In the last four or five years there has been a clear set trend towards stillness in improvised music. The classical parameters – the forming of energy states, the spontaneous, dense communication – are not relevant to this music, but rather the empty spaces, the disparate, non-dynamic, the recessed. Stillness.
This trend is not without its detractors, and from various positions (musicians, theoreticians) it is feared that too much of the former tilled field is being forfeited. There is polemic: improvised music tends to attach itself to trends in new music, after they have long become passé. Like the trend of the non-gestural stillness.
Gene Coleman, bass clarinetist, long-standing protagonist of Chicago’s most varying experimental and avant-garde scene (he can be heard, among others, on the albums of Gastr Del Sol), a festival organizer and curator on the go, lives mostly from his compositions. He does not have to hang onto any trend, he does not feel any need to innovate and does not see himself exposed to any scene pressure. Gene Coleman plays and acts autonomously.
For a tour in the Autumn of 2002 he put together a quartet out of musicians with whom he has worked together before. Franz Hautzinger (quarter-tone trumpet), Sachiko M (sinus generator, contact microphones), Otomo Yoshihide (guitar, turntables) are all world renowned musicians and improvisers who have mastered the use of musical stillness.
So these are the best prerequisites not to reproduce the “cliché of stillness,” but rather to initiate a restful as well as very open and highly flexible improvising process. Stillness is not assumed here, is not a result and an purpose worth aspiring for, but rather it is a means to form. The strong rustling improvisation does not deplete itself, but rather brings forth new constellation of their playing together (also next to each other)
It is slow, peaceful, very relaxed flowing music. But whoever listens closely will hear the tension and the exertion, the wrestling to create expression.
Next year GROB will release a CD that will present some of his current compositions.

Gene Coleman

Franz Hautzinger (also on GROB211, GROB313/4, GROB425, GROB435, GROB544)

Sachiko M (also on GROB432, GROB435)

Otomo Yoshihide (also on GROB432)

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GROB657 arbeit - MARX