ESP 1042
Gunter Hampel – Music From Europe

YouTube Miner: Gunter Hampel, Evan Parker, Ned Rothenberg

by Lars Gotrich

Washington, D.C.’s ninth annual Sonic Circuits Festival began Tuesday night. The festival celebrates all music avant-garde and otherwise out-there. Our very own Mayor Adrian Fenty even sent out an official welcome announcement on fancy mayoral letterhead and everything.

This year brings some heavy hitters like the not-as-reclusive-anymore Jandek, German krautrock pioneers Faust, and ambient musician Tim Hecker. Also featured are unsung composers like Annea Lockwood and Pekka Airaksinen, he of the late ’60s proto-industrial Finnish band The Sperm.

Recently, Sonic Circuits has also peppered in some free jazz, including Paul Flaherty and Randall Colburne, Fight the Big Bull and the Exploding Star Orchestra. This year does the same, featuring the Gunter Hampel European Trio with Elliot Levin and an Evan Parker and Ned Rothenberg duo. Let’s mine the time-suck known as YouTube for some related gems, shall we?

Stateside, German multi-instrumentalist Gunter Hampel is mostly known for 1966’s Music From Europe, a fiery date with Willem Breuker on ESP Disk’. But Hampel has flown the free jazz flag over 30 years, and devotees keep up with his own Birth record label. I’m not sure I can get behind free-jazz breakdancing, but the music for this 2009 Gunter Hampel Music & Dance Improvisation Company performance from Berlin is great. (By the way, Hampel has his own YouTube channel, for those so inclined.)

And if you speak German, here’s a very recent interview on German television, which features a bit of his vibraphone work from the late ’70s and, as always, Hampel’s hilarious headgear.

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Ned Rothenberg and Evan Parker’s 2006 performance at Roulette was named was one of the year’s best concerts by All About Jazz/New York, so I’m facing a bit of a problem here: a certain baseball team is playing the currently 51-99 Nationals (hey, only 11 more losses and they’ll tie the previous D.C. team, the Senators!). My allegiance to the Braves is strong, so I may miss out on Friday’s performance. However, if you prefer polyphonic reed interplay to peanuts and Cracker Jacks (I don’t care if I ever get back), there’s sure to be a stunning experience ahead.

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A much younger Evan Parker Peter Brotzmann opens the following clip of a 1970 performance of the Globe Unity Orchestra in Germany. That band is something of a European who’s-who of free jazz, including Evan Parker (saxophone), Alexander Von Schlippenbach (piano), Derek Bailey (guitar), Manfred Schoof (trumpet), Albert Mangelsdorff (trombone), Han Bennink (drums) and a few others I can’t identify in this wild free-for-all.

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As for Ned Rothenberg, he displays his circular breathing technique with a round of polyphonics in this excerpt from a Roulette TV DVD.

Finally, RUCMA put together a pretty great little series this past April, pairing reed players and percussionists in the style of Interstellar Space. The John Coltrane and Rashied Ali duet classic gets tribute performances from Darius Jones and Jackson Krall, Ras Moshe and Tyshawn Sorey and Ned Rothenberg (clarinet) and Samir Chatterjee (tabla), which you can see below.

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