JAZZ REVIEW : Carter, Phillips Reach for Limits

Perhaps the greatest risk an improvising musician can take is to stand in front of an audience alone, without accompaniment, and attempt to create instant musical drama. A case in point was a program last Thursday night at L.A.C.E. (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibits) in which two gifted performers--clarinetist John Carter and bassist Barre Phillips--provided contrasting variations on how to make your own kind of music.

Carter, a player who refuses to be limited by traditional playing techniques, opened the evening. Using circular breathing (a method that allows long phrases to be unbroken by the need to take gulps of air), multiphonics (in which the instrument is “overblown,” producing several simultaneous notes) and an astonishingly far-ranging mechanical technique, he painted a canvas of vividly expressionistic musical colors.

There was, however, always a feeling of theme and variation in Carter’s works. A mature veteran of the jazz scene, he brought a familiar sense of structure to his most extraordinary technical flights of fancy.

Phillips--an active participant in ‘60s avant-garde music who has lived for the last two decades in France--produced an equally startling array of sounds from his cumbersome instrument: Multi-stop arco harmonies; ponticello playing (to create glassily fragile sounds near the instrument’s bridge); tapping, rubbing and stroking across both the strings and the wood of his bass.

But Phillips’ improvisational style was quite different from Carter’s. His works unfolded in a series of evolving sounds, one episode unfolding into another with the seeming inevitability of a spiraling nebula.

Less easily associated with jazz, Phillips’ improvisations--like Carter’s--were fascinating examples of the music that can be created by performers who are willing to risk probing the outer limits of their art.