Marian Murray, Alexander Hawkins, Paul Dowling and Tony O’Connor (photo: © 2010 Julia Healy)

Big, big thanks to guest artist Alexander Hawkins for taking time out of his busy schedule to join the Lab; for his generosity and his musicality. I can’t think of a better improviser with whom to close the season.

Thanks also to the double basses of The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) Of… (Paul Dowling and Tony O’Connor), and to all who performed (Andrea Bonino, Juniper Hill, Marian Murray, Han-earl Park and Kevin Terry). We gratefully acknowledges the support of the UCC School of Music and the Basement Project Space in making the June 2010 event possible. Thank again to Veronica Tadman for work behind the scenes, and to photographer Julia Healy [see the photographs (new window)…].

And as always, thanks to all who came to listen, and to all who supported the Lab during the 2009–2010 season. See you in October!

As with all the recordings since December 2008, this month’s recordings are covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. [More info…]

Stet Lab featuring virtuoso pianist-improviser Alexander Hawkins

Tuesday, 15 June 2010

7:15 pm (doors: 7:00 pm)

Ó Riada Hall [map…]
UCC Music Building
Sundays Well
Cork, Ireland

€10 (€5)

Featuring the leading English pianist and improviser Alexander Hawkins, the final Stet Lab event of the 2009-2010 season will take place at 7:15 pm on Tuesday 15 June 2010 at the Ó Riada Hall, UCC Music Building, Sundays Well, Cork, Ireland.

Recently heard performing with the legendary Sonny Simmons, and with the pioneering Joe McPhee, Alexander Hawkins has been dubbed “one of the brightest rising young stars of British jazz and improvisation” by John Eyles (All About Jazz). This appearance at Stet Lab marks his Irish debut.

Hawkins is a powerful and inventive performer best know as a member of the transatlantic Convergence Quartet (with Dominic Lash, Taylor Ho Bynum and Harris Eisenstadt), and his own 6-piece Ensemble (featuring Orphy Robinson, Otto Fischer, Hannah Marshall, Lash and Javier Carmona). In the British improvised music scene Hawkins is the most sought after pianist of his generation, as sideman he has worked in Evan Parker’s trio and quartet, and he has performed with jazz and improvised music luminaries including Louis Moholo-Moholo, Lol Coxhill, John Butcher, Mark Sanders, Steve Williamson, Tom Arthurs, John Russell, Pat Thomas and Eddie Prévost.

Also performing at the event will be Stet Lab regulars including Kevin Terry, Susan Geaney, Marian Murray and Han-earl Park.

Opening the event will be Stet Lab’s resident ensemble The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) of… led by Cork-based improviser and bass player Tony O’Connor.

The event will begin at 7:15 pm (doors open at 7:00 pm) and entry is €10 (€5).

Stet Lab gratefully acknowledges the support of the UCC School of Music and the Basement Project Space for this month’s event.

the performers

Born in Oxford in 1981, Alexander Hawkins is a pianist described as having a “wizards’ touch” and a “fierce technique.” Indeed, a recent interview commented that he is “just emerging as one of the most striking voices of his generation, both with unique things to say and unique ways of expressing them” (David Grundy, Eartrip).

He leads his own 6-piece Ensemble, featuring Orphy Robinson, Otto Fischer, Hannah Marshall, Dominic Lash, and Javier Carmona. One review of this group’s debut record, No Now Is So (FMR Records), wrote that “barbed dissonance and wrenching romanticism [are the] clear poles by which he operates…such absolute joy and strength…an incredible record” (Clifford Allen, Bagatellen).

He co-leads the transatlantic Convergence Quartet, featuring Dominic Lash, Hawkins, American Taylor Ho Bynum and Canadian Harris Eisenstadt; a band which has toured the United Kingdom twice (2006 and 2009). Their first album placed in two critics’ Top Ten Releases of 2007 lists. Stuart Broomer in Point of Departure wrote of “a fundamental reassertion of composition within improvised music,” and Jay Collins (Cadence) of “highly unpredictable and thought-provoking music to savor with endless room for future consideration.”

Hawkins also plays in the cooperative group Barkingside, whose eponymous debut album (Emanem) placed in the Top Ten lists in 2008. According to John Eyles in All About Jazz “the level of group empathy displayed here is scary.”

