04/11/2006

Over the last twelve years, the Guelph Jazz Festival has built up a considerable reputation in the international scene of improvised music. It is a reputation propelled by a charming story in which a committed small-town community plays the role of heroine. One might describe it as a melodrama that ends with an unexpected twist of irony, and it goes something like this: Not so long ago, jazz lost touch with its spiritual resources. Good-looking youngsters with dubious motives got a grip on the mass media by playing renovated '50s sounds. They won over the hearts of an ingenuous North American middle class audience but had to pay a scandalously high price for this seduction: While their CDs became available at the counters of Starbucks, the coffee-corporates refused to serve the spiritual and political sides of jazz. Eventually, commercialization and spiritual impoverishment got to the point of "retro-fascism," as Famoudou Don Moye of the Art Ensemble of Chicago put it.

Not everyone, the story continues, was willing to succumb to these pressures. Every September a group of dissenting musicians met with a conscientious community of local fans in Guelph. For five days of the year, everyone involved was committed to a larger purpose, and actually made a difference—not because of some political action committee, but because of the power of æsthetics. By playing free music that defies all categorization, and by doing so as a community, the oppressive system was torn open at its seams. Or so it seemed.

Admittedly, this is an almost satirical rendering of the story, and it is so for at least two reasons. First, because it is so painfully true: commercial strictures on jazz have indeed become so crushing that cynicism at times seems to be the only way out. But secondly, the story needs satirical distancing because it is also untrue. It misses a juicy detail which turns the melodramatic plot into an ironic comedy. To put it briefly, the impressive success of the Guelph festival has little to do with the æsthetic undermining of conventions. On the contrary, the festival attracts its listeners because they get to hear music that fulfills their generic expectations—expectations that involve a predilection for moments of musical surprise. This became thrillingly clear at the latest edition of the festival in September, 2005, when the organizers brought together leading musicians of Montreal's musique actuelle scene with veterans and younger players from Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), although they were not literally brought together on the same bandstand. The majority of the musicians proved how diverse this genre—call it free improvisation, avant-garde jazz, or whatever—has become over the years, how flexible its stylistic means are, yet how coherent it remains in the big picture. The old game of catch-me-if-you-can (identify my style) has long been superseded by the advancement of original visions.

Lori Freedman, a fairly new member of the musique actuelle scene, is a fine example. Her solo performance became a multivocal conversation with herself, full of lyrical witticism. Both on bass clarinet and B-flat clarinet she teamed the instrument and her voice to dazzling effects, sometimes singing along with her playing, but more often uttering high-up melodic fragments that alternated between notes sung and played. The siren intensity of her high register screams made the walls of the lobby at the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre literally sing back to her, a call for further replies she gladly accepted. Never did it become clearer during the festival how much music thrives on its spatial situation. Toronto bassist Rob Clutton chose the opposite strategy for his almost equally impressive solo concert. His performance reached its climax not from a proliferation of sounds coming back from the walls, but from an almost minimalist reduction. For several minutes, he confined himself to bowing single notes, divided by large intervals of time. This was a stimulating effect in at least two ways: not only did he lend each note a Thoreauvian life of its own; he also drove the tension of expectation to the max.

If Lori Freedman was the chief revelation among the wind instrumentalists from the Montreal circle, she found her Chicago counterpart in flutist Nicole Mitchell, who is currently vice-chair of the AACM. Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble was the one group most obviously steeped in mid-'60s hard bop—Andrew Hill's soulful, yet abstract, compositional style comes to mind—but Mitchell's flute techniques are simply unmatched. She displays a similar love for the classical flute tone as did Eric Dolphy, and she counts James Galway among her early influences. But the way she employs tonguing, singing, and whistling puts her at the head of the experimentalist camp. Mitchell also profited from the solid support of bassist Josh Abrams, who, together with drummer Chad Taylor, forms one of the most sought-after rhythm sections of the current Chicago scene. In fact, they are the backbone of alto saxophonist Matana Roberts' trio, Sticks and Stones, another young powerhouse AACM group performing this year at Guelph. In good AACM fashion, Matana Roberts entered the stage wearing African dress and mask, offering a set of rhythmically free improvisations in the Coltrane-Ali vein, while her deliberately out-of-focus sound betrayed the influence of Chicago hornman Von Freeman.

Not every act at the festival was that convincing. Montreal's Évidence Trio (Jean Derome, Pierre Cartier, and Pierre Tanguay), a band that aims at appropriating Thelonious Monk's compositions by embracing Monkish clichés, lacked the guts to really make a statement. Instead of using their pianoless line-up to look at Monk's idiosyncrasies from a sonically fresh perspective, they remained so close to their source that nostalgia for the original began to creep in. But why complain? Paul Motian already offered a quite definitive deconstructive take on Monk on his 1988 CD Monk in Motian. Much more compelling, yet somewhat out of balance, was pianist Satako Fujii's gig with trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, bassist Mark Dresser, and drummer Jim Black. Black may be the greatest drum virtuoso on today's free music scene, but his drum-rolling, cymbal-screeching all-at-once-ness bordered on the giddy and drew all the attention to himself. That Tamura limited himself to screaming high notes did not exactly improve matters.

Nevertheless, the Guelph festival presented a whole range of successful group concepts that intricately interwove improvisation and composition. Pierre Labbé's ensemble intersected its improvisations with short unison passages of sometimes humorous melodic figures, while trumpeter Gordon Allen's band Powerbuch explored a beautifully shimmering palette in compositions that took a long breath to build up musical drama. This paved the way for the most exhilarating band performance of the entire five days, by Cosmologic from San Diego. At times showing a deep fascination with Dave Holland's rhythmic structures and counterpoint improvisations, at times going far further outside, suspending harmony and rhythm entirely, Cosmologic covered a wide range, from intense grooves to raspy textures, all within a few measures. Having just released its third CD on the small California label Circumvention, Cosmologic, it seems safe to predict, has wider attention awaiting it in the future.

The official highlight of the festival did not so much look ahead but rather festively commemorated the AACM, especially the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Musically, however, the concert of the Art Ensemble was hardly the most exciting event. While Roscoe Mitchell played a solo of stunning density and beauty, the loss of trumpeter Lester Bowie has left a wound that's healing only slowly. Young Chicago trumpeter Corey Wilkes seems to have a solid grasp of the Art Ensemble's idiom; and like Bowie, he has a knack for ass-kicking soulfulness, which makes him a welcome addition to the group (how severely the lack of the trumpet has diminished the Art Ensemble in recent years is obvious from listening to their last two records), and yet Bowie, the great trickster figure, still proved irreplaceable, at least in the group's Guelph performance.

Bowie being irreplaceable would be impossible according to the little drama sketched out at the start of this review. If jazz were exciting only in its liberating function, we would have to condemn commemoration as retrograde conservatism. The idea of irreplaceability troubles, even subverts, subversion. That's why Lester Bowie's ghost has a comic story in store for us. The achievement of the Guelph Jazz Festival does not lie in the dismantling of oppressive categories and identities, but rather in the securing of a space in which musical identities can unfold. A quick look across the Atlantic, where this reviewer is based, illustrates the difference. At the state-sponsored annual Berlin JazzFest, the anxiety over categories has turned a jazz festival into a world music festival. Jazz, even avant-garde jazz, is considered just another oppressive category, one that is narrowly American at that. At Guelph, at least, no one makes you apologize for liking jazz.

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