BORAH BERGMAN, LOL COXHILL & PAUL HESSION / Acts of Love
Borah Bergman (piano); Lol Coxhill (soprano saxophone); Paul Hession (drums)
With a unique, two-handed approach that dispenses with the traditional notion of piano playing as competing or interlocking lines, Borah Bergman deals with sound as mass, great chilly bergs or hot flows of magma that change shape as different layers flow against one another, hardening and melting at different rates. By contrast, Lol Coxhill is a singer, a chanticleer on the dunghill of the city or on the rooftree of your house, a head full of old songs and the harmonic codes to transform them. The simplest difference may be that Coxhill comes from a jazz tradition, never more communicative than when playing changes and subverting a saccharine show-tune, while Bergman, for all his deep understanding of blues, boogie-woogie, swing (lessons from Teddy Wilson), bebop (a revelatory glimpse of Bud Powell), comes from somewhere else; classical, cantorial, exclamatory, De profundis clamavi...
What unites them, though, even beyond the astonishing linqua franca of improvisation, is the idea of music as a kind of labour. Both seem to inhabit an old European ideal, anti-romantic and the toughest creative path there is, that subordinates the idea of works, perfect icons of expression ready for admiring consumption, to the idea of work, a physical, mental and moral effort that his ritual at one end of its spectrum and entertainment away at the other. These are hugely enjoyable pieces, they also have an element of ritual to them; but at their core is something much more profound and constantly evolving.
The evolution of music of this kind depends on a very particular sense of time. Like some of the finest British "free" percussionists - Eddie Prevost, the late John Stevens, the younger Mark Sanders - Paul Hession has the ability to impart swing to apparently metreless playing. His virtues are easily overlooked because he seems to blend effortlessly into any background or environment - the classical evolutionary virtue - and one only becomes aware of his importance when he drops out for a measure or two. Such are the ironies of shedding a performing ego.
TRACK LIST
Act of Love 101 (10:16)
Act of Love 102 (5:17)
Act of Love 103 (3:56)
Act of Love 104 (4:50)
Act of Love 105 (4:17)
Act of Love 106 (2:56)
Act of Love 107 (2:22)
Act of Love 108 (2:28)
Act of Love 109 (2:39)
Act of Love 110 (3:07)
REVIEWS
Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic
Much has been made of pianist Borah Bergman's phenomenal technique – the true emancipation of the left hand from its traditional accompanimental role, and all that – but his distinctive harmonic concept has received little attention. Like Misha Mengelberg, he combines predominantly tonal intervals (major and minor thirds, often in recognisable triads and sevenths) with strategically placed adjacent semitones to create a rich yet slightly acidic harmonic field. Previous outings with volcanic free jazz blowers like Roscoe Mitchell and Peter Brötzmann have tended to ride roughshod over the bittersweet melancholy of the 72 year old Brooklyn maestro's playing, but in Lol Coxhill and Paul Hession he's found the perfect playing partners. Coxhill, like Bergman, is stylistically impossible to pigeonhole – anyone still unfamiliar with the extraordinary range of his music should check out the Emanem retrospective compilation Spectral Soprano at once – and wilfully independent (aka bloody minded) to boot: like Steve Lacy he often gives the impression he's following his own agenda with scant regard to what's going on around him, until a sudden turn-on-a-dime melodic twist reveals he was right there all along. He and Bergman display a remarkable awareness of each other's playing, especially in the pitch domain, where Coxhill's serpentine elegance gently unfolds Bergman's harmonic origami while Hession's immaculate brushwork deftly underpins the structure. Hession, as Brian Morton commented recently in The Wire (he also provided the notes to this disc), "just gets better every time I hear him" – but he also knows just when to lay off and let the melodic and harmonic logic of his playing partners direct the flow. Even the most exuberant tracks, notably the fifth, full of Bergman's forearm volleys and Coxhill's raucous squawks, remain light, the musical energy flying free rather than burning a fiery hole in the floor. Despite its distinctly uninspiring cover and generic track titles, Acts Of Love is definitely one of the most exciting and beautiful improv releases of the year.
The main character in Marcel Aymé's poetic short story "Le Passe-murailles" has the ability to walk through walls. Acts of Love could be the sound of him getting trapped in one of them. Operating in the exciting grey area between free jazz, improv, modern composition and plain old insanity, the trio comprises different generations of adventurous improvisers embarked on the construction of thick, organic noisescapes -- that is, the always excitingly uncharted territory where manic saxophone squeals, collapsing piano scales and spasmodic multi-limbed drumming collide and coalesce in unpredictable episodes and configurations. From hysterical, superbusy quantum jazz workouts to crushing near silence, Acts of Love is so stunningly intense that, by the time you reach "Act Of Love 104", four tracks in, you'll feel as though Tank from The Matrix had fed your brain cells with data from the last 35 five years of post-bebop and beyond, with his finger on the fast forward button all the time.
This is probably due to the courageous decision to place the album's definitive tour de force at its very beginning (the exhausting ten-plus minute "Act Of Love 101", of course), a choice that eloquently reflects the musicians' take-no-prisoners attitude. The trio's patternless, possessed playing evokes timeless Escher-esque convolutions. Bergman's volcanic sound-masses are Expressionistic, torn apart, always on the verge of collapse -- like the sound of Carl Stalling's amplified brain frying on a nervous meltdown. Coxhill's subversive shrieking sax combines Ayleresque elements of fury and dissonance, with abstruse touches of quasi-harmelodicism and frightening, exhilarating results. Drummer Hession, following the great tradition of daring British free percussionists (AMM's Eddie Prévost and John Stevens are namechecked in the liner notes), works his way out of the sonic labyrinths thrown at him by his co-conspirators, returning a furious cascade of hyperactive fills, kaleidsocopic cymbal-work and tumultuous, meterless rhythmic enigmas.
More often than not, amazingly, a perverse sense of swing emerges from these chance meetings. It's a foreboding all-out assault in which sonic accidents reveal an a posteriori sense of purpose, while never condescending to a safe, repeatable, discernible "style". Sometimes, impossible as it may sound, "music" needs to stop being played. Acts Of Love is the sound of what happens when that liberating excess takes place.
The problem with some contemporary examples of freely improvised music is that the genre has achieved its own level of orthodoxy. If one is blessed/cursed with a sense of history, what seemed cutting-edge 20-something years ago can seem almost reactionary today. Fortunately there are still musicians adept at jolting us jaded types out of our ennui, and Acts of Love presents three: Brooklyn pianist Borah Bergman and, from the U.K., soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill and drummer Paul Hession. While there are volatile moments, Acts is marked by both remarkable restraint and contrast. Bergman plays with splintery, thunderous key-cracking, but there are just as many moments of his sublimely tender, spacious lyricism. Coxhill gets positively feral at times with his twittering, tart-toned and gloriously cathartic skronk, but he also wrangles a poignantly blues-descended warble that distills wry world-weariness into a few notes. Hession is often so self-effacing one can almost forget he's there, yet he wails as convincingly as his compatriots-as crisp and propulsive as Jack DeJohnette and as impressionistic as Paul Motian. Acts of Love is an album for a friend who believes he can't get into free improv.
