People’s Republic of Australasia, April 12
9/10
I first wrote about Jon Rose 43 years ago. While I have the misfortune to be 43 years older, his art is not. It is still just as fresh, funny, surprising, beautiful, subversive, inventive and defiant. The defiance is intrinsic. Rose has devoted his life to art of making music that shuns idiom, most often, as here, doing this via free improvisation.
At 75, he is an internationally celebrated figure, which no doubt warms his heart, but changes nothing when he picks up his violin; when the aural canvas is initially just as blank as it ever was, and every performance is an adventure into the unknown.
Given he has lived in Alice Spring for some years, this was a rare Sydney appearance, for which he chose a decades-long collaborator in saxophonist Jim Denley and a relatively more recent one in double bassist Clayton Thomas. Like Rose, both have a virtuosity that climbs beyond mere facility, and into the outer reaches of what is possible on each instrument.
To sit only a metre or two from them is to be swept into an intoxicating theatre of sound, since watching them make the music is as enthralling as the music itself. Process and outcome are one and the same. You could variously watch Thomas playing his bass with two bows, sometimes both in one hand, sometimes one in each, above and below the bridge; or Denley using a pot lid on the bell of his alto, making a scraping or vibrating sound while also semi-muting the horn; or Rose using his violin as a percussion instrument of boundless potential. While all three naturally sought ways to enhance what was happening, Rose, in particular, used his slippery, spidery violin to subvert anything that was in the least danger of entering a cul-de-sac of predictability.
It could be music you bathed in, or clung to as it took you for a tumultuous ride, and always it was music of contrasts: of extremes of pitch; of unfamiliar textures; of fragmentary rhythms and elusive tonal centres. Then would come a moment of blinding beauty, as of a melody heard in a distant, unattainable past. Each player intuitively dropped out here and there to leave intricate duets, and one of these, between Rose and Denley, was so texturally startling it was like music from another dimension.
The interaction was routinely uncanny. Partly, of course, it’s a matter of intense listening to each other, but also of freakish convergences. In one memorable section of the second set, the violin and alto cried plaintively over massive, granite-like pillars of bass sound. Another section had Denley growling into his saxophone, Rose sounding like a creaky house in a gale, and Thomas a forewarning of the apocalypse, before all three suddenly retreated to the merest wisps of sounds, and then to just the ghosts of those wisps.
https://www.jonroseweb.com/a_jonrose_biography.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Rose