By Stuart Broomer
I first wrote about AMM at some length about 25 years ago. The most durable
sentence in the piece (further expanded at length ten years ago and since
supplemented with regular reviews) might be “AMM deserves hearing in inverse
proportion to which it can be talked about successfully.” While I still
believe that, I’ve learned nothing from it, and continue to try, if only to
alert fellow listeners to the availability of new releases.
David Ilic once wrote in The Wire that “With AMM, their albums are
as alike or unalike as trees.” That may be truer of some editions of the
group than others, with Eddie Prévost as the sole constant in the group’s
nearly sixty-year history, and that allusion to trees may take on special
significance in the performance under discussion: Testing documents
a concert at the Museum of Garden History in Lambeth, London. The concert
took place on December 13 th 2004 when AMM existed in one of its
duo forms, with EddieP
révost here playing tam-tam, stringed barrel
drum and other percussion and John Tilbury playing piano. They’re joined by
guest Sachiko M, who plays sinewaves. Testing is a single piece,
running to 1:07:33. The work is sufficiently subtle, the sonic materials so
spacious and mysterious, that some identities here attributed to the sounds
might well be mistaken.
In addition to Tilbury’s gifts as an improviser, he is also one of the most
distinguished interpreters of recent piano compositions, with a special
affinity for the work of Morton Feldman, those works that are at once
minimalist in gesture and vastly expansive in time. Testing begins
as a study in the ineffable. Prévost’s initial rumbles of bass percussion
give way to his scraped and bowed cymbals, inviting Sachiko M’s high-pitched
sine waves and Tilbury’s spare contribution of isolated piano tones,
initially in the bass register.
There is no slight intended in suggesting that there’s a fundamental
resemblance between Tilbury’s luminous, floating and concentrated inventions
and the depth of resource that he brings to the music of Feldman and others.
Prévost’s usual instruments are here, his use of resonating surfaces and
varied materials often as sustained as they are percussive. He has a special
instrument here, a barrel drum replete with strings, that he explores with
sustained ferocity at one point in the piece, plucking at the strings that
hold it all together, suggesting the presence of a particularly rugged
string bass. The vast and vibrating space of the piece suits Sachiko M
perfectly, her sinewave generator adding sustained fields of organizing
tones to the enterprise, resulting in a trio that feels perfectly
orchestral.
A note on Testing’s liner essay: Testing is a work that
might challenge any commentator—vast, subtly shifting, dream-like, a reverie
that’s outside language’s capacity to describe, a spacious sound world for
which words might seem particularly ill suited. However, Seymour Wright has
contributed a liner note to Testing that seems perfectly apt.
Wright has recently written highly insightful essays on jazz and free
improvisation, notably on Horace Silver and John Butcher, and he has a long
association with both Prévost’s workshops and various bands. His
contribution here, as an attendee at the 2004 performance, explores
relationships between the Museum and its gardens, as well as the music’s
unfolding in time. It’s a telling enrichment, a complementary reverie that
somehow fuses the setting with the music itself. It’s the kind of thing that
has long made the associated materials of Matchless recordings, usually
Eddie Prévost’s own writings, among the most
enlightening and expansive documents in the arena of improvised music.