Blue Shroud Band

In his program notes, Guy explained that "there were three strands that informed the writing of "The Blue Shroud." The bombing in 1937 of the Basque city of Guernica by German Condor Legion pilots at the invitation of Franco, the painting by Pablo Picasso that arose following the event, and in more recent times (2003) a blue drape that was hung over a tapestry reproduction of the Guernica painting in the United Nations building before US Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his case for invading Iraq to TV viewers and the world in general. Incontestably, the Guernica image of death, panic and mayhem would have sent a far too literal message about the horrors of war to the receivers of Powell's statement."
If you told most jazz fans that a gig was going to involve a specially convened ensemble playing a composition bringing together baroque music, improvisation and jazz they would likely head for the hills, having endured one too many special festival commissions in the past. In Krakow that would have been a very big mistake, and not just because it's snowy up there.
In its entirety the work dazzled as a 80-minute multifaceted journey through transcendent melodies, whipcrack orchestral interjections, intricate rhythmic figures, solo and small group outbursts, song and recitation. Guy's triumph was that all those disparate elements cohered into a singular experience. After the startling introduction, changes came thick and fast, as first delicate strings then reed shimmies transformed the emotional direction. A lyric Spanish-tinged duet between classical guitarist Ben Dwyer and Guy led into a lush setting for Greek vocalist Savina Yannatou's singing of a specially written text by Irish poet Kerry Hardie (a former neighbour of Guy when he lived in Ireland), entitled "Symbols of Guernica."
Guy revisited a gambit familiar from Theoria (Intakt, 1992), by sequencing concentrated eruptions of small group improvisation, which switched from one to another in swift succession. The disparate flavors and textures served to both keep things fresh and disorientate. Guy cued the transformations while still playing, pointing with his bow in one hand, while tapping the fingerboard with the other. Among the combinations which stood out were Evans' playful duet with Fernandez, the pianist's alliance with German reedman Michael Niesemann's alto saxophone, and young saxophonist Julius Gabriel's snorting baritone pyrotechnics. Later the gambit resurfaced in a series of quick changing twosomes with Lopez' drums the constant ingredient, which in their briskness resembled a session with a particularly picky speed dater.
Thorny rhetoric from the trio of Guy, Dwyer and Yannatou's improvising voice re-emerged several times to form a recurrent motif. Yannatou shifted between anguished reminders of human pain and suffering, and serene and elegant singing of the poem's stark imagery. One interchange with the split tones generated by Torben Snekkestad's reed trumpet was particularly striking. As well has Hardie's words, she also wove in spoken phrases which Hardie expressly selected from Powell's speech, relating to UN Security Council Resolution 1441 and weapons of mass destruction.
Perhaps Niesemann's part best illustrated the dual requirements of the score. A professor at the prestigious Essen Folkwang University, he has recorded together with Guy on recitals of Bach with Sir John Eliot Gardiner's English Baroque Soloists, but is also active in jazz and contemporary realms. At times he took on the role which English reedman Trevor Watts has filled in Guy's work in the past as an impassioned soloist soaring through and above a surging orchestral vamp. Yet subsequently he also played the baroque oboe d'amore in the "Agnus Dei" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in D Minor. And did both superbly.
Guy's co-option of works by Biber and Bach meant that the piece boasted some of the most beautiful tunes ever written, which heightened the poignancy of both the vocal texts and the musical settings from which they issued. Perhaps after all the abrupt cuts, the slow natural transitions took on a seamless aspect, meaning that the baroque sat comfortably amid the modern. The timeless melodies served to convey the resilience of the human spirit as well as the promise of redemption. The overall impact was incredibly moving. After the "Agnus Dei," a freewheeling coda brought proceedings to a close, eliciting a rapturous standing ovation from the enthralled crowd.
Although the concert took place in a studio in Radio Krakow, the performance was not recorded and there are no dates set for the unit to reassemble. "The Blue Shroud" convinced as stunning on first hearing, but would reveal many more facets on repeated listening. One can only hope that funding can be found to permit a studio session.
John Sharpe, The New York City Jazz Record, 2014

