Five sets of Fred Frith

Two of Fred Frith’s homemades, The Stone, August 30, before the even­ing’s second set. 

This even­ing and tomor­row, Sunday, September 1, the multi-instrumentalist and com­poser Fred Frith will play two sets each, to close out a week-long res­id­ency at The Stone, the small music space in Manhattan’s Lower East Side foun­ded by anoth­er multi-instrumentalist and com­poser, and fre­quent col­lab­or­at­or of Frith’s, John Zorn. While Frith was a near-constant pres­ence in New York’s altern­at­ive or under­ground or what-you-will multi-genre music scene in the 1980s, when he made the city his home base (the 1990 doc­u­ment­ary on Frith, Step Across The Border, depicts his exist­ence in this peri­od as both exhaust­ingly and exhil­ar­at­ingly peri­pat­et­ic), he is now largely settled in Oakland; he holds a pos­i­tion on the fac­ulty at Mills College. This res­id­ency did not neces­sar­ily con­sti­tute a “rare” New York appear­ance for Frith—indeed, he will be doing some­thing very spe­cial at Brooklyn’s Roulette in less than three weeks, and return­ing to New York to play with Ikue Mori at The Stone in December—but it was a rare oppor­tun­ity to hear him play in a mul­ti­tude of con­texts with­in a very short time. 

I learned about Frith, as I learned about a lot of music, via Creem magazine in the mid-’70s, spe­cific­ally in a column by Frith’s broth­er, the crit­ic and soci­olo­gist Simon. “The greatest gui­tar play­er in the world is my broth­er Fred,” were the first words of this column, and even as a teen­ager with little actu­al sense of how writ­ing was done I under­stood how for any scribe worth his salt such a lede must have seemed irres­ist­able, wheth­er the asser­tion would hold up in court or not. (The lede was also a rare instance of wry humor in what was the some­times sober-to-the-point-of-stiff mode of Frith’s writ­ing.) I was intrigued, but it still took me rather a while to actu­ally find Frith’s work to actu­ally listen to. I got to play a smidge of the debut album of Frith’s first group, the British pion­eers Henry Cow, while fail­ing a try­out for my col­lege radio sta­tion; but it was­n’t until about a year after that I got myself to a Jersey Sam Goody with a good import sec­tion and scored both Frith’s sem­in­al 1974 Guitar Solos and Hopes and Fears, the debut record by the aus­tere, rig­or­ous post-Cow trio (aug­men­ted by a num­ber of Cow alum) Art Bears. (It would be many years before I learned that the word “Bears” in that name func­tioned as a verb.) The min­im­al liner notes on Guitar Solos began “All pieces impro­vised; music heard as played” and ended “the middle part of ‘No Birds’ was played on two gui­tars sim­ul­tan­eously.” Well. I could just not ima­gine. I could not ima­gined play­ing two gui­tars sim­ul­tan­eously, nor could I ima­gine that the sounds com­ing out of the speak­ers being played in real time. The open/barre syn­co­pa­tion of the altern­at­ing chords of open­ing tune “Hello Music” in a bar of four were simple (albeit skewed-sounding) enough, but the cluster of single notes that fol­lowed, cas­cad­ing gid­dily in maybe a second’s time, were some­thing else entirely. As much breath­tak­ing play­ing as fol­lowed on the record—and it still is, almost forty years after its record­ing, one of the most thrill­ing doc­u­ments of an admitedly more abstract than aver­age mode of gui­tar mastery—the music largely eschews vit­ru­os­ity for its own sake while still func­tion­ing as an extremely potent “show-em-what-you-got” state­ment. And while Frith’s impro­visa­tions were largely in some­thing close to a rock idiom, I had still nev­er heard music quite like this before. It was, I under­stand now, some­thing of a cla­ri­fy­ing exper­i­ence for me. The sub­sequent 35 years of my life have been rich­er for hav­ing Frith’s music in it.

The first Stone set I saw was Wednesday even­ing, a trio set­ting with Jason Hoopes on bass and Jordan Glenn on drums. Hoopes and Glenn are mem­bers of Jack O’ The Clock, a first-rate Oakland-based art-rock combo Frith has cham­pioned (its most recent album, All My Friends, is an espe­cially accom­plished and mov­ing song col­lec­tion). For this Frith fan, the notion of the gui­tar­ist in a trio brings to mind Massacre, the blis­ter­ing post-punk combo for which Frith enlis­ted bassist Bill Laswell and drum­mer Fred Maher. Massacre’s ini­tial assault was brief but frantic, a mix of blind­ingly inspired play­ing and punk energy and volume that could wring you out and hang you up to dry even when the band could only squeeze in a 30-minute CBGB set. I saw Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea meet Bill Laswell for the first time at Maxwell’s in 1984 (Laswell was con­tem­plat­ing pro­du­cing one of their records) and the man­ic bass play­er went on at length about Laswell’s play­ing on “Legs,” the open­ing cut of Massacre’s sole album from that peri­od, Killing Time, the gist of his riff being “How’d you DO that?” Massacre sub­sequently reformed years later with the great Charles Hayward tak­ing Maher’s drum chair and remained suf­fi­ciently heavy to open for Metallica in Europe, although the band’s approach cur­rently eschews the punky spurt in favor of the loud at-length extra­pol­a­tion (the ori­gin­al LP of Killing Time con­tained thir­teen tracks, while the recon­sti­t­uted band’s 2001 Meltdown and 2007 Lonely Heart have six and five, respectively).

