Peter Kowald - Global Village
(Free Elephant)
While the hole left in the international free music community by Peter Kowald's passing is one that resonated widely and strongly, the bassist's death left an equally (if not larger) hole in his local music scene in Wuppertal, Germany. Kowald was not only the city's foremost representative in the world of avant garde music, he was also a local mentor, encourager, and friend to many of the city's musicians. He hosted regular concerts at his home, and, between globetrotting trips to play in venues across seas and continents, was very active in and supportive of Wuppertal's local music community. Global Village was a product of both Kowald's multicultural and local musical approaches. The core trio was made up of Wuppertal residents: Kowald on bass, Gunda Gottschalk on violin and viola, and Xu Feng Xia on the guzheng, a Chinese relative of the zither. On Global Village, the trio performs both as a trio, and with additional guests. In accordance with the trio's goal of multicultural communication and the immersion of different improvisational languages within each other, this disc features improvisations with Japan's Otomo Yoshihide on electronics, Korean Jin Hi Kim on komungo, a large Korean string instrument, and American vocalist Pamela Z.
Half of Global Village features recordings made by the trio alone, without special guests or collaboration. It's no surprise that these represent the disc's most cohesive and conversational work, as Kowald, Gottschalk, and Xia, by this time, had developed a strong group voice, and a sense of improvisational ESP that provides their trio pieces with a strong sense of unity, and a stylistic flow that's seamless enough (without becoming commonplace or mundane) that it, at moments, might make the listener absolutely sure that the music has been previously composed. This deep level of communication among the trio is what makes the disc so interesting. Here, we see the effects of the "outsiders," the visitors to Wuppertal, on the music of the Global Village trio. The conceptual strength behind the music becomes further developed when Global Village is viewed as the melting pot, as it were, of not only an array of six different musicians, but six different musical languages, with the combinations of indigenous and individual aspects of musical language in each musician. Even Kowald and Gottschalk, though both Germans, have differing musical backgrounds, as Gottschalk's technique and attitude about her playing are both deeply steeped in the world of classical music, a very different route than the one Kowald has taken as an improvisor during his decades as a free jazz legend.
Yoshihide is the first of the foreign exchange collaborators. His use of samples and modern sounds is a jarring presence within the acoustic string trio. There's an immediate difference to the tracks upon which he appears, a feeling of unavoidable synthesis, but also a harsh sense of stylistic dissonance, one which the trio, despite their best efforts, aren't completely able to diminish. It's due to this dissonance that the three tracks containing Yoshihide represent both Global Village's most exciting work, but also some of the album's most challenging listening. Jin Hi Kim's appearance is far less unsettling, as her komungo transforms the trio into a larger string quartet in which the flurry of bowing, plucking, and strumming creates an elastic jungle of varying timbres and pitches. These musical conversations have the distinct feel of a conversation in a native tongue, but including different dialects, a stew of more subtle differences and more obvious similarities. Though Yoshihide's arsenal, at times, uses the human voice in reproduced form, the inclusion of Pamela Z's vocals in the trio's palette marks another rather noticeable shift. Z's voice is a commanding one, often coming to the forefront over the contributions of Kowald, Gottschalk, and Xia. These last three selections on the disc feature an interesting mix of the organic nature of the human voice, and the rather alien features it can take on when used as a music instrument outside of accepted human language. Among the other instruments, these vocals, sometimes augmented by minimal electronic effects and echo, become an instrument themselves, one that meshes surprisingly well with the trio's tendencies and modes of communication.
No matter which combination of personnel is exhibited in a specific track, perhaps Global Village's most impressive attribute is the way that the musicians seem to find a way to effortlessly combine their specific voices into a total sound. It's not that, at any point, one or more of the performers is inaudible, or less important, but that Global Village contains music that is truly a collaborative effort, music in which singular voices, no matter their background, become a collaborative chorus in which the whole is surely greater than the sum of its parts.
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