Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet featuring Michael Pearson - Be Music, Night

Okkadisk 12060

Peter Brötzmann might seem an unlikely suspect to organize a meeting between contemporary improvisation’s most visible intercontinental free jazz ensemble and the epic odes of beat-contemporary Kenneth Patchen. Patchen did, after all, read with jazz accompaniment and was a vested supporter of bebop; he toured with the Chamber Jazz Sextet in the 1950s, a rare working ensemble that integrated Patchen’s hardscrabble poems with West Coast modern jazz. Patchen also recorded with Canadian pianist Alan Neil for Folkways (Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada, reissued by Locust). Yet Be Music, Night (Okka Disk) is the first I’ve heard of a complete programmatic integration of free improvisation with one of Patchen’s long poems.

It is a fairly ready connection, the meeting of a gruff tenor man from working-class Wuppertal, whose image of raw, lung-busting power yields an earthy romantic as Patchen’s rugged individualism is that of a bard singing of the crags of our consciousness. Brötzmann recorded a solo dedication to Patchen just over twenty years ago for FMP, the classic Fourteen Love Poems, a collection of short unaccompanied reed pieces that mirror textures and cadences found in the poet’s own love poems. Recorded in November 2004 for the Chicago Humanities Project, this recording features Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark on reeds, trombonist Jeb Bishop, cornetist Joe McPhee (also heard on alto), drummers Michael Zerang and Paal Nilsson-Love, bassist Kent Kessler and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, as the Tentet undertakes the ambitious project of assembling an hour’s worth of music to the epic Patchen poem “Be Music, Night,” read here by actor/author Michael Pearson. The first thing one notices about this particular program is that, unlike the aforementioned Folkways LP, poetry is not recited with ‘jazz accompaniment’ or even ‘freely improvised commentary;’ rather, Patchen’s epic song and the music of the ensemble are as one organism, moving in sometimes contrasting directions.

In some ways, the poem itself is a centerpiece, for though the Patchen piece is integral to the longest movement of the record, the 41-minute second movement, it is bookended by two ten-minute instrumental compositions, the frantic and punchy group interaction of the opener and the brooding composition “Master of a Small House,” a Brötzmann piece dedicated to bassist Fred Hopkins featured on the quartet recording Tales Out of Time (Hat Hut, 2004). “Master of a Small House” gleans much from an orchestral reading, with selectively-placed low brass soundmasses behind Brötzmann’s and McPhee’s solos, recalling Bill Dixon’s crunching horn arrangements on “Metamorphoses 1962-1966” (Intents and Purposes, RCA-Victor, 1967). The transitions, too, are abrupt – a soulful McPhee alto solo trying to climb its way out of vicious collective improvisation closes the first movement with an abrupt halt, as the second movement begins with Pearson’s reading accompanied by Brötzmann and Vandermark’s woody clarinet walks and the tearing sheet metal of Bishop’s trombone. The loosely swinging rhythm section gradually settles in with an increasingly toughening recitation, the mood darkening over guttural growls and mocking trombone babble (Jeb Bishop might be the star of the ensemble), Pearson’s repetition of the chorus becoming ever more buried by ensemble tension, until the nine musicians release in ecstatic density and give way to a distorted, amped-up Lonberg-Holm electric cello solo sounding all the world as though the yoga-mastering, chain-smoking cellist is channeling Keiji Haino. Patchen’s fascination with West Coast jazz is not lost on Brötzmann, as relaxed, swinging and oddly dissonant interludes for a clarinet-baritone-rhythm quartet accompany the reading at several junctures (though they quickly give way to freedom). The ensemble knows how to play with Patchen’s own dark uncertainties however, his stoic humanism commented upon with slap-tongued and agitated baritone, nagging at Pearson as he intones that “this is a good world and war shall fail / and God will not forget us,” the music teasing and tearing at Patchen’s words like hyenas at a gazelle. Art will prevail, but with constant prodding and an astronomical range of difficulties.

It is somewhat ironic, then, that in many ways there is more Patchen in the colorfully caterwauling ensemble than the recitation of the poem – Pearson’s reading is sometimes a bit too clean if given to theatrical inflection, the grit of Patchen’s own voice replaced with the grit of gutbucket saxophones and tailgate trombone. There is more color in the dirty R&B theme that enters in slovenly, as Gustafsson lets loose with a baritone solo of perverse proportions, Patchen’s angel of night a bit sluttier than one might expect. Art does, after all have a prevailing stench of as much compost as paint and philosophy.

~ Clifford Allen