Manfred Schoof, "Cadenza"
Manfred Schoof, trumpet
Gerd Dudek, tenor
Jacky Liebezeit, flute
Alexander von Schlippenbach, piano
Buschi Niebergall, bass
Sven Ake Johansson, drums
German "free jazz" of the 1960s – the subject of our documentary recordings - grew out of a complex and multi-faceted socio-economic background. It departed radically from the 15-year history of post-war German jazz, which had emerged in Berlin, Frankfurt, Baden-Baden and the West German radio stations. German jazz musicians of the post-war period lived in a sort of symbiotic relationship to American jazz, and tried to adapt as quickly and as thoroughly as possible to the changing styles of the American music. With the rebirth of German jazz in the 60s - or the end of the "plagiarist period", as Michael Naura once called it - German musicians did everything in their power to break with the American jazz scene which, in the recordings of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, had already parted company in its own way with the American jazz tradition. The "New Thing" - as this new American music was called - was no longer a matter of improvising on pre-set melodic and harmonic models whose chords and tunes were elaborated and recast according to the rules of the prevailing traditional practice of chorus structure. Jazz techniques now took their starting point from structures of a much more general character such as jazz gestures or constellations of sonorities. Sequential structures of any sort and even repetition were avoided, and the customary duration of jazz improvisations - never more than a few minutes – expanded enormously, and often excessively.
Furthermore, the role of the drummer was greatly enlarged in these recordings, even to the point of functioning as an equal partner. Of the four traditional pillars of jazz – the melodic and harmonic model, the fixed pulse, articulation, and phrasing - the first two had been fundamentally changed by the beginning of the 1960s, and articulation and phrasing had been expanded almost beyond belief.
This rebirth of American jazz took a more radical form in German jazz - as it did in European jazz as a whole. The process of radicalization was made possible by the extraordinary enthusiasm of young European jazz musicians for the attainments of contemporary art music. They avidly discussed aleatoric and serial techniques, Klangfarben compositions, or the works of the preceding generation as performed in Darmstadt, Donaueschingen and Cologne and subsidized by the radio stations. In his essay "Free Jazz", published in 1979, Alexander von Schlippenbach - one of the creative new figures in the German jazz scene along with Peter Brotzmann, Manfred Schoof and Gunter Hampel - gave the following account of the spheres of interest and spirit of discovery felt by these young musicians:
"Free jazz is not, as people often like to claim, a transitional style of the 60s. Rather, its beginnings at the outset of the decade mark a turning point of great significance in the history of jazz, comparable to the role played by the Vienna School at the turn of this century in the evolution of Western art music. This comparison is justified by the fact that the evolution resulted from similar processes within the - as the phrase goes - proclivities of the material', and not from a protest stance as people so often and hastily assumed
due to the contemporary student rebellion.
Even as early as bebop the increase in chromaticism had chang-e d the notion of harmony - not to mention the dimensions of time created by the new manner of phrasing. Bud Powell played lots of clusters, and Monk's bizarre two-, four- and eight-bar sequences reflect the shattering of formal design. An early warning of the liberation of jazz from functional harmony, key and metre can be found in Tristano's recording 'Intuition' in the cool jazz style which followed bop . . . Tristano's piano solo 'Descent into the Maelstrom' of 1953 has everything in embryo that later exploded with such force in the work of Cecil Taylor. When Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry appeared on the scene a short while later with their sensational quartet, the first stage was complete.
We listened time and time again, stoned to the gills, to the recordings of this quartet, most of all of their Atlantic series. By 'we' I mean, ,besides myself, the members of the Schoof Quintet at that time. But besides this there were also other influences of a complete by different sort which changed our thinking and stimulated our musical imagination: our enthusiasm for the poems of Georg Trakl, for example, and the poetic content of Paul Klee's paintings, whose titles we translated directly into music. We listened to Bart6k’s string quartets; 'Piierrot Lunaire' hit us hike a drug. The magic word was the term 'atonalitv' that Schoenberng so hated. A veritable pandemonium of sounds, forms and rhythms opened up and offered those who grasped it, and who had the good luck to find like-minded friends, an abundance of creative possibilities. For all its strident beginnings, there was a new gesture of dramatic truth in the music, a gesture which found perhaps its most radical expression in Brotzmann. It was from a connection between the Schoof Quintet and Briitzmann's trio at that time that the Globe Unity Orchestra came into being in 1960.
