Press

Conventional instruments get fresh treatment at the hands of the Tim O’Dwyer Trio.

Saxophonist Tim O’Dwyer blows into his instrument without the mouthpiece, giving one of his compositions, Papyrus, a raspy texture. Meanwhile, on the double bass, Clayton Thomas has inserted rods between the strings and fixed clothes pegs to some of them to get unusual tones that complement O’Dwyer’s efforts.

Drummer Darren Moore runs a bow across a tiny cymbal and uses an assortment of hand-held percussion instruments as the foundation of the music. Listeners can expect all these and more in the Australian trio’s performance tonight as part of a double bill concert at The Chamber of the Arts House, together with Singaporean gamelan group, Gamelan Asmaradana. The inventive musicians will also launch their debut CD, Broken River, next Monday at The Arts House.

A refreshing disc worthy of repeated listening from the outset, Broken River offers a mix of jazz styles influenced by O’Dwyer’s own eclectic taste in music: punk-improvisation to contemporary opera and acid seem to find their little niches in the jazz groove.

Their music is structured to operate within “bookends”, where there is a beginning and an end, but allows players great freedom to roam and express in between, explains the wiry O’Dwyer.

“The music is tight, but organic,” adds O’Dwyer, who has been based in Singapore since 2004 as the head of jazz at the Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts.

Consequently, rehearsals have become a bit tricky, but are necessary given the complex nature of some of the pieces. “Sometimes, we can spend three months workings on a 30-second bit,” Thomas says.

“With so many things going on in the music, we get together to practise the bits we are going to play together,” adds Moore.

O’Dwyer, a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, has been working with the ensemble since early 2004, when he was still in Melbourne. This is the first time the trio is playing outside Australia.

The Elision ensemble’s 20th birthday offering was presented in Brisbane, Sydney and on ABC Classic FM in a concert of Australian works, each exhilarating, challenging and consistently realised in virtuosic performances from various permutations of the ensemble in partnership with musicians from Germany, USA, France and Finland.

Timothy O’Dwyer’s Gravity (2006) for solo improvising saxophone and oboe, trumpet, percussion and viola, gave us the remarkable playing of UK saxophonist John Butcher. Here is a player with a truly distinctive voice combining purity with power, forming utterly distinctive crystalline aural shapes and earthed guttural rumblings, sustaining and working them for long periods without recourse to the frantic gearshifts common to many inheritors of bebop and improvising traditions. O’Dwyer adroitly places Butcher’s improvisational language within his own compositional framework, allowing freedom for the soloist against scored and semi-improvisational responses from the ensemble. After a quiet percussive opening that aptly (for a work titled Gravity) entailed the clatter of dropped mallets, Butcher’s tenor sax fluttered its way breathily into high, sustained notes. The oboe warbled with a Middle-Eastern cadence, the percussionist’s wire brushes swiped the air, the viola slipped into a deep glide and a drum roll presaged the entry of full bodied sax play, a mellow gurgling morphing into staccato phrasing and, over the oboe’s ‘kissy kissy’ outburst, sailing into the stratosphere. In brief, the ensuing episodes yielded a wonderful totality of soloist and ensemble sounds. In the final movements, enhanced by trumpet, the sound world opened out even further, the saxophone evoking horns both French and fog, the cosmos vibrating to flights of percussion and Butcher’s ethereal playing. Gravity, as O’Dwyer’s program note reminds us, is not just about things that fall, but “the ‘tendency’ of 2 objects of mass to accelerate towards each other.” Gravity’s strength is not only in the anti-gravitational push of Butcher’s playing and the rich moments of freefall, but in the push and pull between soloist and ensemble—subject to the score and to the less predictable forces of players and conductor, all given the freedom to improvise. Gravity was an engrossingly vertiginous experience.

If you like it when one of the likely lads on SBS cult car show Top Gear has his face re-moulded by acceleration, you might well enjoy the momentum of this trio, led by the buzzing, ripe alto saxophone of Tim O’Dwyer.

In full cry, they perform some rapid rhythmic hopscotch. Then the foot goes right down.
Clayton Thomas’s pulsing bass sometimes roves, as the landscape does on fast bends, and Darren Moore’s drums throw up smashing punctuations. That’s track one.

There is another like it. Also some atmospheric electro-acoustic textural play on slower tracks and, despite the starkness, a kind of dry lyricism, some caustic humour and even a sort of objectified nostalgia to go with the grainy Super 8 stills on the sleeve. Most satisfying.

