Page One
a column by
Bill Shoemaker
Rachel Musson (far right), ©2021 Graham Silcock
The rhythms of Ernest Hemingway’s prose are now attributed to his hearing Bach at a formative age. They were not rooted in the music’s meter or tempo, but in the repeated pitches of a given passage. His repetition of common words like “and” not only provided cadence to his prose – the opening of A Farewell to Arms is an often-cited example – but pried apart the printed lines of a sentence or paragraph, making more space to be read into. He honed the power of simple declarative sentences and how they can be strung together to describe how something is done or occurs, revealing the eye and the dexterity that give simple procedures meaning and worth. But Hemingway went beyond enumerating the steps of making a fly-fishing lure and created a larger, spiritually-imbued context of a cool morning and a clear, wide, fast running stream close to the middle of nowhere into which buggers and midges and nymphs are cast.
However, there are essential human processes that resist a definitive step-by-step how-to. Creativity is one of them, evidenced by a slew of theories, each emphasizing different factors like context, personality, and operations, among many others. Theories about creativity tend to co-exist, if uneasily, rather than nullify each other, and few are negated like the plum pudding model of atoms. Their essential shortcoming is that they rely on observation and analysis. They are not first-hand accounts. Conversely, artists can be indulgent and arcane and way too meta in explaining their creative processes. Arguably, the better responses begin with a shrug. It just happens. You get an idea and it goes and it changes as it goes. You repeatedly finish only to start again. When the work is done, you understand it and it makes sense and you can describe how and why it took shape over time and stages of development and refinement.
Making a creative process the subject of a work is fraught, the risks compounded if the work depends on the dynamism between two contrasting disciplines, like music and text. One element can subordinate the other or the two just don’t connect, lacking the dangling electrons that create salt for nuanced flavor or gunpowder for dazzling fireworks. And the road less taken can be a dead end. It gets even more dicey when improvisation is prominent in the mix, opening the kitchen door to too many cooks when adhering to a recipe is indicated. This is why, by contrast, the Hemingway example of placing minute procedures in a context of endeavor and discovery and realization has resonance. In skilled hands, this approach can result in work that is engaging, thought-provoking and unsentimentally affirming.
Rachel Musson produced such a work with I Went This Way, one of 2020’s more important recordings. A concert-length piece in which her improvisation-privileging score for an octet of strings, woodwinds and percussion is equally matched by her text, journal entries detailing her experimental and editorial processes and how one thing leads to another. It is at once a bracingly personal work, and a pivotal one for the London-based saxophonist, who had been all but exclusively immersed in freely improvised music for nearly a decade. And timely, as the album’s release of on the Brooklyn-based 577 label – the third, following two by Shifa, the powerful co-op trio with Pat Thomas and Mark Sanders – confirms her international stature to be on the ascent, the suspended animation imposed by the pandemic notwithstanding.
From the outset, Musson uses straightforward language, the emphatic first line of “Start” – “I will” – proving to be a high-yield kernel. The piece begins with Sarah Farmer’s unaccompanied violin solo, his tenuous, sprout-like long tones becoming vine-like, jabbed by Richard Scott’s pizzicato viola, wrapping around Debbie Sanders’ recitation. Sanders’ assured tone and even-keeled delivery is well-suited, generally, for Musson’s texts, but particularly for the opening passage, as it is based on repetition and extension. As “I will” elongates word by word – “I will start” – and phrase by phrase – “I will start by playing a note” – becoming “I will start by playing a note and continue until the line runs down,” the full ensemble makes a staggered entrance. Text and music unfold in different directions. The music gathers steam with the saxophones of Musson, Xhosa Cole and Lee Griffiths, coalescing with the strings – rounded out by cellist Hannah Marshall – and the propulsive tandem of bassist Chris Mapp and Mark Sanders (the two Sanders are siblings).
Concurrently, the text pivots and examines the changes in consciousness improvisation triggers, evoking notes with “next-ness,” that “turn in a leap that sings of something sings of something heard once before.” [sic] Musson’s elliptical but uncluttered language stands in stark contrast to academic writings that place improvisation within the contexts of cognitive science, cultural theory, and social and spiritual practices, all of which touch upon aspects of the deep dive Musson takes. But there’s a profound difference in perspective, hers being mid-stream, wading, the flow of memory and anticipation moving by her, moment to moment. As the intensities and textures of the ensemble modulate, Musson articulates an operational truth: “the thing with improvisation is that ... is that ... is that the elements don’t always quite ... quite match up.” [ellipses Musson’s]
Arguably, music and text don’t quite match up in this first movement – “Start” would be less engaging if they had – but they volley vigorously. Throughout the subsequent four sections of the work, Musson employs contrasting rhythmic feels, timbral blends, and thematic materials to extend the text thread. The initial lithe dancing rhythms of the ensuing section, “Matched Up,” slip about text detailing the delving into material, discovering its underlying form, and how it can be unmoored from convention to be fully realized. Griffiths soon steps forward with a percolating solo, lyrical at first then heated by the improvised embellishments of the ensemble, leading into an unexpectedly stentorian theme, surging with dramatic sweep.
