Held in London’s Conway Hall, Freedom of the City is a new festival of improvised music now in its second year. Organized by Martin Davidson of Emanem Records and the drummer Eddie Prévost, with Evan Parker serving in an advisory role, the festival is intended as a showcase for London-based improvisers (and thus provides a counterpoint to the more internationally oriented LMC festival). This year, twenty-two acts were presented over four days in seven concerts.

Rather in the manner of the Victoriaville Festival, the festival began on Friday, May 3rd, with a low-key and sparsely attended half-day which fielded none of the real headliners. It opened with extreme-minimalist improv from cellist Mark Wastell and trumpeter Matt Davis. They worked throughout near the far edge of audibility; interaction was confined to a mannered “your move” style of dialogue, as if playing chess. “Procession 1,” a series of linked duets by six younger players, was worthy but mostly undercharacterized, though it received a shot in the arm from the delightfully loopy vibraphonist Oli Mayne, whose technique included the repeated lifting and dropping of his instrument.

Singer Maggie Nicols’ workshop group The Gathering performed “Nuts in May,” an improvisation incorporating three John Stevens pieces. Stevens’ musical philosophy found room for everyone from the experienced musician to the complete amateur, and this thirty-piece ensemble (including eight singers) featured every imaginable combination of instrument and technical proficiency. The proceedings also included some (very bad) poetry, live painting, a dancer, and a performance artist who dangled various things overhead – chunks of styrofoam, plastic forks, &c. A patchy performance, it teetered between irritating whimsy and inspired mayhem.

*

Saturday offered the festival’s most consistently impressive programme. Guitarist Roger Smith, an SME mainstay, has recorded little in his own right; his afternoon solo set served to launch his newest disc, the lovely Green Wood (Emanem 4073). Wedged between two chairs, he cradled his small lefthanded Spanish guitar against a large pillow, playing quiet, rippling patterns that every so often sideslipped into a simple melody.

Birdyak’s scabrous Dadaism was rather constrained by the concert-hall setting – one fan later told me you really need to catch them in a pub with a hostile audience – but they were nonetheless enjoyably out-to-lunch. Hugh Metcalfe alternated between a ghastly wreck of a guitar and an amplified gas mask; sound-poet Bob Cobbing (wielding in addition a kazoo and pots-and-pans percussion) and soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill worked each in his own way from Cobbing’s visual poetry, while Jennifer Pike writhed inside a translucent brown body-bag.

Matthew Hutchinson contributed lively, scribbly electronics to a duet with Chris Burn, usually encountered as a pianist but on this occasion giving a very convincing performance on trumpet, concentrating on growling multiphonics and on a range of mutes.

Louis Moholo’s quintet delivered a hardhitting set that rode his majestic cymbal-wash. Unlike some free players, Moholo likes a clear sense of form, and the performance was explicitly divided into a number of partitions and rounded off by a return to its opening gesture: the clicking of sticks against the voice of singer Francine Luce. All five players dug in hard, and the brief encore was an especially vivid tussle.

However funny Phil Minton can be he’s a very intense, sometimes disturbing performer. During his rapidfire duet with longstanding percussion partner Roger Turner, Minton’s mutterings-from-the-id repeatedly lunged towards complete mayhem only to withdraw hastily into the smallest of sighs, whistles, snorts and blurts. It was both entertaining and unsettling to witness.

Playing in duet with Veryan Weston, Trevor Watts gave an extraordinarily passionate performance, his keening saxophone filling the Hall. Weston, in other situations a delicate, even dapper pianist, played very hard, his brows furrowed. This was a performance very close to the idiom of jazz (more so than their excellent recent studio recording 6 Dialogues [Emanem 4069]); at points it recalled Jimmy Lyons with Cecil Taylor, or even, during a freely improvised ballad which Watts delivered with quivering vibrato, Albert Ayler.

The image of Sylvia Hallett with a bicycle wheel over her shoulder initially seemed comic, but once she set her bow to a spoke and, using electronic loops and delay, began to sensitively layer sound upon sound, it was apparent that something very special was taking place. She produced a haunting soundscape using the simplest materials – the wheel, her clear voice, a violin, a bowed saw. For the encore she played the Indian sarangi, setting its wild lyricism over looped percussion created from the sound of her tapping the microphone. Hallett’s work is most recently documented on White Fog (Emanem 4057), and well worth seeking out.