The final night was opened by Tim O’Dwyer’s trio, who played pieces from their excellent album Broken River. The title refers to a stream in the Castlemaine region of Victoria just below the 37th parallel and east of 37 degrees longtitude – or near Bendigo if you prefer – where O’Dwyer grew up. It’s not so far from Heathcote, where my brother-in-law Graham Austin died a few days ago. It can be very dry there. There was a dry and even stark quality to the music, which took off with terrific energy, O’Dwyer’s intensely driven alto saxophone leading the trio through some rapid, precise rhythmic scrambles and hurtling releases. The three jammed the power on with such severity that I wondered how the broad audience would take it straight out of the gate. You know the feeling: phwoof! This is great; I wonder if everyone else can feel it. The response showed that they surely could.

I think people are more likely to be happy when in motion than standing still. The way music can give the feeling of motion even when you are just sitting there is uncanny. In this case: an urgent pulse, and accents on and across that pulse, which could be fence posts flying past or the random chaos of rushing trees. Also the heavy forward pressure of O’Dwyer’s playing. It can give the feeling of terrific speed, of acceleration even when the tempo has not moved, and of the strange hiatus on a bend as the landscape roves about on another tack. O’Dwyer, bassist Clayton Thomas and drummer Darren Moore can really get that happening. And there was much more; textural play in which Thomas set off some beautiful high overtones on rods of metal pushed through the strings of his bass and Moore evoked for me at least the brittle intricacy of dry bush on his kit, while O’Dwyer made some cries and squarks and high thin squeels that seemed like harsh birdsong and stinging insects. All this sometimes leading into slow, powerfully deliberate stomp rhythms. And through it all a stringent lyricism and a kind of objectified nostalgia. A couple of pieces came, I think, from the direction of Anthony Braxton, Oliver Lake, Arthur Blythe.

Everything had a definite purpose and shape. The trio has a strong individual grip on its territory. They got a rousing ovation. It was wonderful to share this with, I am sure, many people who had never heard this kind of music in person.

“An absolute highlight of the festival came right near the end when the great local Tim O’Dwyer Trio joined forces with Dutch visitors, Eric Boeren (trumpet), Wilbert De Jood (bass) and Michael Vatcher (drums). Boeren has been to Wangaratta before. His shining cornet playing was if anything even more impressive this time, but the double trio was the thing, firing the imagination from so many angles when you thought the limits of this music might have been reached. O’Dwyer’s trio (their Broken River CD is strongly recommended) are Tim (alto and bass clarinet) Clayton Thomas (bass) and Darren Moore (drums).

Timothy O’Dwyer’s Gravity (2006) for solo improvising saxophone and oboe, trumpet, percussion and viola, gave us the remarkable playing of UK saxophonist John Butcher. Here is a player with a truly distinctive voice combining purity with power, forming utterly distinctive crystalline aural shapes and earthed guttural rumblings, sustaining and working them for long periods without recourse to the frantic gearshifts common to many inheritors of bebop and improvising traditions. O’Dwyer adroitly places Butcher’s improvisational language within his own compositional framework, allowing freedom for the soloist against scored and semi-improvisational responses from the ensemble.

After a quiet percussive opening that aptly (for a work titled Gravity) entailed the clatter of dropped mallets, Butcher’s tenor sax fluttered its way breathily into high, sustained notes. The oboe warbled with a Middle-Eastern cadence, the percussionist’s wire brushes swiped the air, the viola slipped into a deep glide and a drum roll presaged the entry of full bodied sax play, a mellow gurgling morphing into staccato phrasing and, over the oboe’s ‘kissy kissy’ outburst, sailing into the stratosphere. In brief, the ensuing episodes yielded a wonderful totality of soloist and ensemble sounds. In the final movements, enhanced by trumpet, the sound world opened out even further, the saxophone evoking horns both French and fog, the cosmos vibrating to flights of percussion and Butcher’s ethereal playing. Gravity, as O’Dwyer’s program note reminds us, is not just about things that fall, but “the ‘tendency’ of 2 objects of mass to accelerate towards each other.” Gravity’s strength is not only in the anti-gravitational push of Butcher’s playing and the rich moments of freefall, but in the push and pull between soloist and ensemble—subject to the score and to the less predictable forces of players and conductor, all given the freedom to improvise. Gravity was an engrossingly vertiginous experience.

In recent years, Singapore has emerged as a major South East Asian stop on the international gig circuit. Just one week prior to the CHOPPA Festival, the city state was host to separate gigs by indie-electro torchbearers Yeah Yeah Yeahs, avant folk blues chanteuse Cat Power and nu-punks Green day – not to mention DJ sets by Diplo and 2 Many DJs. While large commercial events companies can balance the cost of flying in and staging such acts, more grassroots ventures like the monthly CHOPPA series usually rely on more oblique strategies; besides providing a much needed platform for local artists to showcase their developing work, CHOPPA, as Singapore’s only regular Improv and experimental music event, acts as a magnet for international artists passing through the region from larger music hubs in Australia and Japan.