Maya continues: “... as for the situation we are in right now with the war in Ukraine and so much more suffering in many other countries. it might be best to listen to Barry’s major composition 'THE BLUE SHROUD' which is based on Picasso’s famous Guernica painting.”
Touchée. Indeed, “The Blue Shroud” (2016) is an imposing, cyclopean work, but totally adequate to the purposes that guide us in this project. As Barry himself details on the website created expressly for the band (14 multidisciplinary, splendid musicians) and for the suite of the same name, it is inspired by the tragic events of 1937, by Pablo Picasso's subsequent canvas, and by a fact perhaps not very well known but that gives us the authentic dimension of certain characters, governments or organisations, while, indirectly, it becomes a resounding example of the art's strength when its forms are combined with the most powerful ideas, emotions or reasons: we are talking about the covering with a large blue shroud of a reproduction of the work that hangs inside the UN building, in order to prevent its incisive, shocking vision during the speech made by Colin Powell on February 5, 2003 in which the allegedly justifying reasons for the Iraq's invasion were exposed. Words are unnecessary... or not: as obvious is that war is the defeat of peace and its most calamitous and damaging denial, either is that the essential previous step for the normalisation of its proposal is the institutional concealment, distortion or denial of the truth. Nothing really new, but in recent years we are having to helplessly witness a perfidious sophistication in the lies elaboration, widely used as a must-buy product for the global consumer. If there were a universally accepted emoticon to represent this concept and its derivatives (manipulation, demagogy, post-truth, fake news, Overton Window...) this sign, printed in bold and intense red, would be one of the most defining symbols of our troubled and disappointing times.

Returning to music, from which perhaps we should never separate: although the magnitude of this work is beyond the intention and dimension of our usual comments, we utterly recommend the leisurely exploration of this generous web page -which includes, among other many contents, a concert in London with the suite's complete execution- in order to first-hand capture the opinions, impulses and creative methods of the master, as well as his as extraordinary as diverse -geographically and stylistically- chosen musicians. At the level of our particular musical perception, we want to record a few impressions among the several that, incisively, have eroded us: the very high level of concentration and dedication of all the players involved; the silky transitions between improvised passages or contemporary orchestrations and the baroque music fragments (with the Crucifixion from H.I.F. von Biber's “Mystery Sonata X” as a theme that, given the recurrence in her discography, we sense is important for Homburger); and above all, the image of the leader conducting the orchestra while playing his dizzying double bass parts. There are certain magical moments in which it seems that a kind of sonic fluid fills the atmosphere, an effluvium so dense that it could be sectioned with a dagger; but it is the hand -or the bow- of a Guy turned in musical demiurge the one that vehemently cuts through the static ether: it is then that the telluric forces are unleashed with supernatural fury, leaving us fragilely defenceless against such a colossal sensory tempest.
Some final notes around the following words, that Barry and Maya sent us after our first contact:
“... is not always easy to keep going and to be hopeful, since it is extremely difficult these days to get concerts for the wonderful Blue Shroud Band, and there are moments when one despairs about it”. Unfortunate, but not surprising: it has never been easy to maintain a jazz orchestra -especially since WWII-, a circumstance that seems unlikely to be reversed. We can easily imagine the enormous difficulties of doing so today, and in particular with such an experimental formation.