John Russell’s acoustic guitar playing is indelibly marked by Derek Bailey’s example, but he has his own sound, a gritty texture sometimes closer to thumb piano or washboard than guitar. His duet partner, Evan Parker, played impeccably but rather within himself, and the ear was drawn more insistently to Russell as the improvisation heated up, the guitarist virtually scrubbing the strings with his pick.

*

Sunday afternoon’s first two acts, Responge (four young electronics performers seated around a tableful of gear) and the duet of electronics/keyboard wizard Pat Thomas and violist Charlotte Hug, didn’t do much for me, but PIM, a trio matching the tabletop electronics of Adam Bohman with clarinetist Jacques Fochsia and trombonist Robert Jarvis, was more rewarding. The acoustic wind-instrument trio of Lol Coxhill, Ian Smith and Paul Rutherford was lyrical and airy: the horns wheeled about each other, approaching then receding from starburst climaxes. I liked the lightness and buoyancy, and while things unravelled towards the end (likely due to the distraction of a talkative child in the audience), I found this an enjoyable set.

Sunday evening was reserved for a marathon three-hour concert by the London Improvisers Orchestra. The LIO has a monthly slot at the Red Rose, though its personnel is rather indeterminate: for this gig, it was about 35 members strong. The unpredictability of personnel and lack of rehearsal time understandably meant that most of the compositions were sketchy and informal, designed to be quickly run down. I did find it frustrating to witness a band full of top-flight improvisers when often so little of their abilities was audible or drawn on, and couldn’t help contrasting this with (e.g.) the way that Barry Guy’s compositions for the LJCO imaginatively showcase the abilities and styles of each player. This may be to compare apples and oranges; yet my doubts were reinforced rather than quashed by the concert, which was intermittently excellent but often prolix and unachieved. A full-orchestra improvisation turned out well, and two small-group improvisations were especially fine: a six-saxophone choir (marvellous to hear Parker, Coxhill and John Butcher in the same ensemble!), and a drum trio of Mark Sanders, Louis Moholo and Tony Marsh. The compositions/conductions were often engaging, but I was disconcerted by the overreliance on theatre and gimmicks: Terry Day’s whooping vocal on his piece; several pieces requiring audience participation; even a piece in which the performers rang each other’s cellphones.

*

Monday opened with a duet between Prévost and cellist Anton Lukoszvieze; rather slow to get going, with the drummer concentrating almost exclusively on bowing his cymbals and gong, it gradually gained speed and energy, with the cellist proving an able partner. The following “Procession 2” was by contrast an embarrassing train wreck, courtesy a yelping sub-Yamatsuka Eye vocalist and a nearly naked rock drummer who treated this as just another jam situation. I was fascinated, however, by electronics duo Furt (Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer), who specialized in harsh collages of sped-up samples, a fine spray of sonic shrapnel which they delivered to their own mysterious internal rhythm, heads bobbing in tandem.

The evening opened with Beckett’s austere radio play Cascando; the speaking roles of the Opener and Voice were prerecorded, while pianist John Tilbury was the live third musical “voice.” Fittingly, the only illumination was the faint evening light. The Marianthi Papalexandri Project was not music but “performance art” at its most maddening. The first part involved loudly-miked rummaging around in tissue paper; the second involved a (miked-up) man quivering slightly inside a small boxing ring; I can’t even remember the third, as I was deep into a book by then.

Prévost prefaced his quartet gig, “I made a promise to myself lately that I was going to play more drums,” and he and John Edwards delivered a refreshing blast of energy music. The youthful front line of trumpeter Jamie Coleman and tenor saxophonist Nathaniel Catchpole played creditably but was ill-suited to this context: I could barely hear either of them from my front-row seat, with the trumpeter inexplicably choosing to work doggedly and inaudibly through his collection of mutes. What mattered was the rhythm section, who were in tremendous form.

*

I could have presented the foregoing account of the festival less systematically, avoiding chronological order, dwelling on the most successful performances and omitting the least satisfactory. But I wish to emphasize that while the festival turned up several excellent concerts, it peaked too early; of the Sunday and Monday performances, only Furt excited me as much as the best of Saturday. Monday’s gamble of heavily featuring younger, unseasoned musicians deriving from workshop situations, while a generous gesture, failed to pay off. I left the festival grateful for having had the opportunity to see many great improvisers from the first and second generations of British free improv, but also wondering about the ways younger players will develop or diverge from that generation’s impressive body of work. Some current avenues of inquiry were in evidence – ultra-minimalism; electronics – but these were not always the strongest features of the festival. Perhaps my questions will be answered by next year’s festival....

Nate Dorward

Coda, Sept/Oct 2002