What were these "proclivities of the material" - to borrow Theodor Adorno's phrase from his "Philosophy of New Music" - which Schlippenbach mentions at the outset of his essay? One of them was the tendency to blur or dissolve melodic and harmonic contours; another was rhythmic articulation as found at the same time in Ligeti's and Penderecki's Klangfarben compositions such as "Apparitions" (1958-59) and "Atmospheres" (1961), or in "Anaklasis" (1959-60) and "Threnos" (1960). Indeed, there was a fundamentally new stance of "dramatic truth" in this music. It was given expression, in the musical material, by the natural use of clusters and tone-colours spectra by modes of articulation that went far beyond mere "dirty notes", by a tendency to seek extreme registers and to make unstinting use of dynamic extremes. Not only were the horns and piano, bass and guitar, involved in the creative process, but also to a great extent the drummer, whose kit expanded into a whole arsenal of percussion instruments. All too often, the lengthy improvisations, sometimes lasting as long as three-quarters of an hour, took on the character of a process of musical attrition and physical exhaustion. The vague or non-existent signposts arranged at the outset of .these jazz excursions - except in a few jazz compositions gave these collective performances to a hitherto unknown degree the character of personal self-expression, guided solely by close kinship of fellow musicians playing in a new spirit and by the unwritten rules which, like the restrictions of serialism, gave rise to a sort of meta-language of jazz in which the only thing that mattered was the individual "free" musical word. It was not until many, years later, in the early 7os, that free jazz, like contemporary art music, returned to "tonal" gestures and modes of expression. At first, however, the new European and German jazz developed
in a direction of orgiastic profligacy which has gone down in history as the so-called "Kaputtspiel" or "play-it-to-pieces” - phase of jazz.
The history of German free jazz is closely linked to a series of ensembles comprising the most radical and, in this sense, creative jazz musicians. The first of these, the Gunter Hampel Quintet, was founded in 1964 and issued an album entitled "Heartsplants" in 1965. In a lengthy essay on the development of European free jazz, "Europaische Jazz-
Avantgarde - Emanzipation wohin?", Ekkehard Jost characterized the early music of this group as follows:
"The musical horizons of Gunter Hampel's 1965 quintet were, at that time, largely determined by the techniques of modern jazz. Its members then included, besides Hampel himself, Manfred Schoof, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Buschi Niebergall and Pierre Courbois 'Heartplants', the only LP issued by the group in this setting, contains free jazz, in the sense of an interactive music of consistently free harmony and rhythm, only in one piece, Schlippenbach's 'Iron Perception'. The remaining pieces contain echoes from widely varying modern jazz styles, though here there is not so much a synthesis of styles as a juxtaposition of divergent techniques, including the periodic modal structures initiated by Coltrane and Davis in their Milestone years ('Heartplants' and 'Our Chant') as well as free, 'tonal linear counterpoint in the manner of George Russel ('No Arrows') and even reminiscences of the euphony of the Modern Jazz Quartet ('Without Me'). And although all these factors are sporadically permeated or overlapped by more or less extended eruptions in free jazz style, the music is still a long way from forming a style in its own right." ("For Example", liner notes to "Workshop Freie Musik 1969-78", Berlin, 1978).
At this time, substantially more self-contained music was to be heard from Manfred Schoof's sextet, to judge from their album "Manfred Schoof Sextett" of 1967. This group was founded in 1965, and contained, besides Schoof, Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano), Gerd Dudeck (saxophone), Buschi Niebergall (bass) and two drummers, Jacky Liebezeit and the Swedish musician Sven Ake Johansson. A similarly self-contained music was produced by Peter Brotzmann's trio, founded in 1963. Its work is illustrated on the 1967 album "Peter Brotzmann Trio", in which Brotzmann, Peter Kowald (bass) and Sven Alce Johansson (drums) took part. When the radio station RIAS in Berlin commissioned Alexander von Schlippenbach in 1966 to write a jazz composition for the Berlin Jazz Festival he was at first advised to write a piece for double string quartet and jazz soloists in collaboration with the Berlin composer Boris Blacher. Schlippenbach, however, preferred to write a piece for large jazz group, and combined two extant jazz ensembles whose work he knew well into a large jazz orchestra. In this way he created a jazz formation which has since become a symbol of European free jazz - the Globe Unity Orchestra. As Schlippenbach recalls:
"Of the groups that started playing free jazz sin Germany at that time the best, to my mind, were the Manfred Schoof Quintet and the new Peter Brotzmann Trio with Mani Neumeier and Peter Kowald. When I heard Brotzmann's trio for the first time in Cologne in autumn 1966 I imagined a combination of this group with Schoof's quintet as the basis of my projected composition. Six further horns were added, and we rehearsed for three days in Cologne before performing the piece, entiltled 'Globe Unity', at the Berlin Philharmonic during the Berlin Jazz Festival. It created quite a stir. Some of the audience were enthusiastic, others were shocked and repulsed. The critics wrote, among other things, 'Sensation with Hoops and Hollers' (Kunier), 'Grownup Pranks in the Philharmonie' (Der Abend) and 'Musical Black Mass with Peter Brijzzmann as Devil Incarnate' (Tagesspiel). There were also some ambitious critics who wrote about a 'fusion of jazz and art music' (Werner Burckhardh in: Die Welt), and Don Heckman of 'Down Beat' wrote about an initial solution to the problem of combining new jazz and contemporary compositional techniques, referring to the significantly European origins of the result." ("Das Globe Unity Orchester", unpubd.)
