Sandy Brown Jazz

In 2019, the Norwegian pianist, Espen Berg decided to perform and record a freely improvised solo piano concert at the Dokkhuset concert hall in Trondheim, Norway. This recording has now been released as The Trondheim Concert on two CDs through NXN records.

When human beings first created music it can only have been improvised since nothing had existed previously but over time music has been formalised, codified, classified and organised such that in many contexts it has become cerebral rather than visceral.  Freely improvised music, created in the moment and existing as it does in various forms provides a special kind of experience both for the musician and the audience, one that is not available from the performance of music that has been composed or arranged.

Listen to Part 1 of Espen Berg's Trondheim Concert:

It is rather ironic that while improvisation is a fundamental element of jazz, improvised music can be almost anything but jazz.  In the book The Pianist's Guide to Historic Improvisation (2020), John Mortensen describes how classical composers such as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven thrilled their audiences with spontaneous improvisation. Mozart's compositions in particular often included a cadenza, an opportunity for a soloist to show off their virtuosity by improvising, but, as lamented by Mortensen, this method seems to have fallen out of favour with many of today's classical musicians.  Avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey in his book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (1992) bemoans that in his view even jazz musicians no longer truly improvise and goes on to describe and demonstrate that true improvisation is alive and well throughout the world in a multitude of locations and contexts.

Bailey's book forms the basis for a series of four documentary films first shown on the British TV station Channel 4 called On The Edge (Episide 1 : Episode 2 : Episode 3 : Episode 4) with each episode beginning with a great piece of improvisation by the iconic Chicago blues guitarist Buddy Guy.

Derek Bailey began his own improvising career playing jazz guitar with a band called Joseph Holbrooke (named after a British classical composer who in the 1920s had an interest in jazz) along with Gavin Bryars on double bass and Tony Oxley on drums.  The band was formed in Sheffield, England in the 1960s and sought to develop ideas of modal jazz and the rejection of chordal improvisation that had been pioneered by Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman respectively in the USA. According to Bailey's recollection, Oxley provided a connection to the latest developments in jazz with a particular interest in the music of Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler while Bryars' interest tended towards the modernist music of composers such as Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen and Cage. The band lasted for about three years before its members left to follow their careers in different directions, by which time the band was freely improvising and no longer playing recognisable jazz.

Derek Bailey

The most famous example of modal jazz must surely be the 1959 Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue, and in the liner notes pianist Bill Evans likens improvisation to Japanese ink wash painting. He goes on to say "As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time. Miles Davis presents here frameworks that are exquisite in their simplicity and yet contain all that is necessary to stimulate performance with sure reference to the primary conception".

In the USA, another strand of jazz called ‘free jazz’ coincided with the civil rights movement and Ornette Coleman became a standard bearer for those that wanted to shake up the establishment.  His 1959 album The Shape of Jazz to Come baffled some audiences but in due course had a huge impact. His tender, blues-drenched track Lonely Woman is unforgettable while his 1960 album Free Jazz, with the Jackson Pollock painting "White Light" on the cover proclaimed a musical form of Pollock's abstract impressionism.

Listen to Ornette Coleman and Lonely Woman.

According to Derek Bailey, the jazz music of the early 20th century was a unique art form with "boundless vitality, enormous musical and sociological importance and worldwide influence" but by the mid-1960s the revitalising impact of the work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman was beginning to fade. Reasons proposed for the decline include the demands of record companies for music that appealed to a wider public, the requirements of educationalists that jazz should have a teachable academic basis and the increasing popularity of other types of popular music. However, this was one of many occasions when predictions about the impending demise of jazz proved premature.

One organisation, formed in Chicago in 1965, that sought to promote jazz and other music of the African diaspora, precisely for the reasons that Derek Bailey applauds it, is the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM).  The AACM ran an adventurous programme of avant-garde and free jazz as well as other modern music and some of its most famous adherents include Jack DeJohnette, Henry Threadgill and Anthony Braxton.  In 1966 at the Monterey Jazz Festival, Jack DeJohnette was the drummer in a quartet led by saxophonist Charles Lloyd with a young pianist Keith Jarrett and Cecil McBee on double bass that provided an outstanding live performance (available on a 1967 album called Forest Flower).  This proved to be the beginning of a long-standing relationship between DeJohnette and Jarrett. Henry Threadgill, after serving in the US Military in Vietnam, formed the free jazz group 'Air' although he is perhaps better known for pushing the boundaries in the way he selected his ensembles than for his composition.  Anthony Braxton also served in the military and in 1969 recorded the album For Alto which was the first, full-length album of unaccompanied, solo saxophone.  Both Threadgill and Braxton have enjoyed remarkable careers and will be performing at this year's EFG London Jazz Festival, preceded by a showcase of some of today's best UK free improvisers.

Listen to the track from For Alto Anthony Braxton dedicated To Pianist Cecil Taylor.

In Europe, free jazz had a polarising effect, appealing perhaps to a young and politically idealistic generation rather than those with more traditional tastes.  The late 1960s were turbulent times with revolution brewing in the Soviet Bloc, rioting against the war in Vietnam and widespread political unrest.  In London, a band called the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME), formed by drummer/trumpeter John Stevens and saxophonist Trevor Watts proved to be a nursery for aspiring free improvisers.  Many musicians passed through the SME over the succeeding years including saxophonist Evan Parker, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and Derek Bailey.

Keith Jarrett

In Europe musicians such as saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and saxophonist Jan Garbarek emphasised the art rather than the politics of free or avant-garde jazz and particularly in the case of Garbarek, used traditional music as a starting point for both composition and performance. Keith Jarrett, who with Jack DeJohnette, had been playing with Miles Davis and performed at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival was also interested in folk music and at the suggestion of ECM record label boss, Manfred Eicher, formed a European Quartet with Garbarek that included Palle Danielsson on bass and Jon Christensen on drums. Jarrett, whose mother was Slovenian, incorporated European folk and classical music influences into his compositions and the quartet recorded five albums for ECM. 

