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http://music.guardian.co.uk/print/0,...122426,00.html

'It's about total freedom at all costs'
What happens when you mix the intensity of hardcore punk with the improv spirit of John Coltrane? Marcus O'Dair reports on the gloriously noisy rise of Death Jazz
Marcus O'Dair
Friday November 9, 2007

Guardian
This year's London jazz festival may be stretching the jazz envelope a little further than usual. Alongside appearances by Acoustic Ladyland and Led Bib, two bands who have made their name through combining jazz with a hefty quota of punk and heavy rock, the festival plays host to Fraud, once memorably described as the jazz equivalent of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. While these bands might inspire familiar it's-not-jazz outcries from Wynton Marsalis disciples, from a broader perspective they are merely the tip of an iceberg whose frozen depths are far more terrifying. Owing a debt to German sax lunatic Peter Brotzmann, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, avant metallers God and Cynic and in particular the thrash-jazz of John Zorn, these musicians combine a jazz sensibility with a naked primal rage that is more usually found in hardcore punk or heavy metal.

It's a fragmented scene, the majority of which is still decidedly underground, but it is sufficiently vibrant as to be already attracting attempts to define it. Dirty jazz, trash jazz, post-jazz and the PC-baiting spazz jazz are among those already floated. Yet no term is as evocative as death jazz, derived from the title of a record by Billy Shaw's Shovin' Sunshine.
Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers, a California act who peddle an "amorphous fusion of all things extreme and dissonant", is not a man who likes to be part of musical scenes. Yet he probably speaks for many death jazzers when he says: "What I'm trying to express is a very well-cultivated violence in sound. I have had an interest in the more extreme forms of jazz for several decades but I am only interested in the most violent, radical aspects, which would probably make me highly unpopular at the latest Ronnie Scott's jam session."
His craving seems to be for the sort of wild ecstasy that the beat generation found in bebop. Yet in the era of MP3s, when Nina Simone can sit quite naturally between death metallers Nile and industrial rockers Nine Inch Nails, there's no need to confine this search to a single genre. "I'm interested in hearing certain kinds of energies in music," continues Walter, who lists his prime influences as free jazz, hardcore punk, No Wave and death metal. "I see no contradiction in searching for this energy in different places."
"Jazz and hardcore are both extreme kinds of music," agrees Seb Rochford, drummer for Acoustic Ladyland, among numerous others, and multiple Mercury nominee. "I like Slayer, the Stooges and Lightning Bolt. The jazz that I like is played with as much attitude as Pig Destroyer. Mingus, I feel, has the same kind of intensity as Napalm Death."
Not surprisingly given this range of influences, death jazz is a broad church. Some of its exponents are graduates from jazz college who may even continue to also play in "straight" jazz acts as well. Others are open-minded rockers making the reverse journey towards the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler. Wunderkind sticksman Chris Corsano started out as a punk and hardcore drummer before becoming one of the most in-demand players in free jazz.
Geographically, too, death jazzers stretch from Leeds, represented by cheekily monikered improv upstarts Death Qunt, to Zu and Jooklo Duo in Italy, to Brooklyn, home to jazz-thrash-everything quartet Gutbucket. Their respective backgrounds are evident in musical differences. The Thing's Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson's insistence that free jazz and pre-punk are "all the same as far as I'm concerned" shines through in the trio's garage rock aesthetic. Norwegian duo MoHa! offer an electronica-tinged take on death jazz, while the Fish, on the suitably-named Ayler records, are more rooted in the straight ahead free- jazz tradition of old.
Despite these differences, however, this motley group of musicians have arrived in a remarkably similar place. They even turn up regularly on each other's records, in particular Original Silence, a kind of death-jazz supergroup, featuring the ubiquitous Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, alongside members of the Thing, Zu and Dutch experimental rockers the Ex.
"It's a whole circle," explains David Keenan, member of Glaswegian sax'n'drum duo Tight Meat and a man whose free jazz obsession started with a love of acid rock freak-outs. "Once you go beyond the avant garde, you're back to being absolutely primitive, and I like to think that we blur that line. The first time music was ever made, it was improvised - yet to me, a lot of the improv that came out of free jazz became impossibly cerebral. What we want to do is to return improvisation to its role as the primal musical gesture."
Whether or not that has yet been achieved, the recent growth of death jazz is undeniable; so much so that the term has spread beyond the specific sub-genre defined here. The Vile Imbeciles, a compelling trio in the Birthday Party mould, have a jazz component that is close to negligible, yet they still boast a bass player with the words "death jazz" tattooed on his arm. Self-proclaimed death-jazz act Soil & "Pimp" Sessions, meanwhile, are in essence a relatively straight jazz sextet with an over-eager marketing department.
For further evidence of death jazz's continued expansion, witness the move by Acoustic Ladyland to major label V2, the multiple awards and nominations bestowed on Fraud and the appearance by Chris Corsano on Volta, Björk's latest album. Raoul Björkenheim, guitarist in Box and the aptly named Scorch Trio as well as an improv veteran of over 20 years' standing, says he's noticed audiences not only growing of late but also getting markedly younger. Ken Thomson of Gutbucket confirms: "I think there's a noise jazz or punk jazz or death jazz scene opening up. Eight years ago, when we started, it seemed we were the only ones doing this, and now it feels like we have company."
Reasons for this recent growth are manifold, including the ability of the internet to unite niche groups and the simple ebb and flow of musical fashion. This is accentuated by the state of both mainstream jazz (visually boring and musically "outdated and highly unimaginative", if you believe Gutbucket's Thomson) and rock, blasted by Death Qunt's Craig Scott for being "advertised as extreme when it's the most commercialised horrible nonsense with nothing rebellious about it whatsoever". Others see broader social factors at play. Björkenheim regards this kind of improvisation as "a cathartic experience in a society where people are getting more and more scared of making mistakes", while Tight Meat's Keenan sets it in still grander context: "This music is always inherently political, because it's about absolute freedom at all costs. Things feel politically and culturally apocalyptic right now and when everything goes to pot and the grid goes down, we can keep jamming because we don't need electricity. We can make wild noise music in caves."
It seems then that Zappa was right: jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny. Whether in some post-apocalyptic dug-out or in the slightly more relaxed confines of the London jazz festival, this bizarrely perfumed music - an attempt, in the words of Weasel Walter, "to find beauty in the madness and horror of life" - is on the rise. Just don't expect a No 1 single any time soon. As Walter says, "My music is very personal and not geared towards mass acceptance in any way. I don't really expect anyone to like it."

From New York to Ella: Highlights of the London jazz festival

The London jazz festival now runs to nearly 200 events in 41 venues over 10 days. You could catch R&B star Jamelia's tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, or banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck's gig with pianist Chick Corea, or Bozan Z's Ornette/Balkan mash-ups. Or how about a six-hour celebration of Thelonius Monk? John Fordham and John L Walters suggest a few of the more interesting routes to take in this broadest of music festivals