OVARY LODGE - Ovary Lodge

 

(OG 600)

 

Track listing: Gentle One Says Hello/Fragment No. 6/A Man Carrying A Drop Of Water On A Leaf Through A Thunderstorm/Communal Travel/Coda

 

Keith Tippett (piano, harmonium, recorder, voice, maracas), Julie Tippetts (voice, sopranino recorder, er-hu), Harry Miller (bass), Frank Perry (percussion, voice, hsîao, shéng).

 

Recorded live at Nettlefold Hall, London SE27, 6 August 1975. Released: Autumn 1976. Produced by Ovary Lodge and Keith Beal. Sleeve design by Liz Walton.

 

(Author's Note: The album credits explain that an "er-hu" [most commonly spelled without a hyphen as "erhu"] is a "two-stringed Chinese violin," a "hsîao" [modern spelling: "xiao"] is a "Chinese bamboo flute" and a "shéng" is a "Chinese bamboo mouth organ.")

This is the first entry on Ogun to involve Keith Tippett, beyond question the most important non-South African musician to be associated with the label. One could say that he was one of the two most important musicians in early seventies Britain - the other being his friend and sometime bandmate Robert Wyatt - insofar as both men were utterly open-minded about all the different strands of then-contemporary music and were keen on drawing them all together. I saw Tippett's enormous band Centipede at the Lyceum Theatre in London on Sunday 15 November 1970, aged six, and the experience most likely influenced the way I perceived and understood music for the rest of my life. There were, I realised, no boundaries to music. There were jazz, rock and classical musicians on stage, all striving towards a greater good. Everything was open, and to be shared.

No doubt Tippett's then record label RCA would have been delighted for him to continue on that gargantuan pathway. The double album of Septober Energy, the extended work that Centipede performed that Sunday evening at the Lyceum, followed in the summer of 1971. In hindsight it did not quite measure up to the excitement and intensity I felt coming from that stage. The band were only allotted three days' studio time and producer Robert Fripp spent so much time marshalling this awkward enterprise in the control room and ensuring that the recording went to schedule that there was no time for him to play any guitar (as he had done at the Lyceum). In addition, recording sessions commenced at ten in the morning - a time of day hitherto unknown to most of the players - so the intensity wasn't quite as focused as it might have been.

Nevertheless Septober Energy became a very important album to my teenage self, and its naivety - bear in mind that Tippett was only in his very early twenties when he put the band and piece together - is far outweighed by many electrifying and transcendental moments. Its utopian vision of a collective society, where every individual counted towards a higher goal, was, I believe, also highly influential politically.

Although the record fared less well, both critically and commercially, than might have reasonably been expected at the time, RCA remained eager for the Tippetts - they thought of Keith and Julie as the John Dankworth and Cleo Laine de leur jours - to develop even bigger and brighter extravaganzas; there was talk of them going out on the road with a travelling circus troupe and tent. They were markedly less enthusiastic about Tippett's decision to focus on a trio which he had co-formed with the drummer Frank Perry. This trio, with Roy Babbington (see OG 020 and OG 522) playing bass, recorded two albums for RCA, both meditative in nature and more or less completely improvised, entitled Blueprint and Ovary Lodge (they christened themselves after the latter), which were promoted and sold minimally. Tippett wriggled out of his RCA contract with few regrets on either side.

Actually, a good two-thirds of Blueprint set the tone for what would familiarly become known as Ovary Lodge, since Julie Tippetts also appears, in various vocal and instrumental guises, on four of its six tracks. She eventually joined the group as a full-time member, and when Roy Babbington left to become a permanent member of Soft Machine, his place was taken by Harry Miller - hence the appearance of a live Ovary Lodge album on Ogun, and the beginning of an exceptionally fruitful musical relationship. Together with Louis Moholo-Moholo, Tippett and Miller would become essentially the house rhythm section for Ogun Records, and for the three or so years in the mid-seventies that they worked, played and recorded together, they became the most dynamic and creative rhythm section in all of jazz. Indeed Tippett himself once told me that the ecstatic rush of the three men playing together was sometimes so overwhelming that he'd forget which band they were playing with - he'd have to look and see which horns were in the front line and think, oh yeah, this is Isipingo, or Ninesense, or...

