This site (busterandfriends.com/stet) will remain as an archive of Lab activities between November 2007 and April 2011.

My thanks also to all the guest artists who have shared the stage with us, generously contributing to, and transforming, this practice. There’s too many names to mention, but I’d like to thank, in particular, two club-runners, Bruce Coates (who with Sarah O’Halloran and I kicked-off Stet Lab in November ’07) and Mike Hurley for their advice, cautionary tales and encouragement; to Murray Campbell, Franziska Schroeder and John Godfrey who took time out of their busy schedules, and stepped-up when others would/could not; and to Corey Mwamba, Ian Smith, Justin Yang and Alex Hawkins for encouraging words, and an unwavering belief in grass-roots music organizations. Special thanks to Paul Dunmall, Mark Sanders and Don Malone; heavy-hitters who believed in the Lab enough to participate with neophyte improvisers in what must be, by their standards, a low-key event.

Kudos to Jesse Ronneau for supporting improvised music, and the aims of the Lab in particular, during his time in Cork. I apologize for the many whose name I’ve not listed, but y’all have my warmest thanks, and my sincerest admiration for your contributions—we are a better space for it!

Of course, the biggest thanks go to everyone who participated as listener (and I am thinking in particular of the regulars who come every month!), and to those brave ones who jump-in the deep-end!

Signing-off as curator: Thanks, thanks, thanks and thanks to y’all!

BTW, some of my observations about running this space around the half-way point of my tenure as curator are at ‘Lab report 2007-2009: how to run an improvised music club’.

Stet Lab celebrates its third birthday with trumpeter Ian Smith

Monday, 15 November 2010

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

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

€10 (€5)

Stet Lab will be welcoming London-based, Irish virtuoso trumpeter Ian Smith in celebration of the third anniversary of Cork’s monthly improvised music club. The event takes place on Monday, 15 November 2010, upstairs at The Roundy, Castle Street, Cork, Ireland, at 9:00 pm (doors open at 8:45 pm).

Mainstay of the London improvised music scene, Ian Smith is best known as cofounder of the London Improvisers’ Orchestra, and The Gathering. He has performed with improvisers such as Evan Parker, John Stevens, Maggie Nicols, Steve Beresford, Eddie Prévost, Reeves Gabrels and Harris Eisenstadt. His second CD as a leader, Daybreak, featured Derek Bailey, Veryan Weston, Gail Brand and Oren Marshall, and his most recent release is with the spontaneous mashup ensemble Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Han-earl Park plus Lol Coxhill.

Smith’s playing has been described as a “revelation…. There is a clear jazz edge to his tone, which sounds almost radical these days when many trumpet players in the improv world seem inclined to turn their back on that vocabulary. But he can also dip down to breathy flutters and muted coloristic playing” (Michael Rosenstein, Signal to Noise). His style has been compared to Wadada Leo Smith and Joe McPhee: “gestures seem to derive from earlier forms of jazz, and there are moments of harmonic directness that you could put chord symbols under. But it has all been thoughtfully moulded into a highly convincing and distinctive language” (Philip Clark, JazzReview).

Joining Smith on stage for the Stet Lab event will be Cork-based guitarist, and fellow member of Mathilde 253, Han-earl Park.

Opening the event will be a trio of Stet Lab regulars, Andrea Bonino (guitar and electronics), Helena Reilly (voice) and Athoulis Tsiopani (keyboard).

For three years Stet Lab has both introduced new blood into Cork’s musical life as well as fostering local talent. Cork’s monthly improvised music event, Stet Lab is a space in which improvisers can meet, play and learn from one another. Since its launch in November 2007, it has successfully brought together improvising musicians with varied experiences and from far afield; hosted twenty-two events with twenty-seven guest artists, including eighteen international visitors.

