Founded in Rome by Franco Evangelisti in 1964, Gruppo D’Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza is cited as the first experimental composers collective, their revolving membership including such figures as Egisto Macchi, Mario Bertoncini, Frederic Rzewski, and Ennio Morricone. Their self-titled 1973 LP for the General Music label is an eclectic and beautifully abstract beast, and it’s the second of the ensemble’s releases to see welcome reissue by Superior Viaduct.
These days free improvisation, a system as well as a widely populated genre as underappreciated sonic frontier, is predominantly associated with a subset and historical period of jazz, but it also has a multifaceted relationship with modern classical music, and it continues to be practiced, if increasingly on the cultural margins, right up to the present.
Novices and the generally tender of ear reliably reject free music as an absence of instrumental skill and compositional craft, or less politely, dismiss it as just so much fucking around. This is comparable to those who derided the Abstract Expressionist painters as a gang that’s main discipline was the shuck and jive of charlatanism.
Jackson Pollack endures as the most famed Abstract-Expressionist, and to currently denounce the man and the artistic movement connected to him as being polluted by fakers and frauds is to court ridicule as an utter philistine. To be sure, the drift away from the realist objective in the visual arts and literature has been largely accepted if not fully embraced, but the situation is less easily assessed in film and music.
Sculpture, painting, and writing have been with us for centuries, but moving pictures, that invention beloved by Surrealists, Modernists and seemingly anybody with a couple of spare coins in their pocket, is still a relatively new state of affairs, and as such was inextricably altered by an almost instantaneous desire to turn a buck off the development.
Music also spans back millennia, but the breakthrough of recorded sound roughly coincides with that of film; the moneymakers, if a bit slower on the draw, eventually got their hooks in as well. Naturally, those seeking purely financial gain often aided in the production of essential musical works, as alongside (and overlapping) these mercantile interests were folks aspiring to disseminate on the basis of quality.
In the fall of 1961 the first pressing of Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet incorporated in its jacket The White Light, Pollack’s masterpiece of seven years prior. The reason was clear, to link two individual streams of abstraction and to hopefully transfer the gradual, partial, and in some cases begrudging acceptance of one art-form onto the other.
Of course, the more familiar listeners become with musical abstraction, the more likely it is to find approval; e.g. Modern Jazz, Coleman, later Coltrane, “Revolution 9,” the solos of Jimi Hendrix, and the outside stuff from Sonic Youth. And yes, everything in that list shares an affiliation with songic forms, inviting newcomers to potentially engage without getting lost in the deep weeds.
Gruppo D’Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza offers a similar but distinct gateway. In its membership is found one of the most distinguished and famous of all soundtrack men, if not necessarily by name; indeed, if I had a nickel for every instance of someone mouthing the theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, well, I’d be a very wealthy person.
Only a portion of those conversant with Ennio Morricone’s film work have pursued him into the land of Il Gruppo (as their rather unwieldy handle is contacted), but for those who did, knowledge of the maestro has surely assisted in absorbing the results, the musicians’ shared background as composers integrating with free improvisational methods to produce a type of instant composition that’s still vibrant today.
On this 1973 recording, the lineup consisted of Franco Evangelisti, Walter Branchi, Mario Bertoncini, John Heineman, Egisto Macchi, and Morricone. Instrumental duties can range wildly in free-improv scenarios, but profiles of Il Gruppo mainly credit Evangelisti on piano and percussion, Branchi on bass, Bertoncini on percussion and piano, Heineman on trombone and cello, Macchi on strings, celesta and percussion, and Morricone on trumpet and flute.
“Collage 5” begins with the lurch, rattle and wiggle frequently thought of in regard to non-jazz free-improv (in particular, the Brit strains essayed by New Phonic Art, Iskra 1903 and Wired on ’73’s 3LP set Free Improvisation) as bowed strings and a forlorn trumpet enter the scene. Soon enough rumbling piano keys commence a three-way dialogue with trumpet and drum as a hint of harmonica and human voice follow. Emerging into the equation; trombone, chimes, bells, whistles, and maybe even squeak-toys. Suddenly it’s like a BYG/Actuel session co-produced by John Zorn and Eugene Chadbourne.
