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Improvisations by Jon Dale.
"Improvised music is completely natural. When it’s couched in those terms like it’s weird or it’s inaccessible or it’s an art thing... I guess it’s an art thing in a sense but you’ve gotta be really careful, because it’s really natural for the people that are making it, for the people that we are bringing over. I don’t think it’s a big statement for how different they are; I think it’s just an extension of their selves."
Beginning Sun 22 Feb and running for three nights in Adelaide University’s Union House FringeHUB, some of the world’s leading improvisers will lock horns in a series of duos as well as solo performances. The man greatly responsible for the event, dubbed improvisations, is Adelaide writer/musician/label boss Jon Dale. Having written for such publications as The Wire (UK) and Ptolemaic Terrascope (UK) and currently contributing to Signal To Noise (US) and Perfect Sound Forever (US) among others, Dale wanted to bring the improv folks over from the east coast only What Is Music Festival. Himself a non-conventional sound artist and convener of the esoteric Rhizome label, Dale explains, "You get the chance to actually see this stuff happen as opposed to reading about it in The Wire or hearing about it in the grapevine."
A Live Music grant from Arts SA and co-operation from the Adelaide Fringe Festival and What Is Music have been integral for this special event to go ahead. "It does really come down to funding in Adelaide. I think the audience is there but the size of the city means that audience isn’t ever really going to cover what you need to do this kind of thing. It’d be good if this is the starting point for What Is Music to hook into Adelaide," Dale muses.
The beauty of improvised music lies in its unpredictable nature. Those who saw The Necks play this year will agree that there are infinite possibilities that may be explored by such artists, but one thing that needs to be clarified is that improvised music is not merely to be enjoyed by the intelligentsia.
"It’s as natural as breathing. That also breaks it down for the interested party who is a bit unsure and feels that maybe there is this edifice of art discourse constructed like a wall around them and they can’t break through it. There is something really terrifying about it, which is great. I don’t think that you are completely high and dry when you are on stage: you’ve got knowledge of what you can do, a lexicon of your instrument or whatever, or the language you’ve defined for yourself as a player and you sort of draw on that. It’s not nearly as fixed as a structured piece of work. But at the same time playing something structured can still open up as well in different ways. In a sense this whole improv/freedom/structure divide thing is interesting because that binary continually falls in on itself I think." He’s right. The art of instant composition is replete with taking risks, but it is those risks that often help the music preserve its beauty.
"We understand it’s a niche thing in a sense. But it does have a broader resonance. There are things that you can hinge onto within the festival that open it up."
Whether you are intrigued by Sonic Youth or Sun Ra, Merzbow or Can, Stockhausen or Velvet Underground there are sounds and colours here that will at the very least open your mind up to the worlds of possibility traveled by improvised music. "It isn’t like Europe where there is a really comparatively strong base of support for this stuff. And they’ve got a lot of devoted venues for improvised music. We don’t really have that yet."
Yet is the operative word here. This promises to be an intriguing series of shows. Think of it as broadening your musical palette.
Lenin Simos
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Improvisations runs from February 22-24 at the FringeHUB, Adelaide University.
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