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

Next month’s Stet Lab will take place on Monday, 6 December 2010, featuring the exciting Derby-based vibraphonist Corey Mwamba.

the performers

Ian Smith has been playing since he was fifteen. He has studied with Joe Csibi (principal trumpet in the Irish National Symphony Orchestra) and Bobby Shew (Buddy Rich, Horace Silver bands) as well as learning harmony from Trevor England (ex-Berklee). As a bass he was a Vocal Scholar of the College of Music and a Choral Scholar of Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin. There is a strong tradition of trumpet playing in Smith’s family, his grandfather Chick Smith played in many British dance bands from the 1930s onwards and his cousin Jimmie Deuchar was at the forefront of British bop as well as playing in the Clarke/Boland Big Band. During the mid-80s while in Trinity College, Dublin, he arranged music for and played on many recording sessions, including jingles for the Bank of Ireland, a TV documentary score and singles for local rock bands. He has also composed and performed for theatrical productions including a version of Joyce’s Nighttown scene from Ulysses at the Project theatre, Dublin.

He has guested on albums by highly established Irish songwriters like Luka Bloom and Mick Hanley. He joined post-punk band the Real Wild West in the late 80s and gigged frequently with them for three years, including playing the Eurorock Festival ’87 in Frankfurt, the Mean Fiddler in London and supporting Echo and the Bunnymen and the Pogues in Ireland. The Real Wild West single was produced by Pogues Shane MacGowan and Philip Chevron; the album was produced by John Langford of The Mekons. Ian Smith appeared at the Cork International Jazz Festival in 1988 and 1989, playing a set with saxophonist Richie Cole in ’89. He has been involved in duo and trio gigs with guitarist Louis Stewart. He moved over to London in 1990 and in May ’91 co-founded the group Forest which quickly became established on the London freeform scene. He was a sometime member of the Screech Owls, a rock band which featured former Virgin Prune Dik Evans, which performed at the Mean Fiddler.

Since 1992 he has been playing improvised music and has performed with Evan Parker, John Stevens, Maggie Nicols, Lol Coxhill, Steve Beresford and Eddie Prévost among others. His own trio, Trian, has played at the 1993 London Experimental Music Festival and the 1992 Soho Jazz Festival. He also participated in a reformation of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra in the ICA in 1994. He has collaborated with composer Roger Doyle, winner of the Bourges International Elecro-Acoustic Music Competition 1997, and he has been featured on two instrumental tracks by the hip hop band Marxman. He toured the UK with Butch Morris’ London Skyscraper conduction project in November 1997.

He helped to institute the London Improvisers Orchestra in 1998 with Steve Beresford and Evan Parker, which continues to play monthly in London and has recently performed at the BimHuis in Amsterdam. He also founded The Gathering with Maggie Nichols.

In 2000 he recorded his second CD as a leader, Daybreak, with Derek Bailey, Veryan Weston, Gail Brand and Oren Marshall. Into the twenty-first century, as well as regularly playing with London improvisers, he has also performed with Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar Arkestra, guitarists Han-earl Park, Reeves Gabrels, the Poet and Detriot legend John Sinclair, and New York-based drummer Harris Eisenstadt.

Smith’s style has the free-form panache of a Wadada Leo Smith or Joe McPhee, but his experience of other musics is never too far from the surface. Some of his gestures seem to derive from earlier forms of jazz, and there are moments of harmonic directness that you could put chord symbols under. But it has all been thoughtfully moulded into a highly convincing and distinctive language.

(Philip Clark, JazzReview)

Smith’s trumpet playing is a particular revelation. His brassy blats and smears play off of the hyperactive spatters of Eisenstadt’s drums. There is a clear jazz edge to his tone, which sounds almost radical these days when many trumpet players in the improv world seem inclined to turn their back on that vocabulary. But he can also dip down to breathy flutters and muted coloristic playing.

(Michael Rosenstein, Signal to Noise)

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 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 duo concert with Paul Dunmall, a trio with Kato Hideki and Katie O’Looney, an improvisative meeting with Thomas Buckner and Jesse Ronneau, 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.

