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Description
A tricky concept, improvisation, and one which the 68-year-old guitarist and composer from Yorkshire, who lives and teaches in Oakland and Basel, embodies. „I had a crisis in 1981“, he said in the interview for his „European Jazz Legends“ article in the magazine Jazz thing. „I did a solo tour of Japan (...) and I was fixated on the idea that, if I was really an improviser, I would never repeat myself. How dumb can you be? But anyway. I got so fixated on this that it became a struggle to actually play at all. (...) One night I came off stage with my fingers bleeding. Both hands. And then I understood that something wasn’t right here. I mean, I was pathologically obsessed. And I think it was a good experience to have gone through to understand, that it’s actually totally irrelevant. I have an instrument, I have my resources, all I have to do is be empty. So if I’m empty, I don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s where you should start from.“
Being a man of his word, in more ways than one, Fred Frith ambled through the backstage area that night singing something slightly operatic while joining his musical partners on their way to the stage, and began to play.
The New York City Jazz Record:
"Honorable Mentions New Releases 2017"
Content
Storytelling (for Eduardo Galeano) Chapter 3
La Pasión de Sonar
Backsliding
Interview with Fred Firth (by Götz Bühler)
Performers
More Information
Technical Details
More from this series
Among jazz fans, you can have a lot of fun arguing whether “European Jazz” is a useful counterpoint to the American tradition, an original supplement thereto or “is worth less than American jazz on the market” as it can be read in a Wikipedia forum. There is no doubt that there have been and are gifted musicians this side of the Atlantic, who have molded and formed jazz for decades. They have developed very unique playing styles by merging European music traditions with American influences. To give these pioneers of European jazz a stage was the idea for the series of articles “European Jazz Legends”, which has been launched in the magazine Jazz thing in their 100th issue in September 2013. The musical highlights of the concerts and the on-stage interviews with Götz Bühler were released on these CDs.
