The Mutable Joys of Wind-Blown Sound
Erwan Keravec, Peter Van Huffel's Callisto
The Nonchalant Versatility of Bagpipe Master Erwan Keravec
I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to the traditional music of Brittany, as I’ve been affected by a long-term allergy to most Celtic music, for better or worse. The latter is manifested by the fact that until the last week or so I’d never spent much time listening to the work of French bagpiper Erwan Keravec, who is a product of Bretone tradition. But he’s so much more than that, and he’s spent decades placing the instrument in unusual contexts. Considering the popularity of music built from drones, my knee-jerk lack of awareness seems pretty stupid, because few instruments can offer so many possibilities when it comes to sustained tones, including intricate harmonic activity and evolving rhythmic patterns, as the bagpipes. I have listened to Keravec previously, particularly in collaboration with reedist Mats Gustafsson, who has championed the piper for years. In 2018 they released a visceral duo project called Luft that featured Keravec engaged in the sort of fully improvised setting that the saxophonist has long excelled within. Keravec, who also appeared on Gustafsson’s sprawling birthday celebration document MG 50—Peace and Fire, acquits himself without issue, serving as an agile, imaginative improviser, but it is only recently that I’ve started to get a fuller picture of his practice.
I revisited a superb solo live recording through Café Oto’s invaluable digital label, 23.10.22, and it’s been blowing my mind. Keravec reveals an astonishing mastery of blending a rich drone with insane, rapid-fire patterns made with the instrument’s chanters. He goes through a couple of ideas over the course of the 41-minute performance, with his slowly undulating drone suggesting something purely electronic. Its buzzing tone warbles and wobbles, and sometimes seems to swallow up additional tones within the blob-like chords, and it continues to ring out as he resets his chanters to move onto the next episode in his performance—you can hear a substantial excerpt, below. He goes a long way to dispelling the cliched sonic thumbprint of the instrument’s traditional usage—and for someone who grew up in the US, that means men in Tartan kilts. His tone is biting and nasal, but once the listener can adjust and disassociate from Celtic folk tropes the instrument suddenly becomes amazing, a kind of portable pipe organ of seemingly unlimited potential. Sometimes the drones are massive slabs of harmonic splendor and sometimes, when Kerewec leaves it aside, he conjures some ridiculously gnarly upper register saxophone blowing that would leave many free jazz musicians gasping for air. I’m going to pull out my Rufus Harley recordings and revisit them, as well as beginning my search for other experimental pipers. I’m open to suggestions.
Still, there’s more to Keravec’s practice, and he’ll present another side of his work when he performs a solo concert as part of this year’s Maerz Musik on Saturday, March 23 at Radialsystem. He’ll revisit the program featured on his terrific 2020 album Goebbels/Glass/Radigue (Buda), titled for the three composers whose work is featured. The album opens with “N20 58” by Heiner Goebbels who conceived the piece as a performative work to be played outdoors, with Keravec climbing a hill toward the audience while playing. The work has been regularly adapted to the particulars of a given performance ever since. Unlike the other two works on the album this one features some electronic elements via playback, with crackling thunder, rainfall, wind-like swooshes battering and obscuring the musician’s output—a kind of simulation of the outdoor experience. Six minutes in the weather sounds vanish, replaced by a relentless electronic kick drum, which gradually expands into a series of industrial rhythmic soundscapes, with which the pipes battle; as the piece winds down Keravec produces tones that groan and creak, a sound far removed from the usual profile of his instrument. This is followed by a bracing adaptation of the early Philip Glass piece “Two Pages,” inspired by an earlier, gentler version recorded by the inventive American bagpiper Matthew Welch.
Once again, the drone sounds electronic, hovering and slowly rolling through the subtlest of tonal shifts, while he uncorks glistening, rapidly spinning patterns that morph almost imperceptibly, as with all of the composer’s early work. The performance is deliciously intense and driving, and it’s been utterly transformative to let it take root in my head. But my favorite piece is his collaboration with Eliané Radigue, with another addition to her brilliant Occam Ocean series. Both Kerawec and Radigue were skeptical that the bagpipes could work with her ideas, but what they pulled off proved them both wrong. “Occam XXVII,” which you can check out below, starts out with some of those croaky, unpitched tones as Keravec gets things in place, and then a glorious, uninterrupted slice of hypnosis takes over nearly two minutes, beginning gently, if not a bit tentatively, with a single tone, and then the full harmonic breadth erupts. Within that larger blob of sound resides a cornucopia of movement and collisions. I don’t know if he’s only using the drone element or if he’s complementing with meticulously pitched action with one of the chanters, but ultimately I don’t care. I can’t wait to experience it live.
