This is not me at my flashest but I’m disposed to get a bit boasty as my double trio record ranked no. 25 in Dave Sumner’s ‘Bird is the worm’ list of the fifty best jazz releases of 2018. There were some astonishing albums in there, and to have a place at all was an enormous honour, but to have made no. 25 really stunned me and I was thrilled to think that the album had made such an effect. It won’t win a Bell Award – because I’d have to enter it for one and that’s most certainly not going to happen – and it missed the ARIA probably because no-one there knew about it. Care I do not. Here’s what Mr Sumner wrote:

I really can’t get over how beautifully Tim Stevens unites the free flowing conversation of a piano trio with the soaring harmonies of a string trio.  This isn’t your typical “jazz with strings” session.  There’s a strong modern jazz perspective and an equally strong chamber music influence, and rather than switch roles in a dominant-accompaniment relationship, the pianist gets the two components to enter the same confluence, becoming as one.  As a result, the melodic textures seem endless, and the dual personality of introspective and lively delivers a seriously magnetic charge.  This is music for a lazy morning watching the snow fall and it’s music for the car stereo while speeding between destinations, and, ultimately, it’s music for when you require an infusion of loveliness in your life.

An earlier appearance of the album on the monthly BITW rundown of Bandcamp releases has already been cited, and Mr Sumner had other things to say when first it appeared. What I love about both his statements – and John Shand’s one in the Sydney Morning Herald* – is that he totally gets my conception of the project as a meeting between two discrete groups, a genuine effort at collaboration. I never wanted anyone to think I’d just added some string accompaniment to what I was planning already to do with the improvising trio. When people perceive this about the recording I am delighted. I am gratified and flattered and really encouraged that people seem to have found my string trio writing so effective.

Because I wasn’t schooled in it – at least, not officially. Arnold Schoenberg is not a composer for whom I have uncomplicated feelings; some of his work I admire greatly but I cannot maintain my enthusiasm throughout his oeuvre. Verklärte Nacht I find an inexcusable waste of time, and sometimes his serial music, while probably correct and all that, just isn’t so terribly involving. His String Trio op. 45 however I adore. This is the piece that, when once I was carrying on a little non-plussed about Schoenberg, John McCaughey recommended to get me with the program. I love its vigour and I love that Arnie gets so much done with only three instruments.

Beethoven’s string quartets have long fascinated me, and the late ones are work that I continue to find staggering. That he came up with the things he did when he couldn’t even hear is humbling beyond estimation. I have heard and heard and heard these pieces – C-sharp minor being my absolute favourite – and looked at the scores and tried to get what I can from them. Ditto Bartok, as I’ve said before. And as it turns out almost everyone seems to think of string quartet when they think chamber music, and there are a good number of works by improvisers that append that line-up to whatever it is they have going already for a change in texture. It seemed to me though that to double the trio was a much better way to go about things – it seemed, you know, fair. And I had to be really careful with only three parts about which notes I chose, how I voice-led, all that sort of thing.

I studied all this stuff really quite hard and tried to get a polyphonic thing going that I can’t actually do when I’m playing the piano. The string parts in ‘m.b.’ are not things that I have just transcribed from my piano playing, because I can’t play them. This feels in the manner of a very modest achievement.

So I’m very proud of this piece, and of the band, and of the recording we made. I am very pleased to think of it finding receptive ears here and elsewhere. The double trio will be performing with whom on March 17 at the Jazzlab for the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative. We’d love to see you there.

*Sorry, I think I may have neglected to boast about that – at least, here. On page 25 of the ‘Spectrum’ section of December 22-23, 2018, Mr Shand wrote:

Ultimately the secret lies in the integration. It is one thing to put improvising and non-improvising musicians in the same room; another to avoid one group sounding like a river, while the other sounds merely like the banks. In his first attempt at writing fo a string trio Tim Stevens has succeeded superbly at allowing the banks to slide into the river, if you will. Part of his secret was not over-writing: the violin (Madeleine Jevons), viola (Phoebe Green) and cello (Naomi Wileman) often slip in and out of the pieces, as if offering commentary on the piano (Stevens), bass (Marty Holoubek) and drums (Tony Floyd) rather than just providing frameworks within which the improvising occurs. He has also shaped the compositions within this seven-part suite with more sophistication than a head-solos-head format, so there are notated dialogues between the two trios (notably on m.b.), as well as accompanying of solos. The pervading mood is elegiac, like a series of bittersweet memories of lost love, with brighter sparks flaring from the piano. The strings are especially effective against the bass solos – suggesting they could have also been used to shade some drum features.

26/i/2019

Obviously we’ve been here before, pledging all kinds of nonsense in the hope that a new year will bring the genuine novelty we reckon is indicated. (Love that word, ‘indicated’. I take it from the med community, who use it to mean something like ‘necessitated’ or ‘called for’. I love how you read an indication and the instruction is clear. No right turn. Forty kilometres per hour. You were speeding, and now you owe us $322.)

This post isn’t about resolution though so much as things in the pipeline. There are a few jolly performance bookings made, and there’ll be more about them by and by. I’m planning to write some music, too, that will hopefully be satisfactory.

In the shorter term though, there’s to be a third and final volume in the church recordings I’ve been making at Pughouse Studios since 2015. I’m hoping it’ll be out in early April, since Easter is on the 21st and this recording deals with music of the Passiontide and Easter season/s.

