When Anton Webern was composing his Five Canons on Latin Texts, he probably wasn’t thinking very much about American improvised music. Yet formal harmonic structure is the original essential European contribution to the character of jazz. And while much of the mainstream of jazz repertoire is still mired in the harmonic concepts of Tin Pan Alley, Spooky Actions, a New York based jazz quartet, have found inspiration in the discipline and muted palette of twelve tone music.
In their debut CD “Spooky Actions, Music of Anton Webern” (MSK 117) the quartet plays through note for note transcriptions of the Five Canons op. 16, as well as the Five Movements for String Quartet, op 5. They then improvise over the pieces. Rather than taking extended solos, the ensemble uses a sensitive and informed interaction to create original music based closely on the spirit and form of the written work.
It is astonishing to discover how suited the sonorities of the jazz quartet of drums, saxophone (and flute), electric guitar and bass are for 12-tone music. Indeed, the ears of listeners accustomed to these sounds will find that they are a kind of Rosetta stone; the pristine, compressed structures of Webern’s music take on new clarity and attractiveness, making for extremely accessible listening.
“Whether you’ll like Spooky Actions’ Music of Webern depends greatly on whether you like Webern, so let’s start there. Even before he converted to the serialism of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern had taken eagerly to atonal composition. Webern wrote compressed pieces in which single notes stand out from thin textures and achieve great intensity, helped by an exacting approach to timbre. Webern never supplies an obvious logic to connect those single notes; listeners feel the gaps and build their own bridges. Listening to Webern is something like reading surrealist poetry: suggestive, enigmatic and often fascinating.
Spooky Actions – John Gunther on flute, saxophone and clarinet; Bruce Arnold on “processed guitar”; Peter Herbert on bass; and Tony Moreno on drums – has transcribed Webern’s early-period five movements for string quartet and five canons and supplied its own improvisations on these brief pieces for Music of Webern. But these men aren’t trying to make this most abstract of composers into a swingin’ jazz cat; they address Webern’s music on its own terms and shed new light on its strange beauty.
In the transcriptions, Gunther and Arnold both play their sustained, quiet notes with the concentration and ardor that Webern demands, while Herbert and Moreno occasionally perk up the texture with rhythms alien to Webern, but they’re just as comfortable providing subtle but devastating accents. All four players make their timbres work with Webern while preserving their distinctiveness, for renditions that sound both fresh and idiomatic. The improvisations are just as compressed and arresting as the transcriptions; it takes close attention to hear when they pile in more notes or hit the rhythm harder than ol’ Anton would have, but that only makes the differences more affecting.
“This is the debut album of a New York ensemble, named Spooky Actions, that features the work of Anton Webern, an early twentieth century composer of serialist, or atonal, music. Webern’s work became prevailing and influential for its classical compositions in the 1950s and 1960s with his brief, evanescent works. Linked to Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, Webern was the most radical of this modernist Viennese school of composers in that he strove for utmost purity and economy in the articulation of musical thought. Accordingly, Webern’s music requires strict discipline to play its angular and difficult pieces. This also means that it is an intense, intellectual experience for the listener.
Spooky Actions comes from the phrase “spooky actions at a distance,” a phrase that Einstein used to describe the phenomenon of two seemingly unconnected, disparate objects that nonetheless exert a powerful influence on one another. This is perhaps an apt name for this ensemble that instead of a string quartet employs an unlikely (at least in the mind of the composer) combination of guitar, reeds, bass and drums. This produces a very interesting effect in bringing life to an otherwise seemingly austere piece of music. Mind you, the music does not exactly swing, but Spooky Actions makes this music accessible because of the jazz instruments. In particular, John Gunther’s saxophone, clarinet and flute tend to soften Webern’s sharper edges of a string quartet. This is evident in the third movement of the Five Movements composition. After each movement, there is an improvisation that is as roughly as long as the set piece. Here, the music becomes more ‘spooky’ as it starts to hint of avant-garde Japanese music, particularly how the flute is used.
“It’s always a pleasure to receive CDs from totally unknown labels and even more unknown artists. Will it be a big surprise, something completely new and overwhelming, yes or no? On such moments, depending on the quality of the music, I often realize how many good musicians are around all over the world, and I feel dissatisfied because I’lI never be able to know and appreciate them all. This happened when two CD’s from the label Muse Eek fell on the doormat, one by Spooky Actions, another by the duo Arnold and Keir Ourio. Let me reveal first a little from the background of the musicians involved here. Spooky Actions is a quartet: John Gunter (flute, saxophone, clarinet), Bruce Arnold (processed electric guitar), Peter Herbert (bass) and Tony Moreno (drums, percussion). They did their best in interpreting two compositions of Anton Webern, “5 Movements for string quartet opus 5” and “5 Canons”. They play each movement and canon first note by note, followed by a compact improvisation inspired on it.
Of course we know of composers like Stravinsky and Milhaud who tried to integrate jazz influences in their compositions. More rare are the examples the other way around. I know of a CD by the Keith Yaun Quartet Amen adapting works by Oliver Messiaen for improvisation. But jazz musicians who play compositions of the Schönberg twelve-tone method…? But if you listen to Spooky Actions, you ask yourself why this was not done earlier. Because it sounds very interesting and natural in the treatment Spooky Actions. This may be explained by the fact that Arnold studies already some ten years on the application of twelve-tone music to modern jazz.
Arnold teaches Princeton University and wrote over 50 instruction texts on guitar technique. As a guitarplayer he played with people like Joe Pass, Randy Brecker and Joe Lovano, not exactly the avant garde section of jazz music. Together with John Gunther, Arnold started improvising on classical music in 1997. This duo became a quartet and there improvisations on Webern is their first release as Spooky Actions. Listening to this CD I imagined Doctor Nerve playing Webern from an rock angle. This may illustrate that Spooky Actions are successful in transforming the work of Webern into a more down to earth version. Some very enjoyable 27 minutes!
“Spooky Actions is the name of an American jazz band, whose unique musical mixture is an added attraction to the Copenhagen Jazz festival’s website, where it can be heard.
The name is derived from Einstein, according to his theory that two particles that are unlike each other, and separated by vast distances, can still affect each other. It was that strange relationship that Einstein described as ‘Spooky Actions’.
The American jazz group translates this into performances about interactions between phenomenon, (in this case music) which are separated by time and conception from their own contemporary musical universe. On their three CDs, the band plays medieval music, Native American music and the strongest, in our opinion, the music of Anton Webern, the Austrian composer known for his atonal work. All of this music is interpreted within the framework of the Jazz Quartet.
Webern was one of the three composers from the influential second Viennese School; the other two were Alban Berg, and Arnold Schönberg.
Spooky Actions has taken on two works from Webern’s atonal unit, his 5 movements for string quartet, opus 5, and 5 canons opus 16.
It is highly demanding music, containing small, perfect moments, based on tone quality and miniature motifs, in lieu of familiar chords and extended melodies. The longest sections only run 4 minutes, and the briefest 22 seconds.
It is immensely difficult to tackle this challenging and densely composed music, and do anything so radical as arranging it for a jazz quartet made up of guitar, flute/saxophone, bass and drum. Yet this is what Spooky Actions has done, and it is actually astoundingly good.
The two works have been sequenced so that after every section there is a following improvisation by the group, all based on the delicate structures set forth in the actual pieces. Spooky Actions understands, surprisingly well, that limitations can create poetry and that is the essence of Webern’s works.
In addition, taking the music from the sound of a string quartet to the sound of a jazz band with drums is tricky, but Tony Moreno, on drum and percussion successfully adds sensitivity and color.