As a sideman, he has worked in Evan Parker’s trio and quartet. He also features in Ntshuks Bonga’s Qwati, alongside Claude Deppa, Gail Brand, Greg Bonnie, Oren Marshall, and Mark Sanders.
Other collaborations have included with Louis Moholo-Moholo, Lol Coxhill, John Butcher, Steve Williamson, Jason Yarde, Ray Warleigh, Alan Wilkinson, Tom Arthurs, Tony Marsh, Will Gaines, John Russell, Steve Waterman, Pete McPhail, Pat Thomas, Eddie Prevost, Francine Luce, and many others. He has worked in the London Improvisers’ Orchestra, the Oxford Improvisers Orchestra, and the Pendulum Big Band; and also plays organ in the funk band Big Train’s Haymaker.

He has played at venues including Symphony Hall, Birmingham; London’s Ronnie Scott’s, Vortex Jazz Club, 606, Koko, Spitz, 93 Feet East, Scala, and Cargo; West Road, Cambridge; the Jacqueline Du Pre Music Building, Oxford; St Sulpice, Paris; the Clothworkers’ Centenary Hall, Leeds; and many others. He has been broadcast in various places, including on BBC Radio 3 and BBC 6 Music. Festival appearances have included the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Cheltenham Jazz Festival, and Freedom of the City.

Forthcoming projects include a collaboration with North Americans Rob Brown, Mark Helias and Harris Eisenstadt; the recording of Ntshuks Bonga’s Qwati; the Somedectet large group; and an organ trio with Steve Noble and John Edwards (recording due for release later in the year on Bo’weavil Recordings).

Hawkins seems to get better every time I see him live; every solo he took tonight was a journey, or, if you prefer, a well-told short story. They would begin as jazz explorations, or even boogie-woogie-flavoured romps, before whipping themselves up to a frenzy of clanging clusters, rolling glissandi, and fast-paced, dissonant runs, like a dancer tripping over their feet as the speed of their performance spins out of control. This was both tremendously exciting and the consequence of a logical development—jazz taken to the edge and then pushed over, because there really was no where else to go—and it was always—somehow—contained within the framework of a two or three minute showcase.

(David Grundy, Streams of Expression)

Improviser, guitarist and constructor Han-earl Park works from/within/around traditions of fuzzily idiomatic, on occasion experimental, mostly open improvised musics, sometimes engineering theater, sometimes inventing ritual. He feels the gravitational pull of collaborative, multi-authored contexts, and has worked with animators, film makers, poets, theater and mime performers, dancers and installation artists. 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. Recent performances include ensemble Mathilde 253 (Park, Charles Hayward and Ian Smith) with Lol Coxhill, a concert with Paul Dunmall, with Kato Hideki and Katie O’Looney, and the performance of Pauline Oliveros’ ‘Droniphonia’ alongside the composer. 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).

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

note: I’m plugging the performance here because Franziska’s appearance at the Lab in November ’08, and Bruce’s in December ’08 and in May ’09 rode on the back of this project.

Big thanks to Juniper Hill who, with shape note singers Sam Backer, Claire Hogan, Sadhbh O’Flynn, Barry Twomey and Robert Wedgbury, contributed of the most adventurous of Labs. Thanks also to The Real-Time Company (for the Ad-Hoc Association) Of… Marian Murray, Claudia Schwab and Kevin Terry for revisiting (and reinventing) the Stet Lab double fiddle and guitar format. Kudos to all who performed, regulars (Andrea Bonino, Tony O’Connor and Han-earl Park) and newcomer (Gavin Prior), and to Veronica Tadman for work behind the scenes.

Thanks for listening!

note: Because of the poor audio quality of the recordings (there’s significant distortion on the recordings of the vocal ensemble), I am not releasing the full recording of the May 2010 performances. If I am able to ameliorate the recordings, the complete recording of the May 2010 performances may be available at a later date. In the meantime, if any of the performers involved would like copies of the recording, please get in touch.

As with all the recordings since December 2008, this month’s recordings are covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. [More info…]

I grabbed my very old, slightly damp-damaged guitar strap off the wall and headed out the door.

It may be as much as fifteen years since I performed standing up with the guitar (and the last time may have been for a game piece by Pedro Rebelo that required a degree of physical and theatrical mobility).

I expected the experience to be physically and psychologically… odd, but I wasn’t prepared for the oddness of keeping my boots on.

And, hey, I never realized how (socio-musically) useful it is to be able to move fro and back as you signal the move from foreground to background.