In any event: This was­n’t Massacre. Jordan Glenn played a staid, small jazz drum­mer­’s kit and Jason Hoopes played an acous­tic bass, while Frith played his stal­wart Gibson ES-355, with the extra pickup clamped over the nut, an innov­a­tion he’s been rock­ing since the early ’70s. It was not a jazz set, not quite; while Frith has a supreme com­mand of all sorts of chord­ing, you won’t ever hear him strike a Tal Farlow son­or­ity, let alone one out of Wes Montgomery. By the same token he rarely extends into the far-side poin­til­ism of Derek Bailey. The instru­ment­a­tion here is of course the same as that of Bailey’s legendary Joseph Holbrooke trio with Gavin Bryars and Tony Oxley, so one would­n’t have been sur­prised to hear Glenn, Hoopes, and Frith go down that route. Again, not quite. Glenn’s style split the dif­fer­ence between Tony Oxley’s math and Paul Motian’s eth­er­e­al swing, while Hoopes juggled time in the tra­di­tion of Scott La Faro. Which allowed Frith to move for­ward with a relaxed, con­fid­ent demon­stra­tion of how phys­ic­al and rhythmic a gui­tar­ist he really is at heart. That’s the thing about his play­ing that I think does­n’t get enough appre­ci­ation; even at its most con­cep­tu­ally out-on-a-limb, it pushes the listen­er. Listen to the thrum of the first chord of Henry Cow’s “Bittern Storm Over Ulm,” the spe­cif­ic attack on the notes and the way they hang as the bass starts its mod­i­fied walk­ing fig­ure: it’s a dance step. With Hoopes and Glenn, Frith’s encyc­lo­ped­ic music­al­ity found a sinu­ous rhythmic plat­form that he could go over, under, side­ways, and down with. 

The next even­ing’s duet with Zorn was of the sort that was likely to inspire reflec­tion that former music­al hel­lions have “mel­lowed.” (An assess­ment that the artists them­selves might not take too much issue with; they named their most recent recor­ded col­lab­or­a­tion Late Works.) Zorn brought only his alto sax with him (pri­or duets have not infre­quently also included mouth pieces and duck calls, and I do actu­ally won­der what Zorn makes of Duck Dynasty, if any­thing at all), while Frith was apt to go at his Gibson with all man­ner of shoe brushes, sticks, bows, met­al chains, and more. This sort of thing, I find, tends to be one of the stick­ing points that people of more straight-arrow sens­ib­il­it­ies tend to have with respect to some approaches to “free” music, that is, why is it not the height of wank to run a shoe brush on the strings of an elec­tric gui­tar over the pickups? The ques­tion actu­ally has sprung to my own mind once or twice and unfor­tu­nately (or maybe it actu­ally IS a good thing, come to think of it) the answer var­ies from musi­cian to musi­cian. In the case of Frith, I think the aspect of giv­ing up a cer­tain amount of con­trol in intro­du­cing these phys­ic­al vari­ables to the pro­cess has a par­tic­u­larly vital appeal because he is a vir­tu­oso. (And of course we remem­ber that one of the pion­eers of “pre­pared piano” was John Cage, a big pro­ponent of extreme uses of the ele­ment of chance in music.) Understand that this is a musi­cian who’s got a stag­ger­ing com­mand of his primary instru­ment, the gui­tar. He can com­pletely detune his gui­tar dur­ing a sec­tion of a gui­tar solo, play an entirely coher­ent set of runs on it in that state, and then put the gui­tar back in tune, per­fectly, all without inter­rupt­ing the impro­visa­tion he is lay­ing out. He’s played with the devices he uses to the extent he has some idea of what effect they’ll have on the sound, but he can­’t know exactly what it’ll be at a giv­en moment. While Frith used a good num­ber of thingama­jigs dur­ing the set, the emphas­is was on the flag­rantly ton­al, and the inter­play between Zorn and Frith was for all intents and pur­poses tele­path­ic. Not infre­quently did they respect­ively skit­ter their way to a har­mon­ized high note that they held in mutu­al delight for seconds. While the Zorn/Frith duo col­lab­or­a­tion, first chron­icled for recor­ded media on The Art of Memory in 1994, began with the play­ers work­ing in a tra­di­tion whose main brief was the aes­thet­ic­ally gal­van­ic con­front­a­tion of tra­di­tion (the set was ded­ic­ated to Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, free impro­visers of the gen­er­a­tion dir­ectly pre­ceed­ing theirs), their cur­rent mode of dis­course is admitedly more  relaxed. But still. As Zorn him­self has observed, when you’re steeped in a new music envir­on­ment, the stuff that starts to sound “access­ible” to you becomes extremely, well, rel­at­ive. The music Zorn and Frith made in this set was more inclined to com­pre­hens­ib­il­ity than to con­front­a­tion, and their inter­play was such that they seemed to be spon­tan­eously com­pos­ing rather than aggres­ively impro­vising. What’s most fun in hear­ing them is the way their respect­ive tones com­ple­ment. Although no longer so inclined to Looney Tunes splat­ter, Zorn remains at least slightly acerbic; it’s a func­tion of his music­al per­son­al­ity, and also to a cer­tain extent, his instru­ment. Few altoists aspire to the burn­ished warmth one asso­ci­ates with Lester Young, and few­er still achieve it. (Art Pepper, some­times, maybe?). Zorn’s tone is con­ver­sa­tion­al, dis­curs­ive, some­times sar­cast­ic, some­times riot­ous, and yes, some­times lyr­ic­al, albeit even then there’s a slight keen­ing qual­ity. Frith’s sound does have a burn­ish to it—the ES-355 is a rel­at­ively thin hol­low body, but it has a nice wide sound­board; got woody res­on­ant sus­tain for miles if you want it—a hearti­ness that can make his most eccent­ric chord­ings play like bouyant Arbuckle slapstick. 

