Sound samples can be found here, here and here.
The title of this recording, documenting two performances by Christian Wolff and Eddie Prévost, is a bit of a paradox. Both Wolff and Prévost have spent their musical careers delving in to strategies for “uncertain outcomes” and in doing so, have created indelible musical identities. The shivered resonance of Prévost’s bowed tam tam and rasped textures which he layers into improvisations with measured resolve or Wolff’s spikey piano attack, injection of reedy melodica phrases and changeable progression are readily identifiable and central to their respective approaches to music making. Then there is the history that the two have together. Wolff played with AMM in the sixties when he was living in London and has continued to collaborate with them since. He has also recorded in improvisational settings increasingly over the last decade with musicians like Keith Rowe and Michael Pisaro. So, one may ask, how uncertain are the outcomes at hand?
Prévost grapples with a similar conundrum in his liner notes. Their duo concert at Dartmouth College in 2016 (captured on the second disc of this set) was billed as a “concert of experimental improvisation.” Prévost muses as to what, at this point, experimental even connotes. He settles in on thinking about experimentalism as a musical practice, paraphrasing Cardew’s essay “Toward an Ethic of Improvisation” which talks about a “collective searching working practice. Loosely speaking, each musician acts autonomously. Yet at the same time makes a conscious attempt to accommodate the other… No one thinks in these terms while playing. But the essential feeling, effect and outcome is evident.” He goes on to say that “undoubtedly, it is the risks arising from the aleatoric and the unexpected gains from serendipity that mark this engagement. All has the potential for aesthetic disturbance within the wider cultural forum.”
Wolff looks at things a bit differently, though his thoughts complement Prévost’s sentiments. He is clear about a divide between his compositional practice and working in an improvised setting which he talks about in an interview with Nate Wooley. Here he confides that he revels in working in improvised settings for “just the pleasure of doing it! Of playing with others in a completely open, unpredictable situation. I don’t relate it, at least consciously, to anything I do compositionally. It’s like experimental drawing, quick and in the moment.” But his sensibility as a composer certainly comes through in his improvisations. In an interview with James Saunders, he talks about “social interaction in music” which resonates with Cardew’s “collective searching working practice.” Wolff explains that “the conditions for getting my work out, making it social — to my mind the only way that music exists at all — drew me to these kinds of pragmatic solutions. That the ways to them were experimental (indeterminacy, etc.) has come to be a social and political, matter too. The techniques of coordination, interaction and interdependency, all players being equal (really, the normal thing in chamber music) and the sharing out of musical independence between composer and performers – that can have a metaphorical or exemplary force: social democracy.” He goes on to say that “Apart from giving individual players ranges of choice in what and how to play, my main interest has been the mutual effects players have on each other in the real time of performance.”
This notion of collective, social interaction is immediately evident in both live performances captured here. The first disc, recorded at Iklectik in London in September 2015, is comprised of two improvisations. Prévost’s shuddering bowed cymbals open things up, quickly joined by the insistent jangle of hammered, prepared piano. From there, the densities open as single, struck notes drop against shimmering skeins of percussive overtones. One hears the concurrent threads laid out by the two settle in, driven by adjacency and focused listening. Wolff draws on melodic kernels, quirky harmonics, timbral shadings of string reverberations and percussive attack, deftly manipulating the strings inside the piano. He also injects tinges of wheezy melodica, building waves of densities against Prévost’s scrapes and tremors. Prévost’s attacks his panoply of gongs, cymbals and metallic percussion progress with patent patience, skirting against the pianist’s more active lines. His masterful control is in constant play as he plies rubbed drum heads, resounding cymbal scrapes and clattering metallic sputters with a practiced ear toward attack and decay. The second, improvisation strikes out with more overt activity, building a spikier trajectory. Yet there is also a settled patience at play throughout.
The second disc, a single extended improvisation recorded at Dartmouth College in July 2016, mines similar strategies but the arc of the piece is far more expansive. No one would mistake this for an AMM recording; Wolff is a far more restless player than John Tilbury. For the first ten minutes Wolff’s bristly notes and Prévost’s poised oscillations provide perfect foils for each other, but slowly, a forcefulness emerges. More strident timbres and animated trajectories sidle up against pools of calm. The two navigate their way through this with a heady incisiveness, eschewing any notion of tension and release, instead listening for just the right moment to steer things off. Wolff’s use of melodica and harmonica also serves to subvert the flow of the improvisation with puckish insouciance. There are also sections of dark composure, with spare lyrical threads placed against rustling percussive shards. In the final section, Prévost introduces dry, crackly textures that play off of his sheets of scoured metallic overtones and Wolff’s stark struck notes and plucked string reverberations. The two build off of that to bring the improvisation to a gripping close. In the end, whether this is “experimental” or of “uncertain outcomes” is subsumed by the two absorbing sets captured.
— Michael Rosenstein, 'Dusted' November 15, 2017
