Kent Kessler

Jeb Bishop, Ken Vandermark and Kent Kessler

Sebi Tramontana

By Laurence Svirchev

April in Munich had the feel of being a breath away from Spring. The plants in German city’s English Garden were just beginning to show their buds, the Alps to the south had their snow-caps, and the bloated rapids of the River Isar that runs through the center of Munich were green with the silt of those mountains. The sky was a winter leftover, still lead-colored, but the sunlight that strained through it revealed homes and apartment buildings surfaced in muted browns, yellows, siennas. The city itself was not particularly noisy, and that aural quality kept the ears primed for music.

The home for the “Come Sunday Improviser’s Forum, the Einstein Kulturzentrum, was another story. A couple of flights downstairs, the Cultural Center is a series of brick-lined caverns, originally constructed in a pre-electric century to store ice cut in the mountains. The ice in turn was used to keep Munich’s famous beers cold during the summer months. In keeping with the construct of the venue, one of the halls was named “Jazzclub Unterfahrt”, a transliteration being ‘Subterranean Adventure.’

The adventure of this year’s “Come Sunday” was a meeting of eight Chicago-based improvisers and two Europeans who frequently play with them. Michael Zerang (percussion), Kent Kessler (bass), Jeb Bishop (trombone), Jim Baker (piano/electronics), Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello), Lou Mallozzi (electronics), Ken Vandermark (reeds), and Tim Mulvenna (percussion) came from mid-America and hooked up with trombonist Sebi Tramontana, and reeds player Matts Gustaffson.

The annual event was born out of the imagination of Sebi Tramontana. A resident of Munich but native to Sicily, Tramontana had two years previously approached the city’s Cultural Affairs Department for sponsorship of a concert consisting of himself, Paul Lovens, Matts Gustaffson, and Phil Wachtsmann. Christoph Höfig, representing Cultural Affairs, loves improvised music but he was faced with a dilemma. In an interview he explained, “How can I get funding to present the music of improvisers when such high art is not part of regular tours and is less popular than mainstream jazz?”

His answer -and Tramontana’s- was to annually pull together a group of musicians for a one-off meeting of improvisers and record the music. They named the event after the Ellington composition “Come Sunday” not only because the meeting is held on that day but in tribute to the artist who did so much to contemporize the ancient concept of improvisation. They also introduced a ‘Composer in Residence’ series leading off in 1999 with British musician Evan Parker. The 2000 composer was Italian Giancarlo Schiaffini.

The first concert of his year’s Come Sunday was an extraordinary solo bass recital by Kent Kessler. Kessler was handicapped because his own bass had developed a crack in the neck and needed a repair job. Not only was Kessler working with an unfamiliar instrument but he comes Mingus school of the deep-sounding bass. The loaner bass he was provided with was built for high-velocity articulation of the notes, which drives the frequency response higher rather than lower. As he changed the strings on the loaner before the recital, Kessler underestimated his emotions when he said, “Some things I like to do don’t speak on this instrument.”

He opened with the arco technique, spending five minutes of lightly tapping the bow on the strings, letting the instrument resonate. Then he moved to taking his time to sense the touch and sound of the instrument. He was finding the superficial sound, all right, his movements probing tentatively and lightly. He would strike the instrument, feel the sound, back away, and then interrogate another area of response. But at minute twenty, his muscularity demonstrated he had gained control, had conquered the action of the bass to make it speak a Kesslerian language. The sweat began to gather on his face and neck, the sinews of right forearm stood out formidably, and then he dramatically began plucking below the bridge of the instrument, producing an appealing ring.

By minute thirty Kessler was able to articulate the bass with a traditional sound, clearly sounding each note, letting these decay into a natural silence. The improvisation transited into a melodious dirge but instead of ending mournfully, Kessler accelerated into fast vertical runs and in a final demonstrative act, decelerated and stopped dead with a held and resonating note. It was a 35 minute performance, a tour de force.

The audience could not know –the business of the loaner bass had not been announced- that Kessler had been operating under extreme duress. The applause was long enough that he was forced to come back. He got onto the stage and said, “Thank you, but that was just about everything I know.” It wasn’t true, of course, and he gave a five minute arco solo encore to satisfy the audience’ ravenous hunger for, as the co-artistic director called it, “high art.”

