Nothing about the duo encounters of John Zorn and Fred Frith, neither
live nor as captured on their cd The Art of Memory (Incus,
1995), is easy. They've both grown into more than noteworthy
composers, but they have each held tight to their improvisatory roots.
Their duet has generally been a clash of quickly-spewn ideas, but on
this night they presented something more varied (although no less
challenging). Frith played an electric hollow-body guitar and relied
heavily on effects while Zorn at times slowed his screams and fast trills,
creating wider spaces within which they could work, more of a landscape
than in past meetings.
But their long relationship was still evident in the playing. Frith began
one piece mimicking quite well Zorn's fast, pinched-reed flurried, to
which Zorn responded with long-drawn, sustained notes. Frith then
switched to sustained notes, leaving Zorn with no choice but to play
lines atop. Then, with Zorn in melody mode, Frith started looping
ringing lines below him. At other points, Frith laid down and looped bass
parts, playing melodies and washes over them and creating a backing
band for Zorn to play against. It was a generous set, varied and giving,
and more musical than their previous pairings.
As a sign of the times, at least a half dozen people in the SRO crowd
were holding digicams above their heads then quickly checking the
display screens - the only way all but a few they could see the stage.
Following their surprisingly musical set, Zorn took the stage with
Boredoms screamer Yamatsuka Eye to again subvert expectations of
difficult listening. The duo created a more musical meeting than they
might have in past years. Eye's sonic experiments have taken him past
pure screaming energy and into more advanced methods of madness,
playing with psychedelia and tribal rhythms, a sort of raving mad rave.
He had with him for this set a technician ata laptop, processing
reverberating tones and room-shaking booms trigered by a pair of
handheld balls of mysterious origin. The effect was something like Eye
inside a theremin. Jumping around, dancing and making sudden or slow
movements with his hands, he created resounding, thunderous,
subwoofing percussion and high-pitched interference. It made an
unstable ground for Zorn, but then Zorn doesn't need a lot to go on. He
screamed and sang on his sax as Eye rang and pantomimed with his
bionic meditation balls.
Eye didn't stop short of screaming, of course, putting his voice through
heavy effects and a plastic tube which also ran through effect while Zorn
submerged his mouthpiece in a pitcher of water. While something like
the duo tracks on the Painkiller box set might have been expected, what
they delivered was closer to their Tzadik disc Nani Nani.
After a few pieces they brought Frith up to join them on guitar. As a trio,
though, they wandered, not quite finding the fluidity that the evening's
duos had shared. "All you dudes should just start screaming," came a
yell from the audience from someone no doubt hungry for the sheer
noise they might have perpetrated. "I think it's a good idea."
Comments and Feedback:
|