NoBusiness Records, based in Lithuania, is one of the most
significant labels operating today in the field of free jazz, focusing
on both new projects and archival, usually live, recordings.
In early 2017, NoBusiness inaugurated a new series in
collaboration with another label that shares the same operational
strategies, the Japanese Chap Chap Records. Active since the early
Nineties, Chap Chap has released both new works (like the fundamental
Golden Hearts Remembrance by Wadada Leo Smith), and
valuable archival recordings (Sabu Toyozumi with Han Bennink, Motoharu
Yoshizawa with Evan Parker, Mototeru Takagi).
The first volume in this new series is in a way a mirror
of the collaboration itself, as it features two musicians from opposite
parts of the globe. The late Paul Rutherford, an early practitioner of
free improvisation in England in the early Seventies, helped define the
very essence of European free music; Sabu Toyozumi is one of the
protagonists in the excellent, and still little known, Japanese free
jazz scene from the same period, and he's still very much active to this
day.
The live recording contained in The
Conscience comes from a concert held in 1999 at Cafè Jumbo in
Tokoname, Japan, and it was originally meant by Sadamu Hisada, the
concert promoter, as a simple documentation of the event, with no
intention to release it. The sound quality betrays its origin, with a
slightly uneven mix that sometimes risks covering the subtler aspects of
the music, Rutherford’s nuanced playing in particular. However, these
are minor deficiencies, and the recording quality is in general more
than adequate.
Rutherford and Toyozumi already recorded together the year
before, a session that would be later self-released by the drummer on
the record Fragrance. This previous experience was
clearly beneficial to the performance at hand: building on a common
language based on free jazz, while pointing to even more abstract
territories, the musicians demonstrate an immediate understanding of
each other's playing, building on an urgent, unrelenting exchange of
ideas.
The record consists of a constantly changing free-form
improvisation, divided in five tracks that share the same basic traits.
Trombone and drums often proceed in parallel directions, suddenly
locking in tight rhythmic exchanges or diverging in abstract textural
explorations. The absence of a clear direction is disorienting at first,
but the richness of timbres and dynamics explored by the musicians
guarantees the strong involvement of the listener, called to decipher
the intricacies of their improvisational dialogue, its contradictions
and mysterious flow.
The Conscience is a prime example of
free music at its most daring, an ever-changing musical landscape where
the only constant is surprise.
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Paul Rutherford – trombone
Sabu Toyozumi – drums
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