Lifemusic

Music is one of the primary resources of the human imagination

Cornucopia - The Rod Paton Jazz Ensemble.

Cornucopia and hornutopia - a unique jazz experience

Rod’s 6-piece ensemble “CORNUCOPIA” has been in operation for over 20 years. The line-up features French Horn sandwiched between two saxes and underpinned by a rhythm section of piano bass and drums.

The line-up varies depending on conditions (i.e. available finance). Recent performances have included the talents of: Ray D’Inverno (piano), Sam Brown (drums), Nick Reynolds and Rick Foot (bass), Julian Nicholas, Tony Woods, Bruce McGavin, Lee Goodall, Nick Sorensen (Saxes), Jim Rattigan (Horn) and Vivien Ellis (voice), as well as a number of younger musicians.
Original music includes The Real Ale Set, The Six Villages Suite, The South Coast Suite and the monumental Ascension Jazzmass which was performed at the Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton University to a capacity audience in March 2000 with the voices of Jazzmanix and the Ascension Singers (plus the 21 xylophones of the Xylophonics!) A double CD of this performance is available.

“HORNUTOPIA” is a much more recent project - a world music band which draws upon Afro-Cuban energy, Balkan rhythms, Jazz-Rock fusions and even outer limits such as Monglian throat singing to create an exciting dance-oriented melee of original compositions and improvisations.

Line-up includes Tony Woods (saxes and flute), Dave Murrell (guitar), Ray d’Inverno (electric piano), Nick Reynolds (Bass guitar), Tony Shepherd (drums), Nigel Rippon and Louise Sevier (percussion).
IMPROVISING

Unforeseen Magic

Improvisation is the essential act of music. It is the primary creative function: nothing comes into being without it.

Improvisation means, literally, to work with the ‘unforeseen’ - each living moment requires an improvisatory decision to facilitate movement to the next living moment. Working directly with unforeseen events is a form of magic.

Improvised music is directly in touch with living process - hence lifemusic.

Planning

In our culture we are obsessed with planning; we believe that ‘planning’ equals ‘structure’ so that an unplanned event is easily misunderstood as an unstructured event. This is a mistake which leads to rigidity of thinking and impoverishment of the imagination: absence of magic.

Becoming over reliant on planning for the future we easily miss the significant beauty of the present. This results in a dislocated sense of meaning and a disembodied sense of self.

Improvisation is unplanned beauty, instant structure created from the sounding resources of our own inner selves.

Improvisation celebrates the here and now!

The Classical Tradition

The canon which runs from antiquity via Palestrina and Bach and through to Schoenberg via Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven is truly a wonderful tradition full of beautiful music. But who needs it any more? And when did people begin sitting down to listen to music instead of dancing and singing along? Compared to the joys of group improvisation, this great European tradition seems like so much hierarchical social nonsense studded with genius.

Notating and Recording

In our attempts to ‘fix’ musical culture, notated and recorded music has been afforded higher status than improvisation. The aurally transmitted culture which was folk music has itself become a fixed commodity. Classical music (in the broad sense) has become a kind of safe haven for those who require music (and life) to be predictable and unchallenging (listen to Classic FM if you disagree.). The world of orchestras, opera houses, chamber quartets and lieder recitals has become a heavily subsidised repository for tradition - a museum culture.

Improvising

Despite all of this, improvisation is a thriving aspect of 21st Century musical life. We find it in Blues, Jazz, Rock, World Music and all places where live musicians are engaged in re-inventing and re-creating musical experiences in so many ways. Improvisation is not restricted in style, it’s an attitude, an approach. It re-invigorates music with life energy. It escapes from notation, from scores, from staves, from clefs, from barlines (prison bars), from fixed notions of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, from conductors, from seated patrons, from equal temperament, from composers, from teachers, from grade exams, from analysis, from all the stuff that imprisons music and renders it comatose. No accident that a good classical performance is often described as “well executed!”

Ascension Jazzmass

Rod Paton writes…

Ascension - Jazzmass was composed between 1988 and 1990 and received its first performance in the Chapel of the Ascension, Bishop Otter College, Chichester on Ascension Day in 1990. It is a complete setting of the text of the Latin mass, with a final section (Doxology) constructed around an Ascension Day text by the Christian mystic Angelus Silesius.

If upward you can soar
And let God have his way
Then this has in your spirit
Become Ascension Day

The piece uses large forces - female vocalist, 4-part choir, nine-piece jazz ensemble, organ, plus 21 marimba-style xylophones. Ascension is an exuberant and celebratory work in which the choir members are called upon to sing with a wide range of vocal styles, including overtone singing, chanting, calling and free vocal improvisation as well as traditional four-part harmony whilst the jazz ensemble is given plenty of space for improvisation.

The decision to use 21 xylophones originated in a dream in which I found myself in an African village surrounded by the sound of continuous xylophone music. When I asked a villager what the piece was about he explained that it was the “Music of Life” and, should it stop, the world would come to an end. Each member of the tribe had his or her own motives to play and could come in or out of the piece at will. This link between musical structures and the life force appealed to me with its resemblance to creation myths in which the world is sung or intoned into being. The number 21 is part of an overall numerological sequence which permeates the structures of the music.

The popular conception of jazz as a semi-commercial form of entertainment music has always been wide of the mark. From its roots in spirituals, gospel and blues, via the sacred concerts of Duke Ellington, the Love Supreme of John Coltrane, the Mahavishnu of John McGlaughlin to the contemporary abstract earth spirit of Jan Garbarek, jazz has always been music of profound spiritual dimensions.

The celebration and structure of the Latin Mass has roots which stretch back to ancient sacrificial rituals, the functions of which were to renew the people’s relationship with the earth, the flow of life, the reality of death and the transcendental nature of belief. Such rituals, in their ever-changing forms, provide vehicles for physical, emotional and spiritual renewal.

Renewal is the hallmark of jazz in its continuously evolving semi-improvised forms and also of Ascension Jazzmass in which the old and the new embrace. Archaic techniques such as overtone chanting and tribal xylophoning take their place alongside modernist structures - free-form improvisation, atonality, serialism and minimalism. Alonhside, we experience blues, swing, jazzrock and be-bop. As well as echoes of Byzantine hymnody, medieval polyphony and even nineteenth century chorale.

This breadth of styles is unified by three ideas - a calling motive heard at the very beginning; ascending chords of D flat, E flat and F which provide the Lydian harmonic framework which permeates the whole work; and a rising 4-note melodic cell heard at the beginning of the Credo. The score is fully notated for soloist, choir and organ whilst leaving plenty of space for the jazz musicians to improvise, both freely and within defined chord structures.

Ascension Jazzmass was performed to a capacity audience in the Turner Sims Concert Hall, University of Southampton in March 2000. A double CD of this performance (£15.00 plus £2.00 p&p) can be obtained by emailing info@lifemusic.org with your details.