These three elegant-looking releases from Norway reveal the close links that have grown up between that country and its neighbour across the North Sea: each features input from British musicians - bassist Barry Guy slugs it out with the Tri-Dim trio (reedman Håkon Kornstad, guitarist David Stackenås and percussionist Ingar Zach), Phil Minton and Pat Thomas add some sauce to the No Spaghetti quintet, and Phil Wachsmann's violin and electronics dance gracefully around Charlotte Hug's viola, Ivar Grydeland's guitar and Zach's percussion on "Wazahugy" (whose unimaginative title is another British touch often used by Martin Davidson's Emanem label). For added hipness (and, probably more importantly, guaranteeing the album will sell fast) Jim O'Rourke pops up as guest remixer of one of the tracks on "2 of 2". Quite how Jim finds the time to do all he does is a mystery to me, but even if he did throw this together in an afternoon, it still sounds fresher than much of what surrounds it - for despite being excellently recorded documents of accomplished and vivacious improvisation, none of these three albums sounds substantially different from the kind of stuff Incus, Emanem and Bead (Wachsmann's old label) were putting out a quarter of a century ago. The question is how many albums of rapid-fire chattery improv do you need to own? I'm not sure why young Norwegians want to go trotting down Derek and Evan's garden path, but they'd do well to remember Christian Wolff's telling critique of the total serial complexity of the Darmstadt avant-garde: "Complexity tends to reach a point of neutralization; continuous change results in a certain sameness." In rock, the idea that you can continue doing the same thing for thirty years provokes laughter, if not pity (unless you're dumb enough to pay big bucks to see stadium dinosaurs like the Eagles or the Stones, not to mention clowns like Cliff Richard and France's terminally ridiculous Johnny Hallyday) but it's apparently OK in jazz and improvised music. Bailey, Parker (Evan and William), Brötzmann, Taylor and Guy (to name a few) are still awesomely impressive, especially live, but they're treading water. "A bunch of old guys sitting around playing rock'n'roll", to quote Frank Zappa, who ended up doing a lot of that himself. In all fairness though, there is much to like and admire on these three offerings from Sofa, but revisiting "Topography of the Lungs" thirty-two years after the fact and selling it as "hardcore improv" somehow bothers me.
Acura Alfa Romeo AMC Aston Martin Audi Bentley BMW Bricklin Bugatti Buick