rent+art+quest - a photo on Flickriver

rent+art+quest

Dear Bill Major,
As I wrote earlier today: I re-listened, this time to some of the FIM (Frankfurt’s Indeterminables Musiqwesen) CDRs. This out-put of CDRs on the print-on-demand-label recout (here a remained selection) were launched in 1995 through my production of the CD "Endlos / Endless" – a memento "50 years after WWII" for an exhibition in Poland, for which I invited the FIM trio Parallelaktion, plus singer Corinna Mayer.

What I auditioned today was "Hot Deals" by "Imperial Hot" (Christoph Korn – gt, Bertram Ritter – dr, A23H – reeds, tp, and Casio). I do not want to describe the music. I just love the feel of these 15 year old recordings. There is also "Rent Art Quest" by the "Stern4et" (Daniel Franke – as, cl, comp, Micha Daniels – kb, Bertram Ritter – dr, A23H on bari sax, bcl and ts, comp) from some years later – a lovely birthday present those talented younger musicians gave me. It was recorded during a "Jazzferien" session I had set up at a castle in the Spessart mountains in 1999. With Micha Daniels – kb, Bertram Ritter – dr, and A23H – ts there is another beautiful session made in a Frankfurt bunker in 2000, "House of Thee". Together with Christoph Korn I had a duo "Canada dry & 20" recorded in 1992-1994 with drummer Vladimir Tarasov as a guest. Of course there is more from that period I could tell you about. For today I'll finish by mentioning "Cassini", a nine-piece band which I assembled in 1998 with members from my bands "Hale Peat", "Imperial Hoot" and the theater ensemble I put together for my Frankfurt-am-Main production of West Side Story (Harry Petersen- as, cl, Stefan Lottermann – tb, Martin Lejeune – gt, Christoph Korn – gt, Marcel Daemgen – sound system, Peter Antony – kb, Bülent Ates – dr, Günter Bozem – dr, and A23H – ts, bcl, arr). This recording sounds to me like an early version of Otomo Yoshihide’s orchestra ONJO, in which I was a member, as you know, during 2005-2007.

Alfred 23 Harth / Lindsay Cooper / Phil Minton – the three musicians on "Trio Trabant a Roma" – appeared at festivals in Moscow & Volgograd prior to this recording as members of Lindsay’s "Oh Moscow" (we hope to do a new recording in 2010). Especially for Lindsay and me, the impressions from this journey were so deeply strange that even after returning to "the West", we felt like we were still in another mental state – the "State of Volgograd." I formed this trio at the invitation of the Budapest Festival in 1990, so there is that title "et all ways Budapest." It's been twenty years now since The Wall came down. In those days, we were just beginning to see the odd spectacle of cars coming from the East mixing into traffic in Western cities. One East German car was called the "Trabant". I liked that name, since trabant also means a planet orbiting a star, so I called the new trio "Trabant A Roma". Earth was under a new "orbital tent" after the Iron Curtain had come down. It was funny to see those strange cars from the East making long distance journeys through Western Europe – finally "all ways lead to Rome!" The fourth title refers to a festival in Strasbourg where we performed (see CDR Le Cadran Bleu). At that time I also played the Farfisa organ, Casio keyboard, and other miscellaneous stuff, all part of the search to express with the strange by-products of technology emerging at that time. The trio didn't last long (until 1993), same with "Oh Moscow" which played its final concert at the London Jazz festival in 1993 due to Lindsay’s worsening illness (which I didn't know of until 1998, when Sally Potter confirmed the facts concerning Lindsay’s declining health).
It was the brief period of time after the Sovjet Union collapsed in 1991, when all of us were curious about Eastern cultures – the curiosity was mutual among those in the former Soviet bloc. Moscow TV offered to produce a filmed portrait about me in February 1992; this led to my appearance at the "Open Music" festival in St. Petersburg alongside members of the Russian musical avant-garde. The film's title "Balance Action" is taken from the name of a famous saxophone from the early Cold War years. It also refers to the "balance action" that finally led to the breakdown of the Communist regimes. In old Leningrad (freshly rechristened St. Petersburg again) I met Vladimir Tarasov. He told me that before the Wall fell, he and his compatriots were forced to smuggle my records through a narrow, secret tunnel. He also claimed that, in the old CCCP avant-garde circles, I was a celebrity on the order of Michael Jackson (probably a Russian exaggeration). In fact, I did receive one of my very first fan letters from Moscow, in 1970 – somebody who loved the "Just Music" LP (ECM 1002). With Tarasov I formed the Quasar Quartet in 1992 with Simon Nabatov (Russia) and Vitold Rek (Poland); we performed together with Dmitri Prigov. But, just as fast as it arose, this cultural exchange period ended – astonishingly quickly, compared to the decades-long span of the Cold War, which had threatened the entire globe with doom.
Because my group "Just Music" played in Prague in 1970 I knew how serious audiences loved what we brought to our music from the West – they had witnessed the disappointing Prague Spring revolution two years before and heard reflections of those heady times in our music. Since 1971 I had numerous opportunities to reach audiences throughout Eastern Europe – Dresden, Leipzig, East Berlin, Krakow, etc. Last year another listener from Prague told me how important it was for them to hear "Cassiber" in 1984. With that in mind, it is a bit sad that 7K Oaks cancelled its October tour which would have brought us to the Wroclaw festival (where I had played with "Just Music" in 1972 and with "Gestalt et Jive" in 1986(?)).
Now I am patiently waiting at the border of Stalinist North Korea to play my music beyond the split – my heart is already there. Who knows what the ongoing imperialist wars within the holy Sufi countries will bring in context of the metastasis of capitalistic asymmetries and Western weapons mass-production…

Alfred 23 Harth, in September 2009

Taken on: January 7, 2011

Tags:

Frankfurt’s Indeterminables Musiqwesen

FIM

A23H Autobiography « less

Sets appears in: • FIM / recout • LP/CD/DVD catalogue

Stats: 32,808 views

Link to this photo view:
Link to this photo large view: