my mind.

I’ve heard act-after-act, musician-after-musician, each competent, at times with impressive technical proficiency.

And, unlike the lazy magazine critic, I don’t mean that patronizingly; certainly not as an insult. I know that technique is important, and that, in navigating that cyborg (non-)boundary between instrument and instrumentalist, that there is, perhaps, no such thing as ‘empty virtuosity.’

But there are so many performers who sound like countless others; and I ask why I should listen to one as opposed to another.

Yet, thinking of another performance (this one a little while back in Cork), it isn’t enough just to have a niche; not for me, if you are technically incompetent.

I suppose what I am saying is this: I want, at bare minimum, to be able to play—to have a relationship with the guitar that is technically accomplished—but I also want to want to be heard—that listeners/audiences would seek out my playing and my performances. Ambitious? yes. Cocky? probably. But I owe, if not myself, my elders and my tradition nothing less. (I’ll happily take accusations arrogance since the alternative would be insulting to the music—its history, its practitioners, its audience, its community—I’ve chosen to be part of.)

Vijay Iyer’s talk at the Southbank Centre:

Iyer talks of creating “opposites” in performance; of a need for someone or something to be a “foil”. He talks about a dialog with history, with the instrument, with the audience. He talks of “improvising an identity” powered by, and as a result of, social history.

references

Bailey, Derek (1992), Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (London: British Library National Sound Archive).

Lewis, George E. (2002), ‘Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives’, Black Music Research Journal, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (Vol. 22), pp. 215-246.

final Stet Lab event of 2009

Monday, December 7th 2009

9:00 pm (doors: 8:45 pm)

Upstairs @ The Roundy [map…]
Castle Street
Cork, Ireland

€10 (€5)

The final Stet Lab event of 2009 will take place on Monday, 7th December, upstairs at The Roundy, Castle Street, Cork, Ireland. The event will feature the innovative Belfast-based improviser-composer, multi-instrumentalist and computer artist, Justin Yang.

The club’s very first cover band will comprise Justin Yang (saxophones and electronics) and Han-earl Park (guitar). Park remarks, however, that “who we’re covering, and how we’re covering it, is a little bit of a secret. Consider it a challenge to the audience to discover it themselves.”

A native of California, Justin Yang is currently exploring the use of real-time computer animation as notational and interactive constructs at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast. He is a musician who eschews the prioritization of pitch, rhythm or timbre and instead utilizes communication as the driving factor in his work. A student of both Anthony Braxton and Brian Ferneyhough, Yang says his work “lives in the spaces between composition / improvisation; jazz / classical / vernacular; electro-acoustic / instrumental; notated / graphically-scored / freely-improvised; [and] performance-art / sound-art / installation-art”.

Performing alongside this special guest at Stet Lab is the club’s founder and curator, Cork-based guitarist and improviser Han-earl Park.

Opening the event will be three performers reunited on the Stet Lab stage: Marian Murray (violin), Susan Geaney (flute) and Veronica Tadman (voice). They have been improvising for many years as individuals and as part of larger improvising ensembles but this is the first night for the trio to perform together as a unit.

“I am really looking forward to, and delighted to be, performing with Marian and Susan,” says Tadman who is no stranger to Stet Lab. “I have missed having the two of them at Stet Lab the past year and it will be fantastic to be able to perform with them.”

The event will begin at 9:00 pm (doors open at 8:45 pm) and entry is €10 (€5).

Stet Lab will return in 2010 with Istanbul-based improviser and electronic musician Korhan Erel on Monday, 11th January.

the performers

Justin Yang belongs to a generation of artists which can alternatively be thought of as post-idiom, post-scene, post-fame, post-artistic role (maybe as Morton Feldman suggests post-music). Like many of his contemporaries, Yang’s work lives in the spaces between composition/improvisation; jazz / classical / vernacular; electro-acoustic / instrumental; notated / graphically-scored / freely-improvised; performance-art / sound-art / installation-art; and it is developing within a contemporary movement towards an ontologically new notion of art. Yang’s work, reflecting contemporary practices across the artistic spectrum, is characterized by an intensive exploration of technology. Whether, like Evan Parker or John Butcher, it is the mechanical technology of Adolphe Sax, or the digital world engendered by Max Matthews; as McLuhan after Benjamin posits, the artistic merit of this work is inseparable from its means of production. It is a live art whether free-improvisation, materials algorithmically triggered in real-time, or a collection of electronic oscillations which only make sense when combined acoustically. It is characterized by interactivity, produced by a decentralized, multi-nodal network of operators, making not only the materials an extemporaneous expression but the means of organization an in-the-moment invention as well. The trappings of this work, its essential backbone, is no longer scales or motives, rhythms or timbres, but infrastructure—how to compellingly engage the performer in a network of communication and interaction with other performers, whether it be man or machine—moving the performance model from one of expression/production to that of navigation/exploration; what Anthony Braxton would call ‘the mystery of navigation through form’.

Yang’s 3VDB, inspired by the Morton Feldman composition Three Voices and the work of improviser Derek Bailey, is a self-contained system for performer with live electronics. It is made up of a live microphone, live processing software, two amplified speakers on each side of the performer, programmable foot controllers, and screen-based animated graphic feedback.

Han-earl Park works from/within/around the traditions of idiom-agnostic, experimental improvised musics, sometimes engineering theater, sometimes inventing ritual. He prefers collaborative, multi-authored contexts, and has worked with animators, film makers, poets, theater and mime performers, dancers and installation artists. As a musician (guitar, banjo, bass guitar, piano, electronics and software) he has performed in clubs, theaters, art galleries, concert halls, and (ad-hoc) alternative spaces in Denmark, England, Ireland, The Netherlands, Scotland and the USA.