The solo set that fol­lowed on Thursday even­ing I had not ori­gin­ally inten­ded to stay for, but I’m awfully glad I did. It was the most remark­able fifty minutes or so of solo instru­ment­a­tion I’d seen, well, to be hon­est, in less than a year. I’m think­ing of the recit­al Keith Rowe gave at The Stone on September 11 of last year, as it hap­pens. Both of the con­certs had, as it happened, strong nar­rat­ive implic­a­tions. Rowe, whose music has evolved into such a highly abstract realm that a blind­folded listen­er might not ever guess that some­thing resem­bling a gui­tar is part of his instru­ment­al array (he plays with the instru­ment flat on a table, and his gui­tar actu­ally has no sound­board to speak of), very delib­er­ately evoked the events of the date on which he was play­ing, albeit in a per­son­al, indir­ect way. On Thursday even­ing, the talk on the streets among quite a few people was an impend­ing act of war on the part of the United States against the gov­ern­ment of Syria. The cli­max of Frith’s impro­visa­tion, which in large part until that point had him cre­at­ing minor-key set­tings via delay ped­al and play­ing lyr­ic­al, English-folk derived fili­grees over them, was the evoc­a­tion of a bombed-out warscape, not rendered in terms of stand­ard high-volume dis­tor­tion as such (and it was note­worthy that, through­out all the music played dur­ing the five sets I saw, the improv cliché of “now we’re gonna play really soft! and now we’re gonna build it until we get really LOUD! and then we’re gonna get soft again!” was con­sist­ently avoided), but unmis­tak­ably and angrily nevertheless. 

Last night, promp­ted by my friend Bruce Lee Gallanter, the co-proprietor of the great music shop Downtown Music Gallery, I went to The Stone again. He had men­tioned the night before that Frith was going to play on a few homemade instru­ments that he had­n’t touched in dec­ades, and that it would be hec­tic. I did­n’t check the cal­ender so I did­n’t know that the hand­mades would be brought out for the late set, and that the 8 p.m. set would be Frith play­ing piano with a per­cus­sion­ist and elec­tron­ics play­er. Well. I was there, so. On percussion—a large array of mostly small instruments—Nava Dunkelman; on elec­tron­ics, includ­ing a small mix­ing board and vari­ous ped­als, Jeanie-Aprile Tang. Both women are young, both wore black dresses; they would­n’t have looked out of place on an epis­ode of Girls, were Girls inter­ested much in the exper­i­ment­al art world. (Interested parties can con­nect Laurie Simmons to Fred Frith in a “six degrees” game by way of Christian Marclay, if they wish, how­ever.) Frith intro­duced them and thanked them for allow­ing him to sup­plant their usu­al pian­ist, Tara Skreekrishnan, with whom the two women form the trio Dapplegray, which came out of Mills College.

