Hi Following the fairly recent posts about other Meltdown gigs in London,
I meant to post my thoughts on the Marc Ribot, Evan Parker and Han
Bennink improvisation at Ornette Coleman's Meltdown festival. Earlier
that evening Acoustic Ladyland performed for free in the Royal Festival
Hall foyer, to a crowd of early birds who would either go to the Yoko Ono
concert, or the Marc Ribot gig next door. The lineup still has Pete
Wareham and Seb Roachford on sax and drums respectively, but features a
newish bass player and a brand new guitarist replacing the other previous
members. The group was tight and exciting with as much guitar workout as
saxophone scronk. Most interestingly, they've dropped the vocal numbers
so it's now an all-instrumental line-up. They drew a young eager crowd
who lapped it all up - well worth catching as they're touring on their
new album. Into the concert proper in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, it was
clear that the Ribot / Parker / Bennink gig was far from a sellout,
although as the compere suggested, those who did come were excited and
respectful, with none of the walkouts that were seen at the Fred Frith
gig a couple of days later. Support was from a group called 'About' with
John Coxon (of Spring Heel Jack), Pat Thomas, Charles Hayward and Alexis
Taylor. Lineup included laptop, keyboards, drums, guitar and vocals.
After a few minutes of a fairly conventional sounding (and forgettable)
ballad, the music was allowed to gradually disintegrate with a few
snippets looped in 'real time', sometimes aggressively. This formula was
repeated a further twice, and whilst there were moments of interest, it
felt too devoid of ideas to sustain my interest. The crowd's reaction
seemed mixed, and the applause was polite and muted. When the main act
came onstage, the audience was rapt. It was fully improvised, but all
three performers were continually 'on' that the whole gig not only
sounded fresh and exciting but the three were playing so collectively
that some endings were so tight to almost sound rehearsed. Consisting of
several short pieces, generally Ribot and Parker dominated, trading ideas
from one another and Bennink bouncing off the pair. Bennink's antics
(bouncing sticks of the ground, pulling faces at the crowd, knocking all
his kit over, rollling on the ground) were amusing and added a liveliness
to the music, but the trio's performance was so involving his
attention-seeking diversions weren't really necessary. Occasionally,
Ribot would get into a riff but the others didn't let him settle on
anything for too long. Parker had one short 'solo' piece using his
trademark circular breathing on soprano sax, with Ribot accompanying with
drones and Bennink tapping on the scaffold balustrades at the side of the
stage with his sticks, and although the sax line was busy the relative
spareness of the accompaniment was a nice contrast to the rest of the
evening where all three took a prominent role on each piece. The music
was generally energetic and busy, with a controlled roughness; it was
rarely allowed to become delicate. After about an hour, it seemed Parker
was ready to end, they played one more piece then left the stage to
enthusiastic applause, returning then for one brief encore before
retiring. I could have listened to a lot more. An absolutely engaging
and absorbing performance. Cheers for now Dave
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