Some Loose Assemblies II

Review by John Eyles

“When drawing music, the tension and movements affect the mark-making directly“

Claire Zakiewicz performing with Douglas Benford, Alan Wilkinson and Keisuke Matsui
Hundred Years Gallery, Hoxton, London, July 2021
Photo: Felice Knol

There is a long history of music that was inspired by visual art and vice versa. Clear examples are Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, based on the watercolours of Viktor Hartmann, and a number of musical compositions that pay homage to Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Perhaps the most direct relationship between the two forms, in the mind of the public, was the post-war link between jazz and the Abstract Expressionists, both exploring the freedom of their forms. For example, Jackson Pollock created his drip paintings to the bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In most instances the inspiration was realised at a distance; Mussorgsky’s suite did not influence the pictures that inspired it any more than Pollock influenced Bird and Diz’s music. It is arguable that some modern graphic scores, Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise being a prime example, fall into a category of visual works that influence the music but are not in a real-time dialogue.

The above thoughts were triggered by the event Some Loose Assemblies 2 which took place at Hundred Years Gallery, in Hoxton, London in July. As its title suggests, this event was the second (of three) based on the theme of live performances and projections that explore the relationship between different art forms in order that there might be cross-fertilisation between them. The events were curated by visual artist Claire Zakiewicz, who has incorporated live music into her practice of performance painting for many years. She has explored one-way responding to music or vice-versa, as well as two-way interaction. She has written of the interaction between the mediums: “When drawing music, the tension and movements affect the mark-making directly, and so minimal yet dramatic music is a good combination”. In pieces staged in New York, London, Bergen and Venice, Zakiewicz had drawn and painted during live improvisational performances with musicians such as cellist and vocalist Lenna Pierce, vocalist Alwynne Pritchard and percussionist Aaron Moore with each artist responding to the other in real time.

For Some Loose Assemblies 2, the music was freely improvised with a simple white projection keeping time to twenty minutes for each performance. The contributing musicians were multi-instrumentalist Douglas Benford, drummer Andrew Lisle, electric guitarist and cellist Keisuke Matsui, trumpeter and flugelhorn player Loz Speyer, reeds player Alan Wilkinson, and double bassist Thodoris Ziarkos. In addition to the musicians, Zakiewicz also recruited dancer Petra Haller and Dutch-born visual artist Gwendolyn Kassenaar. Kassenaar is a familiar figure on the London improvised and experimental music scene, at events such as Freedom, a monthly improvised music evening held at the Vortex jazz club or Skronk, a regular improvised music gathering, where she makes drawings of performers. Kassenaar and Haller often collaborate, including the recent production of a large mural of the dancer and a performance in a shop window, both in or near the City of London.

The performance space at Hundred Years Gallery is intimate so to accommodate social distancing rules and welcome as many audience members as possible, there were two performances, with separate audiences. Each set began with a trio comprising Speyer, Ziarkos and Lisle. Clad in a head-to-toe black outfit, Haller danced freely in front of the trio, in response to their playing while the musicians responded to her movements. Kassenaar painted throughout the performance but the other performers could not see what she was painting although the audience could clearly see her rapid-fire blue and yellow brushstrokes on a black background. At the start of each set, Kassenaar recited the poem ‘Steps’ (‘Stufen’ in German) by Herman Hesse, its reflections on death providing a frame of reference for the performance that followed.

Driven by Speyer’s horns, the trio’s continuous improvisation was energised and flowed freely, giving Haller plenty to react to and explore with her own free movements. The back-and-forth reactions of the trio and dancer were clear to see, and in the two performances were noticeably different, clearly not pre-planned or rehearsed. As an end product, Kassenaar’s final canvas served as a appropriate record of the set that the audience had witnessed in static form.

After an interval, a trio of Wilkinson, Matsui and Benford played with Zakiewicz herself. In a set-up very different to that used by Kassenaar, Zakiewicz painted on a three-metre square of canvas laid out with paints and implements, on the floor in front of the trio, so that they could see exactly what she was doing and react to it. She, in turn, painted blindfold so that she could focus her response on the music without the visual stimulus of the painting in progress. As a result, this trio’s music was rather more reactive than that in the first set as they were responding to each other as well as to Zakiewicz’ painting. The musical sets would have surely been very different had the two trios swapped artists.

In between the two performances, upstairs in the café, Gerald Curtis, an artist who works across performance, painting and photography, played a short set. Accompanied by recorded piano music, he created a drawing on paper in real time. This work highlighted the creative energy that characterised the collaborative performances on the bill, which was fascinating to watch. The evening demonstrated the fertile ground of combining live music with performance painting and drawing and the depth of the work that can be accomplished across mediums when executed with skill and passion.

Review by John Eyles

John Eyles started writing about music in 1992 when a friend asked him to be the jazz columnist for Murdoch’s TODAY newspaper. TODAY closed down late in 1995. Since then, John has written for many print-based and web-based media, although he has an uncanny knack of writing for publications that close down! (The Independent Catalogue, Rubberneck, Avant, Opprobrium, One Final Note, Paris Transatlantic, BBCi …) He currently writes for All About Jazz and The Squid’s Ear — both currently in good health!  

For recreation John enjoys improvising using voice, alto or sopranino saxophone, and electronics. He is a long-standing participant at AMM drummer Eddie Prevost’s weekly Friday evening improvisation workshop, a founder member of the Mopomoso Workshop and a regular at Skronk. He is a member of the improvising trio Bouche Bée, with guitarist Petri Huurinainen and vocalist/flautist Emmanuelle Waekerlé, of the thirteen-member London Experimental Ensemble, of the Mopomoso Workshop Group a.k.a. MoWo and of the large (sometimes one-hundred-member) ensemble Murmurists.