Mats Gustafsson - 2016 - MG 50- Peace & Fire 4xCD Boxset

 

Trost Records – TR140

Most fiftieth-birthday collections look backward, arranging a career into a respectable monument before the candles have stopped smoking. MG 50: Peace & Fire does the opposite. Recorded across three nights at Vienna’s Porgy & Bess, this four-disc box uses Mats Gustafsson’s birthday as an excuse to gather musicians from several generations and discover what can still happen between them. It is less a retrospective than a social portrait drawn in sound. Gustafsson appears as saxophonist, instigator, student, collaborator and gravitational disturbance, but never as a solitary hero standing in front of his accomplishments. The real subject is the network surrounding him: long friendships, formative influences, younger musicians, recurring groups and temporary combinations held together by the belief that improvisation is not private self-expression but communication performed without a safety rail.

The opening disc immediately establishes that “peace” and “fire” are not opposites. Peace is the concentration that allows musicians to hear one another before a direction exists; fire is what that concentration becomes once everybody commits. Gustafsson and Didi Kern begin with a compact exchange of breath, impact and provocation, followed by RISC’s cooler electronic terrain and Sven-Åke Johansson’s wonderfully dry mixture of percussion, theater and song. Johansson is not presented as an elder placed politely inside somebody else’s celebration. His dada humor, unconventional objects and sideways relationship to the jazz songbook reveal part of the freedom Gustafsson inherited. Swedish Azz then turns national jazz history into active material, treating melodies associated with Lars Gullin, Bo Nilsson and Jan Johansson with affection vigorous enough to rearrange them. History here is neither worshipped nor discarded. It is handled, bent, interrupted and returned to circulation.

The second and third discs demonstrate how Gustafsson can remain unmistakably himself inside radically different structures. Fake the Facts, expanded by Paul Lytton and Martin Brandlmayr, produces a dense electronic-percussive environment in which the saxophone must negotiate rather than dominate. Christof Kurzmann and Sofia Jernberg answer with fragile voices, digital texture and long suspended space, temporarily changing the entire emotional scale of the festival. Fire!, enlarged with Jernberg, Mariam Wallentin, Agustí Fernández and Erwan Keravec, turns repetition into something ceremonial and physically overwhelming: Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin establish the heavy ground while organ, bagpipes, voices and saxophone keep changing the weather above it. The following night moves from the composed precision of Klangforum Wien to the microscopic free interaction of TR!O + 1, then finishes with The Thing and Ken Vandermark converting collective improvisation into a form of punk-rock propulsion. These are not stylistic detours surrounding a central Gustafsson language. Together they are that language, built from the refusal to accept that acoustic detail, electronic abrasion, ensemble composition, old jazz melody and enormous riffs must live in separate houses.

The fourth disc, recorded in the smaller Strenge Kammer room, quietly changes the meaning of the whole box. Gustafsson steps out of the center while friends and collaborators offer solos, duos and dedications in his direction. Kjell Nordeson reaches back toward music the two played as teenagers; Per-Åke Holmlander turns tuba breath into affectionate grotesquerie; Agustí Fernández explores the piano’s strings, wood and internal machinery; and Erwan Keravec fills the room with the continuous pressure and ancient overtones of bagpipes. Kurzmann and Vandermark create a spacious electronic-reed landscape before Anna Högberg closes with the brief birthday greeting “Ha den äran.” After hours of massed sound, the small final gesture feels exactly right. Influence is revealed not as imitation but permission: the freedom another musician gives you to become more fully yourself.

More than four and a half hours of music cannot summarize Gustafsson’s first fifty years, and the box is wise enough not to try. A life in improvised music cannot really be summarized; it can only be convened. People enter carrying their histories, equipment, obsessions and unfinished conversations, then create something that did not exist before they occupied the same room. The photographs and essays included with the original physical edition document the gathering, but the recordings preserve its deeper evidence: the trust required to risk failure in public and the joy of hearing somebody else alter your direction. Peace is the space made for that exchange. Fire is the exchange becoming irreversible.