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CD |
| 6.216 Ft
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| 1. | Wintertheme
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| 2. | Le Tombeau de Jean Nicot
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| 3. | Only Trees
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| 4. | The Mousing Minuets / Witte Bloeman / Mousing / Black Minuet
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| 5. | Wintertheme
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| 6. | Andrea Fleischmann
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| 7. | Nor Night, Nor Day, No Rest
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| 8. | De Spul
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| 9. | Wedding Music
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| 10. | En Deuil
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| 11. | Blauwe Sliert
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| 12. | Winter
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| 13. | Een Kennis Vind Ik Niks
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| 14. | Die Viool Komy Wel Terug
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| 15. | Een Schuiftrompet Voor Julius
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| 16. | Wintertheme
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Jazz / Avant-Garde; Chamber Jazz; Modern Composition
Recorded: Nov 1999
Amsterdam String Trio
Ernst Glerum - bass
Maurice Horsthuis - viola
Ernst Reijseger - cello
Setting out from a gently vibrating string, the sound spreads out to artistic equilibrium, it proliferates. And it does so with the harmonic sequences of a natural composition, which fills the space. A splendid bridge, as subtle as one could imagine, leads through the air, invisible and yet familiar.
---Henri Michaux
Even words have a use-by date. In the seventies the term »chamber music jazz« swept through the newspaper supplements - perhaps a term reflecting helplessness, but still a very marketable slogan. Within the cordoned high-culture channels of such notorious sensitivity-literati as Peter Handke, it offered many searchers for self and identity a way of latching on to an attitude which turned away from the attempted uprisings, the clatterings on the barricades embodied by ideologically correct Free Jazz, in favour of an exploration of individual essence and existence. The Third Ear as navel of the world: people wanted beautiful harmonies again - after all, the world itself was dissonance enough. A post-revolutionary mood demanded musical sedation for agitated little souls.
But since then, it has emerged that not everything that puts itself forward as an alternative to the old, ingrained stylistic formulae has to be reduced to insipid sonic sensuality or spaced-out esotericism. Now, luckily, we have entered the postmodern phase, and we have written Umberto Eco's dictum »With irony, without innocence« on our banner.
After a break of over ten years, the celebrated Amsterdam String Trio has got back together again. Still surprising, still unfathomable - in the precision of their playing, in the mise-en-scene of their pieces, which appear almost classical in manner, and in the absence of any concession to opulence. The irony that Eco talks of operates under cover; the less obtrusive, the more enduring. It is concealed here within the sparseness, the stringently linear flow of ideas. But one thing is clear immediately: the era of innocence - including that of experimentation - is over. At least for a while. This seems like a brief pause, a taking-stock, a moment of reflection on all the forms that were full of inherited and thus ostensibly fixed meaning.
It is as though the Trio had decided to redefine itself: in terms of a new formulation of its own aesthetic aims and demands. There are no sharp divisions, narrating old antagonisms between composition and improvisation. The music describes transitions, superimpositions, permeations. As far as the shaping of form goes, it does away with contrasts, exposing them as old mock-battles between critics and their so-called avant-garde which, like a kind of time-travelling vanguard spying out the future, on returning to the present graciously bequeathed us some notion of what will inevitably happen. And for a long time, we were so grateful that we could believe in a future.
The music of the Amsterdam String Trio does not pre-empt the future. It glances back into the past with a subtle, ironic smile, and doesn't seek to be other than present-day. A real present-day imaginative space, in constant motion. A space that is also transparent to the translucent images of musical origins. And so the longest piece on this CD is not dedicated to the memory of the chain-smoking Jean Nicot, who gave his name to nicotine, but to his current mode of presence: to the grave of the patron saint of smokers.
What is happening here is a subversive corruption of those old rules of the game according to which new art always had to set itself apart from old art - through a programme of negation. This corruption occurs gently, imperceptibly. The past seems new in the light of the present. What soothes turns out, in fact, to be what disturbs; each note, each composed or improvised sequence is double-coded. It is only the seeming withdrawal from the expression of individual ecstasies and the ostensible disappearance of the musicians behind their music that allows them to produce identity. The weighty slowness of some pieces creates an unexpected sensation of lightness. Discreet music, owing not a little to the wily spirit of Erik Satie. The Amsterdam Trio seems to know exactly how, these days, discretion ranks as resistance. Who cares where the spirit of the times has sunk to, so long as music is right here with us - and gives us an inkling of what the architecture of freedom can really mean.
--- Harry Lachner |
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