Stone, Brick, Glass, Wood, Wire (Graphic Scores 1986-96)

On the impressive two-CD set Stone, Brick, Glass, Wood, Wire (memorize the order; there will be a test later), ubiquitous avant-garde music festival performer Fred Frith takes listeners on a tour of five early- to mid-'90s fest appearances, at Angelika (Bologna), FIMAV (Victoriaville), the Time Festival (Gent), Jazz Marathon (Groningen), and the ever-popular Kulturzentrum Dieselstrasse (Esslingen). Scads of avant-garde luminaries typically appear at these gatherings and are sometimes assembled into avant supergroups of sorts; for example, the FIMAV selections on SBGWW are performed by an ensemble including Frith on guitar and violin, Ikue Mori on drum machine and Zeena Parkins on harp and accordion (both of whom appear on all except the Angelika tracks), and drummer Han Bennink, pianist Myra Melford, saxophonist/flutist Jean Derome, guitarist/daxophonist René Lussier, accordionist Guy Klucevsek, and trumpeter Lesli Dalaba. The Frith and friends concerts excerpted here are linked by a set of photographs, which Frith began taking during the waning days of Henry Cow, used as graphic scores for structured improvisations. Reflecting the CD set's title, these are in fact photos of rocks, brick walls, windows, stacks of firewood, high-tension wires, and the like, and the images' visual patterns make them well suited — with the addition of a few written rules here and there — as scores to guide music-making. In the most conventional use of the photos (nicely reproduced in the CD booklet), time can be read from left to right and pitch vertically; more unconventionally, various elements captured by Frith's lens — such as smudges of paint, scattered leaves on sand, or the mortar in a brick wall — serve to guide soloists and instrumental groupings. The musical results vary widely; there are bursts of skronky noise and moments of extreme density contrasted with sparse, chamberesque musings. Given all the musicians involved, an assortment of instrumental voices enter and exit: electronic buzzings and scrapings, the ethereal pluckings of a harp, long and drawn-out chords from an accordion, percussive assaults, the bluster and blurt of a free jazz tenor sax. Abrasive textures sometimes seem uncannily accurate in sonically representing the photographic content — no doubt due in part to the "metaphorical" approach to interpretation Frith mentions in the liners (and after all, the musicians were not gazing at photos of puppy dogs or pleasant postcards of the Mills College campus). Since everything is improvised, the ensembles don't suddenly break into unison melodies complete with ear-pleasing tonal harmony. But the photos do place everyone on the same page, so to speak, and a certain cohesion prevails. With Frith directing and explicit instructions guiding the musicians, the full groups or subsets are even able to stop and start on a dime in certain instances. Perhaps most importantly, Frith's graphic scores rarely place the musicians in opposition to one another or foster elaborate in-jokes that seem designed to amuse the bandmembers at the expense of the listener. (In other words, SBGWW avoids the occasional pitfalls of John Zorn's Cobra.) Ultimately, the participants' high levels of musicianship elevate the proceedings, as does Frith's willingness to give the musicians wide latitude in their interpretations (he doesn't seem the type to whip an errant colleague into shape for failing to "correctly" interpret a pile of logs). At its best, structured improvisation can provide a guiding context that enhances, rather than limits, the impact of the improvisations themselves. Such is the case with Stone, Brick, Glass, Wood, Wire, some of the best photographs you ever heard.