Keith Tippett/Matthew Bourne at Union Chapel

[Serial_Apologist]

Much looking forward to this today, having seen these two "at it" a few months back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSPcI_2ETiw

For more of this you have to visit Keith's official website on facebook, which I'm probably not permitted to advertise on here!

[Serial_Apologist]

Much looking forward to this today, having seen these two "at it" a few months back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSPcI_2ETiw

For more of this you have to visit Keith's official website on facebook, which I'm probably not permitted to advertise on here!

You arrive and queue in the rain outside the premises - a redbrick monstrosity of Victorian religious good intentions midway along an elegant Georgian terrace - and on being let in are told you don't have to pay anything, but a donation would be appreciated, a fiver being the accepted amount to drop into the old tobacco tin. But most clearly didn't feel five squids to be nearly enough recognition for the artists about to appear: several £20 notes went in with change declined. Food was being served from a tressel table set up at the back, from where people made their way to the tightly lined up original oak pews. Three young musicians were playing a desultory kind of improvised wallpaper music that sounded like people informally warrming up - they would provide a semi-backdrop between the three advertised sets of free improv. First on were two young besuited pianists, who proceeded to freely improvise two vaguely free-jazz pieces, interesting if no matching of equals, but maybe that wasn't intended. Steve Beresford's partnership with the pianist and "sound artist" Tania Chen - about whom I can find little, although she's all over the www, apart from her being based in both London and New York - steered a fascinating path through constantly changing musical terrains: Ms Chen, in addition to piano making use of percussion mallets, some toy or other connected by longish lead to a hand control on the innards of the piano and a sounds emitting miniature hand-held laptop; Mr Beresford finding rather than making space for his askanced take on, in this instance, ragtime amid the forest of possibilities presented by the open format, not to mention a few strings-glancing flying objects thrown his way! Performance art has long been an important part of Steve's musical presence, arguably to an extent at the expense of his reputation otherwise as an improvising pianist of choice for Evan Parker. Whatever might have seemed on the point of breaking out into something wild was kept under wraps in a - for Steve Beresford - remarkably not-in-the-face performance. In Keith Tippett's duo with 30 years younger Matthew Bourne, also West Country-born though often thought a northener, we have possibly the closest of the Bristolian's pianistic partnerships to musically melded minds in a 40+ years long story of non-stylistically congruent dialogues characterised by contrasting approaches which have unfailingly delivered in terms of drama and excitement. With Tippett starting things off with a portentous low note, the two musicians gradually felt their way into a single-minded narrative - the one completing the phrases presented by the other like two conversing friends finishing each other's sentances, all building into a seamless gelling of ringing, rippling textures, interwoven with those references we've come to expect from Mr Tippett - that Gymnopédies-like waltz that appears from nowhere; the music box-playing folk melody that can never quite be identified; the sustained Messiaenic floating chord complexes.