The keystone-like “Syncope” lasts barely a minute and a half, but it leaves a deep impression, as the strings swoop in and peck about like birds while Debbie Sanders takes a more forlorn tone describing “(w)ay out from the world – it’s got exit written in large letters on the door ... this is where the exiled live; there’s space here for the disenfranchised. This is a wrench in time: death shines through, not yet to be taken, but saying ‘I am here.’” [ellipsis author’s] The internal journey of discovery becomes a walkabout in a real-world limbo. This is not to suggest that the text thread is broken; rather it is knotted to the last, lengthy two sections, which account for more than 2/3rds of the piece’s running time.
With “For Pauline,” Musson ceases to nimbly balance text and music, and uses only six numbered Zen koan-like statements to demarcate or frame vividly disparate sections. Her evocations of machine and street noise and herons in flight and ants in a glass box are resolutely cryptic, both in terms of meaning and function, but they do allow Musson to create larger swaths of music and create a sequence of materials that proves to be equally essential to I Went This Way being a watershed work. Her adeptness with scoring is made plain with the movement’s opening theme; its initial statement and deconstruction by the strings recalls Dutch composers like Maarten Altena and Ig Henneman, while its reiteration by the horns has the brawn of an Art Ensemble of Chicago head. Additionally, there is ample solo space for Cole’s full-bore tenor.
Text-wise, the concluding “End Note,” is the polar opposite of “For Pauline” – well over a thousand words spoken over the course of thirty-six minutes, it is part summation, and part brief for ongoing inquiry. For the most part, the music has the feel of conducted improvisation, textures rising and ebbing in consort with the text. When read, the text is prosaic; when spoken by Debbie Sanders, it has subtle power. Musson’s most jazz-leaning material appears late in the piece and again at its end, its wistful bluesiness intoned with a sigh, suggesting a resting point is in sight. While each member of the ensemble has their spots on this enormous canvas, the two solos by Mark Sanders stand out; considered statements instead of pyrotechnical displays, they reflect a design aesthetic that connects him to a lineage of drumming that reaches back through Max Roach to Baby Dodds.
Still, it is Musson’s text that differentiates I Went This Way from her prior work and that of her colleagues and contemporaries. Unlike the other sections, the text for “End Note” registers more as a monologue than a lyric, telling the tale of a journey of discovery. Again, simple declarative sentences, a core of words shuffled almost sentence by sentence, create a rhythm that coheres the piece as much, if not more, than as any of its other elements.
However, the process that yielded I Went This Way is ongoing. Musson reprised “For Pauline” and “Syncope” on Dreamsing (577), her newly issued collection of tenor solos. Both pieces are transformed in this collection of mostly brief pieces built upon timbres and dynamics; without her speaking lines from the original texts, the connection with the ensemble versions might well elude the listener. The solo album’s cover art provides an apt metaphor. Two photos of a stretch of empty country road, one laying at an angle over the other. It’s obviously the same spot, but the design introduces a discontinuity, a gap, that the eye glues together. It is an image that provides context for Musson’s long haul.
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Musson’s trek began in Porthcawl, South Wales, where she studied both violin and Welsh in primary school – like many of her generation, Welsh as a first language waned after her grandparents’ generation, and much of what she learned was in primary and secondary school. Her exposure to Welsh folk songs -- particularly a recording featuring flute used in group singing – sparked her initial interest in woodwinds. Although she took up saxophone at 14, Musson then had no ambition to become a full-time musician, content to play flute in community orchestras and saxophone with a dance band that played Burt Bacharach and other light pop fare in Welsh workingmen’s clubs. In the early 1980s, Musson began attending the Dave Wickens-led, Welsh Jazz Society-supported summer jazz program in Porthcawl ostensibly for adults, which admitted her because she lived in town. There she encountered artists spanning Tony Oxley and Norma Winstone.
“I blame that experience for everything,” Musson recently remarked with a laugh.