The music industry and its derivatives impose their relentless market laws, where the various offers are increasingly conditioned to demand's niches that are shaped according to the dominant tastes, adapted to our geographical regions, ages and other digitally obtained criteria. Some musical appetites that -with slight or insignificant evolutionary variants- are inoculated, preconfigured and promoted with media generosity, in order to guarantee their lucrative and narcotic perpetuation. "Majoritary" is often equated with "of intrinsic quality", and by extension, with "essential" and "necessary". On the other side we have music like this, which survives ignored by the vast majority of the mass media, protected however by brave, risky promoters and producers, via their programming and their irreducible music labels. It is obvious that a very important part of the public may not be in tune with this almost clandestine proposal, neither from the very beginning, nor through various subsequent attempts: as it cannot be otherwise, we respect all preferences and phobias, and especially those of those who propose it but do not get it. But we refuse to accept the qualifiers of "snob", "elitist", "only for musicians or for very prepared fans" with which it is frequently and slightly (dis)qualified -especially within our skinny national panorama- either by casual passers-by, or by a significant part of the jazz audience itself. Regardless of technical, interpretive or musicological aspects, as mere fans we understand that just as a specific person wounded by painting will feel inexorably attracted to figures such as Da Vinci, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Repin or Estes, another one will instead (either from the beginning, as a result of an epiphany, or as a consequence of a growing fatigue towards the most conventional or orthodox forms) be captivated by Blake, Turner, Kandinsky, Bacon, de Kooning (Willem and Elaine) or Freud, who will reveal to him or her an unknown world, unsuspectedly installed in balances as unstable as disparate from the up to then tracked. Or perhaps -and even better- she or he will feel enlightened by all of them. What we ultimately want to emphasise, at the risk of being branded as basic or naive, is that with this music or with other artistic manifestations with similar features, it is not about understanding it, but about feeling it. It is not about assimilating it, but about living it. And for musicians, it is most likely not about demonstrating, explaining or flawlessly performing it, but about transmitting it with a skillfully channelled passion and emotion. And that in the same way that not all musical experimentation becomes ipso facto interesting, essential or wonderful for the mere fact of being such, the fact that we connect or not with it does not invalidate us, nor does it make us privileged owners of the keys to a supposedly primordial musical arcanum.
(Thanks again to Maya for her kind corrections on the english text)

If Picasso's painting is iconic, its restless energy seems to enter time as well as record it, both in the viewer's experience and its own history, evident in the temporal lines that Guy would use to weave together his work:

"There are three strands that informed my writing of The Blue Shroud: the bombing in 1937 of the Basque city of Guernica by German Condor Legion pilots at the invitation of Franco, the painting by Pablo Picasso that arose following the event, and in more recent times (2003) a blue drape that was hung over a tapestry reproduction of the Guernica painting in the United Nations building before U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his case for invading Iraq to T. V. viewers and the world in general. Incontestably, the Guernica image of death, panic and mayhem would have sent a far too literal message about the horrors of war to the receivers of Powell’s statement. In an act of extreme cowardice, it was deemed necessary to sanitize the presentation, so the tapestry was covered with a blue drape by U.S. staff and media personal prior to the broadcast."

If anything, that extended narrative adds to Guernica's power and its immediate application to our time, that blue shroud everything from a nice decorator touch to a burial shroud for both a painting's protest and the victims of war.

* * *

Guy's score begins in writing over photocopies of Guernica reproductions from books (a rare painting that could transmit its power even in newspaper reproductions). He divides the image into nine characters. Irish poet Kerry Hardie will compose stanzas to go with each of these figures (the bull, the warrior, a wailing woman, a blinded bird, the blade-pierced horse, the single bulb of torture, the light-bearer, another woman, a helpless figure) as well as a final verse, an elegy to pure spirit that marks transcendance:

I am joy, a weightless lark,
I rise like the spirit releasing.
I am in sunlight, wind and doubtful weather.
I crouch in a cat’s paw of grass.

Guy writes melodies and matches instrumental voices, often having improvisation crossing over scored parts. UN Resolution 1441, the censure of Iraq that would pave the way for the U.S. invasion, becomes an essential vocal text. Originally drafted at a meeting in the Azores by four heads of state--U.S. president George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Spanish Premier Jose Maria Asnar Portuguese Prime Minister José Manuel Durão Barroso--the text in four languages (including two versions of English) will become material for recitation and improvisation.

The Blue Shroud is a collaboration with history as well as contemporaries, with Picasso certainly, but other pieces of music enter: the "Agnus Dei" from Bach's Mass in B Minor and parts of H. I. F. Biber's ninth and tenth Mystery Sonatas, that's the Christian mystery not the general kind. These are emblems of compassion, grace amidst horror.