Next up on the concert stage was John Corbett, a Chicago-based journalist intimately connected with that city’s improvising scene. Corbett described the contemporary lot of improvisers, stating that “The number of live music venues has grown hand-in-hand with its audience…on a given night, the DKV Trio (drummer Hamid Drake, bassist Kent Kessler, and reed player Ken Vandermark ) can pack the house of tenor legend Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge, and do so with virtually no publicity.”

Corbett traced the history of jazz in Chicago, from the days of King Oliver, Earl Hines, and Louis Armstrong, through the time of Sun Ra, and onto the work of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and into Hal Russels’s NRG Ensemble. At each transition in his narrative, Corbett invited some of the Chicago musicians to stage improvisory exhibitions; he then give some background and contribution of each musician to the Chicago scene, including those of European origin, such as Gustaffson and Tramontana.

Later there was the music of “Blhtz”, a band combining of electronics, cello, trombone, and percussion. Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm did most of the cueing to change the sectional flavors. He used different techniques to coax sound from his instrument, like using a stiff card to vibrate the cello strings. He used a block of styrofoam to rub against the strings, ending up with a cute pile of white chips at his feet.

But it was Jim Baker who provided the most intriguing music. Mr. Baker spent his time stooped behind the cover of a suitcase made of plywood, oriented such that he was hidden from the audience. He was bent to the point where one could only see his shoulders and the top of his head. The motion of his shoulders indicated he was moving his arms, but the sound that was swirling through the room did not seem to correspond with those movements.

But from a backstage position, one could see his electronic instrument, a board filled with wires, plugs, rheostats, and dials. With headphones covering his ears and wires ending in alligator clips hanging around his neck, he looked like the first-generation switchboard operator one sees in ancient black and white cinematography. Plugging and unplugging, dialling and making little sparks, he and the other musicians constructed a series of vignettes. The electronics had the quality of sound made under-water, submarine life that ended in a silent way because of the high viscosity of the medium. Occasionally, he would twist his body to the on-stage pianoforte and dazzle with intricate runs to compliment the electronics.

Come Sunday ended with three conceptual pieces played by the ensemble of musicians, each of which was designed by a different composer. The strangest composition was led by Matts Gustaffson. It was a construct about the challenges of making ensemble music when a musician’s ears are muffled and cannot fully use his practiced and acquired ability to call and respond.

With the ensemble waiting, Gustaffson circled a hand to cue the outfit, then held up a ‘one’ finger. Each musician in the ensemble then fitted A-class sound-dampening plugs into their heads. Again Gustaffson circled his hand in the air and they put on B-class ear muffs. The additive effect of these industrial noise-protection devices is about a 40 decibel reduction in sound. That reduction meat the musicians were effectively rendered mute to the sound made by other instruments unless they are played so loudly that are heard via the conduction of the bones in the head.

At this point the audience was laughing, but the musicians were dead serious, all-eyes, antennas straining to open-up their sensory perceptions. Gustaffson gave another signal, and this cue required every musician to play at such a volume that they can just barely hear themselves play. That means the following: no musician can hear another, the musicians playing an instrument with a mouthpiece can detect their own sounds, the drummer can feel some vibrations, as can the bassist, but the guys on electronics are essentially clueless since there is no physical feed-back into their bodies.

Of course the audience is all ears, since the decibel level of the music is very low. After we get the improvisers’ “silent treatment” for a while, Gustaffson sends another cue and off come the hearing protectors for most of the band. Then we get to hear some crash and bang crescendos, while poor Kessler, the only one required to keep his hearing protection on, plays an arco solo to end the piece.

Other delights were the Jeb Bishop Trio and the “Joe Harriott Projects”, a quartet playing the music of a nearly forgotten tenor saxophonist. One seeming weakness in the programming –for whatever the reason- was the demographics of Chicago improvised music were not adequately represented. That said, the concept of this year’s Come Sunday was solid: it gave the Munich audience (filled with not only with aficionados but also Munich’s non-improvising musicians) a chance to hear superior musicians from an active and important American scene. One can only hope that Come Sunday will come again.