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."