Clive Bell and Sylvia Hallett - The Geographers (Emanem)

Emanem 4112

In order to find the roots of improvisation, the communicative act that has infused music since its earliest inception, it is necessary to look beyond the tempered scale and bandstand practices to non-tempered and ritualistic practices that imbue those most ‘basic’ ways of making music. To be sure, there are several ways in which non-western source material have found their way into contemporary improvisation. As a spiritual communion, a celebratory act of reverence and worship of sound run through the mill of jazz and western classical music as well as China, India, Japan, Turkey and points in between, ‘ethnic improvisation’ has informed the Sea Ensemble and Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society, among others. Of a more direct approach, and conceived to gain both a more diverse palette and a constancy of new playing situations, the use of an entire catalog of non-western and homemade instruments has informed the work of composers like Mauricio Kagel and the improvisation group New Phonic Art (Michel Portal, Vinko Globokar, Carlos Roqué Alsina, Jean-Pierre Drouet).

Somewhere in between reverence and a knotty neo-dadaist approach to process lies the duo of Clive Bell and Sylvia Hallett. Hallett, a regular fixture in the London Improvisers’ Orchestra as a violinist (see Bagatellen for a review of the LIO’s latest), has worked since the mid-1970s with many of England’s most vanguard improvisers, a tireless explorer of high harmonics and lengthy bowed tones: violin, viola, cello, sarangi, bowed bicycle wheels, saws, electronically-produced sounds and voice have all entered into her lexicon. Bell, primarily a shakuhachi player (he studied the instrument in Tokyo) and a collector of Asian mouth instruments, has worked in the LIO as well as with the BBC Symphony; The Geographers is their first recorded duo. Something one has to keep in mind when listening to Hallett and Bell (or any of the above mentioned ensembles) is inherent in the title of The Geographers: making an aesthetic, creative map of the world does, on many occasions, require cultural juxtaposition. Such a concept is part and parcel of this music – as in New Phonic Art, where it is highly doubtful that any other musical situation could employ zurna, alphorn, pipe organ and tabla in a quartet improvisation, so Cretan pipes, electronics and bowed bicycle spokes probably have not met before this duo. Luckily, The Geographers appears as a balance between reverent and post-structural juxtaposition, humming electronics and high harmonics from Hallett’s arsenal girding and filling out the traditionally-played, plaintive and full-bodied sound of Bell’s various pipes and flutes. “Shrugging into Spring” opens with percussion and dissonant reed cries from Bell’s pi saw (a Thai free reed instrument) before segueing into an intense bout of shakuhachi and viola, a slowly building overture of disparates. Sarangi and shakuhachi are employed for “Flying on the Landing,” an exploration of controlled violence, Bell’s shakuhachi given a pinched, terse vocabulary to mate with the sarangi’s 35 tuned blades. The khene, a Chinese harmonica, is given a hymnal workout (indeed, as an instrument, it has a processional quality) to an underpinning of bowed bicycle spokes in “With the Book Propped Up Against the Horse’s Mane.” To be sure, there is a foray into wispy bent notes and wide vibratos commingling, saw and breath in “The Weald,” the thirteen-minute centerpiece in which Bell’s shakuhachi takes on a distinctly bowed, shrill character, a thicker grade of metal to match Hallett’s saw.

Juxtapositions, while undeniably present, are often subtle and, as Bell and Hallett are well aware of the potential of both instrumentation and listening ability, ironic commentary is quashed by the complementary beauty that each is able to bring from their vocabulary. With The Geographers, Clive Bell and Sylvia Hallett have created a rather visceral meditation on sound – leaving one to wonder whether the originators of musical communication had such power in mind.