The double bass is most familiar in one of two guises, as either the solid, none-too-agile lowest member of the symphony orchestra's string family or through the freer, nimbler, plucked bass lines of jazz. The profile of Kilkenny resident, British bassist and composer Barry Guy, 50 this year, is, however, in other areas. On the orchestral scene he has worked in chamber orchestras and early music bands. He's also one of the finest interpreters of the most demanding solo pieces produced by contemporary composers. In jazz he's renowned for his work in free improvisation. And his compositional output ranges from works for conventional orchestras and ensembles (he received the Royal Philharmonic Society's Award for Chamber Music Composition for 1991-'92) to pieces for the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, of which he is founder and artistic director.
It all started, he says, with the descant recorder in primary school and in the school military band in secondary school. Here he tried everything from trumpet to tuba and beyond, settling on valve trombone. More interesting than the band itself, however, seems to have been the Dixieland band that was formed within it, " `the naughty boys' band,' we used to call it. They wanted a little bit of bass line, not on the trombone but on something that thumped, so I took up the tea-chest bass, you know, one pole and a line, a reflection of the skiffle thing that was happening at the time."
The little group turned out to be quite successful, getting gigs in working men's clubs (Labour not Conservative) and this led to the purchase of a real double bass, with the luxury of four strings, and major problems of where to put the fingers (solved by marking cardboard and putting it under the strings!).
Later, as the Pete Robinson Hot Four, Guy and his friends used to go to jazz clubs and play the interval, sometimes heading off after the show for late-night jam sessions with well-known blues and jazz performers. It helped that the place they headed off to was an off-licence.
In spite of all of this, Barry Guy's main interest was not music at all but "drawing art" and when he left school he spent three years in an architect's office "working with three elderly gentlemen who taught me how to draw churches, do Georgian restoration and the like". At the same time, though, "there was a saxophone player in the band who knew a lot about the American avant-garde, John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg. I don't know where he accumulated this knowledge. He persuaded me to go along to take composition classes he was taking at Goldsmith's College. It set in motion a quest for research, finding new things."
Eventually, he decided to study music on a full-time basis. He recalls his audition at the Guildhall. When asked to continue a given fragment in Mozartian style, he launched into "a screaming improvisation" which impressed one of the professors, Buxton Orr, enough to guarantee him a place. "Since I'd been working for three years, I felt it was a great privilege to be allowed to study music full-time. A lot of people came straight from school and I found them wasting their time more than anything, because it was an extension of school."
At college, "every day was a great discovery". He was, he says, "almost like a vacuum cleaner" sucking in everything from Monteverdi (a key encounter) to Stravinksy and Xenakis. And at the same time, he had moved out of swing into bebop and modern jazz and was involved in the early experimentalism of the Little Theatre Club in St Martin's Lane, "the workshop for the new, free music".
The impetus here was to move away from Afro-American jazz, "to find some European way of playing improvised music. We had to discard some of the old models, to break down the old buildings, to build something fresh. It was like going into a dark tunnel with no real way out, necessarily. But we knew it had to be done in order to find a new type of discipline. Once you drop a lot of the conventional and routine things of the song form, like regular recurring harmonies, certain rhythmic aspects, the melodic aspect, we wanted to find new ways of defining how we play. It was exciting and scary at the same time.
"In this scenario, the first sound would be the moment of creativity. Where that note or sound arrived or how it arrived in space, the qualities of that sound, the intentions of the player that made the first sound, all of these things were a type of evaluation that had to be dealt with at the time. "It's incremental, the way that the whole language is built up. And for me that's why I'm so interested in this aspect. It's a form of communication which is pure between people. I always call it an intensely socialist type of music, because you're having to play this music without composition. What you're dealing with is human beings. You're actually getting right to the heart of how people communicate with each other. There's always the sense of finding something new about somebody."
He counters the let-it-all-hangout, soul-baring view of free improvisation with a caution that "there is an intellectual process". He quotes Cartier-Bresson to the effect that the thinking should be done before and after taking a photograph, not while taking the photograph. "A lot of the way we interact in this type of music has to be intuitive but, at the same time, it has to have a huge background knowledge to make the thing work. If you go on stage and let it all hang out, that's sloppy discipline, like talking to your therapist or something.
"What is interesting for me in free improvised music is that you're creating a cogent argument, a cogent music which makes sense to the intellect as well as the heart. It's this amazing fine balance of human endeavour. If you do it right and infuse it with energy and commitment, I think the music can come over as being as solid and as convincing as a piece of composition. But it's different, because you're not dealing with composition in the normal sense of the word. You're dealing with creation, creation at the moment. I don't see that as a lesser music than writing something down on paper. After all, I'm a composer as well as a performer. It just means that two musics happen in different spaces, in different time spans."
Barry Guy is featured as composer and solo improviser in tomorrow night's opening concert of the Sligo Contemporary Music Festival and in a late-night improvised concert with Mats Gustafsson (saxophone) and Raymond Strid (percussion). Information on the full festival programme, which runs until Sunday, can be had from the Model Arts Centre on 071-41405, fax 071-43694 or email: modelart@iol.ie.
