THE EUROPEAN
IMPROVISERS ENSEMBLE JEAN-MARC
MONTERA DAAN
VANDEWALLE. THE BAD BOYS COLLECTIVE.
NIMMERSATT
THE
EUROPEAN IMPROVISERS ENSEMBLE
This
ensemble,
originally put together in 2004 by Jean-Marc Montera -
guitarist and eminence gris behind the
Montevideo arts centre in Marseille - was formed to
interpret graphic scores, starting with the mammoth Treatise by Cornelius Cardew. Completed in 1967, Treatise takes the
form of a fat 193pp book of graphic notations. Cardew
himself, and most of those after him who have approached
this score, have usually concentrated on interpreting
just a few pages. Attempts to perform the whole thing
are rare, not least because, realistically, it would
take about a week. That’s certainly how long we grappled
with it over the course of our rehearsals, undertaken in
a very agreeable small Corsican town. We approached the
score from all sides, and threw every imaginable
interpretative strategy at it. And most of the time not
spent eating or sleeping was occupied with discussions
about the validity of the score as
a score, and how to reconcile Cardew’s earlier
(interpretative) and later (dismissive) writings about
it. By the end of all this, the ensemble was
good-naturedly divided between those who wished to take
a more intuitive, spontaneous approach and those who
thought strict annotation, a conductor and a set of
agreed rules would produce more plausible results. We
tried it all ways. And gradually, over the next run of
concerts came, like most of our predecessors, to the
established conclusion: so three of us - Daan
Vandewalle, Jean-Marc Montera and myself - chose several
pages, annotated them, suggested rules for
interpretation and then conducted them, using a
stopwatch. This did seem to work. Then we moved to other
graphic scores, and even commissioned a handful of young
French and German composers to produce new works for the
ensemble. My contribution was Life
on Earth – a game piece rather than a graphic
score, but fun to do because very unpredictable. The
band was the same for all the projects: Helene Breschand
(acoustic and processed harp), Jean-Marc
Montera (guitar, table, objects, processing), Daan
Wandewalle (piano), Hans Koch (bassclarinet,
soprano), Lelio Gianetto (contrabass), Thomas Lehn
(analogue synthesiser) and myself.
DAAN
VANDEWALLE. THE BAD BOYS COLLECTIVE. NIMMERSATT
Best
known as a concert pianist, specialising in contemporary
repertoire, Daan is also an accomplished improviser,
which is how I first met him – we were both part of Fred
Frith’s Graphic
Scores Ensemble. We met again in a quartet Fred
put together - with clarinettist Claudio Puntin - in
Koln, a project that prefigured Fred’s Tense
Serenity (the same line-up plus trumpeter Lesli
Dalaba). A couple of years down the road, after a trio
concert with Daan and Jacques Palinckx, Daan and I were
both seconded into an enlarged Palinckx
project with the regular group and DJ Donotask. This
lasted maybe a year. Then, in 2007, to mark
Stockhausen’s lamented passing, I organised a re-working
of his Stockhoven/Beethausen piece, which Daan and I
performed in London, with Robin Rimbaud on guitar. And
of course we were both in Jean-Marc Montera’s European
Improvisers Ensemble. We were soloists on a double
performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte
and - as a trio with Jean-Marc
Montera - performed Christan Wolff’s For
1, 2, 3 players. This trio with the addition of contemporary cellist
Arne Deforce
soon became the Bad
Boys Collective – a festival ensemble –
that first appeared at the Flanders
Festival, in Ghent - playing Cage classics, and
then as a more generalized ensemble trying to interpret
a range of non-standard notational scores, in new way.
We even took on Stockhausen’s Kurzwellen,
using one the master’s original giant tam-tams – and
discovered that the short wave environment has been
drastically depleted in the internet age. Today Daan and
I are still in The
Bad Boys Collective, and also the
Ligeti/free-noise ensemble Nimmersatt
- along with John Greaves and Jon Rose; though,
unaccountably, our jazz standards trio with 7
contrabassists is still waiting for a commission. What’s
wrong with everybody?
THE
BAD BOYS COLLECTIVE.
NIMMERSATT
ON
RECORD
THE
BAD BOYS COLLECTIVE. Out of their
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