‘Cesura’
Ernesto Rodrigues (viola)
Guilherme Rodrigues (cello & pocket trumpet)
Alfredo Costa Monteiro (accordion)
Margarida Garcia (electric double bass)
[creative sources, 2003, cs008cd]
This is an extremely strong and creative disc of improvised music. It is not new, in fact it was recorded almost exactly five years ago to the day, but I want to write about it because although it got several favourable reviews when it was released, I feel that it has since been largely overlooked and forgotten. This forgetting is partly due to the fact that all four musicians have been pretty prolific since then and between them have released dozens of newer discs. Cesura was released on Portuguese violist Ernesto Rodrigues’ own Creative Sources label, and that too is part of the problem. Ernesto and his cellist son Guilherme are both excellent musicians, but tend to get overlooked because virtually all their music is self-published on their own label.
Cesura was the eighth CD on Creative Sources which had started up two years earlier in 2001, but in the five years since then the label has developed a massive catalogue, running now to over 130 discs. 120 new discs in five years means one a fortnight, so even if you had the money to buy them all, it would be virtually impossible to keep up. And there are scores of other labels releasing improvised music – none perhaps quite so frequently as Creative Sources – but altogether it means that there is a huge glut of material out there. These days it is so easy and inexpensive to issue a disc that, compared to the early days of improvised music when LP’s came in drips, this corner of new music is now flooded with wave on wave of releases. And this at a time when CD sales are falling dramatically. It doesn’t make any economic sense. But then it never did, because CD’s and labels featuring improvised music are labours of love rather than economically balanced entities, and people are prepared to lose significant amounts of money in order to get their music published. Inevitably though, with so many improv discs around the quality is very variable, and sadly this means that some excellent music gets lost amidst the chaff and receives little or no attention. And some of those that are noticed are then quickly forgotten with the next flurry of releases. Such is, I think, the case with Cesura.
In the brief sleevenotes Rui Eduardo Paes tells us that the Portuguese word ‘cesura’ refers both to the act of cutting and to the scar caused by that act. He writes that “this music is cut with a flick knife over the surface of silence.” Ironically the album was produced at a time when there was something of a rift cutting through the world of improvised music, and much of the argument was around the notion of silence. Across the world groups of new and (generally) younger players had begun to produce a different music to that of the established generation of improvisers who had largely come out of the free jazz world of the 60’s and 70’s. For a while things became quite polarised; some people felt that they had to take sides and some relationships (musical and social) came to an acrimonious end. Putting it ridiculously crudely, the ‘old’ style which had valued instrumental virtuosity above all was dubbed European Free Improvisation (EFI), while the new lower-case style was ‘electro-acoustic improvisation’ (eai) in which silence (or at least an attention to small sounds) and the use of electronics were what set the pulses racing. So in England Evan Parker’s lightning quick polyphonic playing in his trio with Barry Guy and Paul Lytton was considered archetypal EFI, while the quiet explorations of the IST trio (Simon Fell, Rhodri Davies and Mark Wastell) were pure eai. And in Germany anything with old heroes Peter Brötzmann and Paul Lovens was EFI, while anything with Burkhard Beins or Axel Dörner was eai.
In reality of course a lot of musicians – including some of those mentioned above - moved (and still move) quite happily between these two polarised stereotypes, and a lot of music was (and is) produced which doesn’t fit neatly into either camp. But the fact remains that from about 1998 new styles of improvising were emerging and an album like Cesura is very much a product of those shifts in emphasis.
There are four tracks, the first three between 6 and 9 minutes long, and the last significantly longer at 21:31. But listening to the album it is very difficult to hear clear divisions (caesurae) between one piece and the next, especially because the silences between tracks are so brief. There are no dramatic climaxes or finales or resolutions of musical material; that is not what the new style was about. You could play the tracks in a random order and the disc would be just as strong. What the music does have is an extraordinary attention to detail, to producing and listening to small sounds and noises as they occur in the present. Yes, there are passages when the music speeds up or slows down, gets denser or rougher, or when the volume increases or falls back into silence. But none of this is the working through of a structural logic, or even of a felt structure (such as the much over-used arch form, by which an improvisation starts gently, becomes loud and increasingly frenetic, and then tails off in a shorter quiet coda). The music simply ‘is’ in the moment, and the musicians react to each other’s sounds in a commendably quick and open way.