Musson came to London at 18 to study at City University, opting for an academic music degree rather than a performance degree. “At the time, you couldn’t go to a conservatoire and get an academic degree,” she explained. “I’ve always gone for sensible options. It was sort of a halfway house, doing what I wanted to do – which was music – but not in a totally unsensible way.” She still had to endure a year of lessons to achieve the preferred saxophone sound for classical literature. “I don’t like the sound of a classical saxophone. It was a case of just getting through that so I could move on.”
As is often the case, Musson’s jazz education largely occurred off campus. In addition to attending jam sessions where she gained familiarity with standards, she notably played in the original incarnation of Polar Bear. More consequential in the long term, however, was her work with Federico Ughi; in addition to working with the drummer in After Breakfast, she contributed to his 1999 album, The Space Within (Slam/577). Ughi departed for Brooklyn in 2000, where he co-founded the 577 label, which has proved to be pivotal in the documentation of her work.
Coming from a town where little to nothing happened fifty weeks out of the year, her daily access to gigs and jam sessions were revelatory. “It was just amazing to go to The Vortex or Ronnie’s on a regular basis. I was really into the British jazz scene at the time. I really liked Loose Tubes, people like Steve and Julian Argüelles and Iain Ballamy – all that lot – and they were very active on the scene at that point, so it was easy to keep track and follow them. I was also massively into Lee Konitz at that point. He would come over a lot at that point and play at Ronnie’s or the 606, which is a tiny little place where you could see Konitz or Kenny Wheeler up close – Paul Motian and Bill Frisell, all that lot as well.
“Konitz had an authenticity. There was the sense that he was creating then and there, which I now recognize as being really important. If he was having a bad day, you would hear it; and you would hear it if he was having a good day. He is probably one of my biggest influences, though people might not hear a connection.”
Despite her immersion in the jazz scene, Musson stopped playing publicly for much of the aughts, and taught special needs children, using music to develop communication skills with autistic children. Because she had let go of her contacts, stopped going to gigs, and had put her horn away, she faced two hurdles when she returned to the London jazz scene in her early thirties: regaining her strength as a player and reorienting to a new, even alien landscape of players and venues.
While she still taught – and returned to the summer school she attended as a teenager as an assistant tutor – Musson became a part-time graduate student at Trinity College of Music. “I was trying to reconnect with my former self, if that makes any sense.” She was frustrated that jazz education focused on prescriptive pedagogy and not supporting artistic goals and aspirations. “Jazz education is archaic,” she concluded. “They just want you to model someone, and then they mark you.” While she was influenced at the time by Dewey Redman, she already knew she wanted to be outside his shadow. Earning her Masters “served its purpose, to reconnect with the scene, find colleagues, and take myself seriously as a musician again.”
Another unattractive aspect of this period was Musson’s encounters with gender discrimination. “That was one of the things that was really present at college; that there were so few of us. I felt unusual. Jazz was then very male dominated. I constantly felt like I had to prove myself, and I can’t really put my finger on how much that feeling comes from within and how much is imposed upon you. That’s always been there for women. I’ve had crazy situations. I was once at a jam session [in her early twenties] where a bloke whispered in my ear, ‘You’re a woman; you can’t play.’ It’s in the air. I think that was part of my towards the improvised music scene, which is much more diverse.” In recent years, Musson has been part of a committee tasked to raise the profile of women participating in events produced by Mopomoso, the long-running forum for improvised music founded by guitarist John Russell.
After Trinity, she formed Rachel Musson’s Skein with pianist Alcyona Mick, bassist Will Collier and drummers Javier Carmona and Josh Morrison. In late October 2010, the F-ire label issued Flight Line, which she now considers her “most jazzy album.” The Guardian’s John Fordham gushed that “this album’s originality and assured tenor-sax playing ought to make her a hot ticket in 2011,” praising “Musson’s unusual blend of a melody-building lightness with a raw, free-jazzy multiphonic palette,” her “fine folk-lament themes,” and “stuttery postboppers” that “packed in more motivic twists than seem possible.”
However, Musson did not share Fordham’s enthusiasm. “I knew when I was mixing it there was something wrong. I just wasn’t happy with it. I thought: What am I doing? This isn’t me. The bits that worked were the ones that were freer. The bits that didn’t work were things that I wanted to do when I was 22, and were no longer interesting to me.
“I was already finding my way into the improvised music scene during the making of that record. I was going around to Javier’s house once a week to improvise with him. I started playing with the London Improvisers Orchestra. It was a smooth transition. I began exploring techniques instead of melodic notes. I realized I could do whatever I want, so I would just try things out. One thing I noticed when I listened again to that first record was that I wasn’t happy as a soloist; accepting that, I then worked on dialogue, a more interactive way of playing. In jazz, the whole thing about being a saxophone player is standing out front and playing. That’s not what I like to do. I want to be part of something, so that really came to the fore. That period felt very organic and expansive. I would record things and take them home and listen to them, and think about what was working and what wasn’t working. There’s more jazz in my playing now, but my playing then was a reaction to the education system and a removal of all things jazz.”