During the 1990s Andrea Bonino performed regularly with Eugenio Sanna and Nanni Canale, who had been students of Donal Rafael Garrett during his years in Pisa, Italy. A friend of John Coltrane, Garret encouraged musicians to learn to be creative on many instruments instead of focusing on mastering one. Andrea followed this advice and still likes to keep an experimental attitude in his work, improvising on guitars and other stringed devices, electronics, objects and toys. Among others he has played with Mike Cooper, Roger Turner, Steve Noble, Roberto Bellatalla, and with the late Mississippi blues legend R. L. Burnside.

Stet Lab featuring Bruce Coates and Jonny Marks

Monday, May 11th 2009

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

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

€10 (€5)

This month’s Stet Lab, Cork’s improvised music event, will take place at 9:00 pm on Monday, May 11th 2009, upstairs at The Roundy, Castle Street, Cork, Ireland. The event will feature saxophonist Bruce Coates (UK) and vocalist Jonny Marks (UK/New Zealand via China), plus Cork-based improvisers, Han-earl Park (guitar), Owen Sutton (drums), Paul Dowling (bass), Vicky Langan (electronics) and James O’Gorman (guitar).

May’s Stet Lab will see a bold mix of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Returning will be Birmingham-based Bruce Coates, founder of FrImp and the Birmingham Improvisers’ Orchestra, and a saxophonist with a sound both daring and inviting. Having worked with musicians as diverse as Christian Wolff, Lol Coxhill, Tony Oxley, John Edwards, Chris Hobbs, and previous Stet Lab guests Paul Dunmall, Mark Sanders and Mike Hurley, Coates regularly negotiates the intersection between avant jazz, free improvisation and post-Cardew experimentalism. A Stet Lab veteran, he performed twice before at the Lab—in November 2007 and December 2008.

Making his Irish debut at this event will be Jonny Marks from New Zealand via Mongolia and the UK. Marks is an experimental vocalist and throat singer who has worked with Damo Suzuki, Thomas Lehn and Takashi Harada, and with bands such as The Verlaines and Thrashing Marlin. He has appeared at the Wellington International Jazz Festival and the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.

Joining Coates and Marks will be Cork-based improvisers, guitarist Han-earl Park, and the young, up-and-coming drummer Owen Sutton.

The evening will be opened by a trio comprising bassist Paul Dowling, Vicky Langan on electronics, and newcomer to the Stet Lab stage, guitarist James O’Gorman. This eclectic ensemble will showcase three radically divergent approaches to improvisation.

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

Stet Lab will return in June with more real-time, musical mutations and hybrids.

Below, for example, are John Hough’s photos (© 2009 John Hough) of the February 2009 Lab with Andrea Bonino, Paul Dowling, Paul Dunmall, Neil O’Loghlen, Katie O’Looney, Han-earl Park, Mark Sanders, Jamie Smith, Owen Sutton, Veronica Tadman and Kevin Terry:

The diary has now been updated with links to the corresponding photo slideshows. Currently, the events with photo galleries are January and February 2009, March, June and December 2008, and November 2007.

All images copyright their corresponding photographer (currently, these are John Downes for November 2007, John Hough for the others).

If you object to your image being used in this manner, please contact me.

I’m indebted to those who have told stories of, and given advice on, running no- or low-budget ventures elsewhere. My thanks to Mike Hurley (Fizzle, Brimingham), Lin Zhang (Grind Sight Open Eye, Edinburgh), Hugh Metcalfe (The Klinker, London), Paul Harrison (Classic Anxiety Dream (RIP), Edinburgh), Phil Morton (Frakture, Liverpool) and John Russell (Mopomoso, London) for their cautionary tales and hints & tips. In particular, I’d like to thank Bruce Coates (FrImp, Birmingham) and Stuart Revill (Safehouse, Brighton) who gave tangible, concrete pointers about the dos and don’ts of such a venture prior to, and just after, the very first Stet Lab in November 2007. I am also grateful to Alex Fiennes and Martin Parker (directors of the, by comparison, more ambitious and grander dialogues, Edinburgh) for their advice. Many things I’ll be saying here are derived or adapted from the suggestions and practices of these people and their organizations.

