AMM - The Tightrope Walkers of Improvisation

In 1966 a collective of nonconformist, inquisitive London jazz musicians formed the improvising ensemble AMM. Guitarist Keith Rowe, tenor saxophonist Lou Gare and bassist Lawrence Sheaff had taken part in the early days of composer Mike Westbrook's big band. Drummer Eddie Prévost had worked with Gare in a quintet rooted in the hard-bop of Max Roach and Sonny Rollins. They were soon joined by composer Cornelius Cardew and Christopher Hobbs, who added a touch of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen to an already rich mix.

To this day AMM remain one of the fundamental names in British jazz improvisation. It's an important group, because it was the first to make such significant use of a lineup so varied, with roots that blended a jazz background with post-serial, post-Darmstadt avant-garde composition. Rather than positioning themselves as improvisers trading sounds within an open dialogue, AMM sought structures that generated themselves enigmatically during performance, folding individual personalities into a collective ethos.

Internal political friction proved a turning point in AMM's evolution. Twice, clashing ideologies reduced the group to a duo. Cardew and Rowe's Maoist views sparked a rift, and for a time concerts alternated between the Cardew-Rowe duo and the Prévost-Gare duo. Later, in 1972, Rowe and Cardew left the group. Rowe returned in the mid-Seventies, and at that point a trio took shape, alongside pianist John Tilbury, which lasted until 2004.

Despite the combative nature of the political views held by AMM's members, the group always remained open to musicians it felt an affinity with. In 1968 composer Christian Wolff, of the so-called New York school, played double bass with them during a stay in England, and Cardew occasionally returned to the fold before his tragic death in 1981. Saxophonist Evan Parker, cellist Rohan de Saram of the Arditti Quartet, and avant-garde clarinettist Ian Mitchell all crossed paths with AMM.

"AMM music", as it later came to be called, builds on a centripetal sonic flow that the musicians, attentive listeners, can seize upon or steer toward new territories. Each musician represents a separate layer of activity that overlaps with the others, and when these jagged layers dance in counterpoint with one another, the music generates a cumulative structure.

The band debuted on the rock label Elektra, which explains why they occasionally shared a stage with artists like Soft Machine and Pink Floyd.

AMMMusic from 1966 was famously misattributed to the Cornelius Cardew Quintet by Jazz Journal reviews, the jazz bible par excellence.

This debut album is already a typical product of AMM's art, with its pop art cover painted by Keith Rowe and Prévost's erudite liner notes, marking the start of the group's frenetic and turbulent search for its own music.

The mumbled start of the opening track "Later During A Flaming Riviera Sunset" consists of a visceral grumble spread over embryonic AMM trademarks. In the background, a bodiless voice snatched from a transistor radio ebbs and flows around the music like a tide. Slow piano chords are answered by high, quick cello swoops, while the oscillating brushwork of Prévost's cymbals ensures a gentle momentum; but every sound is so embedded in the next that the ear is immediately drawn not to the individual colours but to the painting as a whole.

The discrepancies between Cardew and the collective surface the moment he introduces into the musical flow some prickly pianistic solutions that seem to draw on Stockhausen's "Klavierstücke" or Boulez's "Structures", but have little to do with the AMM context. Lou Gare's guttural tenor sax replies with an outburst that wouldn't be out of place on a Coleman Hawkins record: a moment that sums up not only AMM's internal conflicts, but those of the entire English experimental music scene from 1966 onward.

Keith Rowe's radio signals become a symbol of the outside world and add a sense of chance to the equation. Mantovani's syrupy radio strings suddenly appear within the unfolding structure. Edward Heath, the then-mocked leader of the Conservative Party, was also an unwitting victim of these radio experiments.

1968 is the year of The Crypt: The Complete Session, whose second track, "Coffin Nor Shelf", embraces a wide range of material. Gare's saxophone stubbornly tests the boundaries of jazz, and the music answers back with sudden voids and sweeping electronic blasts that tear through its surface. The end of the previous track, "Like A Cloud Hanging In The Sky?", had already tested one's sense of proportion, taking far longer than expected to reach its conclusion. Here the very notion of an ending is completely overturned by the appearance of an ambulance siren — but does it come from Rowe's radio, or is it real, arriving from outside? A mumbling voice is heard, a shout, then someone claps for a few seconds. Yet the ambient noise persists, and listeners have no idea when, or whether, the performance has actually ended. Footsteps can be heard to the right, presumably the musicians leaving the stage. The end.

