Dominic Lash double bass
Josh Sinton baritone saxophone, alto flute, voice
Alex Ward clarinet and electric guitar

In the summer of 2024, I did a short solo tour in Western Europe playing a combination of composed and improvised music with different musicians. The concert played on this evening at the Hundred Years Gallery was one that I was especially looking forward to. I had been working on new strategies and techniques on my lonesome, but I really needed to put these new things next to other folks’ sounds (that’s the only way to really road test the usefulness of these things). And Dominic and Alex would be musicians who would be in the words of Anthony Braxton, "friendly experiencers”. More importantly, they are two of my favourite practitioners of this fearsome discipline of free-form music. They play with a rare combination of joy, focus, clarity and deftness that is too-often missing in this (and most) music.

This music is part of a well-documented lineage that’s well into its seventh decade of acknowledged existence. Which wouldn’t be a terribly controversial thing except for the fact that there was never meant to be a 'lineage' to begin with. The first practitioners of free-form music (what some have called 'free music', 'free jazz' or 'improvised music') were deliberately trying to create a music so inimitable that anyone inspired enough (and injudicious enough) to 'follow in their footsteps' would be thwarted from the jump. The music made was to be unique and of its moment, fleeting past like all the moments that make up a person’s life. By their nature, life’s moments are unrepeatable in a strict sense. The danger in this case is that once an event had sounded, it has risked affixing itself to somebody’s memory bank which in turn risked its recreation which was the one thing everyone initially agreed was not to be done. So, while listening to these beautiful abstractions could at times be daunting, it was nothing compared to an attempt at joining in with the making of the abstractions.

This 'danger' (this is only aesthetics after all) soon transformed into an ever present paradox due to the collective obsessing of a small number of dedicated practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s. Depending on where one lived (this was still pre-internet time), the thoughts and concomitant strategies around this paradox created (or broke up) communities. These strategies didn't necessarily share a common audible sound or sonic texture as much as they did a 'politics of the bandstand'. An approach to musicians' roles on the bandstand that was either freed from or tied to their instrument of choice (among other parameters). This is an approach that’s often had more to do with the psychological/emotional/spiritual condition of the artist making the sounds rather than the sounds in and of themselves. And these are the lineages that I hear when I listen to free-form music. Made by both current as well as past artists.

Back in that pre-internet era I mentioned, the musicians in the UK always sounded to my ear like the most consistently committed to grappling with this issue (paradoxes are annoyingly exhausting as any artist can tell you). And given their aquatic distance from mainland Europe and the Americas, this communal seclusion lent their records a certain consistent thorniness that I’ve always adored. While folks like Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley and John Stevens marched towards this door (so to speak), many more doors (and windows and cul-de-sacs and mouse holes) were quickly generated by Paul Rutherford, Evan Parker, John Russell, John Butcher, Mark Sanders, Philip Wachsmann, Keith Rowe, Lol Coxhill, Steve Beresford, Phil Minton, Trevor Watts, Pat Thomas, Barry Guy, Paul Lytton, etc., etc., and on and on and on…

Enter my compatriots, clarinettist/guitarist Alex Ward and bassist/guitarist Dominic Lash. They’ve played with many of the people listed above and listened to even more of them (amongst many, many others). Playing and listening to them, I’ve always been struck by how they seem to 'get it'. They’re highly aware of this can-I-play-something-I’ve-never-played-before paradox, but like my favourite musicians of my generation, they understand that just because it’s a paradox doesn't mean it’s a trap (and it’s only one of many paradoxes that have been discovered). That is, maybe we will 'repeat ourselves', but that’s simply an event that can happen. And most importantly, we don’t know if that’s going to happen. There is absolutely no plan to play the 'known', but rather than going out of our way to avoid that happenstance, we find it’s far better to remain flexible and open to the moment and adjust accordingly. And it’s this flexibility (and concomitant gracefulness) of thought/intention/hearing that I value most. In everything.

So, I’m not entirely sure what you’ve got in front of your ears right now. I know I’ve never heard anything quite like it and I’ve certainly never played in quite this way before, so by some lights, I guess this could be counted a success. But honestly? I am so bored by the litmus test of success/failure. What interests me far more is what Steve Lacy turned me on to: life/death. Is the music I’m working on alive? Because if it’s not, best that I move on. Because before I know it, I too will no longer be alive, so I’ll have plenty of time then for all that is dead.

[Josh Sinton]