Peter Van Huffel Channels his High Energy Attack into his New Quartet Callisto
Peter Van Huffel, the Canadian-Belgian reedist who’s lived in Berlin since 2008, has devoted much of his energy over the last to decade to his bruising trio Gorilla Mask, with bassist Roland Fidezius and drummer Rudi Fischerlehner. Over the course of five albums the group has grown increasingly muscular, with Fidezius producing a huge, bracing low-end on electric bass that rumbles more than it swings, invoking hard rock more than jazz. Fischerlehner follows suit, and together they give the trio’s leader wide passage for ferocious alto or baritone saxophone improvisations. Given that combo’s aggression and gut-punch timbre I am a bit surprised that his latest working band Callisto lacks a bassist, but as heard on the group’s forthcoming debut album Meandering Demons (Clean Feed) they manage just fine without one. The album is released on Sunday, March 24, which happens to be the date Callisto are playing Industriesalon Schöneweide.
The agile group includes drummer Joe Hertenstein, pianist Antonis Anissegos, and trumpeter Lina Allemano, who has never sounded more powerful and fleet. The quartet delivers a jacked-up strain of post-bop, with punchy production flourishes that reflect a strong rock aesthetic. The leader sticks exclusively to baritone on this recording, heaping more heft on the sonic pile with lines that slash and swerve while also digging deep into the horn’s lushly abraded fabric. Hertenstein’s drums are miked aggressively closely, with crushing low-end and biting highs providing some of the attack a bassist might inject, while Anissegos occasionally applies electronic effects to his keyboards, further occupying the lower end of the sonic spectrum. In fact, the keyboardist’s coloristic aesthetic, which often privileges timbre and texture as much as serving any harmonic role. This context allows Van Huffel, Allemano, and the keyboardist to take off on all kinds of divergent paths from the compositional core, individually and contrapuntally . Hertenstein is also given great freedom, providing thrust and sculpting elaborate improvisatory lines at once. The music is firmly structured, but within those frameworks the band brings serious heat.
Like Gorilla Mask, Callisto is high energy and though Van Huffel doesn’t ever really tap into any sort of fusion tropes, it seems pretty clear that he remains fond of some kind of rock music. “Glass Sanctuary” is larded with reverb and delay, and between its synth intro and Allemano’s expansive blowing shadowed by refracting electronics, it’s obvious that Van Huffel is no purist. Structurally it’s all rooted in jazz, but the group’s interest in expanding, smearing, and reconfiguring acoustic qualities into something abstract is the source of the band’s character. Below you can check out the opening track to the new record.
Recommended Shows in the Berlin This Week
March 19: Les Percussions de Strasbourg: Musik im Bauch (Stockhausen, Steen-Andersen), MaerzMusik 2024, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Schaperstraße, 24, 10719 Berlin
March 20: Amalie Dahl, alto saxophone, and Steve Heather, drums; Klaus Ellerhusen Holm, reeds, Joakim Rainer, piano, and Bjørn Marius Hegge, double bass, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
March 21: António Zambujo, 8 PM, Philharmonie Berlin, chamber music hall, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
March 21: DEK (Elisabeth Harnik, piano, Ken Vandermark, reeds, and Didi Kern, drums); Pink Forest (Guylaine Cosseron, vocals; Benjamin Duboc, double bass, and Franz Hautzinger, trumpet), 8 PM, Exploratorium, Zossener Strasse 24, 10961, Berlin
March 21: Lura, 8:30 PM, Gretchen, Obentrautstr. 19-21, 10963 Berlin
March 21: Dead Leaf Butterfly (Els Vandeweyer, vibraphone, Lina Allemano, trumpet, Maike Hilbig, double bass, and Lucia Martinez, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
March 22: Splitter Orchestra and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, 8:30 PM, MaerzMusik 2024, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
March 23: Erwan Keravec, 9:30 PM, MaerzMusik 2024, Radialsystem V, Holzmarktstrasse 33, 10243 Berlin
March 24: Éiríocht: New Music from Ireland (program includes Jennifer Walshe, Ann Clear, Shane Latimer & Tobias Delius, and Roy Carroll with Axel Dörner and Matthias Müller), 3 PM, Silent Green, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin
March 24: Peter Van Huffel's Callisto (Lina Allemano, trumpet, Peter Van Huffel, baritone saxophone, electronics, Antonis Anissegos, piano, electronics, and Joe Hertenstein, drums, electronics), 3:30 PM, Industriesalon Schöneweide, Reinbeckstraße 10, 12459 Berlin
More experimental bagpipe recommendations. https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/experimental-bagpipes-list