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April 2008
gig reviews

Seb Pipe's Life Experience
Trio VD / Final Terror
The Frank Griffith Nonet
Matthew Shipp Trio
Paolo Angeli, Evan Parker
Barbez
Christine Tobin
The Zig Quartet

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April 2008 gig reviews by Chris Parker

Barbez

Thursday 24 April

'A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land.' Thus Czernowitz-born poet Paul Celan, explaining the purpose of his work to a German audience in 1958.

Celan's parents were lost in the Holocaust (his father died of typhus, his mother was shot by a concentration-camp guard), and he himself eventually committed suicide, so his work necessarily focuses on the darkest aspects of the human experience Ð 'The Sky Beetle', for instance, is based on a poem written shortly before his death in which Celan writes, 'the death you still owe me, I carry it out' Ð and Barbez, a Brooklyn-based ensemble comprised of leader Dan Kaufman (guitars), Pamelia Kurstin (theremin), Peter Hess (clarinet, percussion), Andrew Jones (bass) and John Bollinger (drums), confront this darkness unflinchingly.

Performing Kaufman material based on extensive research into Celan's life and work, the band (joined by Scottish poet and theatre director Fiona Templeton) used a mix of East European folk, 'downtown' (itself an amalgam of jazz, rock and art music) and Brechtian theatre music, Kurstin's ethereal theremin, the focus of the group sound, providing a haunting counterpoint to Templeton's paradoxically dispassionate but affecting narration.

Preceded by a shortish, relatively free-form duo set of theremin and piano (Liam Noble), this was a sobering, moving tribute to a man who, like Primo Levi or Tadeusz Borowski, demonstrated the power and efficacy of (to quote the title of the relevant album made by Barbez for John Zorn's Tzadik label) the 'Force of Light'.

 

 

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