Search - Richard Teitelbaum, David Moss, Shelley Hirsch :: Richard Lowe Teitelbaum Golem

Spellbinding with a sense of performative freedom

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 08/16/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"You may know Richard Teitelbaum from his lifelong affinity with improvisation,although he didn't begin there. After a prestigious formative time at the pinnicle of Eastern establishment musical academia he lived in Europe,studied composition with Luigi Nono for a time and in the late Sixties,in particular Venice,had formed an improv ensemble MEV Musica electronnica viva with Fredric Rzewski,Alvin Curren, and Allan Bryant in the early formations. They toured the face of Europe,playing even in Italian prisons, presenting free white-man-like improvisations, extensions from the free Cage avant-garde. Teitelbaum was the first purveyor of the problematics of live electronics,and this was always a central cohesive element to MEV's rather freak-storm at times-like playing with break-neck fast tortured,gut-wrenching smears and smatterings of textures interweaved with Rzewski's penchant for revolutionary gestures or outright melodies. After the groups unofficial demise in the early Seventies(for they intermittently continued to perform with different personnel,Anthony Braxton,Garrett List), Teitelbaum in the Seventies continued the quest for meaningful improvisation, the conceptual challenge of linking this Western post-Cage,free jazz conceptual frame with the disciplines of improvisation from other world cultures. Teitelbaum had spent time in Japan learning the various means of flutes and instrument,systems there and improvising for practice with primary musicians. Well all this experience finds its way into the Golem, based on Judaic mythological ideas,inspired by a time spent at a Jewish cemetery in Prague. This music still maintains a sense of the playing structural freedoms with great playing by trombonist George Lewis, a like-minded musician who also has worked in live electronics. The result is spellbinding at times, sort of up and down the emotive wheel without an overall agenda that brings things together cohesively. Perhaps it is not to suggest this. The work has been performed numerous times including a series of performances at The Jewish Museum in New York. So the work has weathered itself rather nicely."