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PRESS / f-ire
New Years Day, 1995. A day that most young people would have spent sleeping off a nasty hangover from the night before. But not in Golders Green, at least not in Barak Schmool's house. There, a bunch of like-minded musicians were meeting for the first time to take part in something that Schmool had picked up from conversations with New York's M-Base collective honcho Steve Coleman. Every Sunday for the next year and a half, saxophonist Schmool and a small coterie of fellow London-based musicians, among them keyboardist Nick Ramm, bassist Tom Herbert, drummer Leo Taylor, guitarist Dave Okumu, and occasionally singer Eska and pianist Robert Mitchell, would put down their instruments to exchange ideas and experiences. Before doing anything else, they would learn how to pass on their own understanding, while at the same time learning to receive that of others. They picked up percussion, sang, and studied African music and dance. Only then did they start transferring rhythmically what they'd learnt onto their instruments. It's part of what's called Collective Learning. Forward ten years to August 2005 and 36-year-old Barak Schmool, the visionary spokesman and artistic director of London's F-ire Collective is telling me how this mutual support system was the roots of what has expanded into a thriving creative music collective of over 60 professional musicians, dancers and educators. "We're all sharing in that experience of if you grew up in a real community," he says. "People have just arrived and they're attracted to the creative music scene of a particular nature, but they haven't grown up together. If you play with each other in a village, you've grown up with everyone there and you have the same way of passing on music to each other. You have the same experiences, you move in the same way, you know the same songs, that's one element of a 'enforced' community but also one that we own, and it's there because without that you wouldn't really have it. You need something that everybody shares". Increasingly, F-ire has been extraordinarily active organizing samba street percussion and more contemporary groove-oriented hybrids for carnival, and running African-derived music/dance workshops in coordination with City University and across schools in London. All members of F-ire, however diverse their musical interests, have been involved in courses, workshops and carnival at some stage learning, as Schmool puts it, to develop their own rhythmic sensibility of playing fixed-pulse groove music. Although a vital skill in playing music of any kind, internalising a personalised sense of groove is something that can easily get left out of the equation in traditional western classical music teaching and even mainstream jazz education. Says Schmool: "Everyone I can think of in F-ire has had experience playing dance music. Every great American musician in jazz historically, they played dance music. Jazz is a listening music built on the sensibility of dance music so we have the same thing at the core of our collective." With this in mind, in 1998, Schmool decided to give the Collective a name: Fellowship for Integrated Rhythmic Expression, which, being a bit of a mouthful, was conveniently shortened to the acronym F-IRE. Although the title was introduced as little more than a marketing tag, it's a neat metaphor for a community of young musicians who are virtually single-handedly re-igniting the contemporary jazz scene in London and look certain to make a similar impact around the country with this month's nationwide Contemporary Music Network (CMN) tour. The musicians that formed a large part of the original get-togethers in Schmool's house went on to form the backbone of the saxophonist's African music-derived bands: the Steve Coleman-influenced Timeline and the Afro- fusion, Roots of Unity. But ever since, F-ire bands have thrived on their incredible diversity. It's the music they have grown up with. And with a fresh, open-minded approach that flagrantly disregards the orthodox jazz ghetto's concerns about forging alliances with what is considered less 'serious' music, they have forced jazz into an ongoing dialogue with everything from classical and global sounds to electronics and punk. In so doing they are able to react to what's going on around them, to engage naturally with the zeitgeist. This is absolutely vital for the survival of jazz as a living, breathing music. Echoing the 1970s UK jazz-rock scene, F-IRE's jazz musicians play together under rock band-type names. They look more like rock bands too, closer to gangs than music boffins, a prime example being the skinny tie and attitude of Acoustic Ladyland. Although this generally causes a certain degree of suspicion amongst the jazz fraternity, the bands have achieved this without diluting the creativity of the music. It's due in no small measure to F-IRE's ideals of teamwork and 'strength through unity' that have been forged with huge dedication into a successful working cooperative by its members. In turn this has not only fuelled the creation of a secure environment for risk taking, but also a shared interaction with their environment that's intent on moving jazz forward with the times. "Like every community, when you continue to play to the same people you can't play the same stuff all the time. If you're stuck in the