So as organiser Darren Moore revealed to me at the close of the festival, just after a searing set by a relatively new local dynamo-Prog outfit, Underneath the Velvet Sky, this year’s three day festival was less the result of conscious planning and more the effect of things somehow falling into place, as travelling schedules fortuitously coincided, bringing artists based in Malaysia, Australia and Japan into the island republic within the same time period.

This contingent way of working certainly jived with the improvised nature of most of the festival’s musical content. One downside was the inconvenient weekday programming to accommodate flying schedules. The festival began with a sparse crowd on a Tuesday night, as Pimmon (aka Paul Gough) was due to return to Australia the next day. To his credit, Gough rose to the occasion and, over half an hour, immersed us all in washes of amniotic waves, speakers splattering out an undertow of distorted bass rumble as more ethereal frequencies blazed overhead like aurora streaks. Gough himself seemed entranced inside this immense soundscape of his own creation, swaying, swimmingly, slowly rolling his head and shoulders, mouth open and seemingly voicing the drones emitted it didn’t matter that his voice wasn’t actually miked up – the man was exuding the stuff.

Day two saw a packed crowd, with headline appearances by Zbigniew Karkowski, Tatsuya Yoshida and Uchihashi Kazuhisa. The night began with Yuta Nakayama and Aya Sekine playing a sombre set. Nakayama had set up a triangular arrangement of three electric fans facing a large hanging sheet of metal and contact mics. The fans themselves were rigged with guitar pickups in an attempt to recreate the oscillation of mechanical tonewheels in a Hammond organ. To this mixture of drones and feedback, Sekine added accordion drones, organ flourishes and the occasional concave scream into her accordion pickups. At one point, Nakayama pelted the sporting crowd with dried beans by emptying a packet into one of the fans. It was a performance that stayed with you long after the fact, especially as I later discovered one at the bottom of my beer bottle.

In Singapore on a short residency at Lasalle College of the Arts, Polish Noise composer Zbignew Karkowski, now based in Japan, played his laptop in a pairing with American Brian O’Reilly, who bowed, slapped and used every inch of his prepared, contact-miked up double bass as a giant sound source. The effect was more nuanced than Karkowski’s solo show the previous day, a brutish eight minutes of deafening noise performed with a fixed expression of fierce intensity – the lacerating digital shrieks an expressway to his scowl.

The American musician Anthony Braxton is known to many for the power and precision of his blistering saxophone solos. But Braxton’s expertise spans a much wider range than reed-based improvisation alone, and hcmf 2009 has gathered a cast of leading musicians to highlight a side beyond performance: Braxton the composer.

Two concerts on Friday 20 and Saturday 21 November feature the UK premieres of Braxton’s solo piano works Composition No.1, No.2 and No.3 and The Trip, performed by Geneviève Foccroulle. In contrast, For Braxton on Sunday 22 November branches out into larger-scale interpretations of his work. Apartment House and Frank Gratkowski team up for further Braxton compositions and for the world premiere of a new Gratkowski work, co-commissioned by hcmf and November Music.

In addition, the concert will see the first performance of The Braxton Project by ELISION ensemble and John Butcher, an innovative assemblage of Braxton music and inspiration that connects his compositions, musical language and improvisation with new music created by the performers. Timothy O’Dwyer, ELISION saxophonist and curator of The Braxton Project explains more about the unique work:

What qualities do ELISION have to tackle a work such as The Braxton Project?

ELISION has a history of playing large structured improvisations as an ensemble. The players bring highly developed skills in interpretation and extended techniques combined with being able to expand and extemporise on given conceptual frameworks. There has been a unique ensemble approach to improvisational material developed over the years whether it be self-devised, or directed by others like Richard Barrett, John Butcher or myself. The Braxton Project enables the players to interpret and improvise within the works of Braxton while pushing the music in unexpected ways that are informed by the collective history of the group.

What challenges did the compositions present, both as discrete pieces, and for integrating into this larger work?

The approach for the performance has been to take some older works in the Braxton oeuvre and arrange them, utilising some of the more modern performance techniques he has developed for large ensemble over the past decade. We are using a number of compositions from the 40 and 69 series that will be played end to end and also simultaneously with one another. The challenge is for all the members of the group to play the notation and to improvise within the discreet worlds of each of these pieces given the brevity of information, so when played they all have distinct identities that can be deduced clearly by the listener.

How have you used the pitch and rhythmic language of Braxton’s improvisations in the solo, duo and trio compositions?

In addition to Braxton, there are three other composers that have contributed works. Ben Marks (trombone) has contributed two structured improvisations for two trios that utilise information gleaned from 69M. Richard Haynes (clarinet) has also contributed a tutti piece that is indirectly inspired by both the 69 and 49 series and my own offering for this particular performance is in the form of a violin solo which will appear toward the middle of the set.

