The earliest jazz musicians were often highly suspicious of recording technology. Why spend all those lonely hours, they reasoned, burnishing a tone, only to have it reduced to sonic slush and fat-frying crackle by acoustic recording? Others like trumpeter Freddie Keppard more pragmatically feared that recording did little more than issue an invitation to others to steal his licks. Others yet saw the recording industry as a greedy Moloch.
Technology improved, imitation became a more sincere form of flattery, the industry came to realize that not all jazz musicians were innocent lambs-to-slaughter. But still the nature and implications of recording remained part of the existential – maybe even ontological – drama of a music that was supposed to be created in the moment and which dispersed at the close of its occasion: “gone in the air” as Eric Dolphy famously put it. It’s a faintly unpalatable truth that for perhaps a majority of its admirers, the history of jazz is the history of jazz recording. During the LP era, except perhaps on those labels that espoused a by-the-yard philosophy of repertory recording, making an album was a considerable undertaking and a very definite and visible outcrop in your personal musical landscape. Chick Corea once explained to me how initially reluctant he had been to “rush” into recording, how important it felt to get everything right, and how dismayed he was that barely schooled tyros were now hurrying into print before they had found anything much to say.
At the receiving end, it was hard to disagree, but also rather discomfiting to think that one’s sense of a musician’s work and progress was like the discovery of a small archipelago – some islands small and insignificant, others larger and potentially historic – in a vast, unplumbable ocean. As time went by, and recording technology further evolved, at both ends of the process, one became drawn to so-called completism, the inclusion of “alternate” takes, false starts, breakdowns, the squawk of a producer calling for one more, chatter and discord among the musicians. In much the same way as revisionist literary history was stripping Shakespeare of his unreachable mastery and relegating him to the wider history of Elizabeth and Jacobean drama, with all its vulgarity and violence, the idea of the five-star, masterpiece, career-defining album was giving way to a more horizontal and notionally democratic conception of “the work”. The box set preserving every rescuable note of a club residency became a new paradigm and industry staple. Obscurity – Webster and Ford and Middleton and Rowley, rather than Shakespeare – was valorized.
With the CD, which we naively thought was the apex medium – it became possible to squeeze a tremendous amount of music into a small and relatively durable space, though we soon began to find them scraped along the floor and unplayable, or retasked as drinks coasters. The physical size even of an ambitious collection shrank dramatically, but so too did something of our scale of respect for recorded music.
Now everything has changed again. The CD has been transvalued into just another cluttering, polluting technology, its aesthetic unloveliness no longer countered by convenience. The internet carries vast amounts of music global distances in the mere flicker of an eye, and something fundamental has changed in our attitudes to music. The great saxophonist David Murray was once asked how it felt to be having his CDs issued in batches of three by a supportive Japanese label. Not too testily he pointed out that even these represented only the tiniest fraction of the music he was making at the time, a salutary lesson.
I have no idea how much of Ivo Perelman’s music I have in my notional possession: that would mean on compact disc, a few tapes, a great deal stored on one hard drive or another. He is by the standards of a past age vastly prolific but also strongly defined by the creative relationships he has formed over the years, and particularly now the partnership with Barry Guy and Ramón López. But assessing Perelman’s work, or even simply appreciating it without any critical intent, involves getting rid of any thought of “productivity”. We are (finally, though maybe too late to make a difference) entering a post-industrial age, certainly in culture if not in the industries which produce the biggest smoke plumes and effluent. It makes no sense to talk about product any more or to conceive of an artist’s work as an island group of “masterpieces” and surrounding “transitional”, “consolidating” or experimentally unsuccessful outliers. We are finally able, in a way David Murray perhaps hinted at, to tap into not a body of music, but a process of music-making.
Barry Guy has his own unique perspective on this. I first heard him on a record called Prayer For Peace by the improvising trio Amalgam, and then, a matter of days or it might have been weeks later, playing at a small venue in London. I don’t recall his collaborators on the latter occasion, but what I do recall with absolute vividness is the impression that the very first notes he played then, on disc and in person, were part of a continuous chain of sound that has continued unbroken to the present day. This might sound like some kind of Mucho Maas aural paranoia, but it’s a strong and unbreakable conviction that has carried me through Guy’s music from Amalgam to the London Jazz Composers Orchestra to Baroque material with his wife Maya Homburger, to his illuminating work with the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and his explorations of the neglected common ground between improvised music and the (mostly abstract) visual arts.
A very definite way-station in that long continuum is a record Guy made just a few years ago, before the world succumbed to the hysteria of a new Masque of the Red Death. It was an album called Sidereus Nuncius – The Starry Messenger on which his playing partner was the drummer and percussionist Ramón López. The title comes from a pamphlet written by Galileo Galilei in the humanist Neo-Latin favoured by scientific writers in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The development of the telescope had allowed observers to view ten times as many stars as previously, as well as planetary moons, nebulae and other cosmic phenomena. The analogy with the present boom in recording accessibility hardly needs to be stated.
What made finding the record doubly exciting was that it was a duo performance by Guy and Ramón López, another artist for whom I nurse the conviction that everything he plays is part of a continuous performance begun long ago and sustained to the present. I can only reliably date that feeling to a record called Eleven Drums Songs, which I believe to be now twenty five years old (though I swear I have an earlier disc with a saxophonist called Cotinaud, though there are gaps on the shelf in both the places it might be filed).
In part, some will argue, this impression of a continuity of performance is simply a function of recognition. It is, perhaps, easier for saxophone players than for bassists and drummers to have or develop an instantly recognisable “voice” on the instrument. It was once semi-seriously proposed that a British saxophone player who had lost his passport might prove his identity simply by playing a couple of phrases; regrettably, the border authorities were not jazzophiles. But I think it’s more than this. If music-making, indeed creative process, makes sense at all, then it is not as a series of works but at worst as episodes in the history of work. If the creative process is not a singular thing, then it is merely dabbling and our over-emphasis on originality and change (or development, if you’re a critic) is seriously misplaced.
The music of Ivo Perelman now resembles a vast multi-tier opera, with more functional recitative passage, grand transitional musics and outstandingly beautiful arias. It would be redundant, and inconsistent given what has already been said, to pick out individual tracks in the work you will hear here. It is part of an unfolding narrative, and still more excitingly, a confluence of three continuous musics, each part of which has a fractal relationship to the whole. At the opposite extreme of the telescope – which has since, via Hubble and James Webb, delivered previously unimaginable multiplications of the visual field and its temporal component – there is the microscope. Take this music as a whole as best you can, though we exist in a permanent skirmish with the clock (arguably the third paradigm-changing technology of the Renaissance), but also delve down deep into every moment of it. Be unafraid of scrolling back and confirming that, yes, they did just play that phrase in perfect synchronisation or that for a moment they seem to be moving apart at warp speed. These are all part of the experience, and it is, I promise, a profound and deeply satisfying one.