NEW MUSIC

Let's think about the future. Specifically, first, the future of chamber music. And it's good to remember what chamber music really is: music played on a small number of (usually) acoustic instruments by friends in a small, intimate (again, generally acoustic) setting. But what do these musicians play?

Perhaps a challenge for chamber music of the future could be the evolution of instrumentalists who are not only capable of articulating musical material on their respective instruments but who can also formulate the musical materials spontaneously, becoming composer/performers who construct music in the moment, taking responsibility for the creation of his/her own individual voice as a layer or component within the larger whole of the ensemble, reacting spontaneously to the sonic environment and to the direction(s) taken by the group as the music unfolds. We could say that players here vote responsibly with their sound within a participatory democracy, bringing all of the various musical elements that they've studied, then absorbed as an individual, to the totality of the group, for the betterment of the ensemble and the creation of the music.

The reality of the Chamber Improvisation Trio is Jeff Klatt's principally classical cello background, which has been informed by compositional studies, joining with Jay Mollerskov's primarily jazz guitar playing (also informed by wider compositional inquiries) - those two voices conversing and colliding with each other and the third (the soprano saxophone). The organic realization of the music as it unfolds spontaneously becomes occasionally frightening with its intensity and intimacy. Perhaps this is something that chamber music has the potential to become.

And what can we say about jazz of the future, this American art form which is just over one hundred years old? But in that one hundred years, jazz has paralleled in many ways the developments in European classical music, moving from the relative consonance and triadic harmony of early jazz to bebop's chromatic extensions, to free jazz's polytonal/atonal complexities - and now we see a return to more conservative directions.

If the charge for chamber music is to create a new army of composer/performers who spontaneously make the music (jazz musicians already do this), perhaps the challenge for jazz of the future is the fostering of inclusivity: allowing reference to all the various traditions/periods of jazz by (again, spontaneously) creating forms whereby these varied elements can co-exist. As a result, for example, "standards," the popular song forms that have provided traditional jazz with its architectural road maps on which improvisations are based, might be seen in a new way; why cannot these "tunes" exist as simply a potential part of the overall context of an improvisation (which would then include other freely improvised material that references other periods and traditions of jazz)? These song forms can live, then, in a new way - not as a separate entity (as in, "And now we're going to play 'Stella By Starlight.'"), but as merely another structure, equal to others, and drawn from to provide a component in the form as a whole. A "performance" then becomes a collage of many diverse elements brought together, flying bravely in the face of the unhealthy factionalism which is so present in the current jazz scene.

The format for the FutureJazz Duo is, we can say, one of the most primary of instrumental groupings: horn and drums (read here: voice and log drum, bugle and field drum, zurna and dauli (and its numerous international variants), etc.); Coltrane turned to it for his final (Interstellar Space) recording. The potential for interaction between melody and rhythm is boundless but so is the interaction between color and texture, and any permutations of these - which both instruments are capable of when the saxophone is no longer confined to just "melody" and drums are no longer limited to "playing time." The evolution of the drums from the parade rhythms of early jazz to (recently deceased) Max Roach's bebop time to Elvin Jones' "propulsion" instead of "pulse" to Paul Motian's free floating whisps of rhythm color yields the instrument that Sam Monroe has inherited, plays and uses to interact with the soprano saxophone, which becomes the totality of its own history from Bechet to Steve Lacy and Roscoe Mitchell.

With these possibilities of inclusion, players can still operate in the same way that jazz musicians always have: within the intense arena of communication and improvisation, articulating their own personal language that has absorbed various parts of jazz history. But with new ideas about form and what it can contain, jazz has the potential to become something very fresh and even more personal - and a jazz of the future.

Onward!

The above were program notes for a faculty recital presented by Steve Nelson-Raney at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on October, 2007. The first half of the concert consisted of improvisations by the Chamber Improvisation Trio (Jeff Klatt, cello, Jay Mollerskov, guitar and Steve Nelson-Raney, soprano saxophone). The second half was a long improvisation by the FutureJazz Duo (Sam Monroe, drums, Steve Nelson-Raney, soprano saxophone).