There is certainly a likeminded spirit of collectivity to that which burst out of late-‘60s Windy City USA, and not just to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, either; I’m envisioning the charming pipe-puffing mug of Anthony Braxton. “Collage 5”’s slow, sly growth into a short excursion of what sounds like lopsided marching band music illuminates the comparison with Braxton quite nicely; meanwhile a drunken fleet wielding pennywhistles formulates. And then a finale arrives that can be accurately tagged as bordering on conventionally expressive.
The first half of “Percussione Per Tutti” explores the possibilities of mingling string scrape with an arsenal of diverse percussion; it reminds me of a cross between modern classical and the music of East Asia, though the latter portion of the piece skirts the avant-zone inhabited by their peers Musica Elettronica Viva (or MEV for short; Frederic Rzewski, absent here, was part of both that outfit and Il Gruppo) and AMM (notably, Il Gruppo’s oeuvre, if no less rewarding, isn’t as formidable as that of Brit contemporaries AMM, in turn providing a fine starting point for the free-improv newbie).
And the title of “Mirage” makes it obvious these gentlemen were highly conscious of the music’s tangible properties. The selection opens quietly, hovering forth as layered breathing combines with the tones of abrasion. The circumstance of reality and hallucination is uncertain, and then more human-derived sounds arise, mimicking water; we could temporarily be in a damp dark cave.
In a sense, the previous three tracks are a prelude to the LP’s side-long centerpiece “Macroforma,” the shorter selections allowing the ear to acclimate to Il Gruppo’s unusual sonic environments before expanding them to 25 minutes in length. Many enlivening moments are included in that duration; a tangle of wooly free-jazz, a section perhaps like John Cage scoring a sleazy Giallo (complete with more breathing, this time heavy and nervous), a bounty of loose percussion and stressed-out strings, a brief flurry of something resembling nose-singing…one gets the idea.
Or possibly one doesn’t. In which case, if intrigued, one might want to investigate further. And the more one listens, the more the snap-decisions of a group of brilliant minds come into clearer focus; kinda like Jackson Pollack, y’know? While they’re not alone in returning Il Gruppo to print, it’s an understatement to describe Superior Viaduct’s reissue of Musica su Schemi from last year, and now this LP, as a true service to restless, inquisitive lobes everywhere.
For musicians of a non-commercial nature getting heard has always been a struggle. The fact is that, once upon a time, many big companies distributed this type of material, mostly due to a simple lack of foreknowledge of how the contempo record buying public would receive New Music (as it was commonly called). Additionally, an actual human heartbeat was occasionally detectable in the activities of those labels, the majors having not yet devolved into a single-minded obsession with the bottom line.
Il Gruppo issued two of their records through the Italian branch of RCA and was also involved with classical cornerstone Deutsche Grammophon (the imprint responsible for the Free Improvisation collection mentioned above). Furthermore, AMM’s ’67 debut AMMMusic was paid for by Elektra, and MEV’s first LP Friday came out in ’69 on Polydor; in 1970 the two ensembles were featured on the split album Live Electronic Music Improvised released by a label called, get this, Mainstream.
There’s a notion in this era of digital that everything is out there just waiting for consumption; all a person needs is awareness of an item’s existence and the ability to execute the necessary clicks of a mouse. Bluntly, this is a falsehood; it’s good to recall that when it comes to 20th century art, the responsibility is chiefly on rights-holders to make works available. In lieu of this we have the hit and miss, and yes, ideologically troubling domain of internet uploads; so by extension, anything of a perceived limited monetary return is in danger of slipping through the cracks.
Recently Gruppo D’Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza has seen a few of their albums repressed on compact disc and LP (Musica su Schemi in numerous editions, The Feed-back last year through Schema, and in 2012 Niente, a previously unreleased session from ’71, apparently hit vinyl in Australia), and they’ve been represented by a pair of CD comps doing a pretty good job of spanning their productivity, with Azioni offering an informative DVD.
However, it remains important to soak up this collective’s achievement as initially released, and this latest installment by Superior Viaduct, the first ever full reissuing of the ’73 General Music disc, is extremely appreciated.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