Frith is a fine pian­ist and a good chunk of his Henry Cow stuff plays as piano-based, composition-wise (see also his work with Robert Wyatt on the clas­sic Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard), but the key­board’s not his primary instru­ment. This per­form­ance delib­er­ately put him in a sub­or­din­ate pos­i­tion. One of Frith’s defin­ing char­ac­ter­ist­ics as a per­son seems to be a desirous-to-be-of-service humil­ity. Although praised to the heav­ens for his gui­tar work, and rightly so, for his pos­i­tions in the John-Zorn-led avant-garde super­group Naked City and the Richard Thompson/Henry Kaiser-fronted French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson, Frith took the bass play­er pos­i­tion. For this set he took the bench before a mildly-prepared Yamaha piano and split the dif­fer­ence between Cage and Debussy while let­ting Dunkelman and Tang set off a vari­ety of some­times sur­pris­ingly del­ic­ate aur­al fire­works. For one impro­visa­tion he made a man­tra from a slight vari­ation on his piano part for Art Bears’ “Of Two Minds,” itself a them­at­ic­ally apt homage to the block chords on The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly.” (Pete Townshend is, inter­est­ingly enough, one of the few rock gui­tar­ists whose dir­ect influ­ence you can hear on Frith; anoth­er is The Shadow’s Hank Marvin.) 

The final set I heard was last night’s 10 p.m., for which Frith indeed broke out the hand­mades. He con­struc­ted them, Bruce told me, because he did­n’t want to ruin his own gui­tars; he wanted instru­ments he could hit hard without worry. The hand­mades aren’t pretty, but they’re not caveman-crude either. They are not­able for their lim­it­a­tions. By rad­ic­ally restrict­ing the play­er­’s options, they force him or her to resort to des­per­ate meas­ures. Like hitting. 

Of course, as with his more soph­ist­ic­ated instru­ments, the effects play a cru­cial role. There has not been an enorm­ous paradigm shift in Frith’s elec­tric play­ing since Guitar Solos; it really is as much about the instru­ment’s inter­play with elec­tron­ics as it is with the play­er­’s inter­play with the instru­ments. And here too there’s a cer­tain humil­ity, but also con­fid­ence, at work. Frith does­n’t have all of his effects yoked togeth­er in a spe­cial box he can plug into an elec­tric­al out­let, nor does he have a sprawl­ing all-in-one digit­al box spe­cially designed for him or any­thing like that. His effects are, in a man­ner of speak­ing, à la carte; small boxes, powered by bat­ter­ies, chained togeth­er via patch­chords. And not all that many of them, either. For the homemades set, he per­formed in duo format, under the name Normal, with Sudhu Tewari, an electro-acoustic musi­cian who also stud­ied at Mills College. Tewari played what was termed“heavily assisted readymades.” The the naked eye, these con­sisted of what looked like a solid-state amplifier/receiver with the face­plate removed, and dozens of screws and met­al clips inser­ted into the top grate. I under­stand how this might sound intim­id­at­ing, but the set was in fact rol­lick­ing. The first thing the audi­ence heard was a spoken word sample of  an aper­çu about “con­trol” and much of the dynam­ic of the sub­sequent fifty minutes of impro­visa­tion saw Frith sim­u­lat­ing an effort to set a son­ic agenda and Tewari exuber­antly saw­ing through it. 

As music spaces go, the not-for-profit The Stone is what some might call ascet­ic. It does­n’t serve refresh­ments of any kind, nev­er mind booze. The place holds maybe sev­enty people com­fort­ably, depend­ing on how you define “com­fort­ably,” and (and this is the really excit­ing part) dur­ing the music­al por­tions of the even­ing the man­age­ment shuts off the air con­di­tion­ing, more often than not. This inform­a­tion is likely to make read­ers who aren’t con­vers­ant with this kind of music sus­pect the worst: that exper­i­ment­al arts really are po-faced, anti-pleasure, ded­ic­ated to humor­less suf­fer­ing. I dunno. There were dozens of gen­er­ous laughs shared between the musi­cians through­out the even­ings, more than a few of them shared by the audi­ence. I was also intrigued to see a Portuguese family—from what I could gleaned, a man, his wife, their six-or-so-year-old daugh­ter, and one of the adults’ mom—attend each and every show that I was at, and have a blast. Takes all kinds to make, and bet­ter, a world, I guess.

Fred Frith will be at Brooklyn’s Roulette, per­form­ing his (rel­at­ively!) access­ible, and utterly clas­sic, record Gravity with a large band, on September 19. Frith’s web­site is here.  

View from the corner of Avenue C and Second Street, August 30, 2013, about 7:30 p.m.