Thus the first piece of advice…

if it ain’t broke

I’ve said in the past that, regarding my guitar playing, I don’t have a single original bone in my body. The same would apply to how I try and run Stet Lab. Almost everything we’ve done comes from someone / somewhere else. Guest plus jam-session formats comes from Fizzle; a ‘safe’ testbed for new improvisers—Safehouse; prioritizing audio recordings—dialogues; etc.

Stuart Revill said that there’s a surface appearance of freewheeling looseness with Safehouse when, in fact, it is tightly controlled. Phil Morton said that there’s enough chaos in the music so the organizational aspects should be as structured as possible.

Keep the day-to-day operation of your club, and the stage management of the performance, as professional and efficiently executed as possible so that, on the night of the performance, the music can fly in all dimensions.

the mission

After the bruising January 2008 Lab, I drafted the mission statement to clear this up with everybody and anybody who might want to be involved in Stet Lab. (I even felt a need to articulate what Stet Lab was not.)

This statement was partly inspired by the guidance document that Safehouse used that Stuart Revill showed me. Although the Safehouse guidelines were created for a slightly different purpose from Stet Lab’s mission statement, it’s good to be clear about the long-term objectives of your club. Having a clear mission helps decisions about what’s important and what’s not. It also clears up with your collaborators, and especially with your short-term allies, what you need from them and what they can get from you.

…And, just as importantly, it will remind you why you’re doing what you are doing, helping you through the setbacks and low points (of which there will be plenty).

[Incidentally, the tug-and-pull I experienced during, and immediately after, the January 2008 Lab was partly as a result of two ventures, one by the Quiet Club and another by Tony Langlois, imploding. Stet Lab was originally going to be sandwiched in a week between those other monthly events, offering a newcomer / jam-session niche between the two more tightly programmed entities. It was an odd experience resisting the pull of two forces trying to invest Stet Lab with the dreams of those defunct projects.]

scene building

the improvisative: selling a verb

Most clubs or regular events are promoting, and riding on the recognition of, names (of performers, bands, songs, genres, styles, etc.). They are, in short, selling a product—an object (or near enough to one that performed music can ever become). Stet Lab has a problem in this landscape in that we are largely in the business of selling a process (and not one that you can necessarily take home with you). This can be a difficult thing to promote, and I’ve fallen back on largely meaningless and/or misleading terms such as ‘improvised music’ or ‘free jazz’. Stick in there, and I think that you can cultivate an audience who recognizes practice as the focal criteria.

[Of course I’d be lying if I said I did not have allegiances—in idiom, in tradition, and in practice—I do, but I want to stress the possibility of trans-cultural meetings and creative (mis)understandings. However, I will have to plead guilty to the charge of exercising a (*ahem*) contingent form of bias since, as a no-budget event, most of the visiting performers are my friends and/or colleagues.]

…But other factors keep getting in the way. I’ve been disappointed, for example, in the New Music™ vocabulary that dominates Stet Lab. It’s as if it—the post-War, European and Euro-American quirks, habits and reflexes—signifies some kind of musical neutral ground. I wonder, especially when first-timers hit the stage, what compels people to disengage their non-New Music™ idioms and traditions—their other identities—when confronted by an open improvisative context. (I’ve never discouraged someone from playing the blues, to sing a song, and I’ve often queried musicians afterwards about why they did not.)

