768 : Henry Cow Box Set "6 : Stockholm & Göteborg"

There are those who question the purpose of extended forays into freely improvised territory, and Henry Cow's roughly equal allegiance to spontaneity and through-composition created an at times unfathomable blend of unheard beauty and catharsis. The sheer fearlessness with which Henry Cow approached its music—whether it was the extended liberation of unfettered improvisation or the seemingly impossible challenge of learning impenetrable material like "Erk Gah"—heard performed by the group for the first time on disc six (Stockholm & Goteborg)—made it a group that, four decades on, has never been even remotely imitated, even though there are many who cite Cow as a seminal influence. Cutler's notes on the subject of improvisation are a revelation—some of the best words ever written to try to explain the hows and whys of the process:

Improvisation is not a style; it's a way of being. And although it has to be learned—like speaking a language or driving a car—it can't help you with what to say or where to go: it's more a case of learning how, not learning what. I could describe my own state of mind when improvising as a kind of forgetful attentiveness. I'm certainly not listening minutely to what anyone else is doing; I don't routinely make decisions about my own interventions and I never express myself.

In other circles, sensitivity in improvisers is praised and appreciated, but I suspect Henry Cow would—had we ever discussed the question—have dismissed that kind of sensitivity as a euphemism for Bourgeois good manners—or fear. Harmonious agreement was never our way. Where composition superimposes a past onto a present, improvisation—when it works—is pure, unencumbered, present—a vehicle for the transfiguration of time. We would leap from the struggle with our pasts into these pools of forgetting. By not looking where we were going—and not trying to go anywhere in particular—we collectively stumbled, throughout our career, into impossible, beautiful and unrepeatable music, unaccountably conjured out of the space between ourselves and our contingent public. And although we increasingly argued about our compositions and their direction of travel, our improvisations evolved wordlessly and without conflict—as if they belonged to another version of ourselves, more harmonious in spirit.

Taken from radio recordings in March, 1976 and May, 1977, Cutler and Drake fashion a "performance that could have been" on Stockholm & Goteborg, culled from a series of free improvisations, "Erk Gah," "Ottawa Song," "March," Hodgkinson's bleak and curious "A Bridge to Ruins" (a coda to "Erk Gah") and another surprise—Phil Ochs' "No More Songs." The Ochs tune is about as direct and traditional, in terms of song form, as Henry Cow ever got and was performed as a tribute to the legendary songwriter, who had died the previous year (1976). That the personnel vary throughout the disc—from the same quartet that recorded Trondheim on the Goteborg date to the sextet with Greaves on "Ottawa Song" and with newcomer Georgie Born at the Stockholm show—is irrelevant. The entire 63-minute disc feels of a oneness, as if it came from a single performance.

With the exception of "Ottawa Song," taken from the same March, 1976 show as Hamburg with John Greaves, the rest of Stockholm & Goteborg also features Georgie Born on bass and cello. While still capable of the kind of timekeeping necessary on tunes like "March" (here receiving a far clearer and definitive treatment than on Trondheim), Born's approach was often more orchestral—a contrapuntal partner to those around her in the same way that Cutler, an equally potent groove-meister (though, at times, almost impossibly so given the group's penchant for mind-boggling metric shifts), was an intrepid and imaginative colorist.

Cow continued to be extremely active following the release of 1975's In Praise of Learning, but as 1977 approached they'd not released or recorded an album of new material and, despite the evidence of evolution heard on these discs, there was considerable disagreement as to the direction in which the group was heading. There was no shortage of material—the group had yet to record "Erk Gah," and Cooper was also contributing more. However, when Cutler was asked to come up with new text for "Erk Gah" in the week before the first studio session for what would become Western Culture, it proved an impossible task and, instead, he wrote a series of shorter song texts, proposing the group record them instead. The ultimate disagreement about what Henry Cow should be resulted in those songs being collected, along with four more composed and performed solely by Frith, Cutler and Krause, as Art Bears' debut, Hopes and Fears (ReR, 1978). Meanwhile, Cooper and Hodgkinson wrote (separately and collaboratively) the material that would appear on Western Culture, with "Viva Pa Ubu" and "Slice" first appearing on the 1982 double LP, The Recommended Records Sampler, and later showing up as bonus tracks on East Side Digital's 2001 CD issue of Western Culture.

AAJ