In 1973 Jarrett began playing solo concerts of freely improvised piano with recordings named after the city where the performance took place.  In 1975, on a cold, dark night at the opera house in the German city of Köln he recorded a concert that became the best-selling solo piano album of any musical genre of all time and firmly cemented free improvisation as an art form that reached out well beyond the select group of improvisers and free jazz enthusiasts existing at the time (click here for the album).

In his book, Derek Bailey expresses the opinion "The essence of improvisation, its intuitive, telepathic foundation, is best explored in a group situation." which might explain why his book omitted to mention Keith Jarrett's outstanding achievement in Köln. In 1976 Bailey formed Company, a pool of musicians who were selected pretty much at random to freely improvise together and once a year a selection were invited for Company Weeks.  By all accounts, these gatherings were both chaotic and great fun and were recorded on a series of albums on Derek Bailey's Incus label.  Free improvisers from around the world were invited including John Zorn who organised similar events in New York that included hundreds of musicians that were directed by a conductor using hand signals and holding cards. Company Weeks ended in 1994 but the spirit of Derek Bailey lives on at gatherings of free improvisers to this day (click here for details) and via a radio station that started as a project of the London Musicians Collective).  Many free improvisers took part in the Company Weeks but saxophonist Evan Parker has become one of the best known and has been very influential through his work with pianist Alex von Schlippenbach, with Barry Guy on bass and Paul Lytton on drums in various groupings and the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra. 

Another remarkable, British, improvising musician was pianist Keith Tippett who sadly died in 2020, his route to prominence involved rock music with King Crimson and members of the band Soft Machine; his jazz career included playing with Stan Tracey and Andy Sheppard and his own band, Mujician, specialising in free jazz and improvisation.  Free improvisation continues to attract both musicians and audiences; proof, if this was needed, is the popularity of Corey Mwamba's programme, Freeness, presented on BBC Radio 3 and the growth of record labels such as A New Wave Of Jazz and Luminous that have recently released albums by saxophonists and free improvisation devotees Cath Roberts and Dee Byrne.

Cath Roberts
Photograph by Palma Fiacco

Click here for an online resource for those interested in European free improvisation is a database set up at the University of Sheffield.

For many years, Keith Jarrett continued to perform freely improvised solo piano at major cities throughout Europe, the USA and Japan, he also led the Standards Trio with Gary Peacock on double bass and  Jack DeJohnette on drums. Sadly, ill health has brought his amazingly prolific career to an end with his last solo piano performance in Bordeaux in 2016.

Here is a video of Part 3 of Espen Berg's Trondheim Concert:

Compared to Jarrett who was playing the piano at the age of 3, Espen Berg started later composing at the age of six but not receiving any formal piano tuition until aged sixteen. Discovering jazz and free improvisation he attained a master’s degree at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim completing the highly acknowledged jazz course in 2008.  At university, he formed a trio, 'Listen', with Bendik Giske (saxophone) and Daniel Herskedal (tuba) and then in 2014, the Espen Berg Trio with Bárður Reinert Poulsen (bass) and Simon Olderskog Albertsen (drums). This trio is now considered one of the most celebrated piano trios in Norway, touring regularly in Japan and Europe and having released four albums with the 2019 release, Free To Play, receiving excellent reviews.

In 2011 Espen Berg started working on a solo piano project which resulted in the albums Noctilucent, released in 2012 and Acres Of Blue in 2014, The Trondheim Concert was recorded in 2019.  Keith Jarrett did not describe his methodology and as Chris May says in the liner notes to The Trondheim Concert, "Jarrett has preferred to draw a veil over his methodology, perhaps to encourage a certain mystique to develop around it" and so one can only speculate as to whether Berg's methodology in performing this concert is similar to Jarrett’s.  Interestingly, in his own notes accompanying the album, Espen Berg says that The Trondheim Concert is "a culmination of years of development, reflection and research" and it must surely be inevitable that both Jarrett and Berg could only attempt such performances after a huge amount of time experimenting with the practice and theory of music and some (such as Derek Bailey) might have questioned if their improvisations are really free.

There is a huge difference between the music of Jarrett and Berg and that of Derek Bailey and some of his collaborators. Berg recalls "I once read that Keith Jarrett likes to start his solo concerts with chaos to clear the air and get a feel for the instrument in the room" (and Berg considered this approach for the Trondheim Concert) "but as the concert neared I felt that this became increasingly difficult to accomplish".  Berg continues "I listened to my imagination, my inner ear and found the music I was searching for.  It was all about waiting for the right moment".  He goes on: "Had I started playing a moment earlier or later, the music would have sounded and developed in a totally different way. That's why I think of this as the purest and most essential way of creating and enjoying music, and why this format and concept will be at the core of my career for as long as I am able to play the piano".  

Perhaps one can think of The Trondheim Concert in terms of a butterfly effect, whereby creativity is excited by something quite ephemeral, that grows into a musical narrative of great power and momentum and reaches a finale as the creative fuel starts to run low, but like many virtuosos Berg makes it seem effortless.  Espen Berg is a remarkable pianist, one whose talent has already been recognised in Norway with the award of prizes, scholarships and commissions and he looks destined to enjoy a distinguished international career.  Perhaps one day Espen Berg will name a performance after the city where you live but until then The Trondheim Concert is for everyone to enjoy.

Listen to Part 9 of Espen Berg's Trondheim Concert. [You can listen to all ten tracks on YouTube]

Click here for details of the album.

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