I also feel we missed our opportunity in engaging the broader musical community (and with improvisers from a more overtly idiomatic position) in Cork after the juggernaut that was the January Lab. I’ve mourned this, and tried to rectify it on occasion, but I have no plans to address it… for the moment.

guest artists

Here’s my (partial, situated) characterization of Stet Lab’s home town. The local scene is too comfortable for my tastes. Everyone has their place, and, for me, what passes for improvisation has a smell of a celebration of transcendental vanilla identity and social statis. I want difference and dissent and newcomers and outsiders and visitors to permanently infect the performances at Stet Lab.

I also don’t want a space in which newcomers to improvised music (performers and audience) get intimidated (i.e. ‘know their place’); I want it to be welcoming (although, I worry that I too might be subscribing to a notion of middle-class, transcendental upward mobility).

One more piece of advice: don’t overload one event with guest artists (don’t do the January 2008 Lab). If you do that, you run out of steam real quick, and you can lose sight of the space for newcomers.

[We’re currently not in a great financial situation in regards to guest artists. Currently, we pay door money that can range from €10 to 120 for the guest artist. Ideally, I’d like to move to a situation in which we can guarantee a fee (even if small) for the performers, but this is not going to happen until we transform Stet Lab into a formal organization, and we gain some kind of external support.]

gender makeup of Stet Lab

Difficult issue to crack. Bruce Coates and I have had long discussions about the ‘macho’ aspect of much improvised music. I suspect that (as Phil Morton has pointed out), the ‘old boys’ network’ that underlies the small (if scattered) tribes of improviser-musicians is also partly to blame.

Stet Lab had been doing reasonably well until June 2008, but… sorry, no magic pill, but it doesn’t get solved without a lot of work. Acknowledge it and address it.

student population

Music students of a formal educational institution have, for better or worse, been the single largest minority in the Stet Lab-verse. They are curious, adventurous and, by-and-large, unafraid of failure. They are, in many respects, the perfect model of an improviser.

The College Student Syndrome, on the other hand, does sometimes hang-around the Lab like a albatross when dealing with bureaucrats and funding bodies. The presence of student performers can also, for reasons that I’ve never been able to understand, intimidate other (rookie) improvisers. (Can someone please explain this to me?)

However, I agree with Mike Hurley that it’s good to have students involved, and as UCC is AFAIK the biggest single employer in Cork, I find it weird that funding bodies would avoid us for that reason.

audience

inside and outside

Minority interest musical practices can be prone to cliques. Especially in a small town, the in crowd know each other, and this can be intimidating to newcomers.

Bruce advised me that you should try and recognize people, learn their names, greet them at each event if possible. There’s no magic pill, but you need to open this social space up without removing the possibility of connoisseurship (you want, perhaps, to create an environment in which newcomers can develop connoisseurship).

…And examine your prejudices: avoid the expectation that your audience come from certain classes, identities, genders, ethnicities, races, nationalities, colors, shapes or sizes. (No, I haven’t fully learned this one either, but, as per Franziska Schroeder’s excellent suggestion, I’ve recently distributed posters to Cork’s language schools….)

publicity

Having a regular space and a regular time and calendar spot helps, but you still need to find your audience. Here some potential routes: flyers, posters, press and online resources.

Flyers: This I learned from Bruce: Go to every ‘compatible’ event in town (left-field jazz concerts, experimental music festivals, talks by visiting improvisers, etc.) and flyer everyone who comes out the door.

Posters: I have no idea how well this works. I have only three concrete cases where the poster caught someone’s attention, and of those, only two came to a performance.

Press: This divides into press releases and listings. Again, I know of only one case in which someone came to a Lab because of a local listing (and we’ve never seen him since). Press visibility, however, may help any future funding application, and can persuade visiting (and local) artists that we are at least serious.

Online resources: This, to some extent, is circular. The more press releases and listing that you can get online, the higher your google ranking; the higher the google ranking the greater visibility you have… You may also consider some of the usual, legit SEO optimization tricks.

