Swiss duo play free jazz to curious Yogya audience

Swiss duo play free jazz to curious Yogya audience

Sri Wahyuni, The Jakarta Post, Yogyakarta

The Prambanan Temple's open-air theater is usually a venue for
the classical Ramayana ballet but last Friday night it looked
completely different.

A grand piano took the center stage, right next to a set of
percussion instruments. Two giant screens were erected on both
sides of the stage. Another set of instruments, much larger in
number, were arranged further back on the stage; a visual
confirmation of the scale of the performance.

Entitled The Geisser-Mazzola Duo Concert, last week's
performance presented two free jazz musicians from Switzerland,
percussionist Heinz Geisser and piano player Guerino Mazzola.

Two host groups -- the Surakarta-based Sono Seni Ensemble and
Yogyakarta-based Anane -- accompanied the two jazzers.

While Sono Seni and Anane brought a strong sense of
traditional influence to their experimental playing, Geisser and
Mazzola presented a completely new sound experience for the
audience.

"It's a heavy, heavy stuff for me," an audience member said
about the music played by the duo that night.

In all, the duo played four pieces that night, each of some
20-minute duration, and rounded them off with a jam session with
Sono Seni and Anane musicians at the concert's end.

The pieces, which were given no specific titles and were only
referred to by Mazzola previously as Holy Space, to pay tribute
to the temple, were dominated mostly by rapid beats.

Enjoying them, the audience were drawn into a non-stop
percussive marathon during the concert. The players sometimes
slowed their pace a little, as if giving the audience a chance to
breathe, but it lasted only for few minutes. The rest of the
music was harsh, beat-riddled, energetic music.

The musicians, even when they took a break from playing,
jumped and jived to the beat, using their whole bodies.

"Our music is our music. We don't play a style. We just play
ourselves. We are improvising our music. Still, you can recognize
it, once you listen to us again," Geisser said before the
concert.

While their output nowadays often stretches the perceptions
about what is music, Mazzola and Geisser have solid backgrounds
in structured Western styles.

Fifty-seven-year-old Mazzola started playing classical piano
at the age of six and attended the Zurich Jazz School between
1961 and 1964. Geisser, meanwhile, studied classical guitar with
Ermano Maggini and classical percussion with Horst Hofmann at the
Zurich Music Conservatory.

Mazzola said free jazz meant players took full responsibility
for what they were doing as musicians. By doing so, they did not
depend on songs, arrangements, or rules made by other people.

"Of course both of us are full of jazz traditions as we have
been playing and practicing them for years. But what we are
playing presently is mainly ourselves in the sense that we fully
determine what we choose among the big universe of sounds. And
most importantly, we take full control of time," Mazzola said.

Music, according to Mazzola, is about building artificial time
-- good music, when one feels in a different time in a different
universe. Through free jazz, Mazzola said players were trying to
create an artificial time, which was completely in their control.

"We can stop and go on. So, (when you have) no more rhythm,
it's no more there, because if you have no more rhythm you're a
slave of somebody, of some pattern, of some conductor," he said.

There was no music slavery in free jazz, he said.

The Geisser-Mazzola Duo's music is often based on quick
decisions. It is spontaneous in the sense that they do not know
what will happen. What they usually prepare before a concert is a
series of "inner chords"; not a structure of music, as it is
normally, but a process instead.

"It's a kind of a computer program, which tells you how to act
and react. It's not about how long it goes, but what to do when
this, and this, and this, happens. So, it's a process, not a
structure," Mazzola said.

"It's just like in a conversation, if I may give you a
comparison. If you want to make a conversation then you have to
know how to speak the language. You have to know the words and
the grammar," Geisser said.

"But you don't necessarily need to set a time frame. You don't
even need to have a conclusion to stop a conversation. This is
what we exactly are doing with our music."

The concert, organized by PT Berdikari Sari Utama Flour Mills
and Wartajazz.com, is part of an effort to introduce free jazz to
jazz communities in the country and the duo has also performed in
Bali and Jakarta.

Organizer Agus Setiawan Basuni said of the event: "Here, there
is a sign that both lovers and musicians of (free jazz) are moved
to reach out to each other. Whether people consider this 'good'
or 'bad' music, is a different matter."