There were several reasons to relish the Gavin Bryars birthday bash. Prima la musica: this venerable composer explores many moods in his compositions but he is rarely less than interesting, and only two of the seven items were previously known to me. Second, any opportunity to hear chamber music in the limpid acoustics of the Britten Studio, a Snape Maltings mini-me located next door to the main concert hall, is a treat in itself. And third, there was the unanswered question of whether the American jazz-blues legend Tom Waits would turn up in person to add his closing flourish, as per the recording, to the composer’s most famous work, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. (Unlikely.)
The concert was marketed under the Jesus’ Blood banner so it’s not unreasonable to focus on that hardy perennial. It's a miracle of unsentimental musicianship that dates back to 1971 when the now-pensionable Bryars was a mere 28. Yet one thing I know: he still loves it so. At the end of an intense performance by the Gavin Bryars Ensemble, six loyal musicians drawn from his family and friends with himself on double bass, he himself appeared extraordinarily moved. The audience was no less affected, even though we only heard the 25-minute version rather than the 75-minute expansion for symphony orchestra and chorus that appears on CD.
A live performance such as this allowed the listener to follow each instrument’s progress through the work rather than accept the homogenised (but still affecting) listening experience afforded by a commercial recording. In slow, repetitive music that burrows under the skin, an anonymous, long dead vagrant is heard on a loop singing an unknown song that Bryars believes the man invented himself. The tramp’s shaky voice is rough-hewn and toothless but God-fearing and extraordinarily musical, and in an alchemical act of creation that surely owes something to Pachelbel’s Canon the composer injects a subtle underlay of constantly shifting instrumental sounds: micro-changes that are always breathing, never static.
More than anything, Bryars' achievement has been to bestow a certain immortality on a man whose very existence went unremarked during his lifetime. This “pure” rendition of the work ended far more effectively than the composer’s recording, for the rising instrumentation seemed to guide the voice heavenwards in an unbearably loving act as it receded into silence. Tom Waits for no man in the face of such sublimity.
The core musicians, Morgan Goff (viola), Audrey Riley (cello) and James Woodrow (electric guitar) delivered poised accounts of six shorter works that shared a focus on low strings – now haunting, now baleful – and mutable guitar interventions that often gave the impression of a synthesiser at work. At first hearing there were one or two pieces that seemed aimless, even dull, but Bryars invariably repays repeated listening so further exposure would be welcome. A case in point is The North Shore (1993), the only other composition I already knew, a chilly night piece inspired by the view from Whitby beach and a thing of forbidding beauty that sounds like a precursor to the landscapes of Scandi Noir drama.
