Outside Traditions

In many respects the history of jazz in the USA and South Africa is entwined with the experiences of discrimination and resistance as well as with the cultural practices, social utopias and collective self-assertion of marginalised population groups. In a conversation about how music and society interrelate with each other, Asher Gamedze offers insights into his work as a musician and historian and how certain forms of musical expression originate aesthetically in the experience of and struggle against racism and oppression. A series of graphic scores provides a taster for the premiere of the fourth chapter of “Coin Coin” – Matana Roberts’s exhaustive exploration of the American past which she examines with the help of her own family history. And in a video interview with Peter Margasak, alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins talks about his musical beginnings at church, his latest album, and the relevance and irrelevance of terms such as spiritual jazz and Black radicalism with regard to the current renaissance and popularisation of pertinent aesthetic traditions in the USA.

For a long time, European jazz was a phenomenon that operated almost exclusively within the parameters of established American traditions. The first significant impulses with which European musicians inspired the international jazz community can be traced back to the free jazz movement of the 1960s and 70s. Since that starting point, improvised music in Europe has taken on a burgeoning plurality of forms and has come to epitomise the creativity not only of Berlin. In two picture series we show scenes and locations of improvised music in Berlin: then and now. Julia Neupert’s essay takes a personal look at the beginnings of European free jazz and Peter Margasak shares his subjective impressions of Berlin’s musical landscape from the perspective of an American who moved here from Chicago several years ago and can hardly spend a day in either city without plunging into the bustling life of its vibrant creative scene. A series of videos from associates of the Umlaut collective will also whet your appetite for their entertaining and virtuosic stylistic disruptions at Jazzfest Berlin 2022 as part of “Umpire Jumble”.

Ever since the late 1950s, musicians have made repeated attempts to determine their production and working conditions themselves. When the organisers of the Berliner Jazztage, today’s Jazzfest Berlin, cancelled their invitation to the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann when he could not guarantee that his group would perform in black suits in 1968, his response was to organise the first Total Music Meeting (TMM) together with the bassist Jost Gebers. Within a very short time, FMP developed into an international hotspot for contemporary and, in the early stages, sometimes highly controversial improvised music. With a series of images based on Markus Müller’s recently published book “FreeMusic Production. FMP – The Living Music”, we provide an insight into one of the key centres of European free jazz in Berlin.

“Everything except free jazz!” Anyone describing their musical taste in these terms (and a lot of people do!) is trying to make two things unmistakably clear: 1. I’m incredibly open and that’s why I’m interested in lots of very different things. 2. I can tell the difference between sound and noise and that’s why I know that free jazz isn’t actually music, and definitely not jazz.

Why is this the case? I have no idea. The first time I experienced this music (Ernst-Ludwig “Luten” Petrowsky at the Mensa in Rostock, some time in the late 1980s) I found the experience shocking in a positive way: powerful, cheerful and at the same time wonderfully ferocious. It probably desensitised me early on to all kinds of allergies to free jazz.

These had famously appeared in the early years of the “New Thing”, when even serious critics screamed hysterically when it came to the music of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Jeanne Lee and others. This hysteria was typified by the shrill tone with which the saxophonist Klaus Doldinger indirectly accused his colleague Peter Brötzmann of being a charlatan in the now legendary WDR TV broadcast “Free Jazz – Pop Jazz” in 1967. Brötzmann’s reaction was simply to recommend in the gentlest of voices: “Just sit there and listen!”

I did not personally witness those times, but it does seem that the strong polarisation within free jazz in those days also manifested itself in Europe. The opposition to this music was so strong, yet it held such a powerful attraction for those who thought they heard in it the sound of revolt against everything that was conservative and narrow-minded. Just as in the USA free jazz was associated with the civil rights movement, its European equivalent was located in the protest culture of the ‘68 movement. And this was true of both Western and Eastern Europe. Those who have written about this include Harald Kisiedu in his excellent book “European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950–1975”. Here he also demonstrates that the theory of the radical “emancipation” of European free jazz from its origins in the USA is only partly true. On the contrary, most of the early free jazz pioneers in Amsterdam, London, Warsaw, Wuppertal, West and East Berlin felt inspired by the American avantgarde and many of them had accumulated years of experience playing in Dixieland, swing, cool and hard bop combos.

These European protagonists ultimately discovered that free jazz gave them space to play more personally than before. The challenge was to “play yourself!” – partly because this music could not work any other way: you can’t simulate expressiveness.

At the time, different musicians in different places took their inspiration from a wide range of sources, whether these were in new music, in Fluxus or in the traditional music of their respective regions. A transnational network evolved, within which Amsterdam with the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) and West Berlin with Free Music Production (FMP) became the most visible but by no means the only centres.

Anyone who listens more closely will soon recognise that free jazz in the Europe of the 1960s to 1980s did not just represent a game of breaking things up, it also contained elements of humour, ballads, theatre music and protest songs. In any event it has since proved – quite robustly – to be more than purely an historical episode. Its vehemence and openness have fused into a musical attitude that is expressed in many forms – and can still provoke powerful emotions.

I don’t listen to everything, but I definitely do listen to free jazz!