I figured if I couldn’t carry the 15–20 minutes I’d be playing in the relatively safe space of the Lab without the usual resources (of variable volume envelopes, of the familiar posture), I’d be in trouble playing with the old-timers at OTO. I needed to know….

So I’m up there with John Godfrey: I’ve heard him play over the years, of course, but this was our first on-stage meetings, and I wanted this to be different—to provoke a different kind of music.

And without my usual resources, the volume pedal in particular, I’d figured it would be relatively easy to contrast with John’s highly technically mediated sound (‘sound,’ again, in the afrological sense).

I wanted the performers (myself and John) to work. In a similar maneuver to the encounter with Evan Dorrian, I wanted to create a context in which we’d have to exert effort, to labor; to push him, and, hopefully, to be pushed and pulled in return.

From a curatorial standpoint, however, a problem with this approach is that, as the Lab progresses though the evening, and as many more people engage on-stage (which is a good thing), there’s often gradual downward slope in terms of densities, complexities and energy levels. The format in which the relatively experienced improvisers do their shtick early on during the evening was a created in response to comments from audience members that they desired to witness “how it should (or could) be done” before the relative rookies took to the stage.

But that energy dip….

As curator and club-runner, how might I solve this problem without wrecking the Stet Lab mission? Is it a problem?

Talking to Owen Sutton (drummer) and Tony O’Connor (bass player) after the five (count ’em) guitar ensemble that closed the Lab, I remarked that one of the complications (and one that I worried about prior to the guitar quintet’s performance ten minutes to venue close) stemmed from guitarists generally have bad braking times.

We’re not like our true rhythm section brethren (drummers, bass players, etc.) or our frontline counterparts (horn players, fiddler, vocalists). A braking latency is a trait we share with other idiomatically polyphonic instrumentalists (keyboard players, pianists). Many of us came from the bedroom and can too easily get lost in our little worlds; solipsistic and oblivious to anything but the neat stuff flowing from under our fingers. [Seriously, listen to the track and count how many times you think this happens.]

During the quintet Kevin Terry deploys a moment of near-verbatim quotation. It’s funny and it’s effective.

Sometime later (for me significantly later in the context of this ditty), Enda Buckley also throws one in.

I’m reminded of one student who would, with impeccable timing, while the rest of the ensemble were doing the Make-A-New-Music-Noise-Here routine, would throw in a beautiful open DΔ chord on his guitar at exactly the wrong (thus entirely right) time. It would send the self-fashioned New Music Ensemble reeling from the comfort of its plink-plonks, bloop-bleeps and scratch-crashes.

Fantastic!

This is what Cage never understood. For the Cagian doctrine, all sounds can be sounds as long as it had (ostensibly, and according to culturally and ideologically (and racially) specific criteria) was ‘free’ of history and context. What Cage (and his followers) were barricading themselves from was not convention, but power—the power to disrupt their cozy, easy liberalism.

But that’s a story for some other time….

The pleasure / utility / power of a quote is to throw a big fat spanner into the working of group improvisation.

The drawback / hazard / weakness of a quote can be summed up by the question: now what?

A single quote (as opposed to an explicitly and contiguously idiomatic performance, or a scatter-brained collage of channel-hopping) can have interesting and problematic consequences for interaction. The effectiveness of the quote—to be able to collapse and redirect and improvisation—is also what makes them hard to deal with. Now what? Given that this quote redefined and reconstructed the performance up to this point, now what? I wonder what consequences Kevin and, in particular, Enda were expecting?

John Godfrey and Han-earl Park (photo: © 2010 Julia Healy)

A very warm thanks to guest artist John Godfrey for some high-energy improvisations. Thanks also to everyone else who played: regulars (Tony O’Connor, Han-earl Park, Owen Sutton, Veronica Tadman and Kevin Terry), returning familiar faces (Andrea Bonino), and newcomers (Enda Buckley, Ilse De Ziah, Bertrand Galen and Athoulis Tsiopani). Major kudos to photographer Julia Healy [see the photographs (new window)…], and to all who helped in the backstage running of the Lab.

Finally a big thanks to all who came to listen!

As with all the recordings since December 2008, this month’s recordings are covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. [More info…]

1. Is ‘success’ (however that’s defined) a meaningful idea in approaching (as listener or performer) improvisation?

I’ve tried to address this issue from the other side before, so let me paraphrase that here:

What is the status of ‘success’ in improvisative performance? Is the notion of success relevant to improvised music? If relevant, is it important in the ongoing practice (evolution, mutation or adaptation) of improvisation?

