10 to the power 62 … and jazz

An as yet unremarked aspect of 10 to the power 62 is its provenance in my early experience of jazz. For all of my life I have been an avid record buyer – something that probably seems quaint today, but was for decades a serious and engrossing business for many people – and remember well many of my earliest purchases. It just so happened that my year of awakening awareness was the annus mirabilis 1967. I was fourteen, and was keen to expand my musical knowledge, often buying things in the uninformed hope that they were worthwhile. These things included the first Grateful Dead album, Quicksilver Messenger Service, a swathe of classical releases, including Thomas Jensen’s famous Nielsen First and Fifth Symphonies and the Knappertsbusch Bruckner Five …and John Coltrane’s Meditations. I was so stunned by this last that I went back a few days later and bought Kulu Se Mama …which turned out to be yet another whole new experience. Even today all these albums are represented on my shelves.

The Coltrane albums opened my ears to a whole new realm of sonic adventure. Up to that point the most radical music I had heard was Stockhausen’s Gruppen, which for all its potentiality was unarguably a very rigid piece. I was stunned to discover that music like this existed, without really sufficiently grasping quite what it was that appealed to be able to make use of it. In the years since, I have come to understand that what ‘blew my mind’ (this was, after all, the last gasp of the ‘60’s) about Free Jazz was the loose merging of many individual personalities into a greater whole without loss of distinctiveness. From then on I sought out Free Jazz and Free Jazz-adjacent music, from Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Archie Shepp to the John Stevens Spontaneous Music Ensemble, AMM, and Gruppo Nuova Consonanza – believe it or not, Ennio Morricone was a member of the Gruppo. The scope of this music stretched from the one-minute concisions of Roscoe Mitchell to the two hour+ landscape of Alan Silva’s Seasons. It encompassed worlds, that I found myself intoxicated by – in a very teenage way, of course.

I cannot overstate the contribution those Free Jazz albums made to my personal style. After Coltrane (and I continue to collect his music right up to the present) I dug into Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Joe Maneri, Henry Cow, Evan Parker, et al, all the way to the far-out-est realms of Dave Burrell’s chaotic, deafening, wonderfully outrageous, Echo album (and yes, speaking of that onslaught, I still have about half of the BYG catalogue, from Daevid Allen to the great Jacques Coursil). When my works started to be performed in London in the early ‘80s I don’t think a single soul picked up on this influence; it was too heterodox to be countenanced back then. Instead I was contrasted with my nouveau complexité colleagues like Finnissy and Ferneyhough and Dillon. If I had told people that my orchestration owed a debt to Robert Graettinger’s City of Glass I would have just drawn blank stares. Let alone that my flailing lines were in direct lineage of Don Cherry or Roscoe Mitchell (whose Noonah, which provided the impetus for my 1989 alto saxophone solo burns, was, I gather, also influential on my other colleague, Richard Barrett).

This music of extreme wildness and supple virtuosity has been in my DNA since those early record purchases, and I recently decided to homage the idiom in my work for Drew Gilchrist and Alex Raineri, in Platonia. This work, and its companion-piece the effort to return to the cities of the sane, are in some ways an honouring of my own roots; I can never fully grasp what Free Jazz meant to its original performers and audience, but I can honour it by admitting its deep influence on my soundworld. I have not attempted to reproduce except tangentially the sense of uninhibitedness that characterises much of that repertoire, but the way my music unfolds, its subcutaneous agitation and (occasional) overload, are derivative features.

Having been initiated into the jazz nexus in the late ‘60s’, I started to listen to the once-a-week jazz round-up late on Friday nights on Radio 3 – a typical ghettoisation of the time. One night, amidst all the venerable mainstream jazz, they broadcast a revelatory track: Mike Westbrook’s Autumn King, sung by the incomparable Norma Winstone. This would have been 1970, probably. I was so stunned by this music that I immediately ordered the LP, Love Songs, which – when it eventually found its way to my backwater hometown – turned out to be life-changing. It was clearly in descent of Robert Graettinger’s Stan Kenton collaborations (among many other things) but had a distinctly un-American flavour. And the playing! Some of the most legendary British jazz musicians worked with Mike Westbrook: Mike Osborne, Malcolm Griffiths, George Khan, Harry Miller, Gary Boyle, (along with a less obviously likely Chris Spedding), and Westbrook’s distinctive sound was perpetuated in generations of bands, such as the players for Norma Winstone’s own Edge of Time. No one with ears needs to be told just how ubiquitous this jazz sonority has become.

However, it was not the Love Songs that fed most directly into my own idiom, but Westbrook’s next outing, Metropolis (the complete recording of which seems to have vanished from Youtube). The combination of free playing and tight control in this piece was a direct influence on several of my works from the ‘80s, énoncé and the Third Symphony: Afterimages in particular. When I sat down to write 10 to the power 62 the instrumental line-up put me in mind of these early British jazz works, and Metropolis especially. It may not be apparent to anyone but myself, but when I listen to the wonderful Northwestern University recording of my score, on the Chicago Version tab, I hear a music descendant from those rich jazz sonorities, evocative of the late 60s/early 70s era of my musical education.

I have from time to time spoken with Paul Grabowsky about the possibility for writing something for his Australian Art Orchestra, a major force within Australian jazz. While it would be very tempting to work with such a large and talented ensemble, and although, given my lifelong engagement with Free Jazz, it ought to be a natural development of my style, I have declined to take up the challenge. Having been a member of the Scratch Orchestra in the early ‘70s, and done much improvising earlier in my life, I think I have sufficiently absorbed the nature of improvisation to be able to assert that my personal creativity is of an entirely different nature. The spontaneity of improvisation appeals to me immensely as a performer, but as a composer I want to have networks of linkage that connect up all the disparate elements of the music, and always provide a consistent, coherent, cogent, and essentially non-locally articulate artifact – what I have called elsewhere ‘webs of resemblance’. I have tried to avoid the risk of monotony, and emulate the drama of improvisation by using structures that are both fractal (that is, the operating material is the same at all levels, even if the outcomes differ) and …to use that old cliché, complex. I refer back to my frequently-quoted aim of ‘ceaselessly unforeseeable originality’, à la Roland Barthes, in tandem with retrospective inevitability; I just cannot see how these outcomes can be achieved without considerable planning – as Stravinsky put it “composition is selective improvisation”. Inevitability is the contrary of provisionality, which is surely the essence of the improvised.

For these reasons and others, love Free Jazz though I do, nothing extemporisatory is going to pop up in my music any time soon.