Unwary listeners may initially regard Ovary Lodge as austere, forbidding and perhaps an artefact of its era, or merely baffling. Other than moments when the idiom is to the fore ("Fragment No. 6") this improvised music may not have very much to do with "jazz," but then I don't think it's meant to be. Furthermore, quite contrary to its seeming off-putting nature, Ovary Lodge is actually a highly open and welcoming record; after all, the first track is entitled "Gentle One Says Hello" - this is hardly the Sex Pistols (although I reckon John Lydon, a man far more open-minded musically than his public persona might suggest, would have liked it anyway).

The album was recorded in concert - although we hear no audience - at the Nettlefold Hall, which was a comparatively spacious theatre and cinema complex, designed by Lambeth's first Borough Architect Ted Hollamby to complement West Norwood Library, which was situated downstairs; both were formally opened by Princess Margaret on 12 April 1969.

The Hall was certainly large enough to incorporate Frank Perry's enormous and intricate percussion kit, of which standard drums were only a fraction and which on a good day could take up to three hours to assemble; it was in some ways less a "drumkit" and more a sculpture. Mr Perry really is Ovary Lodge's fulcrum, and a singular figure in British music. Born in Hampstead in 1948, he worked with blues and rock bands in the sixties - one of which included a young Paul Kossoff on guitar - before moving into free jazz and improvisation from about 1968 onward.

Though not generally considered a figure in British free improvisation as some might understand it, Perry was actually quite central; he worked regularly with Derek Bailey, for instance (and I think he appeared on at least one - unrecorded - Company Week event). But his approach was very different to a John Stevens or a Tony Oxley. He was one of the first people in Britain to collect Tibetan singing bowls and his full percussion kit - which he only used for very special occasions, including recording - included many rare instruments from Asia and the Far East. He was certainly a pioneer of what is now called New Age music and his subsequent career has seen him expand into astrology and sound-healing, as well as building his own instruments (I chuckled when the bonus disc to Psychic TV's 1982 debut album Force The Hand Of Chance - an album of tainted genius, if I may say so - which was entitled Psychick TV Themes, used, albeit a lot more naively, some of those same instruments, and thought, somebody's catching up with what Ovary Lodge did seven years previously...). If you listen to Perry's work on Balance (Incus 11), an improvised session with Ian Brighton, Philipp Wachsmann (see OGD 003/004), Colin Wood (see OG 510) and Radu Malfatti (see Ogun passim), the music is initially a lot more rumbunctious and playful than that of Ovary Lodge, but by record's end, meditative drones have taken slow precedence.

So what of Ovary Lodge, the album, other than it is quite unlike any other album of improvised music - att least, in the Western world - that has ever been released? It begins with solemn percussion, summoning the assembly to prayer (since the record does feel like an extended prayer), which is succeeded by high sustained tones, on singing bowls and flutes, reminiscent of guitar feedback (eight years before the Jesus and Mary Chain). Perry's gong signals an increase in activity; this is followed by a bowed bass drone, low piano rumbles. Julie Tippetts' voice emerges from the darkness and immediately gets a vocal response from (I assume) Keith. The call-and-response procedural continues for awhile and is joined by scrambling percussion and roving bass, both arco and pizzicato. Julie's voice goes into Yoko Ono-like ululations before initiating a climactic chant, then settling again (although I can hear her clearing her throat at 9:52!). A modal plane is agreed upon before the music rises and falls once more, provoked by a sinister and probably unattributable rattle, then chiming piano chords straight out of the McCoy Tyner book over droning strings before Miller's bass decisively concludes the piece.

