in Russia
From Plan Eden via Moscow to POPendingEYE
1987 was a year of meetings. So in trio together with Sonny Sharrock & Broetzmann whom I had started working with in duo in '86, Go No Go. My long collaboration together with Heiner Goebbels had been fading, a last resumee in Live in Victoriaville (1987), and playing there in Canada on his Man in the Elevator project me as an Ersatz for Don Cherry & Tim Berne (both couldn't make it there) together with Heiner, Arto Lindsay, Andre Duchesne, Fred Frith and Chris Cutler. My poetical ecological thoughtfullness from This Earth! (ECM in 1983) had been prolonged by an excursion Notes On Planet Shikasta using words from Doris Lessing together with Maggie Nicols, Phil Minton, Paul Bley and Barre Phillips in Strasbourg's Musica Festival & Frankfurt's Old Opera in 1987. In Switzerland I had met Guenter Mueller together with Phil Minton & extended that work as Aleister And Alice with them both plus Sharrock for the festival in Willisau in 1987. I tried to pin down these diverse memorable events in the catalogue Die Zersplitterung. Since I had been starting in duo with John Zorn in 1986 (Moers festival) I had a loose collection of recordings Atom Sex Kino/Aleister And Alice and wanted to knit them together on record, Plan Eden, on the label Creative Works Records, Switzerland, which I had successfully started working with since '86: Red Art / Anything Goes / Gestalt et Jive.
Plan Eden also contains four duets with Lindsay Cooper (titles by Nietzsche: Es sind meine Tiere! / Hoerstueck fuer Alle und Keinen / Der Geist der Rache / Fuersprache der andenkenden Naehe zum Fernen), recorded in February 1987. Lindsay then so friendly invited me for her upcoming band OH MOSCOW which premiered on the festival Zuerich in October later that year.Meanwhile my trio Gestalt et Jive (lately with Ferdinand Richard / Peter Hollinger) came to an end on the festival in Victoriaville. Post modernism & splittering changes popped up everywhere / hyper reality / the end of history (Jean Baudrillard, whose voice I made a radio play with) / Glasnost / Perestroika... OH MOSCOW in it's words (by singer Sally Potter) reflected the late Cold War era with it's seemingly eternal Iron Curtain between East & West. OH MOSCOW went to perform behind the Iron Curtain in the GDR on East Berlin's Festival des Politischen Lieds (1989 February 15 -16) and performed on many other occasions, also in North America. Lindsay's utopian dream to once perform with her group in the city of Moscow came true after the surprising fall of the wall (1989) - in the year 1991 OH MOSCOW had been short term invited to play on a festival in Moscow. To make it happen, some members who couldn't make it there quickly had to be replaced: Veryan Weston for Elvira Plenar on piano and Chris Cutler for Marilyn Mazur/Charles Hayward on drums. The trip became extremely exhausting in general but so fullfillingly satisfying on the other hand.
From Moscow we went by an over night bus trip to Volgograd to perform there next day on the festival Unidentified Movement. I think we all entered a very strange state, a kind of cultural shock by doing this exquisite time-travel-like tour. A year before in 1990 the Budapest festival had invited me to contribute a new project. It became Trio Trabant A Roma (with Lindsay & Phil) referring also to the former GDR cars Trabant which then freshly had been seen all over (West) Europe now all ways travelling to Rome... When this trio had returned from that trip to Moscow/Volgograd and had performed in Esslingen to record, it still had been in a strange state, as if it had been cut out of time, a State Of Volgograd.
On a personal level at that period of time I also went through a relationship crisis with my then wife, born in Dessau, former GDR. It came to a final split at the end of 1991.
