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ICP 032
This title is currently
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Wolter Wierbos - Trombone 1. A Demonstration (22:10) 2. Of Extreme (10:22) 3. Trombone Techniques (30:34) One Improvisation
is volatile stuff. A musician, mindful of an upcoming solo concert,
probably can’t help forming ideas of what that future music might
contain or how it might develop. Some soloists on the improvisors’
circuit like to have all of their material in mind, the full mental
roadmap. Others like to wait till they’re out on the road to see which
route looks promising. Most solo improvisors probably fall in the middle,
most of the time. But without being in the artist’s head, who can say
what spurs a given action at a given moment: something they’ve been
thinking about for months, something so ingrained they barely think about
it at all anymore, something they flashed on from long ago, something they
saw on their way into the room? Not that one’s response need be obvious.
Do we even know sometimes if we react to what we see, let alone how? The
better or broader your technique the greater your options of course: when
you have iron chops from playing in a brass band from an early age, like
Wolter Wierbos, so much the better. And as his friend and occasional
employer Sean Bergin once pointed out, ideas are chops too. The first time
Wolter heard Albert Mangelsdorff producing chords on trombone by playing
and singing simultaneously, he knew he could do that (He has the ear for
it: can play precisely out of tune, above or below true pitch, easy as
riding a bike). He had already figured out that a variable embouchure and
variable lip pressure worked best for him, teachers’ wisdom aside,
before he discovered Ray Anderson or anyone else did that too. Listening
carefully to all the classic Ellington trombones raised some interesting
possibilities too. Two Producer-engineer-editor
Dick Lucas drove Wolter from Amsterdam to his solo gig in Tourcoing in
northern France. Most of the trip passed without incident. Not long before
they got there, they encountered a Godard-scale traffic jam, vehicles
backed up for kilometers. After they crept and crawled the distance, they
came to the scene of the accident that had blocked a lane. In the middle
of official activity was a passenger car smacked into a guard rail,
immobile figure sitting upright in the driver’s seat, facing straight
ahead, hands gripping the wheel, one grim commuter who would punch no more
timeclocks. They both saw it; neither spoke of it. They arrived, Dick set
up his recording equipment and Wolter played his two sets, and they went
home. They didn’t discuss it on the ride back, either. Three This
is Wolter’s second record under his LP he made for Dick Lucas’s DATA
label in 1982. He didn’t want to rush out a follow-up—wanted to make
sure he had enough new to say to justify a sequel (if you’ve heard that
record, you know this is not entirely false modesty; Wierbos doesn’t
just imitate a small plane on trombone; you can tell it’s a Cessna. Not
that he’s been hiding; he’s made quite a few albums with Gerry
Hemingway and Maarten Altena, a few with the ICP Orchestra, Steve
Beresford, the Podium Trio, and with Sean Bergin’s M.O.B., Cecil
Taylor’s Berlin orchestra, the late South African bassist Harry Miller
and many more. Often, playing in someone else’s band, he’ll cheerfully
ignore the chart in front of him to improvise something else. Typically it
works better so it doesn’t get him in trouble. Wierbos likes being able
to play in so many contexts, from straight reading gigs to free
improvising. He likes it that other people’s music is such a broad field
to romp in, and yet his solo records afford him more freedom still,
conceptually or otherwise. His horn breathes on a respirator and shouts
across fields from the top of a levee, and covers a whole lot of before
and after and off to the sides. He makes fast connections and can play
what he thinks. From
a 1996 article about Wierbos in Coda magazine: “Dick Lucas recorded him
at the Groningen Festival in September. They’d told Wolter to play for
half an hour. He never looked at his watch. Got ready to stop, thought he
was a little short, played another little while. It clocked in at 30:20.
‘Those 20 seconds! Shit! I almost had it!’” That
performance appears on this CD. Good anecdote, but: the festival
there—in the Netherlands’ north, another long haul in Dick’s
van—is called the Jazzmarathon, it’s in October, and it’s actually
30:26. Recorded by Dick Lucas, 1-12-95 and 13-10-95. Coverdesign: Han Bennink
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