The Orchestra's Assembly

There's a recent essay on the music of Barry Guy and Maya Homburger
by Irish composer and guitarist (and orchestra member) Benjamin Dwyer in which he refers to their musical process as "alchemical" ("Dios los cría..." Music & Literature No. 4, p. 109-113 [the journal contains an 80-page segment devoted to Homburger and Guy's work]). While Dwyer later exchanges the term for the Spanish "duende," with its specific sense of risk, "alchemical" retains its appeal, even (especially) for a work as Spanish as The Blue Shroud. The group's coming together in the Alchemia can only heighten the metaphor.

Seeing a little of the process of The Blue Shroud's realization, and discussing the work with Barry, I struggle to put its components, its steps in order. Part of the alchemy is in the transformative interaction of composition and improvisation, a continuous exchange among conception, score and execution.

As we talk about it, moments emerge, but there's something quite extraordinary in the way that the piece and its orchestra are a simultaneous, even singular creation. While he mentions in his programme note that he needed musicians "able to co-exist in the worlds of improvisation as well as baroque music," the ultimate piece requires higher and higher degrees of specialization that seem inspired by his musicians' particular skills.

The Blue Shroud orchestra may be as much a composition as The Blue Shroud itself. It's a group assembled out of a complex web of associations in multiple existing partnerships across its 14-member personnel. It's a reflection of the unique breadth of Guy's experience as a musician as well as his openness as a composer. Constructing the group Guy was conscious of employing both existing dialogues while creating new ones. There emerged a dense series of lines, breaking up and expanding connections in a network. The Blue Shroud emerges very distinctly from Barry and Maya's shared musical experience, both with Maya's performance of Barry's modern music and their extensive shared experience in authentic period performance of baroque music, highlighted by her recordings of Bach and Biber.

When Guy's New Orchestra debuted in 2000, every name was familiar to those with a developed interested in contemporary improvised music. When I saw the personnel of The Blue Shroud I recognized about half. Among them, Agustí Fernández and Peter Evans immediately stood out. I'd heard them as a duo and they're both members with Guy of the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble; both have appeared as guests with the Parker-Guy-Lytton trio, Fernández shares a duo with Guy and a trio as well, with Ramón López, one of the Blue Shroud Orchestra's two drummers. Guy has worked extensively with the other drummer, Lucas Niggli, since moving to Switzerland, including another piano trio with Jacques Demierre.

But the baroque connections of Guy and Maya Homburger are just as evident. Like Homburger, violist Fanny Paccoud and reed player Michael Niesemann are members of John Eliot Gardiner's English Baroque Soloists. Another musician with strong period music connections is Michel Godard, a tubaist and master of the medieval serpent, the tuba's snake-like ancestor with a brass mouthpiece and side holes like a reed instrument, which he teaches at the National Conservatory in Paris.

It's here that the connections start to reveal their multiplicity. Like Guy, Godard is equally interested in jazz (he works regularly with Niggli and Pierre Dørge, among others) and has fused the two musics in his Monteverdi: A Trace of Grace project, which includes bassist Steve Swallow and Fanny Paccoud. Michael Niesemann is a virtuoso of the oboe and its slightly lower-pitched ancestor, the oboe d’amore. Many of his recordings have been with Musica Antiqua Köln, but he's also an alto saxophonist who has the free improvising skills to have played in Guy's BGNO. 

The Danish saxophonist Torben Snekkestad has played in duo with Guy (documented on Slip Slide and Collide [Maya, 2012]) and like Niesemann would have no trouble convincing a listener that free jazz is his specialty,
but he also plays soprano saxophone and arranges with the Copenhagen Saxophone Quartet, a classical quartet that has played works by Iannis Xenakis and recorded CDs of Italian baroque music with Snekkestad's arrangements of Corelli and Scarlatti. Snekkestad has fashioned a reed/ brass hybrid, attaching a saxophone mouthpiece to a trumpet to create a wild, braying primordial sound, an odd complement to the gently decorous sound of Godard's serpent, an opposite construction.

