The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #104105 Message #2777402
Posted By: Jack Blandiver
01-Dec-09 - 07:09 AM
Thread Name: improvisation and traditional music
Subject: RE: improvisation and traditional music
As an inveterate free-improvising / experimental (experiential the spell checker suggested - well, that's about right too!) intuitive and most certainly non-muso I have a life-long passion for Traditional English Speaking Folk Song and Balladry. I can quite happily lose myself in recordings of Davie Stewart, whose seemingly random chord-voicings often hint in the direction of the avant-garde however so innocent this might be, though I suspect Felix Doran's programmatic Fox Hunt (which appears shorn of its intro on VOTP) might be more deliberate in this respect. In his imitation of farmyard animal sounds there emerges something of the primal that rests at the heart of much so-called modern art and music.
I suppose I crave a more fundamental communion with the essence of Traditional English Speaking Folk Song & Balladry, but with few historical exceptions I'd be hard pushed to think of many established revival performers I could hold up as an example of someone I could listen to as happily as I might Cox, Larner et al. With the traditional singers one gets an immediacy, the pure drop, warts and all which always makes them a perfect joy to listen to as much in terms of sonic experience as in terms of their mastery of an idiomatic musicality. In the revival there emerges, increasingly I fear, a musicality entirely at odds with the raw sonic immediacy of The Tradition, whose masters have been side-lined as mere source-singers and yet whose performances represent a noise-aesthetic which, to my ears, is as integral to the music as the verses of the songs themselves.
Free-improvisation is founded on an appreciation of the beauties of the noise-aesthetic in direct opposition to the corporate blandness of commercial musicality of whatever genre. The noises of the street, estuary, dockyard, building site, factory, farmyard and the hedgerow are essentials of an everyday sonic ambience and offer us another level of musical possibility. To the feral folk musician this is par for the course...
Just though I'd slot in these thoughts to provide another dimension to the discussion! Here's Part one of Derek Bailey's documentary about musical improvisation 'On the Edge' which is well worth a look: