(Avant-Garde Jazz, Free Improvisation) [WEB] Wolfgang Fuchs, Damon Smith, Jerome Byerton - Three October Meetings - 2002/2013, FLAC (tracks), lossless

Wolfgang Fuchs, contrabass clarinet, bass clarinet, sopranino saxophone
Jerome Bryerton, percussion
Damon Smith, double bass

"Real" jazz musicians – i.e., improvisers who unreservedly equate jazz with "swing" and "blues" take no offence with Ken Burns' ludicrously distorted view of creative musics in the 20th century – often complain that free jazz not only "destroyed" jazz by "alienating" the audience, but also by annihilating the common ground that had up to the sixties, enabled jazz players of all generations to interact with each other: the jazz repertoire, the good old Tin-Pan-Alley-derived store house of melodies, changes, and forms. If jazz has its idioms – swing, bop, cool – and if free improvised music was, as Derek Bailey claimed, "non-idiomatic music", then the free jazz/improvised music crowd could only be a gathering of monads. For if there was no language to be shared, what could be communicated but primeval sounds (which is exactly what improvised music sounds like to the "real" jazzman's ear)?
Well, I do think Derek Bailey is wrong for once. And this very recording might serve as a good argument. Three improvisers from three cities (Berlin, Chicago, and San Francisco) and two generations (born in the Forties and Seventies) get together on the West Coast – and have no difficulty whatsoever in weaving a dense fabric full of intertwining threads, a music alive through the shared awareness of sound and space, of pitched and unpitched, of individuality and collectivity, of distinct lines and group textures. There's no doubt that the vocabulary opened up by the pioneers of the Sixties and Seventies – the world of whirlwind harmonics and multiphonics, of Bartók pizzicati and scraping box textures, of bowed metal timbres, of rapid multi-timbral percussive bursts, of inside piano explorations – has become the basis of a global lingua franca of and improvised music no longer preoccupied with the is-it-jazz-or-is-it-not-jazz question. Wolfgang Fuchs has been speaking this language for longer than his junior partners (as Damon Smith points out: "Jerome and I were both born on October 17th, he in 1974 and I in 1972. We have played together for about six years, and he was just younger enough for me to tell him (like Walter Page did Jo Jones), never play louder than the bass!"). But there is no generation gap here. No trace of condescension or hero worship. For as much as young U.S. improvisers such as Damon Smith and Jerome Bryerton respect the founding fathers, they are acutely aware of the qualities they can bring to the music from their own background. As Damon writes about his percussionist friend (and I guess about himself): "Jerome believes that it is necessary to keep intact many of the European aesthetics revolutionized in the Sixties and Seventies; but what is also crucial is the synthesis of wit and experience of a modern American improviser." There's plenty of "wit and experience" in the music of this ephemeral trio, old and new world style, and enough communicative capability to make many a "real" jazz musician jealous.

The third and finest release yet on Damon Smith's label Balance Point Acoustics, "Three October Meetings" chronicles a few days young Bay improvisers Smith (double bass) and Jerome Bryerton (drums) spent with German clarinetist Wolfgang Fuchs. The CD combines material from two concerts in Berkeley and San Francisco, and a studio session. All recordings took place within a three-day period in October 2001. Smith has rarely displayed such colorful and varied playing. Fuchs, like Radu Malfatti an instigator of silence-focused free improv, alternates between his soprano saxophone, bass and contrabass clarinets. The low, breathy growls of the latter intermingle with the bassist's sinuous arco, while the overtones of the soprano sax mesh with the drummer's bowed cymbals. Bryerton is the real discovery here. His playing is light, inventive and pertinent. Never busy for the sake of it, he focuses on the cymbals in a way strongly reminiscent of John Stevens. The CD starts with a few short studio tracks that explore rather specific textures mostly triggered by Fuchs' choice of instrument or initial technique. Then come the live selections. The long improvs of "Meeting One" are captivating, thanks to a high degree of listening. Despite age difference, these three share the same language. Recommended.

-----------------------
DON'T MODIFY THIS FILE
-----------------------
PERFORMER: auCDtect Task Manager, ver. 1.6.0 RC1 build 1.6.0.1
Copyright (c) 2008-2010 y-soft. All rights reserved
http://y-soft.org
ANALYZER: auCDtect: CD records authenticity detector, version 0.8.2
Copyright (c) 2004 Oleg Berngardt. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2004 Alexander Djourik. All rights reserved.
FILE: 12 Meeting Two.flac
  Size: 39659500 Hash: 8509EA0491EAA9A7BA440B85A32BDA0E Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: CDDA 100%
  Signature: FC162632B5C305742B54229E583ED9341F69A35F
FILE: 11 Meeting One 4.flac
  Size: 42352453 Hash: 17FA64E93AD2039BDAF2F484878187E0 Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: CDDA 100%
  Signature: CDFDE36D76C648CDE6408D86B825314F31B80C68
FILE: 10 Meeting One 3.flac
  Size: 63626070 Hash: 7FBB82035DB83695FA447E475C03E6F8 Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: CDDA 100%
  Signature: ADEFD9296EB2C3CCA056D5BE422ACF9551F243F9
FILE: 09 Meeting One 2.flac
  Size: 24958620 Hash: A5F0684D0AE2E743422746664DC58201 Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: CDDA 100%
  Signature: C5D88D28DB47795502EED04EA2DA90E34F2D1085
FILE: 08 Meeting One 1.flac
  Size: 50986186 Hash: 96B9A8EB963ABE35D7CA7982EF621438 Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: CDDA 99%
  Signature: 092A49D03289BA3ECDCA4341270C62FBA2AA2F81
FILE: 07 Meeting Three 7.flac
  Size: 25153662 Hash: D475D9F2D3DBB8FCFC70B7F8EAE5433D Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: CDDA 54%
  Signature: 9D92D6D41D06ADF3D66FE9590396CA5DE30ABAA4
FILE: 06 Meeting Three 6.flac
  Size: 12341839 Hash: 9CACA6400D9CBB896E356479CE5AE9FE Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: MPEG 92%
  Signature: F2DF0B5F03AF910289C3040D9F90D206974A256E
FILE: 05 Meeting Three 5.flac
  Size: 17103437 Hash: 6C1546C3B54E1F9406C97DD349E9246C Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: CDDA 100%
  Signature: 62B3AB1DCFCC7C2AFAADB431A62AE765C90CB8D0
FILE: 04 Meeting Three 4.flac
  Size: 18345307 Hash: F24E4CCBCC731DD717F0A11DAE79D45C Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: CDDA 100%
  Signature: 42F1108F8F1D1AE1A7B0547687C67AC92B0D392D
FILE: 03 Meeting Three 3.flac
  Size: 11323469 Hash: B6BF0D2ACF3AD259932E79DEC2CEC451 Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: CDDA 42%
  Signature: 5508D4764978D62BD5B6B0CAC801D7AE412366EA
FILE: 02 Meeting Three 2.flac
  Size: 7420304 Hash: AB79F535CEF53F3302F3B301653AA62C Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: CDDA 99%
  Signature: DA8AEF3FDE6E73CAC01613AF9B29083E6FE21B3E
FILE: 01 Meeting Three 1.flac
  Size: 8072146 Hash: 4391D308E09472371FC9980858B9EE18 Accuracy: -m0
  Conclusion: CDDA 100%
  Signature: BC88A7A7B7703CF0F4124560FD219548AFB00204

02 04 06