John Butcher & Mark Sanders with special guest: Georg Grawe
No Longer Available
Launch concert for John Butcher and Mark Sander's Daylight CD on Emanem. The sax/drums duo will be joined by pianist Georg Grawe - a German pianist and composer of exquisite technique who has worked with some of the best performers in avant-garde jazz, contemporary, and improvised music from around the world including Evan Parker, Mats Gustafsson, Gerry Hemingway and Ernst Reijseger.
JOHN BUTCHER / saxophones
John Butcher is a saxophonist of rare grace and power, who has expanded the vocabulary of the saxophone far beyond the conventions of jazz and other musics, to encompass a staggering range of harmonics, multiphonics, overtones, percussive sounds, and electronic feedback. But his playing is far more than merely an array of special effects; it's characterised by a drive and intensity that propels music into strange new places that are both incredibly beautiful and deeply exhilarating.
MARK SANDERS / drums
Mark Sanders has been acclaimed as “the most exciting, original and overwhelmingly powerful drummer alive” (Steve Reynolds, Jazz Corner) and his precise and propulsive drumming has graced projects with, to name but a few, Evan Parker, Jah Wobble, Broadcast, Agusti Fernandez, John Butcher, Roswell Rudd, and Otomo Yoshihde.
"ubiquitous, diverse and constantly creative, drummer Mark Sanders always outdoes himself, whether playing with restraint or erupting like a dynamo." Bruce L Gallenter, Downtown Music Gallery. NY
GEORG GRAWE / piano
A German pianist and composer of exquisite technique, Georg Graewe has worked with some of the best performers in avant-garde jazz, contemporary, and improvised music from around the world; including British saxophonist Evan Parker, Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, American percussionist Gerry Hemingway, Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger, and Italian trombonist Sebi Tramontana.
Born in 1956 in Bochum, Germany, Graewe started out playing guitar in local rock bands while a teenager. He also got into jazz, and in 1974, formed the Georg Gräwe Quintet. Since, he has led groups ranging from chamber orchestra to trios. For 11 years, starting in 1982, Graewe directed the ten-piece chamber ensemble, GrubenKlangOrchester, which included such extraordinary musicians as Franz Koglmann and Theo Jorgensmann. Since 1989, he has had a trio with Gerry Hemingway and Ernst Reijseger that has toured Europe and the United States. Their first recording was released on the HatArt label that first year, followed by releases on the Music & Arts and Sound Aspects labels, and on Random Acoustics, a label that Georg Graewe created in 1993. He also performs on the FMP, Okka Disk, and Wobbly Rail labels, totaling over 30 recordings.
Other new music artists Graewe has worked with include Anthony Braxton, Dave Douglas, Joelle Leandre, John Tchicai, Barre Phillips, Ken Vandermark, and many more. Graewe's work as a composer includes compositions for symphony orchestras, chamber music, and works for solo piano. The end of the 1990s found him leading a quartet with reedsman Frank Gratkowski, Chicago jazz percussionist Hamid Drake, and bassist Kent Kessler; performing in a group called Torque with Melvyn Poore and Peter van Bergen; and touring the U.S. with Reijseger and Hemingway.
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from the sleeve notes of 'Daylight':
Their first musical encounter was at the home of Derek Bailey, and they have crossed paths frequently over the years since, but, for whatever reason, have seldom played together until recently. A handful of duo performances yielded just one brief document, a 25-minute set recorded at St. Giles-in-the-Fields church, London, in 2008, and subsequently released on the TREADER DUOS album.
This is a strange state of affairs, not just given the interconnectedness of the British community of improvising musicians within which they operate, but particularly since Sanders and Butcher are (as you can hear) so well suited. They are both meticulous and understated performers, whose improvisations express lifetimes of musical absorption with economy and expressive precision.
The thirty minutes of this album’s Ropelight was recorded at the annual Freedom of the City festival, at London’s Conway Hall. The hall is home to an ethical society that promotes the hall’s use as 'a hub for freedom of expression and progressive thought'. That makes it perfect, in conceptual terms at least, not just for an annual celebration of the freedom principle in music, but more specifically for the music of Butcher and Sanders, which exemplifies ideational clarity.
As they opened the second afternoon of the festival, light filtered through passing clouds and the partially occluded glass of the roof, and the duo was illuminated by a natural chiaroscuro that seemed to accentuate the music’s malleability. Hence DAYLIGHT, which might at first seem a curious title for an album of improvised music, which is usually considered a distinctly crepuscular exercise.
John Butcher recalls that people noticed the light changes, and tells me that the Southampton University performance was also a lunchtime concert. 'I liked this title,' he says, 'because I think the music of both concerts is quite luminous. There’s a certain unity to them. It was all daytime music. I think time of day has an effect on how one plays.'
At times Butcher made the acoustical properties of the Conway Hall resonate with the sound of his tenor. Of course this is something he’s renowned for, but I didn’t expect him to achieve it in this most sonically sedate of venues. He often thinks, he says, in terms of colour as much as of direct pitch, and experiences serial collaboration as an additive learning process that necessitates conceptual and technical malleability. You can hear that process at work in his playing with Mark Sanders, who is so in the moment that he seems almost egoless.
The duo’s progress through Ropelight is a slow morphogenesis, a sequence of various but consistently non-idiomatic changes. Sanders’ approach to the drums is purposeful but restrained, as he switches between drumsticks, brushes, brass bells and simple hand-pats to achieve the required degree of subtlety, always with a deft and musical sensibility and always maintaining clarity of purpose. I’ve heard few improvisations so elegantly managed.
But for all the expansive variegation of the journey through Ropelight, it taps only a fraction of the duo’s potentiality. The shorter, more concentrated performances from Southampton complement the London date beautifully. Throughout the rarefied but conceptually compacted Flicker, Butcher and Sanders are exclusively concerned with the flux of new sound relationships. It is only during Glowstick that the duo really comes close to evoking the 'fire music' that burns at the heart of so much free playing, particularly where drum duets are concerned. But even here, between intensities, the heat of the performance dissipates into exploratory, drawn out textures and harmonics.
Butcher and Sanders assiduously avoid the easy option of oblation to music’s past. Theirs is a novel syncretism of high drama and vivid musicality, their art continually recast in new light.