same village you've really got to reinvent yourself all the time to be responsible to the community or else how are you going to bind them together with the same old stuff," says Schmool. The new 2-CD compilation F-ire Works: Volume 2 on F-ire's fledgling record label offshoot confirms the boundary-stretching richness of the adventure playground inhabited by many of the artists in the collective. CD-1 mixes tracks of recent recordings, from widely acknowledged punk-jazz movers Acoustic Ladyland, through to the equally refreshing but more dulcet folkish tones of vocalist Julia Biel, with a taster from upcoming releases by the excellent keyboardist Nick Ramm's Clown Revisited, a duo collaboration between explorative pianist Liam Noble and saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, and Basquiat Strings' ebb and flow of classical and improv. CD-2 features some of the same artists experimenting with electronics /programming but entering via differing universes from club culture through to more abstract forms. From Polar Bear's Seb Rochford's lesser known trio Fulborn Teversham, drummer Martin France's Spin Marvel, through to pianist Robert Mitchell's Panacea and Finn Peters' Dr Seus, there's no identifying sound as such. So what then are the things that unite the bands in F-IRE? "I suppose now it's more of an attitude to what you do that is open," Schmool replies. "It means included in every F-ire band's conception is something that is outside music. A lot of people start writing from a concept, which is not music. It's not like this chord or this melody but it's this feeling, this speech, dance move, painting or theatrical form. Everyone has this bigger outlook but more specifically I think it's the way we pass information around each other. You see some bands who deal retrospectively with structure, it's something they've already heard and they try to recreate it with different melody and chords but the structure is unchanged. There's something different about what goes on in F-IRE: I've seen a lot of musicians or dancers saying 'oh actually I want to try this thing, lets work out what it's going to be and you have to go about learning all the rules for one piece, one environment, one story for what you're going to tell. And that means you can't just slap a chart in front of people and say, 'play this' continually. People in F-IRE are learning each other's parts, so you get in a rehearsal and you leave the instruments alone, just clapping and singing stuff and passing on the music to each other which is historically accurate for how, not just jazz but, any traditional music has been passed on." Pianist Robert Mitchell, a former sideman of Steve Coleman and member of Quite Sane, says he sees F-IRE artists as being united by "the sound and purity of expression. It's really exciting and a tiny bit disorientating at first, it's almost as if you don't believe it's possible to get these certain things together in a way that allows everybody to be themselves." The F-IRE record label has released a handful of diverse albums in the last couple of years by Timeline, Ingrid Laubrock, guitarist-led bands Jonathon Bratoeff, Justin Quinn's Bakehouse and Johnny Phillips' Oriole, while other independents with friendly F-ire (Schmool : "the ones who are not gonna piss us about"), such as Babel have released recordings by Polar Bear, Tom Arthurs, Acoustic Ladyland, while Rokit Records released this year's Julia Biel album. The most recent F-IRE CD released last month was Trust by pianist/composer Robert Mitchell's Panacea. The long awaited follow up to 2001's Voyager on Dune records. Trust stands as testimony to F-IRE's pursuit of the ideals originally associated with an indie label in which the artist always comes first. "Other record companies might restrict their artists' progress by controlling the time of their releases" says Schmool. "Now that might be fine economically for a record company but for an artist it's like, 'ok, I did that three years ago, I've moved on now. That project is over, now I've got a different band.' There have been people in the collective - Robert Mitchell is the classic case - who was held somewhere, and told 'no we can't release it, it's not the right time yet' because someone else was the big thing and he got sidelined. And where did he go? He had to split and say 'no I'm being controlled in the wrong way'. I want some way of my creativity going out when I need it for my life. And so people release on F-ire when they want to release on F-ire. It's owned by the artists, the members are shareholders in the Collective so it's there's." But retaining this kind of self-sufficiency is a perennial
struggle for F-IRE only made easier by the Herculean efforts of its members
and an intensive education programme. With backing from City University,
F-ire musicians are also able to rehearse for free and opportunities for
performing get shared out amongst its members. Hampered by a lack of venues
for jazz, this collective approach has generated more gigs not less. It's
all about cooperation not competition. Barak Schmool: "If you give
something away to someone else on the collective you know it's inevitably
coming back to you. That's something you can't often do in a competitive
world: 'oh I can't do this gig but how about having someone else from
the collective who's got an equally high profile on a similar tip."
