A bass improviser's tenacity, decades on

Upon the death of Barre Phillips, a post resurrected from 2007

Upon the death of a uniquely exploratory improvising bassist — whose album Unaccompanied Barre of 1968 is said to be “the first solo bass record in jazz or improvised music” — I’ve excerpted, revised and dressed a post originally on my ArtsJournal blog Jazzbeyondjazz:

Brooklyn, Nov 30 2007: "I hope nobody came here tonight expecting anything to happen," announced Barre Phillips, who looked a lot like George (rant) Carlin, onstage at Barbes, Brooklyn's tiny but main jazz stage, last week. "All we do is play basses." He paused to glance at his grown son David, also wielding a big, four-stringed, long-necked wooden box balanced on a metal peg. "And that's pretty much a lost cause. As I think most of you know."

Phillips, b. 1934, was peering out at diehards -- some 60 rapt listeners (almost all white males, ages 30 - 60) attending one of his three rare gigs in the U.S. that weekend (the others were at Firehouse 12, New Haven, and the Lily Pad, Cambridge). Those of us there -- musicians and audience alike -- were people for whom an hour of loosely formatted, unpredictable because little pre-meditated and rather abstract acoustic interactivity is a cause to be fought for, a pleasure to savor.

A double bass is a low pitch, characteristically low volume instrument. Whether or not in a collaborative role, it rewards (if not requires) attention. Close listening. Music of the sort Barre Phillips had specialized in since the early '60s, when he performed at Carnegie Hall with Eric Dolphy as part of a Gunther Schuller extravaganza, recorded with reedist Jimmy Giuffre's ‘65 unusually soft-spoken groups with pianist Don Friedman and drummer Joe Chambers, and with more rugged Archie Shepp before expatriating himself to Europe —

For the curious, here are his recollections:

— Music not ever designed to be flavor-of-the-month for general audiences. I was reminded just lat week (late Dec 2024) by a record company principal that however much a staunch coterie of Chicagoans in particular (i.e.,. performers often at Constellation Chicago, the Hungry Brain, the Beat Kitchen, Elastic Arts, The Whistler, Connect Gallery, Experimental Sound Studio, even sometimes the Green Mill, Jazz Showcase, among other venues) are devoted to such music, it will never top sales or download charts.

Yet free improv has enjoyed periods of high profile and impact since its first evocations (pianist Lennie Tristano’s 1949 recordings “Intuition” and “Digression”, released in 1950 and ‘54, respectively). “Jazz” and its abstractions, derivations, even its denials, are impacted by the openness of form, polyphony and spontaneity effected over the past 75 years, by the lives, oeuvres and followers of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, John and Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Jeanne Lee, et al. Not just in the US, of course: Toronto’s scene, England’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble, the international Globe Unity Orchestra . . . . I’ve heard musicians practicing “free” precepts in Amman, Budapest, Dakar, Istanbul, Kyiv, Mexico City, Ponta Delgada, Sienna, St. Petersburg and Tampere. The idea of making music by just starting up, listening, imagining, reacting and interacting with instruments at hand (or voice, body parts, what have you) survives and thrives. Its success depends, of course, on the resources and sensitivities of its practitioners.

Here’s a full set by way-too-little heralded British reeds master John Surman’s trio with Phillips and synthesizer Dieter Feichtner. Read Tom Moon’s deep dive into them. You might also be interested — who knows? — in my 2003 NPR interview with Surman on the release of a duet album with Jack DeJohnette.

That trio performance is 50 years old, but nothing dates it. Back in ‘07, the week prior to Phillips’ concert I'd enjoyed free-ish sets by a quartet of brilliant alto saxophonists in the small back room of an East Village basement restaurant, and a concert by percussionist-composer Adam Rudolph's extraordinary Go: Organic Orchestra, some two dozen players, respond to his written notes and improvised conducting, in a Soho gallery. Those performances were rooted to a heyday of the jazz-beyond-jazz movement in the late '80s and early '90s, when John Zorn was signed to ever-elegant Nonesuch Records, and such composer-performers as Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell, Elliott Sharp, Shelley Hirsch, Vernon Reid, David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris, etc. enlivened a dozen rooms, mostly below Manhattan's 14th St., with the sounds of surprise. For reference and pleasure, here’s Butch:

In 2007 Barre and Dave Phillips played basses unconventionally -- rattling a beat with their bows inside their instruments' f-holes, plucking ghost tones and harmonics as well as fully-intoned notes, going for glisses and microtonal intervals. They offered bits of scripted music only at the conclusion of each of their 10-plus-minutes improvs.

Phillips was wrong: Something did happen while he and Dave played. Same as happens when any improvisers of a certain mindset sit down together, starting with and moving towards play. I must applaud, at this point, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, the freely improvising ensemble I go to hear frequently, comprising Jim Baker, Steve Hunt, Brian Sandstrom and Edward Wilkerson, Jr., pace the late Mars Williams — they have played together almost weekly for 17 years, and always seem to achieve something grand. Those listening to EPD, or the Phillipses or Roscoe Mitchell with Tom Buckner, Robert Dick and Scott Robinson, or whomsoever, hear the same things: the findings of artists who've chipped away at implacable silence for a long while, regardless of commercial preferences or financial imperatives.

Its fandom may be small and is certainly self-identified; its charms are easily lost on those who have no patience or resonance for its emanations. But this kind of music does engage, reveal and convey such things as dimensions of dynamic relationships and individual/group expression. The flash and glitter of popular, lucrative entertainments seems all-consuming, distracting and overwhelming. Still, there are those who find meaning in music crystallized in the moment, sans scores or conventional structures. We do not consider the playing of basses or any other instruments by long-adept and inspired musicians a lost cause. Not at all. The tenacity of this activity is a victory for honest if modest hand-made human work. As such, free exploration and expression is a human right and one of its rare blessings.

Here’s Barre Phillips in 2022: