Microsoft word - 2013 0428 moers-nohome02_eng.doc

No home for Blixt, part 2 Bill Laswell The bassist, composer and impresario Bill Laswell is one of the New York scene's most scintillating figures. The panorama of his artistic activities, which not even John Zorn can outrival, ranges from extreme avant garde to the heady heights of commercial success, from mainstream pop, heavy metal and prog rock to hip hop, reggae, blues, jazz, free improvisation, "world music" in various forms, Gregorian chant, ambient, dub and drum & bass. Many of Laswell's projects see several of these styles collide. The trio has always been central to Laswell's work, and even his larger formations have often effectively turned out to be an amalgamation of trios. Text: Wolf Kampmann When Bill Laswell moved from Detroit to New York at the end of the 1970s, he brought to life not one but two trios which proceeded to set off in relatively different musical directions. His first formation, Material, a celebration of avant garde dance music with Can as a role model, was to remain for years, in changing guises, his most important project. Made up of protagonist Laswell, keyboarder Michael Beinhorn and drummer Fred Maher, Material initially served, with admirable flexibility, as a backing band for rather more famous musicians. Appearing with the old prog rocker Daevid Allen, for instance, it morphed into New York Gong. Occasionally, guitarist Robert Quine would make the trio a quartet. Material would later become one of the most opulent genre-busting all-star squads in the music business, no longer supporting but embracing the likes of Whitney Houston, Nile Rodgers, Killah Priest, Archie Shepp, Henry Threadgill, John McLaughlin and Herbie Hancock. That, however, is another story. In 1981 the British multi-instrumentalist Fred Frith, new in New York, was walking the streets of the city in disillusionment. He claims it was then that he happened to hear, coming from a cellar, exactly the music he'd been looking for. He knocked and found Laswell and Maher together in a joint session. Frith got his guitar, the three started to jam, and one of the most influential trios of what would later become the downtown avant garde scene was born. Under the name Massacre, Laswell, Frith and Maher developed a spectacularly caustic combination of punk, prog rock and free improvisation. Their sound was eye-wateringly dry and powerful and the song "Legs", from what was for a long time the only Massacre album, "Killing Time", became a veritable club hit on the Lower East Side. That seemed to be that until Massacre reformed twenty years later with British drummer Charles Hayward and another powerhouse was born, this time fuelling a mixture of improv metal and power dub. Last Exit was one of the most controversial bands of the 1980s. Saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, guitarist Sonny Sharrock, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and Laswell, sometimes joined by Herbie Hancock, set out to exploit the friction between free funk and heavy metal in a way the critics just didn't know what to make of. Laswell and co were written off as charlatans and accused of only being out to shock. Laswell didn't care. Though Last Exit was a quartet, it was actually an amalgamation of two trios – a Hendrix-esque guitar power trio and a Brötzmann-style improv trio. Last Exit's ferocity radically changed the way jazz viewed itself. Various things which would later come to seem normal were only made possible by the groundbreaking and noisy work of this kamikaze crew. The list of Laswell trios goes on forever. Arcana, with Derek Bailey and Tony Williams, followed in the footsteps of Lifetime, Praxis, with Brain and Buckethead, was a kind of speed alternative to Primus, and Painkiller saw Laswell, John Zorn and Mick Harris, the drummer from Napalm Death and Scorn, loudly combining death metal, free jazz and ambient. Whatever the project, Laswell the perfectionist has always combined intense personal passion with intelligent production and great conceptual forethought. However wild those horses may become, Laswell always has them under control. Until shortly after the turn of the millennium, Laswell was bringing out new records almost on a weekly basis. When people were fed up of hearing his name, he just brought them out under someone else's - normally one of his more famous collaborators. Herbie Hancock's classic "Future Shock" is a case in point. After 2001 however, things quietened down. The workaholic had tasted the attraction of a private life. Blixt is one of the few recent projects which harks back to the major trios of the past. After a long career knocking about with guitarists including Robert Quine, Michael Gira, Fred Frith, Sonny Sharrock, James Blood Ulmer and Nicky Scopelitis, Laswell is now partying with the Finn Raoul Björkenheim and the Swedish drummer Morgan Agren. Blixt is a dauntless bastion of power improvisation, unfailingly too much, right at home in that elusive interval between the present and the future, every piece a thrashing, obstinate and entertaining bid for freedom. The nominal similarity between Laswell's punk jazz band Massacre and Caspar Brötzmann's noise cooperative Massaker is just a coincidence - if you believe in such things. More about the son of the Last Exist saxophonist in Part 3.

Source: http://www.moers-festival.de/media/download/2013/pdf/pdf_Artikel/No_Home_For_Blixt_part2_by_Wolf_Kampmann.pdf