Robert Mitchell cites this as an important benefit for his band Panacea:
"the performing possibilities and the regularity of it hasn't been
huge by any means of the imagination but it's been enough to be able to
help the general progress of my group and also the line leading up to
doing a recording of new material. I think it's been lovely to see how
well shared out these possibilities have been between quite a number of
groups without deriving any sense of argument or people wanting things" "But there is a musical necessity when there's forces out there who are limiting the presence of music in the community like the '2 in the bar' rule: that's a moral affront, to restrict people from communicating with each other in sound, and binding communities together. Where you're trying new stuff you've got to have a specific type of audience who go out and listen to something they've never heard before. Most people go out and listen to something that they've got an idea of what it's going to be, so the number of opportunities with promoters or venues, with all the expense of licensing or PRS, is small. Music is being used in this country in many places to sell drinks. So naturally we try to make a lot of things happen which wouldn't happen if you were waiting for money or permission" Contemporary European collectives especially H.A.S.K in Paris directed by Stephane Payen that has recently closed down after ten years, and the scene in Brussels around AKA Moon and Octurn have also influenced F-IRE. People, Schmool says, who "are committed to their own new music which has the same depth and integrity as anything else." The different scenes have established strong connections with each other, setting up gigs together and sharing information and learning. F-ire itself is now galvanising other fledgling creative music communities in the UK such as the Loop Collective and 1001 SongNights in London and Leeds Improvised music Association (LIMA). In turn, a distinctly British lineage can be traced back from F-IRE to the 1980s Loose Tubes generation and its offspring by looking at some of the musicians involved in the F-ire bands. It's no accident that saxophonist Mark Lockheart (Polar Bear) and post-Loose Tubes Django Bates alumnus Martin France (Spin Marvel and Bakehouse) feature. Bates is an inspirational figure to Schmool (who played and recorded with his Delightful Precipice) and other F-ire artists and returns the compliment with his supportive sleeve note on the new compilation CD. In recent years F-IRE has earned much recognition both as a dynamic force in terms of 'serious' music as well as in the popular music subculture. In 1994 and 1995 F-IRE stormed the BBC Jazz Awards, winning awards for Innovation, a rising star in Seb Rochford, best band Acoustic Ladyland and nominations for Tom Arthurs, David Okumu and Ingrid Laubrock. Jade Fox and Finn Peters have been making inroads into the urban and clubby scene while Polar Bear have broken through into the mainstream media, getting on the Mercury nominations short list. Meanwhile Acoustic Ladyland have appeared on major International cross-genre festivals, recently on the Jools Holland BBC Show Later, and hitting the rock media in a way unprecedented in modern times for a group of jazz musicians. The result being, Arts Council sponsored bodies have started to sit up and take notice with F-ire collective about to embark this month on their first CMN tour. Schmool has tried to incorporate everyone in the tour even if it means they don't perform, so there is music for about 15 writers for both small and larger ensembles formed out of about the same amount of performers. Schmool appears happy at the unique opportunity this gives the musicians in the F-ire community but being a man guided by unwavering moral principles, he's somewhat ambivalent concerning any ongoing commitment to creativity. "If only we could concentrate artistically on what we do and make sure that's good and is developing and interesting and then somebody in the Arts Council would come to you and say, 'we like what you do, do you want a national tour?' " he exclaims. "But it doesn't work like that. The Arts Council is more like, 'prove to us you can run one little project and draw a line underneath it and then we'll see if we can give you a bigger project. They're dealing with you in the way they're allowed to, in small packages and you've got to jump through a lot of hoops and if you come up with something that's different you'll be pushed around by departments because your mode of creativity doesn't fit one of their boxes. So [promoter] Tony Dudley- Evans put our name in the right place. I hope that unique opportunity is passed around other young creative communities in the country because it's an accident and one that we're going to be very grateful for. The fact that we're allowed the opportunity and that we're allowed to control a certain element of it to say 'no we don't just want Seb Rochford and Pete Wareham to go on tour because that makes the arts council look good by going with all the cool new stuff, but that they let us include everybody as much as possible." So has the success of F-ire bands, especially recently with Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland, come as a surprise at all to Schmool? "No," he says emphatically. "Because I heard the stuff some time ago and Seb [Rochford] and Pete [Wareham], aren't people who've got their creative fingers in just one pie. They understand things from different perspectives. Pete describes his thing as very 'London', like listening to the Clash or something or like Madness or skateboarding I think, that he was into. It's got a certain kind of energy that resonates with people, a certain rate of change of the length of a piece, how they're composed, how they move emotionally. If you are on the pulse of something that's going on around you, they might not understand the harmony or whatever, but if the sound of that is great, they'll get off on it. Seb, as well, is telling stories every time he plays, within the structures he creates that are very funny. It's a game that's very inviting. I'm not surprised it's a success. It's really, really clear. Other people: me, Robert Mitchell - we write things that are much more opaque, you need to come to it with some pre-knowledge." "We forget the - I wouldn't call it commercial,
but publicity - success. That's irrelevant and it's accidental,"
he says. "Human success: saying to each other we believe in each
other and we're going to make it work so if someone's feeling crap in
the collective, everyone's calling them up and asking them to sit in on
something. In urban society you can live without the support and it can
be horribly empty and meaningless. Through the street in rush hour, people
don't make eye contact, talk to each other. People evolved in small communities
in encampments in forests or villages and are genetically adept at dealing
with that, not at dealing with urban society. Whatever it is, you've actually
created a community that's bound by creativity rather than being bound
by location or by ethnic group or economic position. OK, we've arrived
here in many different ways, from different backgrounds but we're bound
by this creative thing and it's very important and we're going to continue
to do it with each other's help. And that's real success". Selwyn Harris |