Stewart Lee o improwizacji w dzisiejszym The Sunday Times:
I began watching free improvisation when I arrived in London in the late 1980s. (…) At first, I found it ludicrous. During a Morphogenesis show at the China Pig in 1993, attended by six people and a cat, a balloon that one of the performers was rubbing burst, but nobody minded, and I still went back.
In 1997, I saw the guitarist Derek Bailey accidentally walk into a wall while playing, acknowledge the clang of his instrument, and then deliberately bash it into the wall again.
w takich chwilach najbardziej lubię wklejać cytaty ze Steve’a Albiniego:
„Jazz serves a cultural function in the music scene. It is a signifier for musical „adulthood.” To embrace jazz is to don a kind of graduation cap, signifying a broadening of tastes outside „mere” rock music. This ostentatious display of „sophistication” is an insult, and I find the graduation cappers transparent and tedious. Certainly there must be interesting music one could call „jazz.” There must be. I’ve never heard it, but I grant that it is out there somewhere.
Jazz has a non-musical parallel: Christiania, the „free” zone in Copenhagen. In Christiania, like in jazz, there is no law. People are left to their own inventions to create and act as they see fit. In Jazz, the musicians are allowed to improvise over and beside structural elements that may themselves be extemporaneous. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Freedom — sounds good.
The reality is much bleaker. Christiania is a squalid, trashy string of alleys with rag-and-bone men selling drugs, tie-dye and wretched food. Granted Total Freedom, and this is what they’ve chosen to do with it, sell hash and lentil soup? Jazz is similar. The results are so far beneath the conception that there is no English word for the disappointment one feels when forced to confront it. Granted Total Freedom, you’ve chosen to play II V I and blow a goddamn trill on the saxophone? Only by willfully ignoring its failings can one pretend to appreciate it as an idiom and don the cap”.
i jeszcze jeden:
„yeah, people are fucking idiots”
W zeszłym roku Albini produkował album The Thing, więc chyba w końcu znalazł jazz, który mu się spodobał. :)