Cor Fuhler & Chicago Friends

How do you navigate chaos?

That probably wasn't the question going through the minds of Cor Fuhler and his collaborators at the opening night show for the fourth-annual Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music. As they crafted textured cacophonies, they must have had some path in mind--or if not a path, a definite sense that they were communicating with their instruments. Other listeners at the show certainly didn't seem to mind what could easily be described by an uneducated observer as musical madness, nodding their heads as if tuned to some secret mental wavelength communicating all the music's mysteries. This uneducated observer heard four gifted musicians adrift in a sea of chaos, and struggling to find some way through it by creating unity inside of it.

Cor Fuhler is described in the Noise Pop program as a master of "prepared piano," meaning that he plays the instrument by making direct contact with the strings using a variety of objects, from a guitar pick-up to a vodka bottle. Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm plays his instrument using a bow, but also plucks the strings like a stand-up bass, and occasionally even tips his cello over to bang it with his bow like a misshapen drum. Both trombonist Jeb Bishop and drummer Michael Zerang take more conventional approaches to the music, though "conventional" is hardly the word--Bishop doesn't bang his trombone on the stage and Zerang doesn't wear his snare on his head, but they both wield their respective instruments from a decidedly free-jazz perspective.

To ears unfamiliar with free jazz, their collaboration did sound like chaos. Fuhler spun between his piano and his own invented instrument, the "keyolin," which incorporates elements of both the piano and the violin. Lonberg-Holm remained bent over his cello, occasionally tipping it over suddenly to pull the rubber band tied to its side taut so that he could bow that instead. Zerang was just as likely to tap his skins with his drumsticks as he was to clutch the sticks in his fist and pound down on the drums. And Bishop would skew off into wild solos before stepping back from the brink and emptying his spit valve, calmly standing amid the four players and waiting to re-enter the fray.

But after just a few minutes of listening, even the most pop-oriented ears could hear the appeal of the free jazz genre. Though there was no discernible pattern to the music, that only meant that the listener had to pay closer attention, either to create their own imaginary patterns for what they heard or simply to follow what each instrumentalist was doing. Occasionally, from four soloists forging independent paths would come some form of cohesion, nothing involving melody or harmonics but a definite fusion of energies and moods, ranging from loud builds of music to calmer interactions. It was in these moments that the four floating musical threads would somehow weave together, entangling themselves briefly before tearing apart again.

Maybe it's those moments that the group was searching for--or perhaps the more dissonant moments are the real point of free jazz, and any agreement is simple accident. What's perhaps most remarkable is that any unity could have been found inside the din, that with nary a candle or lamp to be found, Cor Fuhler and his fellow musicians could find a path inside their musical chaos. --MS