However, I don’t know if this brings new audience in, but it’s a good way of keeping in touch with your existing base. This is especially important for last minute notifications of changes such as when a venue shifts you around…

venues

Looking for, and finding, a suitable space for improvised music ain’t easy. Especially, if you want a jam session model, you want a space that is relatively informal, perhaps intimate (concert spaces can scare the newcomer to improvisation). I’ve also gravitated towards a small- or no-PA situation since it helps train those of us who have greater resources in terms of volume to be sensitive to the quieter voices, and it greatly reduces setup time (again, a significant issue in jam session contexts).

Here the Stet Lab check list:

• Reasonable acoustics for unamplified instruments.
• We’re allowed to charge at the door, and, in order to charge at the door, we need…
• …a separate room from the main bar/public area.
• Free of charge (or at least low rent) since we don’t make enough to pay the performers nearly enough.
• Access to a bar (helps to keep the vibe informal—session-like).

Audience tend to come to off-the-wall, out-of-the-ordinary events if they know when and where they are held. You greatly increase your chances of holding on to your audience if your event occurs at the same place at the same time (currently, in our case, the second Monday of the month at 9 pm), so keeping things running like clockwork helps.

Here’s another thing that I learned from Bruce: check the booking with the venues, then double check maybe a week prior to the event, and then check again a few days prior. In the brief period in which the Lab has been operating, we’ve had almost every conceivable venue problem: double bookings, mysterious disappearances of the booking, bookings on the wrong day, venues that suddenly decide to charge us rent, venues that lose their music license, and, most spectacularly, venues that get torn down. Having a contingency plan is handy (as we’ve resorted to the University concert hall), but you will lose a significant portion of your audience every time you resort to it.

get a team

I don’t do this alone, and I couldn’t (probably wouldn’t) do this alone. A very, very big thanks to all the Stet Lab (ir)regulars, past and present. In particular, Veronica Tadman and Kevin Terry presently, and Eoin Callery in the past, have served this enterprise well beyond the call of duty. I’m also grateful to Anne-Marie Curtin and Nicki Ffrench Davis for their help in the early days when Stet Lab was the odd-ball offshoot of the Cork Music Collective (RIP).

The events just would just not have happened, and the Lab have likely imploded in the first few month, without them.

however…

…beware of people who talk-the-talk, but don’t turn up; people who (a) say that they would be involved if only such-and-such (the person with the vision gets the job), (b) want to run before we can walk (suggest some whizz-bang, spectacularly time consuming addition to the monthly event), or (c) people who say something is easy, but will not commit to doing any work. I recommend that you see if people are willing turn up every month, help in a low-level, low-key way, before asking them to start their grand plan. Alternatively, ask them to execute their grand plan for, say, three months before going official or public with it (a test run to see if they have the long-term stamina to keep it up).

You need to make judgment calls, weighing the amount of time needed to execute a project vs. the benefits given the long-term aims of your club. (For example, video documentation would be nice, but no professional improvising musicians that I know can turn (even indirectly) video into income of any kind, and it is enormously time consuming to edit and process on our part.)

It’s often good to remind people that there’s nothing wrong with ‘just’ being an audience member or ‘just’ a performer. You really have to be committed to the enterprise, and get a big, big, big kick out of witnessing improvised music (sometimes bad, often indifferent, only on occasion spectacular, although always fascinating) every month for you to labor behind the scenes of an entity like Stet Lab. Getting something like the Lab running is mostly unglamorous drudgery, time consuming and frustrating, and that’s (understandably) not for most people.

is it worth it?

am I club-runner or performer?

John Russell told me that he set up Mopomoso partly to give himself a space to perform. It’s taken me almost a year to come to terms with this, but there’s similar motivations for continuing with Stet Lab.