"Fragment No. 6" - not sure whether anybody was thinking of The Prisoner; in fact, I'm sure they weren't, but anyway - has to be one of the most intense and exciting recorded free improvisations I've ever heard; in fact, I regularly need to correct myself that it is the work of only four musicians. Beginning with Miller's firm bass line, percussion then rattles and high-pitched flute flutters before Keith's characteristic piano cumulonimbi materialise. Julie switches from flute to ardent, full-throated vocalese and the music's violence - if that's how you'd view it; I wouldn't - incrementally increases. A unison figure rises up to a powerful scream. Keith works with some Cecil Taylor-ish note clusters followed by upper register keyboard tinkles before dramatically notching up the intensity button again. There is a momentary exultation from what might pass as a mutant Latin-American cabaret, complete with maracas, before a final and, no matter how many times I've listened to it, thoroughly unexpected and really bloody frightening and shattering climax of Julie's orgasmic screams (of COURSE that's what it's about; doesn't the album cover spell it out - losing one's self in the euphoric whole?) and Frank Perry thunderously bashing just about every Chinese gong he has, seemingly at once, all building up to an titanic tidal wave of OVERCOMING - you can even hear the mimicked pulsed calls of whales in the distance. Perry then signals that the piece can stop, although it actually fades into a minor key mode.

"A Man Carrying A Drop Of Water On A Leaf Through A Thunderstorm," which I think has to win hands-down the award for Most Zen-Like Name For A Piece Of Music Ever, is relatively brief but surprisingly catchy with its seesaw violin motif (backed by a firm pulse from Perry and Miller). Voices enter and we hear what sounds like coconut shells being clip-cloppeed together, so much so that we start to hear collective Red Indian whoops. This is probably the record's most lighthearted track.

The lengthy "Communal Travel" sees the quartet concentrating more on what sound like largely non-Western instruments, beginning with a string duet followed by percussion and Julie having a go on the er-hu (or erhu) - the seesaw motif from "Drop Of Water On A Leaf" even reappears briefly. The group improvisation becomes more active before we encounter a string ensemble resembling a somewhat distressed Alban Berg recital (Lyric Suite?). Perry blows his shéng to provide a deep harmonic underlay, and the effect is not far from an Ennio Morricone score (a fair assumption, I think, given Morricone's long involvement in the Italian free improvisation scene). Strings are succeeded by more fluttering flutes and recorders, then voices leading to communal continental drifts with stern arco bass from Miller. A brief pause for collective breath leads to what sounds like foghorns in the distance, then more pointillistic interplay between bass and flute which resolves in a tolling, slow 4/4 bassline set against gongs and drones. Julie's voice sets out a melodic top line of sorts but Keith then introduces an ominous two-note plucked piano string motif which interacts with gongs and bass. After another unison is agreed, the 4/4 bassline recommences, this time accompanied by a four-note vocal refrain. Some rubberband bass pinches lead to a panoramic coda, with, indeed, tubular bells, before quickly fading. The record ends with a 67-second three-piece vocal coda which, via some slight chuckling, soars to a higher octave before one of Perry's smaller gongs calls a calm end to proceedings.

 

 

I find Ovary Lodge a very approachable record; there is nothing on it that you don't hear at various strategic points throughout Septober Energy, although the four players here have concentrated on honing that particular musical and spiritual essence. In his liner note, Keith Tippett says that, as a matter of routine, the group went on stage with no prior discussion of the music they intended to play - they trusted each other sufficiently to know how each musician was likely to respond to the other. Tippett also remarks that when it came to mixing this album, the musicians were at times unsure who exactly was playing what, and when - and when it comes to Buddhist notions of ego death, individual contributions count for less than the sum of the whole, so that we might recognise our own sense of self all the more readily. Keith suggests that we listen to Ovary Lodge as though it were an orchestra - Centipede, perhaps, or something beyond? There is no other album of improvised music like this. It is one of the finest albums Ogun ever put out.

Current availability: Reissued on CD in 2007, and now available as a download here.