Philadelphia Cobra Heritage Preservation Society

A tentet of young Philadelphia musicians gave an outstanding unauthorized performance of John Zorn's Cobra on October 21st, revealing happy truths about both the musicians and the composition. It's not rare for the piece to be attempted without Zorn's involvement. The dissemination of the work beyond Zorn's sphere is largely due to Stephen Drury, who compiled instructions for the piece in the mid-80s while working closely with the composer and went on to distribute them widely among his students for the sake of propagating Zorn's game piece legacy. Drury organizes and prompts (the term used for the conductor-like actions in the piece) Cobra every once in a while via his academic post at The New England Conservatory, and Dan Blacksberg is an undergrad there who lucked into this experience and decided to stake out a home for the piece in his hometown of Philadelphia while staying there and dabbling in the local improv scene in between his semesters in Boston. Currently a senior at NEC, Dan is also promising trombone improvisor tuned into the current trend of austerity and restraint, as I learned from some rewarding performances curated by Jack Wright in Philly last summer.

I'm embarassed to admit I've never been able to attend one of Zorn's own Cobra performances, so I can't offer an informed opinion about the level of fidelity Dan achieved. Existing primarily as an oral tradition, it's easy to imagine the full complexity of the piece being compromised along the chain of transmission, while at the same time it's easy to imagine Drury's unassailable integrity and artistic devotion doing justice to the piece. Among "renegade Cobra" performances, I'd hazard an educated guess that Dan's was one of the best. The performance was the culmination of considerable serious work by Dan organizing, teaching, and rehearsing adventurous young musicians, a process that actually began this past January when he did a few private and public performances of the piece. I attended a public performance on January 14th, 2005, so I can attest to the vast improvements made in his recent second round of Cobra operations.

Held in a now-defunct and sure-to-be-mythologized loft space in South Philly called The Athenæum, a modest crowd gathered on a cold winter night to watch a ramshackle but respectably-well-rehearsed ensemble lurch and laugh their way through the piece. It was a memorable night for me because I'd rushed over after seeing a transcendental, mind-blowing concert by a quintet led by Mat Maneri (with Randy Peterson, Craig Taborn, Michael Formanek, and Tim Berne) in another part of town. I was firmly ensconced on cloud nine after that Maneri gig (the feeling lingered for days), so I really didn't care what those kids were doing in the name of Cobra; I just took it as a fun and surprising event, enjoying it as a spectacle and catching the odd fragment of magic here and there. It was pretty clear they got lost in the real-time labyrinth a few times. One of the highlights was a wild electric bass guitar freakout by Evan Lipson, who played in contrast to the timidity of some of the others. His unexpected explosion reminded me of the bizarre interjections of rock in the performance of Cobra on Tokyo Operations.

The lineup for this January performance was Diane Brown (violin), Ann Goering (viola), Nate Farrar (electric guitar), Dave Smolen (amplified snare drum, etc), Evan Lipson (electric bass guitar), Natalia Quinteros (violin), Joseph Whitt (didgeridoo), Pete Angevine (toy percussion), Dave Fishkin (tenor sax), Carlos Santiago (violin). One thing I found especially amusing about the performance was a number of gestures presumably inspired by Zorn's 80s work, or at least a passing awareness of it, especially Pete and Dave, who indulged in a number of convincing cliches like mouthpiece quacks and toy sounds. It was as if they were trying not only to perform Zorn's composition, but also replicate some of the specific musical personalities historically associated with it, despite the fact that Cobra is compatible with any musical personalities in theory. I think the piece encourages a kind of soundbite mentality, which can lead to the somewhat superficial and gimmicky gestures I saw in this performance, but which also constrains the improvisor in a way that can lead to the profound innovations in rhythmic organization that can be heard in masterpieces like the 1985 and 1986 performances released by hat HUT or the more recent performances released by Tzadik. I really enjoy hearing musicians pack their ideas into little soundbites instead of potentially wearisome narratives. It leads to a constant renewal of material and unpredictable juxtapositions, a large part of the appeal in many examples of traditional non-idiomatic free improvisation like John Stevens' SME. The beauty of Cobra is the way it can harness and intensify this kind of complexity by disabling the macrostructural decision-making processes of the musicians and reallocating their creative resources to microstructures like individual phrases.

