VOICE - Voice

(OG 110)

 

 

Track listing: Louis Kappa/Yilf Kofla/Ego Worry/African Breezes/Singing Wood

 

Julie Tippetts, Maggie Nicols, Phil Minton, Brian Eley (voices). Recorded live at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London W1 on 13 October 1976. Released: early 1977. Produced by Keith Beal and Voice. Sleeve design: Phil Elm

 

(Author’s Note: Maggie’s surname is spelt “Nichols” on both sleeve and labels but she herself told me that there was no “h” in it.)

 

I’m not sure enough people realised what a quietly radical record the only album by Voice was. “Louis Kappa,” its most directly approachable track, was another I first heard Derek Jewell play (with approval) on Sounds Interesting. Maggie Nicols herself has said that some of the new wave/punk crowd didn’t initially get what she was doing; maybe they just idly dismissed Voice as the work of dull old hippies.

 

But there is nothing remotely hippy about this recital, and quite a lot of what would go on to be adopted as punk. The album bears two sets of liner notes; one is by Julie Tippetts’ husband Keith, who has great alphabetical fun, while the other, written by another Keith (Beal) indicates in its polite way just what a break this music represented. Four singers and no other instrumentalists at all? The voice was generally thought of in the jazz and improvised music world of the mid-seventies – despite Jeanne Lee, Sheila Jordan, Linda Sharrock and Norma Winstone - as a pauper, a pretender to being an instrument. Those who couldn’t play anything sang (see also: drummers per se).

 

But what these two women and two men – in that order – were keen to demand of society (even or especially that represented by this record’s co-sponsor, the Jazz Centre Society) was that the voice, and voices as a unit, be taken thoroughly seriously, and, although immense technical skills were clearly needed to perform their music, they weren’t an absolute necessity. The group itself had emerged out of the Oval Arts Lab in Lambeth in the early seventies and at that time comprised all four voices plus six instrumentalists. When asked to reconvene for the Polish Jazz Festival later that decade, however, only the four singers remained.

 

This is improvising approaching the highest order, as inventive, explosive and meditative as anything being produced at the time. The album was recorded at the Phoenix pub, around the corner from Oxford Circus and familiar to any weary shopper seeking a short cut to Selfridges, in front of an audibly appreciative audience. The socio-aesthetic questions it asks are significant.

 

Phil Minton’s “Louis Kappa” kicks off proceedings with an underlying riff that you’ll be singing all day tomorrow if you hear it. It bears an obvious debt to South African kwela but Julie Tippetts and Maggie Nicols add a slow contrapuntal melodic topline which seems more derived from eighteenth-century English folk music. Their voices steadily break free from the piece’s structure and express a nearly immodest jubilation before all four voices settle back into the main theme.

 

Nicols’ “Yilf Kofla” comes in three distinct parts; firstly, a slow, patient harmonic meditation which gradually builds into the main body of the song. Voices, again chiefly those of Tippetts and Nicols – Minton plays a relatively low-key role on this record, despite writing two of its five tracks; he is generally happy to support and counterpoint the two women where necessary, and is far less prominent than he is in the various groups of Mike Westbrook – lightly take off on improvisatory flight before reaching an ecstatic climax of cackles, followed by staccato soprano cries.

 

More radical still is the second Nicols piece, “Ego Worry.” Rather than accepting the consequences of whatever bad thing is likely to happen to a human being, this piece is an extended exercise in overcoming that kneejerk surrender. It commences with a babble of voices, akin to competing radio stations battling to be heard on the dial. This works up into a free frenzy before receding into what could almost be a parody of stoic old-school Christian hymnal worship, bearing long-held choral drones – throughout Voice there is ample evidence of Nicols applying John Stevens’ ideas of improvisation, with both click and drone sequences aplenty.

 

Once the main theme is stated, however, the four singers begin to break its components down into their atoms. They learn to play with the notes, tones and splutters and “Ego Worry” becomes not just an inversion of what sober folk might consider “real” music, but also a modest proposal with respect to what we, as humans, can do with our bodies. It seems to be the bodies themselves which are doing most of the reworking, as the singers realise, with no small amazement, that their bodies are their primary instruments, and not merely prototypes for societal politesse. The cackling, screaming, escalating coda sounds to my ears like a triumph, a conquest. A political subtext also seems present; at one stage the voices begin to intone the words "ACTION, GROWTH, PLAN" - the weasel words underlying every Powerpoint presentation - at first quietly and gravely, then more excitedly before erupting into brash snatches of shrieks, nearly three years ahead of Cut.

 

Side two is more or less continuous; the first section, “African Breezes,” seems to have been a group improvisation and demonstrates how well the singers listen to each other and develop each other’s ideas. There are ruminative breezes, phantoms of township housewife chatter and excitable screeches before a definite rhythm, followed by a riff and melody, is discovered and built upon. The piece then dies down again with a sombre closing unison ensemble motif which acts as a springboard to Minton’s “Singing Wood,” which follows immediately thereafter without a break (although a very slight edit is detectable on close listening to the L.P.).

 

This latter is the album’s longest and most daring piece. The main minor-key melody – again sounding hymnal in nature – is broken down into sprightly sequences of loud and colourful babble, largely provided by Nicols and Tippetts (one-time Nicols student and future award-winning graphic designer Brian Eley seems content to play a largely supportive role in the group, acting as an anchor for the other three singers’ adventures – he is the “rhythm section” and doesn’t quite break off like the others) and it is phenomenally fuck-you in nature. This device occurs at several key points throughout the record, and while I am reminded by Nicols that she and her mother would frequently gabble at each other in invented gibberish – their own language that nobody else was supposed to understand – the aim of the whole enterprise would appear to be to overthrow stifling geniality and obeisance.

 

In other words, whilst others might listen to the core of “Singing Wood” and hear Monty Python housewives (Nicols and Tippetts) arguing with Rob Brydon’s man-in-a-box (Minton), I bear witness to the liberation of language and “sense,” as well as the anti-suppression of all those “immature” and “infantile” “noises” you’re supposed to put away and suppress when you’re a child. These voices are re-legitimising the noises, making them count and matter again – and yes, you can hear the onomatopoeia of a wood in song, with swirling tree trunks, the high-energy chirping of birds, the roars of distant beasts, the wind searing through the branches, but I hear things that wouldn’t have been out of place in the early work of, again, the Slits or the Raincoats. In addition there is a secondary 6/8 theme that appears to culminate in the phrase "taklakahakaha!" like machine gun fire, a war chant.

 

There are also moments, on “Singing Wood” and also in “Ego Worry,” where you can hear Nicols and Tippetts pleasantly startled by the sky-high registers their voices can reach. If you’re in the thick of an intense improvisation, you can sometimes discover technical capabilities you didn’t know you possessed. Sometimes they manifest as superhuman. They reclaim a lot of Yoko Ono’s tropes at a time before they were deemed “valid.”

 

Most important, however, is this record’s deliberate foregrounding of women as improvisers. Remember that, apart from some members of the string section, Tippetts and Nicols were the only female performers in Centipede (where they first encountered each other and instantly bonded) and that, apart from Kathy Stobart and Barbara Thompson, no female jazz instrumentalists were really known in Britain. They state here that their gifts as improvisers are major and important, and everything which might sound painful and agonised to less wise ears is in fact joyous and celebratory. “Singing Wood” concludes with a more ragged, but considerably more fully-blooded, ensemble recapitulation of the main theme before atomising into…the music of the night, flutters, squeaks of satisfaction. Voice should be viewed as a pre-post-punk classic.

 

Current availability: Out of print but here it is on YouTube.