Admittedly, this inclination to bring jazz and art music closer together, or if possible to merge them, had been in evidence for nearly 60 years. But the results - whether in Debussy, Satie, Milhaud and Stravinsky, or in Blacher, Fortner, Hindemith and Liebermann - seemed no more than exotic hybrids, with the exception of Stravinsky's jazz portraits such as "Ragtime for 11 Instruments" (1918) and "Ebony Concerto" (1945). Yet Stravinsky himself referred to his works as jazz compositions, and was fully aware of the difference between composition and jazz performance.
Schlippenbach's "Globe Unity" went several steps further. During the working out and performance of this piece, new jazz and contemporary art music in fact did approach one another. Not only were comparable musical materials involved, but the modes of musical creation and reaction were likewise similar, especially in light of the advanced improvisation ensembles which arose in art music in the 60s.
In Italy, the "Nuova Consonanza" under Franco Evangelisti was one such group; another, in England, was Cardew's "Scratch Orchestra", or the group "Iskra 1903". In France and Germany the "New Phonic Art" - an improvisation ensemble associated with the composer and trombonist Vinko Globokar - created a sensation. Free jazz was no longer competing with composed art music alone, but also with the improvisation ensembles led by contemporary composers. It had sacrificed its privileged position as an improvised music. At this time the boundaries between jazz and avant-garde music were unusually fluid. It was necessary to listen very intently to note the fine points which set these ensembles apart - for example the undercurrent of broadly-arched swinging phrases that, then as now, distinguish all good free jazz ensembles despite the absence of a "time keeper".
Several avant-garde composers of the 60s reacted enthusiastically to the new jazz and its groups. In 1968 Bernd Alois Zimmermann - Schlippenbach had studied with him and, in "Globe Unity", had attempted to implement Zimmermann's aesthetic conception of the "time-sphere" - worked with the Manfred Schoof Quintet to produce his incidental music to the radio play "Die Befristeten" by Elias Canetti; he also recorded a set of "improvisations" on the jazz episode from Act 2, Scene 2 of his opera "Die Soldaten". In the same year a lively collaborazion arose between Hans- Joachim Hespos and Peter Brotzmann, who took the saxophone part in "dschen". And Krzyszzof Penderecki, who had heard the Globe Unity Orchestra in Donaueschingen in 1967, attempted to transmute his early enthusiasm for this ensemble and its music in "Actions" (1971), a jazz composition, which, however, because of its traditional jazz gestures, was given a lukewarm reception at its premiere in Donaueschingen. To document this uncommonly interesting initial phase of new German jazz on one side of gramophone disc is problematical for several reasons. In these years, improvisations grew out of spontaneous actions, and tended to form two fields of tension: one between the musicians, and another consisting of the imponderables of "sense of space" and audience reactions. At all events, we are dealing with long drawn - out musical processes, and to present them in excerpt on disc is to rob them of one of their special features: the musicians' enlarged, expansive sense of time, and the intensity generated by the extremes of relaxation or "backpedalling" and extraordinary physical exortion. "Sun" and "Globe Unity" by Schlippenbach - both undoubtedly key documents in jazz history - had to be omitted for "reasons of space" since the jazz numbers would have taken up two-thirds of one side of a disc.
