As a kid who grew up on raging punk, it was the ferocious energy of some improvised music that lured me in. It was just as wild and fierce as the electric storms that were unleashed by (mostly) young adults like myself, but there was an added element of surprise, of the idea, or the promise, that anything could happen. For a young, curious listener looking for kicks, improvised music can be the perfect drug (almost thirty years later, the wide-eyed kid is still there). And while there could be some macho element involved that was just as crude as the caveman brutality of some knuckledraggin’ punk music, I soon learned that the best among them dealt in so much more than blunt force and a primitive roar. They had focus.
It was also about bending the rules, taking things out of their contexts and messing them up, and about refining an art to insane levels. It was about control, about becoming so good at this game that playing music became playing with music, and then letting the music take over again. Turning things inside out, rearranging the ingredients, churning them out in different, but no less thrilling, constellations. As a music nut, you are always looking for new thrills (whether you get them from tempestuous noise or soothing minimalism), but the thing is that your experience widens and you are not that easily bowled over anymore. Yet, once in a while, an album turns up that gives you exactly that feeling, the one with the tingles down the spine and the realisation that yes, it’s the real deal!
New Invention does it for me. It’s the kind of album that made me realise that most of all, I am not a music journalist or a writer, but a music fanatic, in love with sounds that rearrange my brain. Colin Webster and Andrew Lisle have been refining their collaboration in several contexts over the past years. Most of these you can find on Webster’s Raw Tonk label, some also on A New Wave Of Jazz. Anyway, the feeling you get from these seven pieces is that of a bond that is taken to the next level. These lifelong learners have left the preparatory stages behind and have established their own rapport with a decidedly personal language. Webster belongs in a long line of sharp-toned alto players, and while he rarely explores the freakish registers of a Kaoru Abe, he could remind you, at different moments, of people like John Zorn, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Anthony Braxton or even Jackie McLean.
There is this ‘punk’ spirit in his playing as well, an unfettered abundance, but he never sounds like a loose cannon. Webster has become a razor-sharp thinker who keeps the link between thought and execution as short as possible, spraying his barrage of stuttering and sputtering morsels of sound with a fearsome precision, as if there is some formal structure behind his freedom. Lisle on his part is his equal, charging ahead with dexterity and accuracy, kneading rhythm into a combustible mass, livening things up with blastbeat-like hammering, snappy fills and rolls and an amazing sense of detail and color, combining swift machine gun-like rattling with the ‘workplace-gone-mad’-rumble of a Sylvain Darrifourcq.
The energy level of this album is high, as only the sixth track, “Kuggar” (a decent atlas helps figuring these titles out), serves as a kind of resting point, but make no mistake: this is not just about flexing muscles, it is not a one-directional assault, no exercise in futility. More than anything else, this is about turning a source of vitality into a force of creativity. Restlessly transforming shapes. That makes the energy so alluring, the drive so palpable, the interplay so exhilarating. It is often said that after more than half a century of improvised albums, it has become hard to bring anything new to the table, but Webster and Lisle are doing just that, and it is one of the most electrifying things I have heard in ages.
Guy Peters 2020