AMM's first ideological rupture saw Prévost accuse Cardew and Rowe of cultural opportunism for trying to impose their Maoism on the group. The result of this split was the formation of a Prévost-Gare duo that, by general consensus, went back to basics by playing generic free jazz. The long passages on To Hear And Back Again bore out this view, though they're offset by other sections that feel more authentically AMM.

The album opens with Gare unleashing a corrosive funk that sounds lifted from "Ornette On Tenor", backed by Prévost's relatively straight time-keeping. But by the second track, "To Hear", a Lester Young-style flourish evolves into a tangle of space and structural rhythm. "To Hear" fades out halfway through, as Gare's experimental, calm, drawn-out low notes wrap around long stretches of silence. When it's time to pick back up with "Back Again", his ethereal melodic lines hover over the spectral shadings of Prévost's cymbals, before probing the harmonic series.

1979's AMM III was effectively the group's third incarnation. Keith Rowe returned in 1976, marking the end of Lou Gare's time with the band. Prévost and Rowe made for a rather tense, quarrelsome pairing before Tilbury came onto the scene. In the meantime, "It Had Been An Ordinary Enough Day In Pueblo, Colorado" was released on ECM. The strange, evocative title arrives midway through the first track, "Radio Activity", a gift from the ether courtesy of Rowe's radio. Rowe's guitar is unusually clean and precise, and across the whole AMM discography it's the sound that comes closest to a conventional electric guitar — though that doesn't stop him twisting it into oblique contortions.

The arrival of pianist John Tilbury in 1980 gave AMM a stable line-up that would last until 2004. Tilbury had already stood in for Cardew on occasion and knew the AMM language well, though his subliminally assertive musical personality profoundly changed the group. Tilbury turned AMM back into a space for improvisers and musicians interested in composition. Cardew's graphic score "Treatise" was the reason the composer first gravitated toward AMM back in 1965. On "Combine and Laminates", recorded three years after his death, AMM use pages from Treatise to inspire and guide an improvisation.

1982's Generative Themes is an excellent studio recording, and the ideas pouring out of the trio sweep the listener away.

The opening "Generative Theme" conjures a grey, suffocating sense of abstraction. The sonic palette is pared down to the almost inert oscillation of a few rigid brushstrokes. The second theme eases the tension with recognizable piano tonalities regularly emerging from the ensemble, though they come across as a surreal fusion thanks to Tilbury's delicate prepared notes. The focal point then becomes a high piano note, repeated relentlessly, clashing with sparse radio signals like short-wave interference. Prévost, for his part, counterbalances these alienated sounds with vigorous, well-honed percussive techniques, from hi-hat rhythmic patterns to steady snare triplets.

The following track is much quieter, save for a lone, low, hammering piano cluster that adds sudden swerves to the ensemble's continuum.

On 1987's The Inexhaustible Document, cellist Rohan de Saram adds his voice to an already revitalized AMM and paves the way for new developments. Much of the album sits at the edge of perceptibility, opening with visceral, barely whispered instrumental "shhh" and "ohhh" sounds, underpinned by an irregular but insistent pulse. Rowe's guitar works with zen-like precision, and de Saram answers with an arabesque of plucked notes. Tilbury slips into a curiously distorted chorale, and eventually de Saram plays a cello melody that, played two octaves lower, could conventionally be called sweet and lilting. At this point, it's dizzying — AMM's long-sought instrumental mimesis has finally been achieved.

The story of this eclectic, kaleidoscopic band essentially ends here. Over the following years there would be a few reunions and, above all, solo projects where individual hyperboles would continue to astonish — though never, of course, quite like the collective work credited to AMM.

Moving between noise improvisation and ultrasound, Testing is a collaboration between British collective AMM and Japanese sound artist Sachiko M. The album documents a 2004 performance at the Museum of Garden History in London and consists of a single monolith of subdued textures and noise matter.

Sachiko M's synthetic emissions find an ideal habitat amid shrill resonances and atonal figures, giving rise to a result poised between a deep-listening session and the construction of a cold, inhospitable avant-garde soundscape. The most striking timbral explorations emerge from Prévost's rough string work, which, combined with piano playing close to Morton Feldman's compositions, sketches a bare framework, ideal for the reductionist poetics traceable to onkyo aesthetics, the strand of Japanese experimentalism focused on micro-events, silence and sonic abstraction.

Contribution by Alessandro Giustiniano (“Testing”)

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