he first time I saw Barry Guy play - double bass at the Guildhall School during Orchestra, an ensemble built largely from at the Huddersfield Contemporary the 1960s was geared towards feeling good musicians I had met at the Little Theatre Clu" Music Festival in 1991 - was the first about my instrument. Through my double-bass "To someone like Derek Bailey, the whole time I witnessed free improvisation professor I found myself in the BBC Symphony idea of reading from a part and foll0"'li~g a unfolding in the present tense, an Orchestra playing music by Olivier Messiaen at conductor was taken as a provocation and initiation into the intimate bond free improvisers The Proms in 1970 conducted by Pierre Boulez. the rehearsal process revealed these personal share with their instruments that fundamentally By then I had already been going to the Little agendas. I recently heard some of the changed the way I thought about music. Guy Theatre Club in Covent Garden for a couple tapes and from the various groans - and wasn't moving with, or in time, to the music as of years, where people like Evan Parker, John spectacular bad language - you might have he played duo with Evan Parker. Rather it was Stevens, Trevor Watts and Paul Rutherford assumed a disaster was unfolding, but now his movements that created time, space and came into my life. At Guildhall I was analysing aware of the intensity of their concentration; sound. Muscles flexed, fingers threw shapes, music by Ligeti and Stockhausen and , through their sheer determination to make it work. hands lurched between strings and bow. His my friend Bernhard Living, I heard Mingus As with all the extended pieces I've written fluid, twitching body would have likely spilt on record for the first time, which left a big involving improvisers, the challenge was to off his stool, I thought, had it not been held impression. I was in my early twenties and my create a compositional form, in this case in place by his skin. I was impressed and mind was open to' all kinds of interesting stuff." for 10 musicians, that could also ~mbrace entranced - and by Guy's deft handling of a By the time Guy joined John Stevens' spontaneity. " subsequent improvisation workshop during Guy didn't hang around long in the SME which a crabby music teacher complained he appears on only one recording, Withrlr!:lllAl that he had brought his pupils along to hear Weather Report riffs not all this noise. Twenty-five years on, and with his 70th birthday fast approaching, Barry Guy is rubbery lash of his bass rebounding still dishing it up all hot and unexpected. the pounce of Derek Bailey's guitar yanked The sampler disc attached to this issue of open workable space for Rutherford's Jazzwise gives a window into his enduring brass inventions (Bailey would subsequently relationship with the Zurich-based Intakt be replaced by violinist Philipp W;lr.tl!':n1arlnl, label, alerting us to the scope of his recent Among the transformational players of projects. Guy's long-standing trio with history, Scott LaFaro re-mapping pianist Marilyn Crispell and drummer syntax of how bassists could Paul Lytton fuses his background in inside a small group changed his free improvisation with composed view of the instrument - and when forms; another trio, Beyond, featuring Guy wasn't listening to the Bill saxophonist Jurg Wickihalder and Trio, Gary Peacock's performance drummer Lucas Niggli, finds Guy Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity left asserting and displacing jazz time; reeling. while with his Blue Shroud Band, his "I was dragged towards composed structures flake away to Unity," Guy recalls. "There was this ' make space for improvisation and sound of Albert's saxophO",e which J' carefully placed flashbacks to the music of Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1967, the found compelling and deeply -moving - TN!~ IAJI,.V·. JS Bach and HIF Biber. On 16 April, at the group had already evolved away from the fluent of hollering, like he was vocaliSing Vortex, Guy will celebrate his big birthday with free-jazz chatter heard on their 1966 album a similarly varied palette. Appearances from Eyemark(reissued on Emanen as Challenge) Evan Parker and Howard Riley will hat-tip with numbers including '2.B.Ornette'. A affiliations that stretch back four decades, while distinctive, local improvised music was a set from the Beyond trio will represent newer emerging, and I wondered how consciously notes; this music was like a resonating associations. The evening begins with a duo Guy heard 'free improvisation' as being Gary as a halo on top. set from Guy and his wife, the Baroque violinist something apart from 'free jazz'? "That's an "What LaFaro brought to the Bill Evans Maya Homburger, where they will improvise and interesting one," he muses. Slight pause. "Even group was, naturally, something quite " perform music by Biber and the contemporary if the distinction might seem clear today, back although equally important to me. Scotty ':.::g. Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag. then we were trying to work it all out. I was sometimes sound like a violinist, and would "The aim was always to find a place where attracted to the SME simply because of the move across the entire instrument, his improvisation and composition could function commitment of the musicians towards their feeling effortlessly strong. The phraseology together," Guy begins, before I've had a chance instruments, and also their ideas of freedom. he brought to jazz, and the reactive way to ask a question, like any interview ought to This was the starting point of Ode, my first his interactions could c!Jange the flow and begin by addressing this most fundamental large-scale piece for improvisers which led to harmonic direction of the music - here was a point. "Everything I did when I was studying the formation of the London Jazz Composers complete idea of relaxed communIcation." 28 MARCH 1711 ~auwI.. Listening to Guy's work with painting 'Guernica'. A soliloquy from JOrg Wickihalder's Beyond, and the trumpeter Percy Pursglove calls us mechanisms embedded inside his to attention. Inside the orchestral own trio with Crispell and Lytton, it's ranks the likes of pianist Agusti not difficult to hear how those seeds Fernimdez, saxophonist Per Texas planted in the 1960s have continued Johansson and drummer Raman to blossom. Wickihalder's intricately L6pez work alongside two musicians plotted compositions, with their more often associated with Baroque malleable fluctuations of pulse, harmony music - violinist Maya Hamburger and mood, require definite jazz chops; and violist Fanny Paccoud. With the and Guy digs deep into his roots in music hitting peaks of emotional the bass truths of Mingus and LaFaro. angst, Guy's structure dissolves into With Crispell and Lytton, he re-enters a stretches of the solo violin 'Mystery negotiation into that terrain between free r ;;;;;;;;;.J Sonatas' by Biber, a mainstay of the improvisation and composition which he has Baroque repertoire, and the work ends with a long called his own. re-working of the 'Agnus Dei ' from Bach's 'B "Because of clashing diaries and geographic Minor Mass'. separation, the trio with Marilyn and Paul " Loo~ , I knew this was risky!" Guy exclaims. is something wonderful that happens only "I knew the sort of criticism that might follow infrequently," he reflects. "When we come from using this borrowed material - and I together the music needs to slot into place thought long and hard about it. But in this piece very quickly - it can't develop on the road I had to find a spiritual essence and, I thought, because we are never on the road. So we have 'I can't write like these guys'. The final thing to start from somewhere and the compositions you hear is music by Bach, but I agonised over I write are all through-composed but flexible, how I should set that moment up - how to containing springboards and suggestions for find a natural transition from my music which improvisation. The album we've just released, could prepare the audience for this moment of Deep Memory, pulls together the resonances introspection. And then I knew the piece had to of all the previous records." A piece from the end. After the 'B Minor Mass', there's nowhere new album like 'Pallen Angel', I say, else to go." sounds like that tension between We're speaking just a few weeks after composed material and improvisation the US election. With the uncertainties has been written directly into the piece raised by a Trum p presidency and by through a simple demarcation of note­ our own forthcoming Brexit, and the specific falling patterns that open the general .rise of a populist far-right, we piece, given to bass and piano, and discuss whether a rebirth of the spirit clearly notated, against a free flow of of 1968 might give improvised music a sweeter piano triads that follow, which shot in the arm. You don't need to read are obviously improvised. "I think a transcription of our worries about that's right, although the piano and Trump - those arguments have been double bass music that begins 'Falten well-rehearsed elsewhere - but Guy's Angel ' is actually indicated graphically, thoughts about where improvised music rather than through conventional music can (and should) overlap with society remains notation. For 'Silenced Music', a later track on fighting talk. "Improvised music," he tells the album, I was happy for Paul to decide what me, as we're about to wind up, "remains the to do himself. I handed him the music and said best model for how to communicate, of how 'think about it' and now he reckons this is the to create something together.