I’ve said already how surprised I was by the reaction to the concert at Melbourne Recital Centre in 2014 and then the resulting CD, I’ll tell you later. The second volume, I’ll tell you later in December, came about mostly because people suggested it. (It seemed indicated.) This third is similar; Garry Warne, organist at St Stephen’s Richmond, was so enamoured of the first two albums he invited me to put together a passion and Easter program and perform it there on Palm Sunday last year.

It was a fun concert, supporting the parish’s organ restoration appeal, and I recorded it on my phone just for what they call the lolz. I was glad that I had because some okay things happened and being the completist I am it was cheering to think that I could, if I wanted to, listen to them again. (Here‘s the Passion Chorale, the opening movement, from that performance, if you haven’t heard it and you’d like to.)

When you do a performance like this, you can rely on at least one or two people to recommend you take it to the studio and make a CD out of it. Which is fair enough, I suppose; it has identified itself as a certain thing, a collection of pieces that have been brought into relationship with one another and with the improvisation, it has taken on its own identity in a manner of speaking, and this sense of unity or integrity or whatever seems to seek representation in the wider world. (Or I could say, throwing caution and humility to the nearest available wind, that one has made such a case for the program that it needs to be re-experienced, in the comfort of the listener’s home.)

I got so fed up with the tedious copyright requirements that went along with my last church album that I resolved never again to record anything I hadn’t written myself. Would you believe, you need to get separate copyright licenses for physical and digital manifestations of your recorded sound? Well, you do. And they’re both dead boring. And of course – this being the part I find totally ridiculous – everything I’ve played on all three church records has been written by people dead for at least a hundred years, so who’s getting the dough? (Not that there is very much of it, either, of course.)

In any case, in order to complete the set I’ve resolved I’ll go through it all again, biting my tongue and thinking of, well, knowing that somewhere in my heart I simply have to deal with all this stuff. The musical stuff, and then consequently the legal stuff. Not long ago when I had that rotten performance at the Jazzlab and flirted with the idea of giving it all away, I was admittedly being rather moronic. A friend reminded me of this the other day, ‘I’d never heard,’ she said, ‘such a shameless pile of shit talked in all my life.’ ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘of course you were right. I can’t not do it.’ And then she: ‘That’s what makes you an artist. That’s it, isn’t it? You can’t not do it.’

I can’t not do this Passiontide and Easter album, either. I’ve written about the continuing influence of church music on my own creative thinking, a consequence of its having been with me since the beginning of my life. Every week to mass, every week hymns and some kind of organ music. If my voice-leading is any good, it’s down to Bach, of course, but prior to that it’s accountable to the four-part writing in the Anglican hymn books. When I was doing my doctorate I nursed a theory that the music that first turned the subject on to jazz became a benchmark by which all subsequent jazz was judged. If you came in via Bob Crosby, or Eddie Condon, or Bix Beiderbecke, or Lu Watters, or even the ODJB, that gave you your bearings.* Church music gave me mine.

And the music remains important, but so does the faith. Being raised in the church is one of the things that the more vocal atheists cite as being responsible for faith, as though those of us who were introduced to liturgy and sacrament early on lacked the discernment to make a subsequent decision to do without it. As though we were comprehensively brainwashed, convinced of something fallacious, and robbed of the capacity to see things differently. 

It’s possible to carry on all kinds of activities without thinking about them. Walking, for instance. Or voting. Eating fast food. Even going to mass. Maybe life is about making the best habits, I don’t know,** although given that it’s good always to be aware, I’m disinclined to go all the way with this one. In any case the idea that the penitent at mass isn’t thinking about stuff is ridiculous, and even offensive. How can people know what we’re doing? It’s between us and God.

I am no evangelist; I am not disposed to try to convince anyone else of what I may or may not believe. This is probably a failing gospel-side but I regard my fellow-humans as entirely capable of making up their own minds about where they put their energy and their love. If people want to talk about it I’m open, and some of my friends do, and have. My profoundest belief though is in mutual respect and I’m convinced (as I’ve said) that if more people took the trouble to listen to each other with an endeavour to understand then we’d have a far more peaceful and emotionally productive environment. I live in a part of the world where, although there are some vehement opponents of religious belief (Fr Rod Bower’s recent post regarding the messages left on his parish answering machine is a case in point) and a lack of enthusiasm at some very high levels for non-Christian codes, it’s very unlikely that anyone’s going to be made to die for their faith. 

Furthermore, doubt is my constant companion. If you ask, how can there be a God with all this ghastly shit going on?, so do I. But then I hear what Christ was on about, and I am reminded of how much responsibility rests with us. If you think God is going to sweep in and make everything right, well that seems unlikely, on experience. But it’s what people can do to make things better that’s going to count, and to my way of thinking the people who are doing God’s work are his representation in the world. This is a matter of honesty, integrity, genuine care, of compassion, thoughtfulness, generosity, selflessness. All the tricky stuff. It’s all possible, of course, without religious belief, too – I don’t doubt that for a fraction of a second. Nor am I saying I’m any great example of it.

But these albums are very important to me because they acknowledge the ongoing presence and influence of church music in my creative work, and in a sense they express gratitude for it. Also though they stand as a reflection of the thinking I’ve done about spiritual matters throughout the course of my life, and testify to the significance of my personal faith in my own situation. If you want to think about ‘gifts’ then music is the one I scored. I’m trying to make the most I can out of it.

*Do you like how I’ve mentioned only white musicians here? I believe I know my Australian jazz history, and the people I was investigating when I made this conclusion predated the Red Onion Jazz Band.
**Actually, if you want to know, I think it’s about honest communication between human beings, with consequences in care and collaboration.

9/i/2019