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There is a day-and-night contrast between Flight Line and the recordings Musson made beginning with Tatterdemalion (2012; Babel) with keyboardist Liam Noble and Mark Sanders. Free from the market dictate to be slightly ahead of the curve – the requisite for being a “hot ticket” – Musson presents as a seasoned, hardcore free improviser. Her first recording with Sanders foreshadows their ongoing collaborations. He is acutely attuned to Musson’s every move, from letting breathy timbres soak up space to charging into the maelstrom. Both Musson and Sanders also know the fine art of triangulation in improvised music, whether it is with Noble’s spiky, vintage colors – think Miles Davis at Fillmore – or with bassist John Edwards’ melding of stark and subtle textures and old-school propulsion on Bibimbap (2016; Two Rivers).
In 2013, Musson invited vibraphonist Corey Mwamba to perform as a duo at the Others for London Jazz Festival; he keenly accepted having heard her album with Skein. Their immediate rapport is documented on one and other, released in 2014 as a download on Mwamba’s bandcamp site, prompting them to tour Germany in 2015. For Musson, performing eight times in little over a week, crisscrossing the country with vibes in tow, revealed much about the nature and evolution of improvised music. Mwamba and bassist Neil Charles were then tapped by Musson and Sanders for a performance at the Brighton Alternative Jazz Festival that November. Undoubtedly, had Mwamba not retired in 2019 from live performances (he still records, teaches and hosts BBC Radio 3’s Freeness), his collaboration with Musson would now be widely recognized, a speculation supported by the Zoom-facilitated What We Said When We Met (issued as part of Takuroku, Café Oto’s series of recordings made during lockdown).
The recordings Musson made later in the teens reflect a widening circle of collaborators. Hesitantly Pleasant (2017; Iluso) finds Musson responding deftly to the piano and electronics of Steve Beresford – still one of the most mercurial figures in improvised music – in a trio with drummer Mike Carrati. Duets with bassists are benchmarks in the discographies of saxophonists spanning Sam Rivers, Archie Shepp, and John Butcher; Tapering Arms Point into the Wind (2018; Weekertoft) is such a recording for both Musson and bassist Olie Brice, given their respective ascents in recent years. She also reunited with Ughi and bassist Adam Lane on Transoceanico (2016; 577), which has a Brooklyn tinge. While these albums have their merits, they don’t constitute a through-line like Musson’s work with Sanders, one that peaks with Shifa, the trio with Pat Thomas.
Shifa is an Arabic word for healing, reflecting a connection with free jazz that has been constantly reinforced since Albert Ayler proclaimed music to be the healing force of the universe more than a half-century ago. Its choice as the co-op unit’s name reflects Thomas’ decades-long research into the centuries-old Arabic influence on European and African American music, which is detailed in his 2003 essay, “Origins Revisited.” This begins to explain why the pianist, who by mid-2019 had received long-overdue critical and institutional recognition, was foregrounded in the press reception of Live at Café Oto, Shifa’s 577 LP debut, the lead of Daniel Spicer’s review in the August 2019 being the most glaring example.
“Pat Thomas is one of the most imaginative and idiosyncratic pianists at work today,” Spicer commenced. “On this debut from a new deep-thinking trio featuring drummer Mark Sanders and saxophonist Rachel Musson, he’s a towering whirlwind of kinetic activity, dealing curt, jabbing chords that stack up a pile of jutting angles like a frantic game of musical Tetris.” Beyond the diminishing use of “featuring” in regards to a cooperative trio, Spicer does not adhere to the convention that co-authors are listed alphabetically, putting Musson at the end of the line. Additionally, only Musson’s performance is subjected to lazy namechecking – “roaring Brötzmannesque ferocity” – which is problematic, even if it withstood scrutiny. Josef Woodard’s take in Down Beat that October partly affirmed Spicer’s while undercutting it: “Despite the democratic agenda and the tendency for Pat Thomas’ piano to establish pieces and sections, saxophonist Rachel Musson is tantamount to a leader here, commanding a bold, granitic timbre. Better known in Europe than in the States, she’s a force deserving of greater recognition, and here’s proof.”