Dan clearly learned a lot from those Philly Cobra operations this past winter, as did the five musicians from that group who also performed in the recent sessions. Or maybe they just had an especially good day, because the music vastly exceeded my expectations. Like the successful Zorn-led Cobra performances that have been publicly released, the music was full of thrilling juxtapositions, rhythmic tightrope-traversals, and even a lot of convincing unison ensemble playing. The lineup for this October performance was (going from left to right around the semi-circle in the photo above) Natalia Quinteros (violin), Rob Ludington (drumkit), Joseph Whitt (doublebass), Dan Peterson (contra-alto clarinet, unidentified metallophone), Nick Millevoi (electric guitar), Dave Fishkin (tenor sax, b-flat clarinet, Gibson Maestro sound system for woodwinds), George Korein (electric guitar, voice, movement), Pete Angevine (drumkit, toys), Evan Lipson (doublebass), Pete Veloski (trumpet). The talent and conviction of these players really burst from the stage, and it was also a pleasant discovery hearing the four musicians (Rob, Dan, Nick, Pete) I'd never encountered before in any form. Some of the musicians have a jazz background and do a lot of gigging around the city, and I was happy to see them comfortably mining their strong points with a few jazz-based ensemble passages that were both spontaneous and tight. For example, Pete's trumpet playing was in a confident and compelling hard bop style that soared over some impromptu grooves by the other Pete's drumkit and Evan's doublebass. I think that improvisors should stick with what they understand and can play well instead of falling into the trap of aiming for some preconceived notion of what improvised music should sound like. After all, any musical idiom can be taken as improvisational material and used in equally meaningful ways. So instead of the half-assed Derek Bailey or Sonny Sharrock imitations we've all heard too many times from improv neophytes, I was happy to see Nick playing his guitar in an essentially conventional note-based way with some brilliant irregularly paced runs and a gentle biting tone. It strongly reminded me of Fred Frith's playing in the 70s with Henry Cow (a slightly jazz-rock-flavored guitar style he rarely returned to later in his career) or Rich Woodson's comparable linear inventiveness in his maverick work, a kind of "rock serialism" feeling. Maybe I'm just biased in favor of this style, but I was seriously digging Nick's playing throughout the set, especially because he was confident enough to play fairly often, but never fell into oblivious soloism or overplayed.

At the risk of sounding like the free improv snob I can't pretend not to be, I honestly don't think most of these players would be interesting as non-idiomatic free improvisors, though they're all quite talented. Among the exceptions, the most obvious to me is Evan, an exceptional musician well-abreast of the full range of avant-garde music who I've heard do killer free improv plenty of times. I'm not aware that any of the others actively participate in the free improv scene; I think they mostly pursue jazz, rock, and academic notationalism. I only offer this curt impression for the sake of understanding the relationship between what Cobra brings to a given performance as an invention of Zorn and what the performers bring themselves as improvisors. Because a performance is a concrete entity comprised of human actions and associated phenomena like sound events, whereas things like paper, ink, words, and memory are formally arbitrary and heterogeneous entities difficult to analyze in relation to each other, a composition can usefully be taken as the intersection of a set of possible performances such that the subset of actual performances serves as a fruitful ostensional epistemology. Since Cobra is defined methodologically and not in terms of musical material, its existence as a composition is potentially vacuous and the key question I think I observed a resounding affirmative answer to is whether the method translates into musical content. It was a clear case of wonderful music emerging from collective interaction even when the individual parts were bland, and it's this collective interaction that was constrained and regulated through Cobra. From this perspective, Cobra can be reconciled with the composer/performer model of recent centuries in which the composer is given specific credit for a performance they had no direct connection with. In other words, I believe this was a great performance primarily because it was an accurate rendition of a great composition, and only secondarily because of the performers' self-generated content.

The piece was dominated by call-and-response structures in which timing was often more important than specific gestural content. It's a piece in which gestures are framed by expectations about pacing and transitions that imbue drama in ordinary musical fragments. Yet some gestures were more interesting than others, and it was George Korein whose imagination and improvisational agility proved the most compelling. A curious case to say the least, I simply wasn't expecting such sublime moments to come from someone who rarely performs as an instrumentalist or improvisor and is known more for eccentric studio wizadry. For starters, he primarily used an electric guitar in this performance and crafted delicate brief shapes of soft distorted tones that brought an element of today's subtle electroacoustic improv into a mix otherwise dominated by conventional musical vocabularies. His playing was also based more on a virtuosity of listening and comfort with the improvisational moment than the virtuosity of instrumental technique that the others tended to rely on. In any case, he was the wild card of the ensemble, coming from a totally different background than the others (all music-school type players) and being a last-minute addition to the ensemble the day before the performance, for which the ensemble had been selected and prepared well in advance. Having gotten a feeling for George's sensibilities from the occasional encounter around town at gigs and such, I suspect he has musical intuitions that made him especially amenable to a crash-course in Cobra. While his subtle guitar bits were quite nice, it was gestures of an entirely different sort that have left me with no choice but to cite him for that ineffable rare spirit common to true free improvisors. Surely noone in the room could've predicted that he'd vocalize during this concert, but when he suddenly issued relatively high-pitched yelping notes from his mouth they were just perfect in every way, separated by juicy pauses, with even pitch and timbre, and without a trace of gratuitous variation. Far from being novelty, these were compelling sounds that lost nothing in successive vocal episodes. In fact, they were nothing short of electrifying as George made slight increases in pitch and intensity at one point. Just as effective was George's use of movement instead of sound during an extended call-and-response sequence between several musicians. He whipped his hair from side-to-side by vigorously shaking his head. The timing was perfect and the soundlessness engaging.

The highlight of the evening came when George entered into a spectacular synthesis of sound and movement resulting in his position on stage as a crumpled heap, depicted in the photo above. Compare this photo to the group shot above in which George is seated with a red guitar and raised hand on the left side of saxophonist Dave Fishkin. The sequence was breathtaking. George began slowly detuning his guitar while making a sporadic sound gesture, decelerating with Reichian ineluctability to the point of dramatic tension that gradually drew his body forward on his chair. In sublime slow motion the process continued until his body crashed to the floor without the slightest bit of resistance. The sheer awkwardness and processual honesty of his resultant and sustained crumpled position was a continuation of the solo. Therein lie the real promise of improvisation. George's stunning performance this evening came on the heels of puzzling gossip on the improv scene about an event that had occurred the previous week but I had sadly missed. If I have the story correct, George (again, not at all known as a free improvisor) suddenly jumped on stage in the middle of a performance by Ensemble Ciutadella (an improv group I believe to be comprised of Stephen Hastings-King, piano; Hilary Baker, soprano saxophone; Samuel Belkowitz, drumkit; Eugene S Lew, drumset; Helena Espvall-Santoleri, cello) and began playing disruptive rock beats on a drumkit and the like, generating a controversial spectacle I've heard reactions to ranging from bewilderment to whispered admiration. Taken together with previous data, I'm beginning to sense the emergence of a new generation's answer to Jason Willett, Baltimore's infamous inscrutable genius of Megaphone/Leprechuan Catering/Half-Japanese/Ruins/post-RIO-dada notoriety. Both worrisome and thrilling, this prospect.

Recounting a few other individual highlights, I was puzzled by a wonderful sound in the mix at various points, a really warm, analog, electronic and reedy sound that carried strong solo lines I couldn't attribute to anything happening on stage. Only afterwards when I glanced about the equipment on stage did I discover it was Dave Fishkin using a vintage woodwind processing unit on his tenor sax and clarinet. Incredible sounds, and Dave's playing was both subversive and seriously skillful. Always a sucker for good reedwork, I was consistently thrilled by the playing of Dan Peterson, an unmistakably advanced player in control of the rare tall and skinny beast that is a contra-alto clarinet.

All told, this was a unexpected musical triumph met with tremendous enthusiasm by a huge audience that filled all available seats and ran upwards of 120 by the best estimate. Held in a gorgeous old building at the University of Pennsylvania at the hub of the city's grass-roots performance culture with free admission and given a strong plug by local newspapers, it drew all sorts of unfamiliar faces clearly indifferent to the dreadfully attended but frequently monumental improv events that occur in Philly fairly often. While all promotional materials clearly indicated that Zorn wasn't affiliated with this performance and would not be present, somehow I suspect his name alone garnered this attention. It's attention well-deserved and, following some of my reasoning above, it's only fitting that it has the sociological parallel of a Stravinsky or Ligeti performance that likewise draws large crowds by virtue of a composer's well-known creation. I suspect this can't be said of many "renegade Cobra" performances, but I think the seriousness and skill of Dan and his motley crew served as fair compensation to the composer in an important sense because it was concrete and bountiful evidence that Zorn created something of profound substance and resilience, much like a great performance of a Stravinsky or Ligeti piece honors the legacy of the composer. While traversing the gray area between an autonomously replicable composition and a fragile segment of oral tradition, I think everyone came out ahead with this one. In the January edition of Dan's Philly Cobra operations, he placidly announced his ensemble as "The Philadelphia Cobra Heritage Preservation Society". I don't recall him using the same name this October, but all (side-splitting) humor aside, it convinced me that the Cobra heritage not only should but can be preserved, the latter a far from obvious possibility.

It wouldn't be Cobra without some hat action, so here's my tribute to the diverse headgear of the evening. It's aspects like this that symbolize the visual spectacle of the piece, and much like I'm told Zorn's own Cobra realizations run, the performance also showed it's possible to take something very seriously and still have fun. I'm firmly opposed to the concept of fun in music in general, but here was a rare case where humor and theatricality didn't conflict at all with musical focus. The group ran through three distinctive takes on Cobra during the set and had so much momentum and great music behind them it felt appropriate and wonderful when Nick Millevoi dug into a Black Sabbath riff ("Iron Man" as I recall) during the especially colorful and playful brief final piece.

~Michael Anton Parker

I meant to run this entry in a more timely fashion, but it was set aside in nearly finished form for more than a few weeks as I became backlogged on music babbling. Many apologies to all concerned.