It may puzzle some readers to note that our documentation of the 60s completely bypasses Wolfgang Dauner, Rolf and Joachim Kuhn and Gunter Hampell musicians who enlivened the jazz scene in their own way. The reasons are obvious. Instrumental virtuositv and the abilitv to handle with complete mastery the various stylistic approaches of jazz are not qualities deserving of preservation in a survey of contemporary German music. Instead, we have included examples of musical innovation, music which disturbs and, besides being novel, in a larger sense helps to form our contemporary sensibility. This is the goal we have set ourselves in selecting our jazz documents from the 60s. cadenza Manfred Schoof provided the following note to "cadenza":
'Cadenza' symbolizes the pre-eminence of playing. Our ability to play becomes a force which imparts form. We have time and a chance to play: this makes a piece possible."
In fact, "cadenza" (8'45") is a multi-section jazz process which not only gives the musicians a chance to play solo "cadenzas" but is also articulated formally by a recurrent complex of motives and a frequently-cited chord sequence. The piece opens with a tentative virtuoso trumpet solo by Schoof.
1'20" There now follows a "screaming" solo for tenor saxophone (Gerd Dudek). At first it seems to settle on the pitches Ab-g before descending into the low register and occasionally playing repeated riffs, all the while catapulting breathlessly from register to register.
3'35" Only now do the unison horns (Jacky Liebezeit on flute) play that complex of three three-note motives which will recur throughout the remainder of the improvisation.
4'30" The motivic complex is followed by a chord sequence for horns. a further quotation of the motives.
5'3:" Now there comes a longish solo for piano, accompanied or thwarted by the drums (Jacky Liebezeit and Sven Ake Johansson) and vividly accentuated by the bass (Buschi
Niebergall). This results in moments of congestion in the instrumental fabric, and equally suddenly in eruptions and breakthroughs. The piano settles into tremolos and "barbaric" pile-ups of chords. The whole passage is dominated by those "register-hopping" clusters which are the unmistakable hallmark of Alexander von Schlippenbach's piano playing and of free jazz.
7'45" Chords in the horns announce the end of the jazz process, which concludes in a unison rendition of the motivic complex. -- Wolfgang Burde (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)
Gerd Dudek, tenor
Jacky Liebezeit, flute
Alexander von Schlippenbach, piano
Buschi Niebergall, bass
Sven Ake Johansson, drums
German "free jazz" of the 1960s – the subject of our documentary recordings - grew out of a complex and multi-faceted socio-economic background. It departed radically from the 15-year history of post-war German jazz, which had emerged in Berlin, Frankfurt, Baden-Baden and the West German radio stations. German jazz musicians of the post-war period lived in a sort of symbiotic relationship to American jazz, and tried to adapt as quickly and as thoroughly as possible to the changing styles of the American music. With the rebirth of German jazz in the 60s - or the end of the "plagiarist period", as Michael Naura once called it - German musicians did everything in their power to break with the American jazz scene which, in the recordings of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, had already parted company in its own way with the American jazz tradition. The "New Thing" - as this new American music was called - was no longer a matter of improvising on pre-set melodic and harmonic models whose chords and tunes were elaborated and recast according to the rules of the prevailing traditional practice of chorus structure. Jazz techniques now took their starting point from structures of a much more general character such as jazz gestures or constellations of sonorities. Sequential structures of any sort and even repetition were avoided, and the customary duration of jazz improvisations - never more than a few minutes – expanded enormously, and often excessively.
Furthermore, the role of the drummer was greatly enlarged in these recordings, even to the point of functioning as an equal partner. Of the four traditional pillars of jazz – the melodic and harmonic model, the fixed pulse, articulation, and phrasing - the first two had been fundamentally changed by the beginning of the 1960s, and articulation and phrasing had been expanded almost beyond belief.
This rebirth of American jazz took a more radical form in German jazz - as it did in European jazz as a whole. The process of radicalization was made possible by the extraordinary enthusiasm of young European jazz musicians for the attainments of contemporary art music. They avidly discussed aleatoric and serial techniques, Klangfarben compositions, or the works of the preceding generation as performed in Darmstadt, Donaueschingen and Cologne and subsidized by the radio stations. In his essay "Free Jazz", published in 1979, Alexander von Schlippenbach - one of the creative new figures in the German jazz scene along with Peter Brotzmann, Manfred Schoof and Gunter Hampel - gave the following account of the spheres of interest and spirit of discovery felt by these young musicians:
"Free jazz is not, as people often like to claim, a transitional style of the 60s. Rather, its beginnings at the outset of the decade mark a turning point of great significance in the history of jazz, comparable to the role played by the Vienna School at the turn of this century in the evolution of Western art music. This comparison is justified by the fact that the evolution resulted from similar processes within the - as the phrase goes - proclivities of the material', and not from a protest stance as people so often and hastily assumed
due to the contemporary student rebellion.
