Eddie Prevost With Ken Vandermark & Michael Zerang at 6Odum, April 13
To really truly know any kind of music, it’s best to be playing it; the next best thing is to be there. But in certain circles even those approaches fall short. Just before he began a solo set at 6Odum on April 14, tabletop guitarist Keith Rowe–one-third of the current lineup of the legendary free improv group AMM–told the crowd a little nervously that he was uncomfortable with performing, had no idea where he was going to start or stop, and that he wanted us to feel free to move around, please. Oh, he added, and don’t feel obligated to applaud at the end, because you wouldn’t feel obligated to applaud after any other ambient sound. By this he didn’t mean that people shouldn’t listen, but that rather he hoped they’d begin to consider all sounds with the sort of attention they were about to devote to his.
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AMM formed in 1965 as a reaction against the tendency of sounds to codify themselves, to stick to established forms even after those forms are no longer new or revelatory–bebop, for instance. Taken to extremes, this line of thinking led the musicians to the conclusion that anything that can be heard exactly the same way twice has already lost something the second time around. In his 1995 book, a sort of memoir-manifesto called No Sound Is Innocent, drummer Eddie Prevost repeatedly refers to what AMM does as “meta-music,” and by that he means in part that he wants to keep music forever out of any place where the ear registers familiar patterns and thus tunes out.
While I’m sure they’d prefer we not refer to anything as a “final result” until they’re all dead, being quite devoted to process, AMM have definitely merged their techniques and philosophies into a challenging, heady brand of improv that can’t help but inspire a traditional sort of admiration. I hesitate to call it a “sound,” but it is distinctive: lots of musicians can improvise, but only these guys can play AMM music. They have trained themselves together for decades–Rowe and Prevost since ’65, Tilbury since ’82–and seem to read one another’s thoughts. By the same token, when they play with outsiders, they’re bound to wind up with something entirely different–as in Prevost’s show of duos and a trio with Ken Vandermark and Michael Zerang on April 13. His approach to his borrowed drum kit at times sounded rather like free jazz drumming in its groove and antigroove, and damned if Prevost didn’t look a little gleeful to be proving himself in that realm.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