He is involved in ongoing collaborations with Bruce Coates, and with Franziska Schroeder, fifteen year long associations with Alex Fiennes and Murray Campbell, and has performed with Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, George E. Lewis, J. D. Parran, Paul Dunmall, Pauline Oliveros, Kato Hideki, Mark Sanders, Chick Lyall, Jan Langedijk, Stu Ritchie, Koen Nutters, Pedro Rebelo, Elspeth Murray, Mark Trayle and Hannes Raffaseder. He is also the constructor of io 0.0.1 beta, an interactive musical artifact, and cofounder of the Church of Sonology.

Park is a recipient of grants from the Arts Council of Ireland, and a recipient of the Ahmanson Foundation Scholarship and the Calarts Scholarship. He has appeared at festivals including Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology Festival (California), dialogues festival (Edinburgh), Sonorities (Belfast) and VAIN Live Art (Oxford). In addition to numerous self-released CDs, his work has been released by Owlhouse Recordings, frimp.co.uk and Frog Peak Music. He has performed live on Resonance FM (London) and on Drift Radio (at mediascot.org), and his recordings have been featured on Kalvos and Damian’s New Music Bazaar (Vermont), and You Are Hear (at www.youarehear.co.uk) which was selected as Critics’ Choice by The Independent (UK).

Additionally, Park founded and curates Stet Lab, a monthly improvised music space in Cork, Ireland, and teaches improvisation at the UCC Department of Music.

Stet Lab’s first event of the 2009/2010 season

Monday, October 12th 2009

9:00 pm (doors: 8:45 pm)

Upstairs @ The Roundy [map…]
Castle Street
Cork, Ireland

€10 (€5)

Stet Lab’s first event of the 2009/2010 season takes place on the 12th October 2009 at 9:00 pm, upstairs at The Roundy, Castle Street, Cork. Stet Lab again welcomes both regular and newcomers to the stage, bringing the familiar and unfamiliar together in the first event of its third year.

Curator and founder of Stet Lab, guitarist Han-earl Park will perform with a duo of returning Stet Lab veterans. Bruce Lee Gallanter of the Downtown Music Gallery (NY) recently described Park’s playing as “Careful, crafty and well-played with that restrained yet fractured guitar that sounds so good. Han-earl’s sound seems to be in between Derek Bailey and Philip Gibbs.” At the event, Park will be joined by violinist Marian Murray, returning to Ireland from Canada, and bassist Tony O’Connor, who recently spent a year in China. The trio will perform what they describe, tongue-half-in-cheek, as “folk from hell”.

Contrasting with and complementing the trio will be up-and-coming composer and computer artists, Piaras Hoban, performing with composer and multi-instrumentalist, David O’Regan. According to Hoban, they will be “making the tuba go beep”.

The event will begin at 9:00 pm (doors open at 8:45 pm) and entry is €10 (€5).

Stet Lab will return on Tuesday, 10th November with the Italian avant-garde trio, Filario Farinoppo.

what to expect: Stet Lab Year Three

The 2009/2010 season promises to expand and diversify the improvisitive geo-politics of Stet Lab. November will see the Lab welcome Filario Farinoppo—a trio of improvisers from Bologna, Italy—and the December event features the Californian composer-performer Justin Yang. Through 2010, the Lab will host visits by improvisers from Belfast, Cambridge, Istanbul and elsewhere.

Here’s a little back-story: in my first semi-public attempts as an improvising guitarist, I had my guitar, amp and volume pedal… plus a compressor, a distortion box, a delay pedal and a chorus unit. Eventually, this chain would be joined by a wah. (I did, incidentally, my first recordings (a piece by Pedro Rebelo) with more or less this complex of equipment.)

Why am I going through this guitar-geek fetish confession? I started as an improvising guitarist of the ‘if-only-I-had-a-gizmo-I-would-rock’ school of wishful, self-delusion. Somewhere in my head, I had this naive idea that what separated me from the Frisells and Friths of the world was the hardware. (Oh, I almost got myself, don’t laugh, an SG thinking that this would get me closer to Frisell and Zappa.)

Yet Bailey never got better than with a guitar, terrible sounding fuzz box, a volume pedal and amp. Heck, Braxton, age 24, got two LPs from a single alto.

Who was I kidding here?

I only got through my personal-political-musical-technical hiccups and hang-ups by jettisoning, first the wah, then the compressor and delay, and eventually the distortion and the chorus boxes.

Fast-forward to the present…

I feel I’ve melowed from my fundamentalist, luddite stance from years ago, but, as I sat watching Katie O’Looney setup her behemoth kit, as I helped her carry her atomized percussion setup out of her van, up the stairs, into the performance space, I couln’t quite figure out what I was feeling.

My mentors include those who enroll gargantuan complex of musical resources and those who do not. How do I figure in this equation? There are, of course, pragmatic dimensions to this (I travel from one gig to another, by and large, via public transport), but nonetheless what are the political/ideological implications of subscribing to one position?

Part choice, perhaps: I did, for example, suggest to Owen Sutton that he might want to “decide whether you’re an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink drummer (a la Tony Oxley), or happier with a more spartan approach (like Joey Baron). Neither [is] the wrong choice, of course….” Sure, neither’s wrong, but neither are they neutral; they have very different implications and possibilities.