Lazy
adjective
adjective: lazy; comparative adjective: lazier; superlative adjective: laziest
unwilling to work or use energy.
“he was too lazy to improvise”
synonyms: idle, indolent, slothful, work-shy, shiftless, loafing, inactive, inert, sluggish, lethargic, languorous, listless, torpid, enervated, slow-moving, slow, heavy, dull, plodding.
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When opening a dictionary or thesaurus to look up the word “lazy”, the one thing you most certainly won’t find there is a photo of Paal Nilssen-Love. Or any reference to him. Hailing from Norway and being, by profession, a composer and skin-basher of no little repute, Nilssen-Love’s discography since the early Nineties is a terrifyingly Stakhanovite affair. Really, it makes me feel tired just looking at it.
Group and ensemble affairs? No problem. Solo releases? But of course. Collaborations and backing musicianship with a huge range of luminaries from Arto Lindsay to Peter Brötzmann to Joe McPhee? Naturellement. Christ, it’s a wonder the guy has enough time to eat and wash behind his ears. And if that wasn’t enough, possibly best of all, he’s the man behind the kit in The Thing, whose live performances you’ll know when you’ve seen them, because their sheer force will have taken all the skin off your face.To be fair, Nilssen-Love got started early in life, learning to play his father’s drum kit and, since his parents ran a jazz club in Stavanger, his tutors included every pro percussionist who was swinging their way through town. Since then, he has deployed these not inconsiderable talents across the bewildering array of outlets mentioned above.
Around 2013, though, just as Nilssen-Love toying with the idea of putting together a “large ensemble”, a request from the Molde Jazz Festival (and the chance to use the production space of another musician, Eldbjørg Raknes), combined to provide the catalyst necessary to bring the project to fruition. In Nilssen-Love’s own words, “I thought, ‘Now is the time to put together a large group’, and I spent maybe half a year putting the names together and checking out younger players in Oslo. I wanted to play with some younger musicians”. Taking the “Ronseal approach”, Nilssen-Love named his new concoction the Large Unit. Four year later, another festival, Only Connect in Oslo, commissioned a piece from Nilssen-Love to be performed there in May 2017. Not doing things by half, Nilssen-Love doubled the size of the Large Unit to twenty-seven members and named it, using his tried and trusted formula, the Extra Large Unit.
For those not fortunate enough to be in the Norwegian capital on 20 May that year, this fortieth release on PNL Records, More Fun, Please, gives us the scoop on what we missed. With twenty-seven players, Nilssen-Love had lots to play with, from accordion and euphonium to electronics and not one, not two, but three pianos. With a sonic palette so comprehensive, it must have been something of a challenge to build a composition that would be both coherent and actually playable. Nilssen-Love commented that what resulted built “as much on the ideas of John Cage as it follows in the tradition of ensembles like Globe Unity Orchestra, and in a way forces the two worlds of jazz and contemporary to mutate together”. Certainly, over the course of its thirty-three minutes, the piece cycles through an enormous range of moods, textures and themes, one moment intensely-focussed solo Cage-ian piano, the next excitable eruptions of Sun Ra-esque big band brutalism. At points I was also put in mind of both Ben Allison’s potent mix of modern jazz with rock viscera, and Mingus’s complex swinging intricacies.Nilssen-Love’s intentionality is that “When writing music, I search for extremes, pushing boundaries: physical, dynamic, instrumental limitations, if any, how fast and how slow can one play, how loud and how quiet. I search for unusual ways of thinking”. Certainly, ample evidence of this approach bursts forth from every note of More Fun, Please.
As a perfect counterpoint to the enormous number of people present to perform More Fun, Please, the next release, 19th Of May 2016, contains only two. However, when one of those is one-man musical hurricane Otomo Yoshihide, don’t expect any lessening of intensity or aggressive sonic attack. Yoshihide had already joined forces with The Thing on a number of occasions, and so the partnership with Nilssen-Love was by no means coming from a standing start.
Recorded live in concert at the Dom Cultural Centre, Moscow on, yes, you guessed it, 19 May 2016, this recording finds the dynamic duo working their way through two extended pieces, “Cat” and “Dog”.
“Cat” begins in such abrasive fashion that it’s like someone walking up to you in the street and rubbing a piece of sandpaper across your nose. Whilst Yoshihide throttles the life out of his guitar, Nilssen-Love thrashes away like a demented drum banshee in complement. A lovely low-end passage recalls something of the threatening menace of early era Sonic Youth, before straying into near This Heat territory with an assortment of tension-laden clanging and scraping. Momentum soon ramps up again to see us out after a delightful seventeen minutes. Then, up runs the angry Rottweiler that is “Dog”, tears the bottom of your trouser leg to shreds with its incisors, and promptly proceeds to destroy your flowerbeds. Modulating from the frenzied to the moody, “Dog” blends the unpredictability of improv with the aggressive thrust of rock, something that doesn’t come off successfully all that often, even though it’s been tried many times, and often by those with the credentials – on paper at least – to do so. Yoshihide and Nilssen-Love, coming at it full tilt, clear the bar with grace, and the result is a real treat to the shell-like ears. Without wishing to come over all ’70s progressive, it’s especially good via headphones, allowing one to really immerse in the music, and jump suitably when the noise sets in suddenly. Lucky Muscovites, that’s all I can say.Both pieces are, I think, “growers”, with repeated listening yielding further revelations and room for enhanced comprehension. Managing the conflicting demands of quantity versus quality is never an easy matter, and Nilssen-Love is to be applauded for keeping the latter high whilst obviously generating such Biblical amounts of the former.
You’re doing the Lord’s work, Paal; keep it up.