Even as early as bebop the increase in chromaticism had chang-e d the notion of harmony - not to mention the dimensions of time created by the new manner of phrasing. Bud Powell played lots of clusters, and Monk's bizarre two-, four- and eight-bar sequences reflect the shattering of formal design. An early warning of the liberation of jazz from functional harmony, key and metre can be found in Tristano's recording 'Intuition' in the cool jazz style which followed bop . . . Tristano's piano solo 'Descent into the Maelstrom' of 1953 has everything in embryo that later exploded with such force in the work of Cecil Taylor. When Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry appeared on the scene a short while later with their sensational quartet, the first stage was complete.
We listened time and time again, stoned to the gills, to the recordings of this quartet, most of all of their Atlantic series. By 'we' I mean, ,besides myself, the members of the Schoof Quintet at that time. But besides this there were also other influences of a complete by different sort which changed our thinking and stimulated our musical imagination: our enthusiasm for the poems of Georg Trakl, for example, and the poetic content of Paul Klee's paintings, whose titles we translated directly into music. We listened to Bart6k’s string quartets; 'Piierrot Lunaire' hit us hike a drug. The magic word was the term 'atonalitv' that Schoenberng so hated. A veritable pandemonium of sounds, forms and rhythms opened up and offered those who grasped it, and who had the good luck to find like-minded friends, an abundance of creative possibilities. For all its strident beginnings, there was a new gesture of dramatic truth in the music, a gesture which found perhaps its most radical expression in Brotzmann. It was from a connection between the Schoof Quintet and Briitzmann's trio at that time that the Globe Unity Orchestra came into being in 1960.
What were these "proclivities of the material" - to borrow Theodor Adorno's phrase from his "Philosophy of New Music" - which Schlippenbach mentions at the outset of his essay? One of them was the tendency to blur or dissolve melodic and harmonic contours; another was rhythmic articulation as found at the same time in Ligeti's and Penderecki's Klangfarben compositions such as "Apparitions" (1958-59) and "Atmospheres" (1961), or in "Anaklasis" (1959-60) and "Threnos" (1960). Indeed, there was a fundamentally new stance of "dramatic truth" in this music. It was given expression, in the musical material, by the natural use of clusters and tone-colours spectra by modes of articulation that went far beyond mere "dirty notes", by a tendency to seek extreme registers and to make unstinting use of dynamic extremes. Not only were the horns and piano, bass and guitar, involved in the creative process, but also to a great extent the drummer, whose kit expanded into a whole arsenal of percussion instruments. All too often, the lengthy improvisations, sometimes lasting as long as three-quarters of an hour, took on the character of a process of musical attrition and physical exhaustion. The vague or non-existent signposts arranged at the outset of .these jazz excursions - except in a few jazz compositions gave these collective performances to a hitherto unknown degree the character of personal self-expression, guided solely by close kinship of fellow musicians playing in a new spirit and by the unwritten rules which, like the restrictions of serialism, gave rise to a sort of meta-language of jazz in which the only thing that mattered was the individual "free" musical word. It was not until many, years later, in the early 7os, that free jazz, like contemporary art music, returned to "tonal" gestures and modes of expression. At first, however, the new European and German jazz developed
in a direction of orgiastic profligacy which has gone down in history as the so-called "Kaputtspiel" or "play-it-to-pieces” - phase of jazz.
