Drawing on musicians already known as part of the
ECM stable, John Potter’s Dowland Project bases its musical creativity
on numerous traditions, inevitably including a strong element of early
music, but also on improvisation and tracks built up from pieces which
have survived in the barest of outlines and just a small amount of notation.
The
Romaria album has been reviewed
here,
and those acquainted with these kinds of programme will already have
some idea of what to expect.
The use of saxophone, in this case used with subtle brushstrokes of
sound as played by John Surman, calls up associations with the Jan Garbarek/Hilliard
Ensemble with albums such as
Officium
Novum, but with instruments having a central role there is also
a relation to the work or
Rolf
Lislevand, though John Potter’s musical choices are typically
less fun and more reflective in nature.
John Potter’s booklet notes explain something of the background
to these recordings: “We’d finished recording and were celebrating
a very creative couple of days working on the album that became
Care-charming sleep. Sometime after midnight, after a very
convivial evening, Manfred Eicher suddenly said, ‘let’s
go back into the church and record some more ...’. … we
had run out of music, [but] as it happened, I had some medieval poems
with me, so we decided to see what we could do with those.” Released
from the inhibitions of planned recording sessions, the results were
spontaneous and surprising, and there are indeed some lovely moments
here, from the lively dancing of the
First Triage to the ‘jazz-sprechstimme’
improvisation of
Man in the Moon and the sustained lamenting
sounds of the Portuguese pilgrim’s song
Menino Jesus à
Lappa.
There is much which is admirable in these late-night single-take creations,
with the musicians attuned to each other and to the direction in which
each number takes them. The whole thing has the feeling of a voyage
of discovery, and while not every moment in every piece is equally convincing,
there are in fact very few places where a phrase or note could be argued
as out of place.
Whether you like this or not is really whether you have already ‘bought
into’ the ECM ethos, or at least, into that part which is strong
on experiment. The results are very fine sounding, but for me the whole
is a bit too much of a good thing. I do unreservedly admire Manfred
Eicher’s pioneering spirit, and this is very much part of ECM’s
unique sound and philosophy, but in the end I can’t help feeling
that this is comparable to the intensive mining of an increasingly narrow
seam. There is beauty here, but I don’t find much which is really
moving - to me this is more a collection of fascinating B-sides than
something really transcendent. There is improvisation, but nothing which
really goes beyond well-established conventions in either jazz or early
music. There are the sonorities of the new placed against the old: timeless
voice and strings both plucked and bowed against modern reeds and jazzy
bass, but we’ve heard all of these before. It’s all very
nice and I’m not seriously against ‘more of same’,
but as with the Garbarek/Hilliard best-selling formula I find myself
becoming restless for development and growth into something which makes
me say ‘wow’ and ‘I wish I’d thought of that
…’
Dominy Clements