The Swedish tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Per "Texas" Johansson (heard to fine effect with Mats Äleklint's quartet) and the young baritone and soprano player Julius Gabriel (a student of Niesemann who plays with The Dorf) complete a saxophone quartet that can actually play like a vibrato-free classical ensemble or use their higher pitched doubles to create gorgeous textures for Guy's most lyrical melodies.

The literal voice of The Blue Shroud is Savina Yannatou, a singer of tremendous expressive range with whom Guy has performed in duet, ranging from traditional music to free improvisation. A live recording from the Bimhuis includes a performance of Guy's "The Ancients," the kind of graceful melody which figures so tellingly in The Blue Shroud (on Attikos, Maya, 2010).

There is a tradition that the best jazz composers (Ellington, Mingus) have written to the voices and talents of the specific musicians available to them. In The Blue Shroud, Guy may have taken this idea to new levels of complexity.

* * *

On the Thursday afternoon, November 20th, I'm privileged to attend the third day of rehearsal which will end with the first run-through of the complete work. The orchestra is spread throughout Alchemia, the tiny basement heart of Jazz Autumna, chairs pushed out of the way to accommodate the group. This is the third day that the band has gone through their regimen: gather to rehearse from ten to six, pack up the equipment to retreat to the tiny bandstand, play three sets a night of free improvisations in wildly varied sub-groups from 8 to 11, then start again the next morning rehearsing The Blue Shroud. They have gathered from Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and America, and despite the webs of association, some are meeting for the first time. The day and night processes are essentially linked. During the day they build the work from Guy's score; each night, in some twenty different improvising ensembles, they get to interact with one another's musical personalities at the granular level, an essential element for The Blue Shroud's eventual performance.

The next night they'll debut the work on a larger stage in Krakow Radio's concert hall. Now in Alchemia, Barry Guy is pressed against a brick wall, turning score pages, conducting, playing bass. On his right are Lucas Niggli and Ramón López with their two expanded drum kits (Niggli has suspended stacks of cymbals, tuned and bowed); in front of Guy are the four reeds and the two brass. Sheltered within the circle is Savina Yannatou, both the voice and the text of Guy's conception. The tiny elevated stage to Guy's left at the end of the room holds all the string players: the grand piano, violin, viola and guitar.

It's a revelation to watch Guy's compositional and conducting style in action, working out a host of holds (pauses, fermatas, silences, sustains), adding and subtracting ensemble voices in a give-and-take with the other musicians. He openly asks for input, questioning the musicians about what they're hearing, welcoming their responses and accommodating change, dropping an ensemble in favor of a single voice, removing a bar here and there or adding an improvising soloist to enrich a texture, all of this arising in the build-up to a first run-through just a day before the debut, and accomplished with a patience and spirit of openness that would be wonderful to behold with a week of rehearsal left to him. The shaping of transitions is a key part of the dialogue, as if only the performer can summon the requisite nuance. The written parts aren't just being matched with improvisation in the work: the fundamental process of organizing the work for performance takes on elements of improvisation. (It's with a sense of joy and bemused wonder that in a quiet moment Ramón López points out to me the presence of a Biber Sonata in his score).

When the group breaks for lunch there are stragglers still at work, Barry and Maya of course, Maya a critical element, the coordinator of logistics, all the elements in this vast network. There are Michael Niesemann and Fanny Paccoud, concerned about one of the segment endings, Agustí Fernández is there and Ben Dwyer as well, Agustí who acts as secondary conductor for one of the most lyric segments, Ben who has written so revealingly of working with Barry and Maya on a composition of his own. Maya, Fanny and Michael share that membership in John Eliot Gardiner's English Baroque Soloists, and it's clearly a rare precision, an intimacy with nuance and a special fellowship that they bring to this, that wonderful compact with 400 years of musical history, its lines of connection growing stronger all the time.