The history of German free jazz is closely linked to a series of ensembles comprising the most radical and, in this sense, creative jazz musicians. The first of these, the Gunter Hampel Quintet, was founded in 1964 and issued an album entitled "Heartsplants" in 1965. In a lengthy essay on the development of European free jazz, "Europaische Jazz-
Avantgarde - Emanzipation wohin?", Ekkehard Jost characterized the early music of this group as follows:
"The musical horizons of Gunter Hampel's 1965 quintet were, at that time, largely determined by the techniques of modern jazz. Its members then included, besides Hampel himself, Manfred Schoof, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Buschi Niebergall and Pierre Courbois 'Heartplants', the only LP issued by the group in this setting, contains free jazz, in the sense of an interactive music of consistently free harmony and rhythm, only in one piece, Schlippenbach's 'Iron Perception'. The remaining pieces contain echoes from widely varying modern jazz styles, though here there is not so much a synthesis of styles as a juxtaposition of divergent techniques, including the periodic modal structures initiated by Coltrane and Davis in their Milestone years ('Heartplants' and 'Our Chant') as well as free, 'tonal linear counterpoint in the manner of George Russel ('No Arrows') and even reminiscences of the euphony of the Modern Jazz Quartet ('Without Me'). And although all these factors are sporadically permeated or overlapped by more or less extended eruptions in free jazz style, the music is still a long way from forming a style in its own right." ("For Example", liner notes to "Workshop Freie Musik 1969-78", Berlin, 1978).
At this time, substantially more self-contained music was to be heard from Manfred Schoof's sextet, to judge from their album "Manfred Schoof Sextett" of 1967. This group was founded in 1965, and contained, besides Schoof, Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano), Gerd Dudeck (saxophone), Buschi Niebergall (bass) and two drummers, Jacky Liebezeit and the Swedish musician Sven Ake Johansson. A similarly self-contained music was produced by Peter Brotzmann's trio, founded in 1963. Its work is illustrated on the 1967 album "Peter Brotzmann Trio", in which Brotzmann, Peter Kowald (bass) and Sven Alce Johansson (drums) took part. When the radio station RIAS in Berlin commissioned Alexander von Schlippenbach in 1966 to write a jazz composition for the Berlin Jazz Festival he was at first advised to write a piece for double string quartet and jazz soloists in collaboration with the Berlin composer Boris Blacher. Schlippenbach, however, preferred to write a piece for large jazz group, and combined two extant jazz ensembles whose work he knew well into a large jazz orchestra. In this way he created a jazz formation which has since become a symbol of European free jazz - the Globe Unity Orchestra. As Schlippenbach recalls:
"Of the groups that started playing free jazz sin Germany at that time the best, to my mind, were the Manfred Schoof Quintet and the new Peter Brotzmann Trio with Mani Neumeier and Peter Kowald. When I heard Brotzmann's trio for the first time in Cologne in autumn 1966 I imagined a combination of this group with Schoof's quintet as the basis of my projected composition. Six further horns were added, and we rehearsed for three days in Cologne before performing the piece, entiltled 'Globe Unity', at the Berlin Philharmonic during the Berlin Jazz Festival. It created quite a stir. Some of the audience were enthusiastic, others were shocked and repulsed. The critics wrote, among other things, 'Sensation with Hoops and Hollers' (Kunier), 'Grownup Pranks in the Philharmonie' (Der Abend) and 'Musical Black Mass with Peter Brijzzmann as Devil Incarnate' (Tagesspiel). There were also some ambitious critics who wrote about a 'fusion of jazz and art music' (Werner Burckhardh in: Die Welt), and Don Heckman of 'Down Beat' wrote about an initial solution to the problem of combining new jazz and contemporary compositional techniques, referring to the significantly European origins of the result." ("Das Globe Unity Orchester", unpubd.)
Admittedly, this inclination to bring jazz and art music closer together, or if possible to merge them, had been in evidence for nearly 60 years. But the results - whether in Debussy, Satie, Milhaud and Stravinsky, or in Blacher, Fortner, Hindemith and Liebermann - seemed no more than exotic hybrids, with the exception of Stravinsky's jazz portraits such as "Ragtime for 11 Instruments" (1918) and "Ebony Concerto" (1945). Yet Stravinsky himself referred to his works as jazz compositions, and was fully aware of the difference between composition and jazz performance.
Schlippenbach's "Globe Unity" went several steps further. During the working out and performance of this piece, new jazz and contemporary art music in fact did approach one another. Not only were comparable musical materials involved, but the modes of musical creation and reaction were likewise similar, especially in light of the advanced improvisation ensembles which arose in art music in the 60s.
