It is unusual to draw a parallelism between the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and this concert but when I left the Cemal Resit Rey Performance Hall, the relationship between the conductor and the orchestra reminded me of the film. Maybe it was all because of the nickname of the conductor Lawrence “Butch” Morris. I will come back to that point later on.
Butch Morris is, actually, not a newcomer for us. He has lived in Istanbul for a couple of years and taught at Bilgi University. He has also performed here with the Nublu Orchestra two times – if I’m not mistaken. This time, he performed together with notable musicians such as Ilhan Ersahin (sax), Eddie Henderson (trumpet), Imer Demirer (trumpet), Juini Booth (doublebass), Ozan Musluoğlu (bass), Izzet Kizil (percussion), Nasheet Waits (drums), Ediz Hafizoglu (drums), Sarp Maden (guitar), Selen Gulun (piano), Bilal Karaman (guitar) Serhan Erkol (saxophone) and Ersin Ozer (trombone).
Butch Morris is a distinctive conductor, composer and a music theorist, who has a very personal view of “conduction”. To quote his website, “Conduction (conducted interpretation/ improvisation) is a vocabulary of ideographic signs and gestures activated to modify or construct a real-time musical arrangement or composition. Each sign and gesture transmits generative information for interpretation and provides instantaneous possibilities for altering or initiating harmony, melody, rhythm, articulation, phrasing or form.” This is how he finds his way while travelling in the waters of collective imagination and improvisation. On stage, you can see him walking back and forth with light steps, appointing each individual musician to play, using hand gestures, establishing a deep eye contact with each musician and sometimes just listening, which are all used for musical components such as downbeat, repeat, sustain, rhythm, dynamics or change in tonality.I think extreme concentration is the key word here as all the musicians’ eyes were on him that night, no moment for an astray, even no looking down. There is no written sheet music in front of the musicians so this kind of improvisation, or spontaneous creativity, requires more concentration than usual so as to keep the band together on timing and tempo.
In my opinion, everything starts in Butch Morris’s mind. He hears a melody or a sound and then starts weaving around it at that very moment with the colourful contribution of the musicians and finally a motif appears and very soon vanishes again to form another one. At some time it seemed to me that the concert was like using a DJ programme live, forming the song layer by layer, adding or leaving out some features, inserting basslines or drums partitions. The journey from Sarp’s guitar to Bilal’s included a wave of notes by trumpets and saxophones. At some point, the melody seemed stable with Booth’s basslines and Demirer’s trumpet notes and the addition of Izzet’s vivace rhythms, but the next minute, the stability broke down with one gesture of Morris and moved on to a tsunami-like composition with the thunder-like notes from all the instruments on stage. From time to time the rhythm stopped with a sign of the stick Morris was holding and then started again with its move as if somebody paused the music, came back a couple of seconds later and pushed the play button. The concert was like the constant flow of a river narrowing, widening, rapidly moving, slowing down, bending, which was formed with imagination and improvisation of the musicians and the conductor.
Although this kind of conduction is difficult for the musicians, the listener also has to understand this approach. You can’t keep a rhythm or start humming the music. It is hard to understand the unwieldy rhythms and the perplexing sounds. However, when you concentrate on the music, listen to changes and how each musician reacts to the other one, how each musical instrument sounds at that particular time, you understand this experimentation with music. Above all, it was a good experience to listen to and think about music in an avant-garde fashion. I couldn’t keep my
eyes off Butch Morris and the orchestra throughout the concert, which was a real pay-off. Finally, there we were strongly applauding them while they were so down-to-earth and happy to have performed such abstract music delicately and impeccably.
If I get back to the film, I still claim that there is a similarity between the characters and the musicians. Butch Cassidy is the thinker and the Sundance Kid is the practitioner. This situation totally applies to the concert. :)
One last word…
Butch Cassidy (to Sundance Kid) : Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.
29 April 2011
An interview with Butch Morris in Istanbul…
http://www.todayszaman.com/mobile_detailn.action?newsId=242280
A video taken at the rehearsal at SALT…
A video taken at the concert…
The B&W photo was taken by Reha Oztunali.
