31.12.2024 | Artist
Barre Phillips, masterful bassist, improviser of radical originality, and a free thinker in life and music, has died, aged 90.
Born in 1934 in San Francisco, Barre moved to New York in 1962 and threw himself wholeheartedly into the new music in its diverse manifestations – playing alongside Eric Dolphy in realizations of Gunther Schuller’s compositions, for instance, and commuting between Archie Shepp’s fiery group and the contrapuntal poetry of the Jimmy Giuffre 3: “different kinds of intensity” as he summed up the experiences. In late 1960s London he played with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble with John Stevens and Evan Parker, with Chris McGregor’s Trio and Septet, with Mike Westbrook’s Concert Band, formed a long lasting creative alliance with John Surman, and recorded the influential solo album known in its various editions as Journal Violone, Basse Barre and Unaccompanied Barre. From the early 70s onwards, for half a century, he was based in the South of France, living in Puget-Ville, near Toulon, returning to live in the US only in 2021.
Barre’s debut ECM recording was the history-making Music From Two Basses (February 1971) with Dave Holland, a first-ever album of mostly improvised bass duets. From ‘72 he toured widely with Terje Rypdal and Jon Christensen (see What Comes After); Terje loved Barre’s sound and composed a Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra (1973) to feature it…
Always open to influence from the other arts, Barre and John Surman began working with choreographer Carolyn Carlson at the Paris Opera. Barre would ultimately provide music for nine of Carlson’s ballets. Out of this collaboration came much of the music to be featured on 1976’s Mountainscapes, an enduring classic. Its spacious sound expanded the Surman-Phillips-Stu Martin trio with the addition of electronics player Dieter Feichtner, whom Barre had introduced to the group, as well as a spontaneous guest appearance from John Abercrombie. Feichtner was also on board for the genre-defying Three Day Moon, Barre’s album with Terje Rypdaland Trilok Gurtu, whose improvised space-rock strangeness attracted attention in Hollywood. Its sound-colourssubsequently underpinned the action of William Friedkin’s1980 movie Cruising.
Barre’s own interest in film was intensified through his friendship with director Robert Kramer and fragments of pieces written for Kramer’s films were incorporated like signposts in the improvised flow of the solo album Call Me When You Get There, recorded in 1983.
Aquarian Rain (1989) , was a fascinating electro-acoustic experiment in what Barre called “mixed music” in which he and percussionist Alan Joule played with and against tapes compiled from their own sounds, electronically processed, spliced and reassembled in collaborative teamwork with composers Jean-François Estager and James Giroudon.
Into the 1990s, Time will Tell and Sankt Gerold documented, on one studio album and one live album, the trio of Barre, Paul Bley and Evan Parker. The pianist and saxophonisthadn’t worked together prior to the studio date. Barre, having played extensively with both men, helped to shape a musicthat embraced the subtle dynamics of the old Giuffre trio and the textural expressiveness of European free improvising.
Tales of Rohnlief and Angles of Repose featured another idiosyncratic trio as Barre joined forces with Joe and Mat Maneri, diving deep into the rarefied microtonal language of the father and son team. “It was as if we’d played together all our lives”, Maneri senior marveled. Barre and Mat Maneriwent on to play together in other contexts including work with folk singer Robin Williamson. On Williamson’s The Iron Stone, it was Barre’s idea to play the Irish reel “Loftus Jones” by Turlough O’Carolan as a free-floating ballad. Director Olivier Assayas subsequently incorporated it as the theme song of his 2008 movie Summer Hours.
In 2016, Barre Phillips called Manfred Eicher to say that he’d like to record a final solo album, to document “the last pages of a journal that began fifty years ago”. The result was End To End, a splendid account of the art of solo bass.
Still to come was Face à Face, a duo with György Kurtág Jr on synthesizers and digital percussion, recorded in 2020. Kurtág addressed the nature of the challenge in the liner notes, describing Barre, fondly, as “an individual on the move… I am dealing with a musician whose playing and phrasing changes constantly, in the most unpredictable ways possible.” In Barre’s own view, he was simply following the sound, and sometimes the sound led to surprising places. “My active role is to do the best I can to play on my instrument what my ear is suggesting. I hear my part almost as if it were composed by someone else.”
