There Are Strings

Wednesday, 29 January 2003

From a review of Spring Heel Jack, J Spaceman, Matthew Shipp, Evan Parker, William Parker and the incredible Han Bennink at the Queen Elizabeth Hall:

Everybody should, before they die, see Han Bennink. This is a man who goes for a run and plays the drums at the same time. Five minutes into the gig, his feet were up on the kit, filling in beats his hands were too busy to deal with. Later he played his kit with a chair leg (still attached to the chair). All this theatre would be empty without his sound, which combines twitching chaos with a cool swing.

More info on the free jazz collaborators from a recent Guardian interview:

It may seem bizarre that two dance DJs should be entering the unforgiving world of free-jazz, but from Shipp’s point of view, the collaboration is only natural. The less dancefloor-bound of DJs are fascinated by free-music, he says, because “they like to deal with scraps of information, and free-jazz is a volcano of information. The DJs are always trying to mix and match and stitch together things that don’t seem on the surface as if they should work together.”