On my way to further the extension to the East before in 1988 I had formed the group Vladimir Estragon (with Phil Minton, Ulrike Haage, FM Einheit), two faces in one, West & East and in 1992 I had an opportunity to be invited by Moscow TV for a portrait of mine which became the short film Balance Action by Sergey Karsaev. This footage trip also had brought me to St.Petersburg where I met Vlad Makarov & Vladimir Tarasov on the festival Open Music. After I decided to form a new group QuasarQuartet in 1992 with Tarasov on drums, Russian pianist Simon Nabatov and Polish bass player Vitold Rek which had been recorded live at the Old Opera in Frankfurt: POPendingEYE. The same year it was the ending of the CCCP/Sowjet Union. In 1993 OH MOSCOW and especially Lindsay Cooper had been honored by an invitation to the London Jazz festival. In 1994 for the documenta archive I gave a performance together with Moscow poet Dmitri Prigov and was invited by Robert Knuth to be a member in the artist group Delikatesy Avantgarde in Gdansk, Poland.
Later in 1999 I had a chance to travel to Moscow again: Peter Kowald, Xu Feng Xia and me played on the Alexander Pushkin festival. There also I met Prigov & Tarasov again. One year before, in 1998, Sally Potter had announced Lindsay's tragic illness which I wasn't aware of until then...
Around 1995 I had beginningly deviated to the Far East by starting working on Han Guk - Korean traditional court songs in a group Golden Circle I had formed for the jazz festival in Frankfurt together with David Murray, Fred Hopkins and Dougie Bowne.
In 2013 I digitalized some video cassettes that I took from the tour in Russia with OH MOSCOW .
In June 2014 it was announced that Henry Cow, Music for Films, News from Babel and OH MOSCOW would all be reforming to play Lindsay Cooper's music at two concerts: one at the Barbican Centre, London on 21 November 2014 as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival; and the other at the Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield on 22 November 2014 as part of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. A third remembrance concert for Cooper featuring the same line-up above was held in Forlì, Italy on 23 November 2014.
In 2015 I was invited to perform at Dom, Moscow Autumn Jazz Festival, and asked Kazuhisa Uchihashi to join me as a duo.
In 2018 again I was invited to perform at Dom, Moscow Autumn Jazz Festival, and put a quartet Revolver 23 together with Nicola L.Hein, Marcel Daemgen, Jörg Fischer.
I am very thankful to have been a member of OH MOSCOW during the years 1987 to 1993, an important period of changes which had blamed Fukuyama's theory of an "end of history" to be untrue.
Alfred 23 Harth, 2018
in Russia
From Plan Eden via Moscow to POPendingEYE
1987 was a year of meetings. So in trio together with Sonny Sharrock & Broetzmann whom I had started working with in duo in '86, Go No Go. My long collaboration together with Heiner Goebbels had been fading, a last resumee in Live in Victoriaville (1987), and playing there in Canada on his Man in the Elevator project me as an Ersatz for Don Cherry & Tim Berne (both couldn't make it there) together with Heiner, Arto Lindsay, Andre Duchesne, Fred Frith and Chris Cutler. My poetical ecological thoughtfullness from This Earth! (ECM in 1983) had been prolonged by an excursion Notes On Planet Shikasta using words from Doris Lessing together with Maggie Nicols, Phil Minton, Paul Bley and Barre Phillips in Strasbourg's Musica Festival & Frankfurt's Old Opera in 1987. In Switzerland I had met Guenter Mueller together with Phil Minton & extended that work as Aleister And Alice with them both plus Sharrock for the festival in Willisau in 1987. I tried to pin down these diverse memorable events in the catalogue Die Zersplitterung. Since I had been starting in duo with John Zorn in 1986 (Moers festival) I had a loose collection of recordings Atom Sex Kino/Aleister And Alice and wanted to knit them together on record, Plan Eden, on the label Creative Works Records, Switzerland, which I had successfully started working with since '86: Red Art / Anything Goes / Gestalt et Jive.