Early on, I felt I needed some curatorial (and ideological) distance between my own take on improvisation, performance and music, and Stet Lab’s ongoing practice. To that end, I removed myself from performing as part of four Labs (January to April, 2008), but I’ve since decided that such curatorial ‘objectivity’ doesn’t much make sense, and I need remind myself that I define myself primarily as an improviser-performer, and only by necessity am I a club-runner.

congratulations, you’re a club-runner

Whether you would want to organize a regular improvised music event depends on what you’re looking to gain from it. Stet Lab, for me, is partly a long-term scene-building exercise; it is, at times, a place of research into the pedagogical, sociological and political dimensions of improvisative practice; an excuse to bring over practitioners whose work I am excited about; and a place to play.

Good luck, and let me know of your experiences and please share your stories.

It’s an issue that popped up before (I briefly touched on this last month, Bruce Coates talked about with the Risk Managers in November ’07, and Chick Lyall in February ’08), but it came to the fore after talking with members of OPKA the day after the Lab. It strikes me that, as good as OPKA’s performance was this month (and there was some fine playing), there’s perhaps a danger that this is as good as it’s going to get; that OPKA is getting a little too comfortable with the current mode of interaction and their roles within the OPKA micro-society.

avoiding chamber music

As both an improviser and a sometimes orchestral double-reedist, Murray contrasted the (useful? successful?) mode of operation in improvised music with what he called the “chamber music mentality”. In chamber music, every part is essential—there is no string quartet without a viola, you cannot have SATB without the alto. Additionally, in every section (and to some extent, between parts), ‘blending’ is the primary criteria for being a good ensemble player. And these parts, these musical roles (viola, alto, second oboe, etc.), are predefined; every player inherits this role and, to some extent, is subsumed into it.

Let’s call this the chamber music criteria…

• every part is essential
• ‘blending’ is the primary goal
• every role/part is externally defined

…and keep this in mind in the subsequent discussion.

meanwhile, in improvised music…

Murray told me that growing familiarity, in performing with Randy McKean in recent years for example, actually leads to a move away from the comfort zone. Murray told me that the duo with Randy really took off with the realization that, whatever Murray did, it would not ‘break’ Randy. Additionally, the acceptance that Murray was ‘dispensable’ (this isn’t exactly the right word, but Murray and I struggled to find the word that encapsulated this idea): if Murray stopped, the performance would go on just fine without him.

In other words, whatever Murray did, Randy would handle it.

I’ve been prone to sports metaphors in the past, but Murray came up with a new one: table tennis. A great game of table tennis is not one that you score points, but in which all your resources—your body, your mind, your training—tells you one thing, but circumstances outwit you. You reach for the ball, but it ball heads in a completely different direction. You loose a point, but you go wow, how did that happen?

On the other hand, a boring table tennis game, from both the players’ and the spectators’ points of view, is one in which the players know exactly what’s going to happen. Lob, lob, lob, lob…. Table tennis ain’t chamber music; we can’t all be reactive, we need to inject left-field choices into the mix.

Thus, going back to our chamber music criteria, Murray posits that not only are these, at best, peripheral issues in group improvisation, they can become liabilities.

So, let’s put together an alternative list:

• every one is ‘dispensable’/‘inessential’
• it’s important to add something unexpected/incongruous/different
• you have the possibility, and the responsibility to, (re)define you role

random observations and questions

Performing in a virus fueled haze…

As I was battling through a cold, my recollections of the whats, whens, hows and whys of this month’s Lab are a bit hazier than normal. (That, incidentally, is why I’ve concentrated on more general points in this report, though I plan to return to a more focused agenda next month….)

The duos with Murray (who was also suffering from a cold) were not, I think, up to our usual standards (we did, for example, much better in June). But I’d be less than honest if I said I wasn’t disappointed…. (And, yet again, I do that tired, lazy whump at the 1:31 mark on ‘the one that almost got away’—yuck, yuck, yuck.)

However, I’m curious how much did work considering my mind and body seemed to be unable to grasp anything other than the most rudimentary tactical decisions. How did it sound to everyone else?