In Italy, the "Nuova Consonanza" under Franco Evangelisti was one such group; another, in England, was Cardew's "Scratch Orchestra", or the group "Iskra 1903". In France and Germany the "New Phonic Art" - an improvisation ensemble associated with the composer and trombonist Vinko Globokar - created a sensation. Free jazz was no longer competing with composed art music alone, but also with the improvisation ensembles led by contemporary composers. It had sacrificed its privileged position as an improvised music. At this time the boundaries between jazz and avant-garde music were unusually fluid. It was necessary to listen very intently to note the fine points which set these ensembles apart - for example the undercurrent of broadly-arched swinging phrases that, then as now, distinguish all good free jazz ensembles despite the absence of a "time keeper".
Several avant-garde composers of the 60s reacted enthusiastically to the new jazz and its groups. In 1968 Bernd Alois Zimmermann - Schlippenbach had studied with him and, in "Globe Unity", had attempted to implement Zimmermann's aesthetic conception of the "time-sphere" - worked with the Manfred Schoof Quintet to produce his incidental music to the radio play "Die Befristeten" by Elias Canetti; he also recorded a set of "improvisations" on the jazz episode from Act 2, Scene 2 of his opera "Die Soldaten". In the same year a lively collaborazion arose between Hans- Joachim Hespos and Peter Brotzmann, who took the saxophone part in "dschen". And Krzyszzof Penderecki, who had heard the Globe Unity Orchestra in Donaueschingen in 1967, attempted to transmute his early enthusiasm for this ensemble and its music in "Actions" (1971), a jazz composition, which, however, because of its traditional jazz gestures, was given a lukewarm reception at its premiere in Donaueschingen. To document this uncommonly interesting initial phase of new German jazz on one side of gramophone disc is problematical for several reasons. In these years, improvisations grew out of spontaneous actions, and tended to form two fields of tension: one between the musicians, and another consisting of the imponderables of "sense of space" and audience reactions. At all events, we are dealing with long drawn - out musical processes, and to present them in excerpt on disc is to rob them of one of their special features: the musicians' enlarged, expansive sense of time, and the intensity generated by the extremes of relaxation or "backpedalling" and extraordinary physical exortion. "Sun" and "Globe Unity" by Schlippenbach - both undoubtedly key documents in jazz history - had to be omitted for "reasons of space" since the jazz numbers would have taken up two-thirds of one side of a disc.
It may puzzle some readers to note that our documentation of the 60s completely bypasses Wolfgang Dauner, Rolf and Joachim Kuhn and Gunter Hampell musicians who enlivened the jazz scene in their own way. The reasons are obvious. Instrumental virtuositv and the abilitv to handle with complete mastery the various stylistic approaches of jazz are not qualities deserving of preservation in a survey of contemporary German music. Instead, we have included examples of musical innovation, music which disturbs and, besides being novel, in a larger sense helps to form our contemporary sensibility. This is the goal we have set ourselves in selecting our jazz documents from the 60s. cadenza Manfred Schoof provided the following note to "cadenza":
'Cadenza' symbolizes the pre-eminence of playing. Our ability to play becomes a force which imparts form. We have time and a chance to play: this makes a piece possible."
In fact, "cadenza" (8'45") is a multi-section jazz process which not only gives the musicians a chance to play solo "cadenzas" but is also articulated formally by a recurrent complex of motives and a frequently-cited chord sequence. The piece opens with a tentative virtuoso trumpet solo by Schoof.
1'20" There now follows a "screaming" solo for tenor saxophone (Gerd Dudek). At first it seems to settle on the pitches Ab-g before descending into the low register and occasionally playing repeated riffs, all the while catapulting breathlessly from register to register.
3'35" Only now do the unison horns (Jacky Liebezeit on flute) play that complex of three three-note motives which will recur throughout the remainder of the improvisation.
4'30" The motivic complex is followed by a chord sequence for horns. a further quotation of the motives.
5'3:" Now there comes a longish solo for piano, accompanied or thwarted by the drums (Jacky Liebezeit and Sven Ake Johansson) and vividly accentuated by the bass (Buschi
Niebergall). This results in moments of congestion in the instrumental fabric, and equally suddenly in eruptions and breakthroughs. The piano settles into tremolos and "barbaric" pile-ups of chords. The whole passage is dominated by those "register-hopping" clusters which are the unmistakable hallmark of Alexander von Schlippenbach's piano playing and of free jazz.
7'45" Chords in the horns announce the end of the jazz process, which concludes in a unison rendition of the motivic complex. -- Wolfgang Burde (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson)
Labels: Free Jazz, jodru, Manfred Schoof
posted by jodru at 21:13
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