Given the instrumentation it is not surprising that string and bowed textures predominate, but not a single ‘pure’ string tone is heard across the 43 minutes. This is a music of scraping, rustling and sawing, with a fair few bumps and knocks to boot. Margarida Garcia’s electric bass gives an extra twanging harshness to the mix, while Alfredo Costa Monteiro’s accordion rasps, wheezes and rattles in such a way that it’s impossible to imagine that this instrument was originally designed to accompany folk songs. Sometimes quiet sustained sounds dominate, but these quickly give way to a busy scurrying as the music ebbs, flows and eddies on and around and then back again towards near-silence. The focus is on getting inside, expanding and transforming the textures of the sounds rather than displaying any great instrumental virtuosity. And from this intense determined exploration a strange fragmented beauty emerges.
But much of the above paragraph would adequately describe dozens of other improvised CD’s from the past 10 years. So why pick out Cesura? Objectively I don’t think there is a good reason; there are doubtless several other similarly excellent improv albums from the same era that sit forgotten on my shelves while I keep coming back to this one. But for whatever reason Cesura has come to represent for me a small moment in the history of improvised music. It’s a snapshot of a time when something new was asserting itself with a freshness and excitement that I think can still be heard in the enthusiasm of the playing with these rough woody textures. Portugal was newly emerging as a centre for radical improvisation, and ‘eai’ was still a pre-school kid, playing and experimenting with eyes and ears wide open. And I also like the fact that it doesn’t quite fit the stereotypes of the EFI/eai split. There are no electronics at all on the album; it is emphatically and delightfully acoustic. Nor does it make a big issue of its silences; yes they are there, but the music moves on quickly and isn’t afraid to become noisily abrasive at times. This was exciting stuff; new possibilities were being explored and there were no perceived ideas, no habitual gestures and no fixed rules about how these explorations might be conducted.
Ernesto Rodrigues (viola)
Guilherme Rodrigues (cello & pocket trumpet)
Alfredo Costa Monteiro (accordion)
Margarida Garcia (electric double bass)
[creative sources, 2003, cs008cd]
This is an extremely strong and creative disc of improvised music. It is not new, in fact it was recorded almost exactly five years ago to the day, but I want to write about it because although it got several favourable reviews when it was released, I feel that it has since been largely overlooked and forgotten. This forgetting is partly due to the fact that all four musicians have been pretty prolific since then and between them have released dozens of newer discs. Cesura was released on Portuguese violist Ernesto Rodrigues’ own Creative Sources label, and that too is part of the problem. Ernesto and his cellist son Guilherme are both excellent musicians, but tend to get overlooked because virtually all their music is self-published on their own label.
Cesura was the eighth CD on Creative Sources which had started up two years earlier in 2001, but in the five years since then the label has developed a massive catalogue, running now to over 130 discs. 120 new discs in five years means one a fortnight, so even if you had the money to buy them all, it would be virtually impossible to keep up. And there are scores of other labels releasing improvised music – none perhaps quite so frequently as Creative Sources – but altogether it means that there is a huge glut of material out there. These days it is so easy and inexpensive to issue a disc that, compared to the early days of improvised music when LP’s came in drips, this corner of new music is now flooded with wave on wave of releases. And this at a time when CD sales are falling dramatically. It doesn’t make any economic sense. But then it never did, because CD’s and labels featuring improvised music are labours of love rather than economically balanced entities, and people are prepared to lose significant amounts of money in order to get their music published. Inevitably though, with so many improv discs around the quality is very variable, and sadly this means that some excellent music gets lost amidst the chaff and receives little or no attention. And some of those that are noticed are then quickly forgotten with the next flurry of releases. Such is, I think, the case with Cesura.