Plan Eden also contains four duets with Lindsay Cooper (titles by Nietzsche: Es sind meine Tiere! / Hoerstueck fuer Alle und Keinen / Der Geist der Rache / Fuersprache der andenkenden Naehe zum Fernen), recorded in February 1987. Lindsay then so friendly invited me for her upcoming band OH MOSCOW which premiered on the festival Zuerich in October later that year.Meanwhile my trio Gestalt et Jive (lately with Ferdinand Richard / Peter Hollinger) came to an end on the festival in Victoriaville. Post modernism & splittering changes popped up everywhere / hyper reality / the end of history (Jean Baudrillard, whose voice I made a radio play with) / Glasnost / Perestroika... OH MOSCOW in it's words (by singer Sally Potter) reflected the late Cold War era with it's seemingly eternal Iron Curtain between East & West. OH MOSCOW went to perform behind the Iron Curtain in the GDR on East Berlin's Festival des Politischen Lieds (1989 February 15 -16) and performed on many other occasions, also in North America. Lindsay's utopian dream to once perform with her group in the city of Moscow came true after the surprising fall of the wall (1989) - in the year 1991 OH MOSCOW had been short term invited to play on a festival in Moscow. To make it happen, some members who couldn't make it there quickly had to be replaced: Veryan Weston for Elvira Plenar on piano and Chris Cutler for Marilyn Mazur/Charles Hayward on drums. The trip became extremely exhausting in general but so fullfillingly satisfying on the other hand.
From Moscow we went by an over night bus trip to Volgograd to perform there next day on the festival Unidentified Movement. I think we all entered a very strange state, a kind of cultural shock by doing this exquisite time-travel-like tour. A year before in 1990 the Budapest festival had invited me to contribute a new project. It became Trio Trabant A Roma (with Lindsay & Phil) referring also to the former GDR cars Trabant which then freshly had been seen all over (West) Europe now all ways travelling to Rome... When this trio had returned from that trip to Moscow/Volgograd and had performed in Esslingen to record, it still had been in a strange state, as if it had been cut out of time, a State Of Volgograd.
On a personal level at that period of time I also went through a relationship crisis with my then wife, born in Dessau, former GDR. It came to a final split at the end of 1991.
On my way to further the extension to the East before in 1988 I had formed the group Vladimir Estragon (with Phil Minton, Ulrike Haage, FM Einheit), two faces in one, West & East and in 1992 I had an opportunity to be invited by Moscow TV for a portrait of mine which became the short film Balance Action by Sergey Karsaev. This footage trip also had brought me to St.Petersburg where I met Vlad Makarov & Vladimir Tarasov on the festival Open Music. After I decided to form a new group QuasarQuartet in 1992 with Tarasov on drums, Russian pianist Simon Nabatov and Polish bass player Vitold Rek which had been recorded live at the Old Opera in Frankfurt: POPendingEYE. The same year it was the ending of the CCCP/Sowjet Union. In 1993 OH MOSCOW and especially Lindsay Cooper had been honored by an invitation to the London Jazz festival. In 1994 for the documenta archive I gave a performance together with Moscow poet Dmitri Prigov and was invited by Robert Knuth to be a member in the artist group Delikatesy Avantgarde in Gdansk, Poland.
Later in 1999 I had a chance to travel to Moscow again: Peter Kowald, Xu Feng Xia and me played on the Alexander Pushkin festival. There also I met Prigov & Tarasov again. One year before, in 1998, Sally Potter had announced Lindsay's tragic illness which I wasn't aware of until then...
Around 1995 I had beginningly deviated to the Far East by starting working on Han Guk - Korean traditional court songs in a group Golden Circle I had formed for the jazz festival in Frankfurt together with David Murray, Fred Hopkins and Dougie Bowne.
In 2013 I digitalized some video cassettes that I took from the tour in Russia with OH MOSCOW .
In June 2014 it was announced that Henry Cow, Music for Films, News from Babel and OH MOSCOW would all be reforming to play Lindsay Cooper's music at two concerts: one at the Barbican Centre, London on 21 November 2014 as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival; and the other at the Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield on 22 November 2014 as part of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. A third remembrance concert for Cooper featuring the same line-up above was held in Forlì, Italy on 23 November 2014.
In 2015 I was invited to perform at Dom, Moscow Autumn Jazz Festival, and asked Kazuhisa Uchihashi to join me as a duo.
In 2018 again I was invited to perform at Dom, Moscow Autumn Jazz Festival, and put a quartet Revolver 23 together with Nicola L.Hein, Marcel Daemgen, Jörg Fischer.
I am very thankful to have been a member of OH MOSCOW during the years 1987 to 1993, an important period of changes which had blamed Fukuyama's theory of an "end of history" to be untrue.
Alfred 23 Harth, 2018