Peter Margasak on European jazz and today’s creative music scene in Berlin

When jazz first took root in Europe it was often within countries where expat musicians from the US had settled, exerting a profound influence on such locales, whether Dexter Gordon and Don Byas in France, Ben Webster and Kenny Drew in Denmark, or Bill Barron and Red Mitchell in Sweden. The scenes in those places were strong, but for decades the metric for quality was always how close players in those countries sounded like Americans. After living in Europe for more than four years I hear an ineffable quality to American jazz when I make trips back to Chicago or Philadelphia, but what about the ineffable qualities in the music created in Berlin or other parts of Europe? Now that we’re well into the music’s second century such a qualitative scale ought to be retired.

The most exciting music on this continent – and there’s never been so much excellent, interesting work related to jazz and improvised music in Europe as there is now – shouldn’t be held to some dusty standard from an ocean away. Decades ago European musicians began developing their own language, pushing away from American jazz orthodoxy to find new pathways. That began happening in Berlin in the late 1960s, with a free jazz movement that felt no need to retain a blues foundation and instead privileged ideas from European music. These days Berlin is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world and the astonishing music community here – which is actually many different, overlapping musical communities – collides ideas from all around the world, finding points of intersection and disruption in endless traditions. There are still countless of musicians in Berlin and the rest of Europe that subscribe to the old American conventions, and while some of them do it exceptionally well, they’re not really propelling the practice forward. Instead, we have a giant professional class that finds satisfaction in honing age-old skills. But in most cases, those aren’t the musicians who will leave their mark.

The diversity of activity in Berlin is dizzying and almost impossible to keep tabs upon for the open-minded listener. The city’s free improvisation scene has been duly celebrated around the world going back decades, but these days much of the excitement comes when musicians from other traditions – whether neue musik, various ethnic traditions, or electronic realms – engage in the practice. And then there are free improvisers who stretch out, driven by curiosity and study, to enfold once alien conceptions into the fold. As Berlin’s population has grown more diverse, so too has its music scenes. As I sit writing this the weekly update of the Echtzeitmusik calendar has turned up in my inbox, and the listings present a cornucopia of adventurous sounds happening in Berlin, but this calendar is but a tiny fraction of what’s happening here, the best of which tends to engage not only in the music that happens all around us in this city, but with all sorts of international activity.

When the European media suggests that American jazz and improvised music is moribund, it’s no less ignorant and chauvinistic than the US voices that have long given short-shrift to music made over here. Why not celebrate that diversity, especially in a city like Berlin that feels like a melting pot as much as anywhere on the planet?

The pictures of Berlin photographer and music fan Cristina Marx document the creative jungle of Berlin’s live music scene. Her series of photos conveys visual impressions of the vast range of improvised music in Berlin today and the places it is played.

The influences of regional music traditions within this year’s Jazzfest programme are as manifold as they are aesthetically inspiring. They range from the songs of Northern Italian female field workers through the distinctive tone qualities of traditional instruments – from Romania, Poland, Armenia and beyond – and on to musical folk traditions from all over the world. Henning Bolte takes the beginnings of ethnomusicological field research in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region as the starting point for an essayistic journey through the history of the reciprocal relationship between jazz and folk music evident in the contributions to this year’s Jazzfest Berlin. In a series of short videos, musicians from the programme talk about their different relationships with folk music from a wide variety of regions. Issues of identity and tradition are raised along with their specific approaches to ways of making music that often rely solely on oral traditions: from learning by ear via recourse to ethnomusicological methods to the creative use of field recordings and experimental techniques. And in a video interview, the Chicago based AACM artist Ben LaMar Gay, who seems to absorb the musical languages and cultural influences of his fellow musicians like a sponge in his multistylistic creations, shares some of the mysteries of his creative process.

The term “folk music” awakens numerous associations, images and emotions that are both appreciative and less appreciative in nature. In any event, folk traditions that have been formed in regional and local cultures over long periods are the origin and basis of all forms of music, ranging from sacred to classical (from Bach to Bartók and Berio) and from jazz to pop and rock – whether they have been used consciously or their effects have been absorbed subconsciously. They can be recognised more or less directly or made recognisable with the help of studio technology. Even what we call jazz, while evolving into an urban music practice, has deep inherent links with various folk traditions.

Folkloric influences in music are not to be underestimated and keep on resurfacing in contemporary music. The absorption and adaptation of folk traditions take place in a dynamic process of continual interactions, transformations, transmutations and impulses in which the effects of both internal music and external musical forces are manifest. They operate within a vital force field filled with thefts, distortions, trickster-like resistance, identificatory anchor points, escapism and reassuring references.

Jazzfest Berlin can look back upon the most varied approaches within this force field. And there are also numerous examples in this year’s edition. The focus of the 2022 edition of the festival is directed eastwards – on folk traditions in Armenia, the lands around the Black Sea, in Transylvania, Poland and the Ukraine. As a consequence of the deadly acts of war since 24 February this year, the East has increasingly become the object of our attention and our cultural understanding. This compensates for a lack of recognition (that also applies to music) that experiencing a variety of approaches to the rich folk traditions from this region at the festival will not entirely resolve but which nevertheless can be bridged by numerous living impressions.