In the brief sleevenotes Rui Eduardo Paes tells us that the Portuguese word ‘cesura’ refers both to the act of cutting and to the scar caused by that act. He writes that “this music is cut with a flick knife over the surface of silence.” Ironically the album was produced at a time when there was something of a rift cutting through the world of improvised music, and much of the argument was around the notion of silence. Across the world groups of new and (generally) younger players had begun to produce a different music to that of the established generation of improvisers who had largely come out of the free jazz world of the 60’s and 70’s. For a while things became quite polarised; some people felt that they had to take sides and some relationships (musical and social) came to an acrimonious end. Putting it ridiculously crudely, the ‘old’ style which had valued instrumental virtuosity above all was dubbed European Free Improvisation (EFI), while the new lower-case style was ‘electro-acoustic improvisation’ (eai) in which silence (or at least an attention to small sounds) and the use of electronics were what set the pulses racing. So in England Evan Parker’s lightning quick polyphonic playing in his trio with Barry Guy and Paul Lytton was considered archetypal EFI, while the quiet explorations of the IST trio (Simon Fell, Rhodri Davies and Mark Wastell) were pure eai. And in Germany anything with old heroes Peter Brötzmann and Paul Lovens was EFI, while anything with Burkhard Beins or Axel Dörner was eai.
In reality of course a lot of musicians – including some of those mentioned above - moved (and still move) quite happily between these two polarised stereotypes, and a lot of music was (and is) produced which doesn’t fit neatly into either camp. But the fact remains that from about 1998 new styles of improvising were emerging and an album like Cesura is very much a product of those shifts in emphasis.
There are four tracks, the first three between 6 and 9 minutes long, and the last significantly longer at 21:31. But listening to the album it is very difficult to hear clear divisions (caesurae) between one piece and the next, especially because the silences between tracks are so brief. There are no dramatic climaxes or finales or resolutions of musical material; that is not what the new style was about. You could play the tracks in a random order and the disc would be just as strong. What the music does have is an extraordinary attention to detail, to producing and listening to small sounds and noises as they occur in the present. Yes, there are passages when the music speeds up or slows down, gets denser or rougher, or when the volume increases or falls back into silence. But none of this is the working through of a structural logic, or even of a felt structure (such as the much over-used arch form, by which an improvisation starts gently, becomes loud and increasingly frenetic, and then tails off in a shorter quiet coda). The music simply ‘is’ in the moment, and the musicians react to each other’s sounds in a commendably quick and open way.
Given the instrumentation it is not surprising that string and bowed textures predominate, but not a single ‘pure’ string tone is heard across the 43 minutes. This is a music of scraping, rustling and sawing, with a fair few bumps and knocks to boot. Margarida Garcia’s electric bass gives an extra twanging harshness to the mix, while Alfredo Costa Monteiro’s accordion rasps, wheezes and rattles in such a way that it’s impossible to imagine that this instrument was originally designed to accompany folk songs. Sometimes quiet sustained sounds dominate, but these quickly give way to a busy scurrying as the music ebbs, flows and eddies on and around and then back again towards near-silence. The focus is on getting inside, expanding and transforming the textures of the sounds rather than displaying any great instrumental virtuosity. And from this intense determined exploration a strange fragmented beauty emerges.
But much of the above paragraph would adequately describe dozens of other improvised CD’s from the past 10 years. So why pick out Cesura? Objectively I don’t think there is a good reason; there are doubtless several other similarly excellent improv albums from the same era that sit forgotten on my shelves while I keep coming back to this one. But for whatever reason Cesura has come to represent for me a small moment in the history of improvised music. It’s a snapshot of a time when something new was asserting itself with a freshness and excitement that I think can still be heard in the enthusiasm of the playing with these rough woody textures. Portugal was newly emerging as a centre for radical improvisation, and ‘eai’ was still a pre-school kid, playing and experimenting with eyes and ears wide open. And I also like the fact that it doesn’t quite fit the stereotypes of the EFI/eai split. There are no electronics at all on the album; it is emphatically and delightfully acoustic. Nor does it make a big issue of its silences; yes they are there, but the music moves on quickly and isn’t afraid to become noisily abrasive at times. This was exciting stuff; new possibilities were being explored and there were no perceived ideas, no habitual gestures and no fixed rules about how these explorations might be conducted.
2 comments:
Hello dear Lucy! Here Ernesto Rodrigues. Just today i found your insightful review. I'd love to send you more music. Please let me know your address, if you are interested. My email:
ern.rod@netcabo.pt
hope all is well.
Take care
ernesto
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