Ezz-thetics

Ezz-thetics

a column by
Stuart Broomer

In 2009, John Butcher’s Weight of Wax imprint released John Butcher Group’s 2008 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival premiere of his composition for octet, somethingtobesaid (reviewed in Issue 25). 15 years later, he has issued Fluid Fixations, debuted at HCMF in 2021 by John Butcher +13. Like the previous work, this performance contains various materials, including pre-recorded solo work and electronics as well as notated elements. Two musicians from the earlier project appear here as well, bassist John Edwards and turntablist dieb13.

Great improvisers are also gifted composers, even if they don’t plan events or write them down. Though Butcher turns to relatively formal composition here, he is still doing what he has done very well with larger ensembles – creating a series of interactive sonic environments with eight movements containing eleven zones, lettered from A to K, each with a set of distinct directions.

The instructions for the composition are varied and detailed but do not require a conductor. There are directions for durations of segments and individual passages: though the piece was rehearsed using a clock, it was not used for the actual performance. Segments may begin with one sub-group then evolve into another with some overlapping personnel. The opening segment, “Slipstream,” for example has a continuous presence of percussion and drums, with individual pairs and a trio entering for very short, timed bursts. Decays are indicated, but there are only a couple of occasions where specific pitches appear, and then only for one or two notes. As the work develops, the scores incorporate photos from nature.

The rest of the group are also stellar improvisers, collaborators familiar with Butcher from work in other settings, making him the hub of the ensemble. In a note, Robin Smith of the Huddersfield Festival quotes one of Butcher’s remarks on his method: “If you pin things down too much you can kill them. I want to give instructions that run from the very precise to the almost intangible, in a way that allows the musicians to mould their playing into the piece ... Ultimately, I’m the common denominator: the people within the group haven’t all played with each other, and there are some who won’t even have met before.”

Butcher also benefits from long associations with most of the ensemble members, a remarkable collection of musicians based in England, France, Germany, or Norway, who cover a wide range of musical practices and styles, both inside and outside improvised music. He draws upon a broad range of textures: strings, percussion, winds, and electronics. The string players include cellist Hannah Marshall, violinist Angharad Davies, Aleksander Kolkowski on Stroh viola and musical saw, and bassists Pascal Niggenkemper and Edwards. Trumpeter Liz Albee and trombonist Matthias Müller constitute a brass section; Mark Sanders and Ståle Liavik Solberg play percussion and drums; dieb13 and Pat Thomas on synthesizer represent electronics; Sophie Agnel plays piano; Isabelle Duthois sings and plays clarinet.

In a recent note, available on both the Bandcamp page and the physical CD, Butcher discusses his methods and his intentions and provides a sense of what he hoped for:

Fluid Fixations places 14 highly individual players into a framework built from instructions that direct ever-shifting groupings, materials and relationships. Overall, the piece was informed by what I think of as psychological orchestration – imagining how specific people might respond to particular ideas, and to the sonic company they find themselves a part of.

In places the sound world incorporates saxophone recordings cut earlier to vinyl by dieb13. His improvising with them – for example, the mouth sounds in pt 2 (with Isabelle Duthois’ voice) and the feedback-saxophone in pt 6 (with Aleks Kolkowski’s musical saw) – tangibly changing the fixed into the flowing.

Some sections use photographic imagery, mostly drawn from nature, to suggest spaces where the musicians can step away from the score to create their own worlds. Specified solos, duos and small groupings were woven into the piece, but my aim for much of the time was to engage the entire ensemble in a multifaceted group music. One whose internal workings both reflect and refract these musicians’ unique energies.

That’s a subtle methodology, and also a legacy of jazz band-making for roughly a century, different personalities interacting in different ways in different situations. While it’s hardly necessary to insist on the music’s part in a jazz continuum, that “psychological composition” ties it strongly to traditions established by Basie and Ellington (and developed in various ways in large improvisatory groups from Globe Unity to groups in which Butcher participated, like the London Improvisers’ Orchestra and Chris Burn Ensemble). This is music developed for the identities in the band, and strong, creative identities they are, as well as being drawn from different milieus. The sound store even stretches to strange instrumental vocalizations, these sometimes formed electronically as in the bizarre duet of “ice needles” which might suggest a nursery of emerging electronic infants, gradually discovering an infinite malleability of pitch.

As to Butcher’s concerns about pinning things down too much, there’s never a sense of that happening when dictating duration and timbre leaves so much to inventive individuals who are at once dedicated to both the moment’s possibility and the work’s ultimate coherence. The temporal challenges of the score – for example, the five-second duos from the opening moments of “slipstream” – can arise as exuberant explosions, challenges to see how much one might pack in to surmount extreme restraint. A detailed score constructed with decisive moments of time-limited liberty can sound at times like a novel life form (“ice needle”), a world of mechanical birds and strange winds (“florid”), a funhouse (“slipstream”), at others a wondrously sustained and pensive mystery (“oyashio”) or a nocturnal garden haunted by electricity (“at risk of enchantment”).

It’s an arresting and thoughtful musical achievement.

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