Trusting your (former) students?

Back in July, I wrote that

…sometimes I seem to be the one holding the group back in performance. Listening back to, for example ‘evening echo’, it’s the guitarist holding the group back. Marian Murray, Neil O’Loghlen and Veronica Tadman do not need me to make concessions. They know how to swim, and I don’t need to provide the floatation device.

And that’s my problem during my duet with Tony: an unjustified lack of trust in Tony’s [Tony O’Connor’s] abilities. I think I’m still stuck thinking that I’m performing in a classroom context, and not in the big bad world.

The two ditties (the two ‘versions’ of ‘the one that almost got away’) with Murray, myself, Tony O’Connor and Veronica Tadman were, perhaps, the first time when I finally managed to let go of certain issues of trust.

Do you know your improviser-teachers’ moves?

Apropos of nothing to do with Stet Lab, but one thing I noticed during the recent performance by FURT was how much I could anticipate Richard Barrett’s gestures. Now, Richard was my teacher, and I also noticed something similar with another of my (former) teachers, Chick Lyall, when he performed last year. So my question: do you know your improviser-teachers’ moves? Can you anticipate, with unexpected, above average accuracy, their gestures? Do you share their timing—their rhythm?

I ask partly because I got the feeling that, during this month’s Lab, Tony and I were sometimes spookily locked together.

Also performing at the event will be an exciting new quartet, OPKA—Owen Sutton (drums), Paul Dowling (bass), and Kevin Terry and Andrea Bonino (guitars).

It’ll be an event of compelling noises and left-field interactions. Hope to see y’all there—we appreciate, and depend on, your continued support.

…In the meantime, as a taster, here’s a clip of Campbell with Han-earl Park:

The event will feature Birmingham based saxophonist Bruce Coates—navigator of the boundary between avant jazz and after-Cardew experimentalism. Coates will be performing with composer-performer-installation artist Sarah O’Halloran, improviser-guitarist Han-earl Park, and double bassist Neil O’Loghlen.

The Coates-O’Halloran-Park trio originally kicked-off the first Stet Lab in November 2007. Check out audio recordings of the very first Stet Lab (including the very first six minutes and three seconds) for a sample of what to expect (or not).

Hope to see you there, participating as audience, performer or helper, and thank you for your continued support: we’ll be closing Stet Lab ’08 with a very high note (perhaps from a sopranino saxophone).

updates:

12-05-08 change date of December Lab from 8th to 9th.

Stet Lab’s final event of 2008 featuring saxophonist Bruce Coates

Monday, December 8th Tuesday, December 9th 2008

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

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

€10 (€5)

Following the successful first birthday celebrations, Stet Lab, Cork’s monthly improvised music event, returns to The Roundy, Castle Street, on Monday, 8th Tuesday, 9th December. The final event of 2008, the lineup comes full circle and the Lab welcomes the return of Birmingham based saxophonist Bruce Coates who performed at the very first event in 2007.

Bruce Coates is a saxophone player with a solid foundation in avant jazz, free improvisation and experimental music. Coates is the founder of many projects in the city of Birmingham including the free jazz / free improv concert series FrImp, and the Birmingham Improvisers’ Orchestra. Furthermore, he has performed with many of best known names in improvised and experimental music including Paul Dunmall, Lol Coxhill, Christian Wolff, Mark Sanders, John Edwards and Mike Hurley (whom Stet Lab featured in July). The deft and accomplished technique of Coates is his own: creative, innovative yet approachable allowing any sax lover to identify with the sonic timbre.

Joining Coates will be a group of Cork-based improvisers including composer, performer and installation artist Sarah O’Halloran and improviser-guitarist Han-earl Park, plus the young, up-and-coming double bassist Neil O’Loghlen.

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

Stet Lab will return in January 2009 with more real-time, musical mutations and hybrids.

updates:

12-05-08 change date of December Lab from 8th to 9th.