Arguably, what distinguishes Musson’s playing – on soprano as well as tenor – on this mid-‘18 date and elsewhere stems from the classical training she endured, which enables her to nail a repeated, altissimo motive, sustain a braying multiphonic texture, and make reed effects really pucker and pop. This should not suggest constraint on Musson’s part; rather, hers is a case of precision maximizing split-second decisions and impulses, which abound on Live at Café Oto and its follow-up, Live in Oslo (577). The trio had only a few gigs in the fourteen months separating the two recordings, its most prolific period being a three-date swing through Poland; subsequently, the interplay caught on their 2019 Blow Out festival performance is not attributable to steady work, but to a precision of response on the part of all three improvisers.
“The Oto gig was our first,” Musson explained, “and even though we didn’t play often until the lockdown, the music really moved each time. Our responses to each other became much better, much quicker, more attentive to the small things that happen in improvised music. I think that process makes the music collaborative.”
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Social media posts frequently have unexpected consequences. That was the case when Musson posted in 2017 about wanting to revisit composing. Among those who read it was Tony Dudley-Evans, the veteran Birmingham-based producer. In 2015, Dudley-Evans stepped away from his main role with Birmingham Jazz, which had taken on the new name Jazzlines with its integration into the city’s Symphony Hall, but retained an Advisor’s role; additionally, he started a relationship with Fizzle, a team focusing on improvised music. Having an ongoing dialogue with Mark Sanders, who had been recommending Musson to him for some time, Dudley-Evans contacted Musson about a commission; by then, Musson knew she wanted to work with text.
One of the mandates for regional presenters is the cultivation and promotion of local talent; subsequently, one of the priorities in creating the project was finding suitable Birmingham-based musicians for the instrumentation Musson wanted. A regular collaborator with Musson – they currently play in a trio with woodwinds player Julie Kjær – London-based cellist Hannah Marshall was a given. Bassist Chris Mapp was known for playing with Sanders in Gonimoblast, an electronics-privileging improvising group, and occasionally with Paul Dunmall. Dudley-Evans knew violinist Sarah Farmer and violist Richard Scott from the Birmingham improvised music scene; he had first encountered saxophonists Xhosa Cole and Lee Griffiths when they were matriculating through the jazz course at Birmingham Conservatoire. Musson had heard Debbie Sanders read poetry with Mark’s band and thought it worked really well.
Dudley-Evans secured a slot for the premiere of I Went This Way at the 2018 Surge into Spring festival, itself a product of local networking. Curated by Sid Peacock, a composer and educator who leads the Surge Orchestra, of which Mark Sanders is a member, the festival is an outgrowth of Grow Your Own, an initiative of Nick Gebhardt, a professor of Jazz and Popular Music Studies at Birmingham City University. The work was then presented at the 2019 Cheltenham Jazz Festival, where Dudley-Evans had presided before his semi-retirement – the concert was broadcasted later that May on BBC Radio 3’s Jazz Now.
At the outset, the version of the piece presented at Cheltenham differs from the Oto performance several weeks later, as Debbie Sanders begins the piece without accompaniment, and is first joined by Cole’s scampering flute. As the strings enter, Marshall’s ability to simultaneously nudge and dovetail moves to the foreground. The general contours of the two performances soon coincide, the interplay leading up to the saxophone’s sweeping theme at Cheltenham having a tad more go-for-broke looseness. It becomes apparent as the Cheltenham performance unfolds that the piece is more open to real-time tweaks than suggested by the Oto performance alone. Perhaps it is the special electricity festivals generate and the gravity of subsequent performances that explains the differences. In her interview with saxophonist and Jazz Now co-host Soweto Kinch, Musson praised her colleagues for being attuned to the “social aspect of improvising,” the awareness of, and ability to build upon, what is happening at any given instant in the proceedings. Heard in proximity to each other, the two versions indicate that the social aspect of improvising is at the heart of I Went This Way.
After three years with the piece, Musson considers the experience of realizing it to be invaluable, although she does not now foresee pursuing large-scale projects, with or without texts – prior to the lockdown, she began to work with new texts with Sanders, Brice and saxophonist Jason Yarde, a more manageable proposition. “Even before the pandemic,” she explained, “funding projects like [I Went This Way] was really difficult. A lot of things have to fall into place.” And within a compressed schedule; weeks for the writing; a few days at most for rehearsing; days, if not weeks, between performances; logistics: the list goes on.
With the release of the 577 CD, I Went This Way has most probably reached its terminus. There are changes Musson would make if the opportunity arose, trimming the text at points. Still, Musson thinks “the performances are amazing; that band is wonderful.” Although it signals her arrival as a composer, Musson cautioned, “what someone might hear as compositional is often Debbie and the musicians really working together.” She deflected the question of the longer-term impact of the piece, replying, “I think it got me somewhere.”