I initially transcribed Braxton’s solo 8F from his For Alto record using a time line (down to tenths of a second); there was no way that I could put this into a metre or irrational rhythm! I then transformed the transcription into violin music using spacial rhythmic notation and literally using the pitch material. The second layer of the composition included me adding phrasing, dynamics and some extended techniques that were specific for the violin. My previous work at Huddersfield in 2006 involved a similar project in collaboration with John Butcher where he improvised within one of my notated works. Since that performance I have transcribed what he played and converted his solo into a clarinet/ bass clarinet part. This process is a part of my PhD candidature, so there is obviously a longer answer here for next time!

What is your favourite aspect of Braxton’s work in general? Is he underrated or misunderstood as a composer?

As an alto player, I have to say his solo improvisations are my favourite thing about his work followed closely by his small groups of the 1970s and his quartet of the 1980s. But he has written great music and had great recordings after this time as well, so it is hard to say! I don’t think there is any doubt about Braxton the instrumentalist being at the forefront of the technical development of the alto saxophone, the bass saxophone and the contrabass clarinet over the past 30 years.

Braxton the composer is a trickier subject and this will only be my opinion here. I think in his compositions and writings he courageously brings together very disparate legacies from the last half of the 20th century. These influences come together unequivocally in his music and they include the free jazz of John Coltrane et al, the experimental music of Stockhausen and Cage with the strong sense of the connection between music and mysticism found in the work of Coltrane, Stockhausen and Sun Ra amongst others.

Braxton along with many of the other composers from the AACM, including George Lewis and Henry Threadgill, have stood heroically at the cross roads of Afrocentric and Eurocentric music pulling together the intrinsic ideas of both these worlds in their own music, which strangely seems to be still controversial… The problem of ‘rating’ him as a composer lies within these areas- people can’t pin him down and rate him against composers in one particular camp: he defiantly sits between them all!

Other musicians on Anthony Braxton:

Anton Lukoszevieze
“Braxton’s music reminds me of the paintings of Bradley Walker Tomlin, strangely. With their calligraphic whimsies and constructions, jostling the picture plane. His music is also fundamentally about communication and a post-free-experimental-jazz-ghost-trance sound world that is glorious and rumbustious.”

Evan Parker
“Ever since he made the ground breaking solo saxophone recording For Alto in 1969, Anthony Braxton’s music has been characterised by his vision and determination to innovate. The scale of his imagination is boundless, his courage limitless.”

Frank Gratkowski
“Anthony Braxton has been a strong influence to my music for a long time. He is one of the very few composers who really found a way to blend all kinds of aspects of contemporary classical music, spiritual music, jazz, improvisation, determination and many others. He is a great spirit who is always looking for new directions. Also in person he’s a beautiful and open minded character. I’m very thankful to have the opportunity to perform his music.”

Jazz-punk-noise-improv-terrorists Bucketrider have a love (or is that fetish?) for musical adventure and they expect the audience to join in. The launch of their latest release
“Le Baphomet” was clearly planned to be an event. The plan was risky, given the location and the audience, but it was a clear success. Sean Baxter and Erick Mitsak kicked the evening off with their version of Samuel Beckett’s play “Words and Music”. What was it “about”? Well, it revolved around human nature, sloth, fascination, love, old socks, the competition between words and noises, and the difficulty in moving by walking frame or inside a suitcase.
Next up, Tim O’Dwyer and Greg Kingston used their whole bodies to set up music of tension and release with saxophone and treated guitar. Snatches of jazz melody or metallic frenzy constantly threatened to burst through a taut skin of noise. Greg also made me wonder whether that was him breaking through the skin of performance, as he slapped himself, shot himself in the mouth with a cap-gun, or quipped “just fuckin’ keep talkin’ that’s fine” to the crowd. Jaw-dropping stuff.

We were then given the Ballarat Bum Puppets’ take on video piracy and sci-fi remakes. I won’t ruin the stunning impact of seeing them yourself, but let’s just say they take literally the phrase “talking out of your arse”. Before playing “Le Baphomet” from start to finish, Bucketrider introduced the audience to their aesthetic, simultaneously butchering and breathing new life into “Say My Name” and “Careless Whispers”. They’re hard to pin down – just when you think they’re smooth and rehearsed they assault your ears, collapsing into noise. At times impassioned, other times wry and laconic, often both, they could be trying to build a bridge between virtuosity and pub ugliness. Tonight, the bridge is built which inspires some of the audience to dance on it, in their own unconventional way. The encore is introduced by a snappy rant against the sycophancy surrounding recently departed rock icons, but is quickly surpassed by an abrasively hypnotic jam-like piece. Hard to tell if Bucketrider are picking up converts, but if the crowd size and response is anything to go by, it seems Melbourne is fond of musical adventure. Now, if we can only manage to prize them away from their televisions and get them into the Make It Up Club on Tuesdays. That would really be something.

Andy Jackson, Beat Magazine, 2001