Dusted Magazine
John Butcher & Eddie Prévost — Unearthed (Matchless)
Within improvised music, there are certain recordings that initiate timelines. One of them is John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space, which established the drums and saxophone duo as a creative situation worth exploring and documenting. The album’s name articulated the format’s appeal — maximum freedom. It provided a creative space within which the participants, freed of harmonic boundaries, were limited only by their techniques and imaginations.
Drummer / percussionist Eddie Prévost (born 1942) and soprano / tenor saxophonist John Butcher (born 1954) are members of different generations. A founding member of AMM, Prévost is part of English free improvisation’s first wave. Butcher came on the scene in the 1980s and first played with Prévost in the 1990s. They’ve had differing relationships to the format under consideration. While AMM functioned for several years as a drums / sax duo in the 1970s, Butcher steered mostly clear of drummers, as well as anything else that might push him towards a jazz-oriented way of playing, as he established his singular vocabulary of carefully inflected, constantly non-obvious extensions of what one expects from a saxophone for or much of the 1980s and 1990s. However, they’ve developed an enduring partnership that spans several contexts, including the duo. Unearthed is their third such recording.
Unearthed is partly a creation of circumstance. The duo’s previous recordings were made in the greater London area, where Butcher lives and Prévost has often worked, and the latter employed a pared-down percussion set-up. But since it’s a bit harder for Prévost to get around these days, this recording took place in All Hallow’s Church in High Laver, Essex. The building was originally erected over 800 years ago, at which time repurposed Roman tiles and bricks were among the building materials. In addition to antiquity, it is distinguished by its active acoustic qualities. The bounce-back from old stone is not a problem for Butcher, who actively seeks to play in crypts, caverns, cisterns, and other lively acoustic situations, but an opportunity. He’s a master at incorporating the influences of echoes and absorbent surfaces into his improvisations. But while the space could easily turn an extroverted drummer’s playing into an undistinguished blare, a jazz drum-kit is the instrument that Prévost has chosen to play. One of his accomplishments on this set is his deft management of the density of his playing and the clarity with which he’s been recorded. His drumming doesn’t blare, it sings, and the recording conveys both his playing and what the space does to it quite clearly.
Interstellar Space unveiled potentialities, stripping away limits to permit absolute freedom. But the human condition dictates that even if one can glimpse artistic liberty, absolute freedom is beyond anyone’s grasp. After all, Coltrane died just five months he and Rashied Ali played the session. And barriers aren’t all bad; they give a body something to push against. Prévost inhabits with the boundaries of time in several ways. He not only plays the drums with all the awareness of space, presence, and meter-transcending shape that he’s brought to AMM and so many other musical encounters; he plays them like a jazz drummer, drawing upon the brush technique, cymbal accents, metric subdivisions and syncopated pulses that a young fellow who came up playing bebop and skiffle in the 1950s learned by heart. One might say that he’s surveying his own timeline as a drummer, from back to front. There’s a moment in “Digging,” the second of the album’s long tracks, where he finishes an unaccompanied passage with a flourish that Gene Krupa would recognize as a solo-ending signal. Butcher responds with a lightly feathered, circular breathing-elongated gargle. Earlier in the same piece, he inserts echoing pops into Prévost’s spare perambulations about the snare and tom, focusing the kit’s output. The act is simultaneously contrary and completing, a reminder that one of the limits that this format shatters is the limit of one musician’s imagination.
Bill Meyer — February, 2024