London Improvisers Orchestra - Responses, Reproduction and Reality

Emanem 4110

A good friend of mine once characterized the experience of listening to an improvising orchestra (and I think he was referring specifically to the European examples) as like running full speed through the Louvre – a significant amount of great art occurring at flashes barely comprehensible. This is certainly true of thematically irreverent ensembles like the ICP Orchestra and Willem Breuker Kollektif, as well as the kaleidoscopic Globe Unity outfit, and the more soloistically-inclined aggregates of Alan Silva and Manfred Schoof – but what happens when one stalls out in a room of color field paintings? For such a coloristic situation, there are a few large improvising orchestras for which stasis, not speed, is the key to sensory expansion.

Formed in 1997 as the result of an English project directed by trumpeter-composer-conductor Lawrence ‘Butch’ Morris, the London Improvisers’ Orchestra have remained active since that time as one of the few orchestras of its ilk to focus almost completely on free or conducted (though otherwise almost total) improvisation. At the core of the ensemble, the page reads like a who’s who of the eminent English improvising community: trumpeter Harry Beckett, trombonist Paul Rutherford, violinist Philip Wachsmann, reedmen Evan Parker and Lol Coxhill, bassist Simon H. Fell, drummer Louis Moholo, multi-instrumentalists Terry Day and Steve Beresford, and guitar-sculptor Keith Rowe all participate in the LIO. Responses, Reproduction and Reality (Emanem), spread across two performances at London’s yearly Freedom of the City Festival (2003 and 2004) and featuring thirty-eight improvisers, is larger than anything LIO's contemporaries have put together. Yet despite the presence of a core of improvisers, there is not what one could call a ‘base’ around which the music occurs – say, a singular rhythm section and a few reedmen that rise to the occasion without fail. Rather, one can only speak of a constancy of expanding and contracting fields of activity, an increasing hum of movement and sound interaction that yields an orchestral personality if not a central nervous system. It is somewhat surprising that Louis Moholo – the renowned South African drummer who propelled the Brotherhood of Breath and even kept Kees Hazevoet and Peter Brötzmann in line – does not make use of his characteristic cross-rhythms to give the orchestra a jubilant ‘swing,’ choosing to play in an almost completely textural fashion along with other percussionists (save his underpinning of John Butcher on “Ism”). With only a single complete improvisation in the set, the remainder of the album is conducted by members of the orchestra, in the sense that the pregnant gestures of the conductor are directly in response to the dynamics and direction of the improvisation for as masses push outward, they are themselves pushed onto other branches. Yet among the gestures and trills, the organism maintains singularity, and those moments that stick out from the proceedings – the aforementioned Butcher tenor solo or Beresford and Veryan Weston’s piano filigree on altoist Caroline Kraabel’s conduction “Hearing Reproduction 5,” providing the weight of an orchestra to Jaap Blonk’s vocal sputtering, Rutherford’s solo entrée to the set – are beautifully bandaged thumbs for obvious reasons, providing necessary daubs among layer after layer of rolled-on paint.

As a conduit for masses of sound moving in groups from two to thirty, the London Improvisers Orchestra is a necessary and important vessel and a world apart from the sensory overload that has graced many a free orchestra. In a sense, however, there isn’t enough overload in these proceedings to make them stick in one’s craw – what separates a Clyfford Still from a Mark Rothko, a conduit from the material itself.