Alliance for Improvised Music

New Show


Georg Graewe (solo piano)
Wed, May 19, 8 pm, $8, Nelson Music Room, Duke East Campus


POSTCARD FROM EUROPE
The musical spectrum of Georg Graewe
by Bruce Carnevale with kind permission of Wobbly Rail Records

george graewePianist Georg Graewe will give a solo performance on Wed, May 19, at 8 pm in Nelson Music Room on Duke's East Campus. Tickets are $8. The show is co-sponsored by the Duke Institute of the Arts and the Alliance for Improvised Music. The show is also an unofficial cd release party for Georg's new Wobbly Rail quintet disk "Concert in Berlin 1996 - Snapshots 1-53."

For jazz pianist Georg Graewe, performing and improvising is visiting the past, setting an accent against or with others, or combining them. Like fellow musicians -- Matthew Shipp practices Baroque pieces, Peter Brotzmann enjoys playing Ben Webster tunes at home -- Graewe hardly plays what he listens or practices to. Cream cd's sit next to country, next to Schoenberg, next to Jelly Roll Morton. As label owner of Random Acoustics, Graewe finds all of these musics bound by intensity and hence equally valid.

"There was an intensity in Cream. Live, you hear an electric improvising rock band." While his own music sounds little like "Sunshine of Your Love," neither does it sound like the pre-gig music he listens to with his highly acclaimed trio (with Ernst Reijseger and Gerry Hemingway) -- Prince, Al Green, or maybe George Jones. Indeed, this music recharges and challenges, almost as a thesis to which Graewe and crew place an antithesis: "a method of contradiction, to set something against Boulez or George Jones."

It's nothing extraordinary for Graewe, whose own approach to music history could turn a few heads. "Complementary" is his word. "No one takes into account that Schoenberg was almost the same age as Jelly Roll Morton. I believe in a complementary movement, and by thinking them together, interesting things can emerge, what is missing in one you find in the other." More? "Both Boulez and Coltrane worked on 'time.' Boulez on making it more flexible, Coltrane, roughly parallel, on 'temporal sheets of sound.'"

"Certain things are simply in the air," he says; not a mystical, but rather an historical spirit (think Hegel) spurs musicians to work through problems in different but complementary ways. In jazz, one finds developments of a much larger "musical spectrum," which has "aspects in Schoenberg or Stravinsky." Or Merle Haggard, but all make up a larger order.

"One wouldn't interest me without the other, it's a question of tensions," he continues. "I wouldn't admire Morton so if I didn't know Schoenberg. And to live in a world only with Boulez would be a sad existence."

Graewe's work spreads itself in many formation: solo, duos, the trio above, various quartets, larger formations with voice specialist Phil Minton and American harpist and sometimes Partchian Anne le Baron. More recently he has worked with Swedish reedsman Mats Gustafsson, American percussionist Hamid Drake, and German saxist Frank Gratkowski. In short, the cream of the younger generation of free improvisers.

Prey to the environment, a man walks outdoors recording storyteller's anecdotes through a tube-like device, thereby preserving an oral tradition. This is the image of Graewe's Random Acoustics label. Random? It's about "coping with the momentary situation," Graewe told me, "as a factor in music making." Similarly, his favorite piano, the Bosendorfer, must be coaxed: "with the Bosendorfer the music always makes a curve when it comes out." An image of an eavesdropping fly adorns the cardboard CD sleeves.

Graewe is a sensitive partner and never dominates. While some find him complex, intellectually challenging -- see the Penguin Guide to Jazz -- his music doesn't penetrate you, but opens before you, offers many places to enter, but rarely stays in place.

One of the best introductions to Graewe's work is through his trio with Reijseger and Hemingway, on 'Flex 27' (Random Acoustics). The intimate setting and clean recording clearly introduces each performer: the pieces are stunning miniatures, most running about three to five minutes, perhaps a great intro for those wary of free improv. Reijseger sounds occasionally classic, early 20th century, in his melancholic ruminations, but never dwells. Graewe light-handedly punctuates Reijseger's bowed passages, and Hemingway adds patterning texture. There is a fineness, a clarity of line here.

His larger ensemble, the GrubenKlangOrchester ("Sounds of the Mines Orchestra") actually used old coal miners songs as a foundation, fragmenting them into short sections. Graewe was born in Germany's coal mining area. A beautifully delicate recording, 'Flavors, Fragments' (ITM) documents this band. Graewe sets forms in place - for example alternating duos and trios, rhythms, tone pictures - and allows the player to fill them. He edits duration, filters out a tension. His other ensembles work similarly, on 'Chamber Works 1990-1992' (Random Acoustics) embellished with Minton's voice and le Baron's harp. Here you hear Satie-like lightness, Dada-esque nonchalance, a music that can float right by you, or into you For fans of free improv, a welcome addition. For the initiate, a good place to start.

More info:


Choose your destination...