What can I recall best of all of this? The great curve of the work--it's power and terrors, the sweep of the orchestra, the power of certain improvisers-- Fernández and Evans especially--to transform individually the collective shapes of history and orchestra that Guy's score will plumb. Above all there's the extraordinary lyric beauty of Guy's setting of Kerry Hardie's "I am in Sunlight" as sung by Savina Yannatou, coming after the polyglot horrors of Resolution 1441.

* * *

The Blue Shroud is both composing into and through history. It invokes the history of art, both its symbolic potential and its possibilities for social meaning through the figure of Guernica, a work that in both the long-term history of fine art and the immediately political. It invokes, too, profound threads of musical history, from the rich beauty of Baroque melody to the mathematical egalitarianism of Viennese serialism to the play of mystery in free improvisation, which is not simply the most recent development but a hinge through which these materials are connected. It is a writing through history in which its sense of engagement renders all its materials (musical, visual, social, political ) immediate, available and malleable, be it Biber and the oboe d'amore, the sonic and the pictorial, the silent scream of Guernica's bull, the circle in which Guy's adventures in the most distant and recent musical worlds come together in a singular discourse.

Guy's visioning of Guernica includes a depth of Spanish music that is more than mere decoration. It reverberates with and extends the special relationship that jazz has developed with Spain, what Jelly Roll Morton called "the Spanish tinge," and touches on the transmutation of Afro-Cuban sources in Latin dance, all the way to Miles Davis and Gil Evans' Sketches of Spain with its trumpet transmutation of Joaquín Rodrigo 's concerto for guitar, Mingus's Tijuana Moods with its wild fusion of war cry and mariachi, and most tellingly here, Charlie Haden's Liberation Orchestra and its fondness for folk songs of the revolution In the band itself, the two Spanish musicians have each recorded national repertoire: López' thrilling Songs of the Spanish Civil War (Leo, 2000) and Fernández' beautiful El laberint de la memòria (Mbari, 2011), improvisations based on Spanish music of the 20th century. López is a master of flamenco drumming, while Benjamin Dwyer, a former resident of Spain, has set poems by the civil war poet Federico García Lorca and brings an essential element. The splashing percussive highs of Fernández and Dwyer, the latter's attacks magnified by the brightness of his guitar, create a hybrid of classical and flamenco elements, the brightness of which can penetrate the ensemble.

The Blue Shroud is a work of tremendous complexity in which every component influences everything else--Guy's composition and the segments of compositions by H.I.F. Biber (1644-1704) and J.S. Bach (Agnus Dei from the B Minor Mass)--some feeding the improvisations, some acting as ultimate touchstones in the piece, the improvisations in turn influencing the way we hear Biber, Bach and Guy the composer, for whom the improvisations are an essential component making the totality both an immediate and a collective creation in which historical artists collaborate with contemporary ones. Biber and Bach aren't appropriated, they're invoked and embraced. The work seems to engage history/suffering through emblems: the comfort and ordered and majestic beauty of Biber's Crucifixion Sonata (Number 10) and, more transcendentally still, Bach turning lamentation into a beauty that Guy can call "heartbreaking," the Agnus Dei, "Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, grant us peace."

* * *

The Blue Shroud is a continuous stream of new textures that point to the complex relationship of art to the representation of pain, suffering and sheer incomprehensible horror: it distracts as it lends solace, somehow creating balance and distance with which to appreciate the immediacy of experience. The Blue Shroud becomes a kind of coeval of Picasso's painting, its large musical "canvas" stretching through Picasso's own evolution, including the fractured plane of collage and the omni-perspective of cubism (suggesting even the panopticon of Jeremy Bentham's speculative prison system). The polysemy of the work extends from its mixed musical languages to its literally mixed languages, as Yannatou works through Kerry Hardie's poems and the languages of Resolution 1441, extending them into chanting, singing, crying and speaking in tongues, an authentic language of the wounded spirit.

The baroque music achieves a special quality here. If the period instrument movement has restored early music to its authentic sounds and pitches, here it travels a step further, as it's situated firmly in the present. We are invited to hear in a way that is genuinely multiple, each element speaking authentically anew.