| When Eighties ambient
music legend Harold Budd plays at the Festival this month,
it will be his last-ever public performance. So why did
he choose to perform his last dance in Brighton? asks
Oliver Lowenstein
IFar away
- in fact 6,000 miles away - in an unknown quarter of
the city of quartz, Los Angeles, one of the masters of
a music which helped define and shape the Eighties and
Nineties ambient art music scene, pianist and composer
Harold Budd is preparing for a farewell pre-retirement
concert. Perhaps surprisingly, albeit to Brighton's grateful
gain, Budd has accepted an invitation from the Festival
to be very special guest at an evening showcasing different
parts of his long and luminous career. "I felt Brighton
was a perfect ending to a really interesting career,"
he says over the line from the city a few weeks before
the concert.
Some few months in the arranging, the concert is the contemporary
music highlight of this year's Festival, fielding a string
of guests, both announced and unannounced, including Robin
Guthrie (former half of the sorely missed Cocteau Twins),
long-term mainstay collaborator with Budd, guitarist Bill
Nelson (from mid-Seventies Bebop Deluxe), vocalist John
Foxx (from pre-Midge Ure Vienna Ultravox), as well as
Japan's Steve Janson.
Also in the mix is Jah Wobble, whose peripatetic dub bass
lines will anchor the evening's finale - what Budd is
billing as a mega-jam in 4/5. Prior to hitting that groove,
Janson will play an unrecorded piece by Budd, Lirio, composed
"for solo gong" and written, Budd relates, when
he was challenged in a Guadalajara café to write
a piece there and then, on the spot. Half an hour later,
Lirio was the result.
The evening, Budd tells me, "is a long programme
divided in two parts", beginning with a string quartet,
bringing in Alexander Balenescu, one of the so far unannounced
guests, followed by brief guitar duets and solo piano
pieces selected from throughout Budd's 35-year piano-playing
career.
And, after the break and part two's warm-up Lirio, "this
will move into a long textured atmospheric piece with
Robin. The thing I love about Robin is how he can create
an atmosphere with so little happening, with such a reduced
palette. I can always recognise him through a sea of sound."
Up on stage with Guthrie will be Fila Brazilia's Steve
Cobbie, who played with Budd when he performed at the
Big Chill Festival a few years back, on laptop. "Everyone,"
he says, "will shine in their own special way."
Budd's close connections with these musicians goes back
to the Eighties - a different time and place to music
in the early 21st century. That many of the musicians
offering time and respect to Budd are from that period
- whether Nelson, Foxx, or Wobble and the Cocteau Twins
- demonstrate his appeal to musicians across the generations.
Years earlier, Budd was a part of a south Californian
late Sixties/early Seventies minimalist compositional
scene, along with Eugene Bowman and Daniel Lentz. At the
time, he liked to call it 'lovely music': spare, incrementally
slow, stripped down electro acoustic piano music, interspersed
with lyrical flourishes - a kind of Southern Californian
mirror to the East Coast minimalisers, Philip Glass and
Steve Reich. For some, Budd's music has been a painterly
and visual music language and interpreted as the musical
equivalent of LA's not-so-distant Mojave Desert. Budd
says that, while he understands how people make that connection,
"it's completely missing the point. It's not painting
a place. It's an aesthetic or psychic - though that's
a loaded word - space."
It was Brian Eno who acted as conduit to introducing the
British music world to this fellow innovator, initially
re-recording and re-releasing Budd's long langorous piano
music, Pavilion of Dreams on the first of Eno's many small
solo labels Obscure, before embarking on the first of
two collaborations: 1980's The Plateaux of Mirror followed
in 1984 by The Pearl. Both are infused with Budd's lush,
lyrical piano, wrapped in Eno's sympathetic space-tinged
electronics. Budd good-naturedly calls the ambient tag
"benign and harmless enough", adding that "like
all -isms, it misses the point". However, according
to John Schaeffer, author of 1990's New Music, these albums
"practically define the term 'ambient'".
This strong collaborative sensibility has continued down
through the years. Budd began working with Robin Guthrie
and angelically-blessed Cocteau singstress Elizabeth Frazer,
for 1986's The Moon and the Melodies, a rapturously-received
record which saw the atmospheric fit between the Cocteau's
oceanic soundworlds and ambient's ether dissolve. Guthrie
and Budd worked again on the latter's The White Arcades,
while Budd has gone on releasing both solo albums and
further joint works, one with another old hand from the
early Eighties: Through the Hill, with XTC's Andy Partridge,
which Budd described as "spending an afternoon with
a stranger". The most recent of the solo albums is
Avalon Sutras, which arguably underscores the close links
between this thicket of ambient and the Buddhist end of
the New Age spectrum - particularly California's Zen community
- which resident musicians of a certain age seem to find
an affinity with. Budd feels the time is right and, whether
he is retiring to the monastery or his family, Brighton
is lucky to be host to this, his final concert.
Harold Budd, Concert Hall, Brighton Dome,
May 21, 7.30pm, £14-18. Tel: 01273 709709.
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Tickets 01273
709709 or www.brighton-festival.org.uk
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copyright The Insight
2005 |
