Ezz-thetics a column by I’m not sure one can readily build an improvising supergroup by gathering musicians with long-term supergroup experience, a single overblown reputation included might ruin it all, but when Rodrigo Amado assembled The Bridge, with pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, drummer (and vocalist) Gerry Hemingway, and bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Amado demonstrated that it can’t hurt to try. He then drove home the point with The Bridge’s first recording, Beyond the Margins (Trost, 2023), by releasing a recording of the quartet’s very first (and brilliant) public performance. To flesh out the point, Alexander von Schippenbach led his eponymous trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens for roughly 50 years as well as the Globe Unity Orchestra. Gerry Hemingway established his credentials early on with the Anthony Braxton Quartet of the ‘80s and ‘90s, completed by Marilyn Crispell and Mark Dresser, while Ingebrigt Håker Flaten initially made his mark with Mats Gustafsson and Paul Nilsson-Love in The Thing, a hard-driving reenactment of ‘60s spiritual jazz renewed with elements of punk pop crossover. Amado’s own bona fides? He had already led a kind of supergroup, This Is Our Language, similarly built on a significant elder, Joe McPhee, a rock-solid bassist, Kent Kessler, and a mercurial drummer, Chris Corsano, with Amado’s own malleable and focussed intensity conjoined with an acute sense of structure. Before that, Amado had been practicing with the Lisboan trio of cellist Miguel Mira and drummer Gabriel Ferrandini, adding guests like Schlippenbach, Peter Evans, and Jeb Bishop. All emphasize one of Amado’s strongest qualities, a faith in spontaneity, buttressed by a devotion to craft. A survey of the contributing bands will suggest that each one has a mastery of a specific methodology: the free and fluid interplay of the Schlippenbach Trio; Hemingway’s contributions to the spontaneously determined compounding compositions of the Braxton Quartet; Håker Flaten’s anchoring of The Thing’s strange alliance of Albert Ayler methodologies with those of pop and soul music. The release of Further Beyond (Trost), recorded at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam in April 2023, extends and add an exclamation mark to anything that might be said of Beyond the Margins. The opening track, the 17-minute “A Change Is Gonna Come,” will reveal the group’s sense of structural play immediately, from the compound pulse of Håker Flaten and Hemingway to Schlippenbach’s development of ostinatos and a generalized and shifting harmonic movement, with Amado establishing certain flexible melodic motifs. Within a minute or two the quartet will have a set of mutating values that lend a genuine formal strength of curving fundamentals that are subject to extensive variation in their generation of motifs that function melodically or rhythmically. The mid-tempo collective complex that the quartet generates will gradually thin, Amado’s line growing spare, repeating anthematically, lowering volume, as Schlippenbach comes to the fore, bringing his own spiky figures. The group’s immense calm in rendering structure is evident here. Instead of Amado disappearing, he returns briefly to the fore before exiting, leaving ground to Schlippenbach. A sense of collective empathy continues to the conclusion, by which time the group’s interactivity becomes at once a matter of simultaneous and multiple pairings, each improvised line interacting with other parts in a strange double of a composed string quartet. “Further Beyond,” the 26-minute centerpiece, begins with Schlippenbach etching a delicately probing, Monk-redolent reverie. Amado soon enters, both in-step and forming a continuous melodic complement, moving from smooth, dark-hued runs to occasional pointed bleats and yips. Håker Flaten enters next, with a loose and rapid bass line, then Hemingway, lightly and loosely, creating a kind of four-dimensional reverie, gradually building tempo while Schlippenbach continues his dissonant probe. Force gathers, tempos accelerate, all somehow both gradually and suddenly, and the quartet is in a strangely clarified maelstrom, everyone independent, everyone somehow connected. Things gently unravel as Amado withdraws, the trio continues, Schlippenbach leading in his characteristic way, as formally etched as Monk, yet somehow free. He gradually moves to a kind of pointillist sparseness, the trio then accelerates through a tight-knit passage before moving to a balladic quartet with gradual and uncanny unions of Amado’s saxophone, Håker Flaten’s arco bass and Hemingway’s voice in a passage in which individual identities disappear into one another, Hemingway eventually chanting a rhythmic pattern before a final acceleration leads to a sustained high-speed passage in which Amado’s final assault is at times supported by continuous unison rhythmic insistence from Schippenbach, Håker Flaten, and Hemingway, it all concluding with an ultimately balladic repose. The concluding “That’s How Strong Our Love Is,” is a brief and perfect send-off in which simple and complex materials dovetail perfectly with one another, commenting on and reinforcing the structural integrity and complementary quality of individual parts. Further: The Quartet’s ultimate level of joy in concordance suggests comparisons beyond the world of free improvisation, though a certain cognizance of Schippenbach’s masterful recording of the entire Monk canon, Monk’s Casino (Intakt CD-100), provides a suggestion. I have a fair sampling of Thelonious Monk’s recordings, but the ones I return to most frequently (and as frequently as any other classic jazz recordings) are those recorded at the Five Spot in August 1958 – Misterioso and Thelonious in Action (Riverside) – an ideal moment in Monk’s career when he was ensconced for an eight-week period in congenial surroundings with a consistent and excellent band (Johnny Griffin, Ahmed Abdul Malik, Roy Haynes), Monk free for a time from the Scylla and Charybdis of the artist’s life – from far too little attention, remuneration and collective play to an excess of attention, celebrity, travelling and performing. Without that attendant drama, The Bridge achieves similar levels of joyous expression. A word on improvised music: There are both fashionable complaints about free improvisation as passé (usually from the never whens) and others, more legitimate, that it falls too readily into patterns. Improvised music at the evolved stage of Further Beyond is continuous work in attentiveness and construction of an astonishing quality, but one nonetheless achieved by a few current working ensembles, however different their individual and collective materials. In part, based on the sheer amount of listening involved, it’s also personally rewarding. The genius of collectively improvised music is that it’s its own listening experience, constructed instant to instant by the musicians’ listening, the compositional component that underlies the heard contribution. Here the titular referencing to great soul music, songs or performances by Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, emphasizes links to the profound social history and roots of jazz as an insistently social music. In this sense, free improvisation is a profound exercise in empathy, a significant value in itself, both in the listening of the musicians constructing it and in the listening of the audience (better audient, always, in this music, to some degree individually construed), however developed the skills in assemblage of sound. Great improvised music can exist without an independent audience; how lucky, however, for such an audience when such an audience exists.
© 2025 Stuart Broomer
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