Fred Van Hove: WIM FANFARE - Free Music (1975 -1988)

Parallel to the intrigue and innovation of the music, Jazz is a story of political and economic reorganization. In America, from the days of swing, bebop, and eventually free jazz, the story is repeatedly one of the musicians against the record companies, venues and financiers that seek to control both their wages and their artistic development. This art, beloved and respected globally, but it is also tainted by the legacies of disenfranchisement, ruthless commodification and socioeconomic neglect of even its greatest luminaries. Because of this shameful history (and unchanging present), it is essential for those devotees of the genre to pay close attention to attempts at freedom from the yoke of reckless commercialism, rare and often clandestine as they may be.

In Belgium, the WIM (Workshop for Improvising Musicians)'s Free Music Festival has fallen through the cracks of jazz history, but is no less spectacular for its obscurity. Founded in 1975 by Fred Van Hove, Cel Overberghe, André Goudbeek and Ivo Vander Borght, the Free Music Festival was held every year until 1988, drawing local free jazz practitioners and global audiences alike. The festival held no ties to labels, publishers or organizers outside of the actual performers. Bands spilled out onto the rustic streets of Antwerp, into city squares, public parks and other spaces across the metropolitan area. No concert houses, no restaurants, no bars, just flummoxed audiences going about their day, assaulted by Van Hove's abrasive accordion trills, Kris Vinck's bellowing trombone or Goudbeek's corrosive squawk on the alto. Van Hove and company invented a music which could not be alienated from the performers, the city, even the precise moment in which it was played; a music immune to the greedy vampirism of producers. Sadly, this also means present listeners have had a very limited set of recordings to whet their appetites, until now. Remastered from rare promotional tapes printed for a Belgian arts & culture magazine, WIM FANFARE offers an invaluable glimpse into the group's local revolution, complete with a performance by the original band in '75.

Every track smells like the street. The blaring, expressionistic accordion swooning between tinny mallets tastes like sopping cheese curds and oily fritters, Goudbeek's salacious toots resemble the earthy rasp of the vendor's slogans. It is difficult to mistake the incorrigible back- and-forth between Herman Paessens' soprano and a flurry of tenors and alto in "Gutcha" as anything other than a spontaneous petty brawl bursting from some nameless boulevard snafu.

The performances teeter on the line of the ridiculous and carnivalesque, and upon noticing the line, they eagerly trounce over it Marches, rags, jigs, polkas and more, all represented in equal fervor. An entire history of folk music in the 20th century is acted out, part grandiose procession, part madcap farce. The orbits of the sublime and the crass are rendered very close together, the two crashing and mixing like meteors surging toward the earth. Nothing is sacred, or perhaps everything is; the profound and profane twin cliffs staring down the same mad abyss.

WIM concerts are born from the streets and naturally take the many signs and signals urban life produces. They are far from the first to do so. But the musicians do not act as parrots, do no not deign to imitate these scenes, which frequently reduces them to mockery. It is not translation they are after, but the "thing" in itself. If the syncopated drum line resembles the controlled chopping of a Flemish butcher, or the cackle of Richard Cuvillier's trumpet reminds one of an old peasant's nasal guffaw, it is not out of interpretation, but integration.- The musicians play with the same humility of a solitary organ grinder or wandering busker. They play as if their concerts were natural parts of city life, because in Antwerp, they really were. Today, Van Hove's name is as inextricably linked to the city as Peter Paul Rubens, and why not? There is evidence of his (and by extension, WIM's) sound on every corner and cradled in every public square. The group's true revolution was just this: to liberate the performer from the tyranny of their overlords, and return them to the people and communities that formed their identity. There is no record this year that treasures so dearly the stink of life.