And does that success or failure depend on a more-or-less autonomous criteria (whether or not you call that criteria ‘musical’)? Furthermore:

Not withstanding the desirability of both, is it better to fail as a piece of music, yet leap into the unknown, or is it better to craft a listenable piece of music, but remain in a safe space?

2a. If yes to question 1, what might success mean in an improvisative practice?

I’ve circled around this issue without necessarily addressing it.

It wasn’t going to be great every time. It can’t be. We aim for greatness (however you define that) perhaps (I know I do), but we often fail.

…[The right attitude for improvisation is one] that encompasses a personal (or shared) understanding that some outcomes are more desirable (however you gauge that) than others. Add to that a sense of how to improve (evolve, mutate and adapt)—a creative intelligence—that makes the next one likely better than the last, and you have the model improviser. Aren’t we, to borrow a term from Mark Dresser, involved in a personal pedagogy?

That logic seems a little circular to me—I’ve failed to define many of these elements—and I fear that I’ve sketched out a practice that is defined largely by reflexive criteria (“I did that because I felt like it”). Certainly that does not tally with my professed skepticism of wishful, transcendental musicality.

Aside: I find it interesting that Dominic Marcella points up the YouTubified duo with Bruce Coates as an example of unsuccessful music. Bruce and I would probably agree that it was not our best moment by a long shot (I’ve referred to this performance as our “first crash and burn”), but I wonder if Marcella’s invocation of a holistic ideal music helps or hinders ongoing practice?

I think there are broader social, cultural and ideological forces here that make this question answerable (or at least addressable), but I want to know what you think.

2b. If no to question 1, how does the next day’s performance build upon the previous day’s?

There appears to me, at least in theory, possible ways of approaching evolution (at least in the Darwinian or Braxtonian senses) without the explicit mandate of ‘success’.

Sometimes the less than satisfactory improvisations bring into relief approaches or contexts that you are not able (yet) to deal with… or a performer highlights your relative lack of inventiveness or skill…. Even if these are musically less than successful (whatever that means), all these are valuable and are worth participating in as a performer and as a listener. [Read the rest…]

I still haven’t really defined the criteria for this here. I have my own ideas (primarily to do with politics and the sociality of performance) which I may write about at a later date, but what do you think?

3. Do prepared means (plans, schemes, compositions) define the criteria by which an improvisation is successful?

I was curious about the game plan that Paul and Nick Williams has for their duos at the March Stet Lab. By their reckoning, it didn’t quite work… but is that relevant either as performer or as listener? Similarly, the game of tag that opened the March Lab; was the game important or was it peripheral? It certainly affects the dynamic of real-time music-making, but in what way (if at all) is it important to the gauging of success?

In other words, if you have a plan, is success dependent on how closely you follow it? Is the criteria for judging success based upon the shape, form or effect of the plan? or can it be something else?

How much baggage do we bring to (improvisative) play? I’d argue that, as improvisers, our activities and engagement with real-time play might be more… constructive if we step-off this line between Cagian denial of agency and authorial determination. As improvisers, I value your (and my) identity and history (maybe even our prejudices), but I hope that there’s a possibility of their mutation through playful engagement.

I’m asking: what do you think?

Nick Williams and Paul Stapleton (photo: © 2010 Julia Healy)

Thanks to Paul Stapleton and Nick Williams for an exciting and eclectic set, to everyone else that played (Juniper Hill, Ruti Lachs, Tony O’Connor, Han-earl Park, Veronica Tadman and Kevin Terry), and to photographer Julia Healy [see the photographs (new window)…].

Last but not least, special thanks to all who came to listen and witness musical mutations in motion!

As with all the recordings since December 2008, this month’s recordings are covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. [More info…]

Kevin Terry, Evan Dorrian and Marian Murray (photo: © 2010 Julia Healy)

A warm thanks to Evan Dorrian for playing and his generosity on stage, and to all who performed, Stet Lab (ir)regulars (Paul Dowling, Susan Geaney, Juniper Hill, Marian Murray, Han-earl Park, Owen Sutton, Veronica Tadman and Kevin Terry) and newcomers (Philip Guiton and Claudia Schwab). Kudos again to Kevin for refereeing on the night, Veronica for MCing, and to photographer Julia Healy [see the photographs (new window)…].

As always, special thanks to all who came to support this event!

As with all the recordings since December 2008, this month’s recordings are covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. [More info…]