Green Room - Live Trajectories (Leo, 1996 )

Chick Lyall, piano, keyboards, bamboo flute 
David Baird, Chapman stick, cello & electric cello, voice, tapes
David Garrett, prepared piano, prepared dulcimer, percussion

Recorded May 2, 1996

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Engineer: David Galbraith

Green Room is the name of an electro-acoustic group led by Chick Lyall, a Scottish pianist born in 1958. His influences include progressive rock, jazz, contemporary classical music, and electronic music. Influenced by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and the European avant-garde, Lyall concocts a unique hybrid that is difficult to classify. My previous exposure is to his more obvious jazz work, especially his quartet album with Joakim Milder (Broken Poems, Caber 2003).

I have five Green Room albums in my personal collection:

Hidden Music (Leo, 1994)

Live Trajectories Leo, 1996)

Undertow (FMR, 2006)

Tin Man (FMR, 2007)

Concertante (FMR, 2015)

Live Trajectories is selected for the 1990s because it presents a live Green Room performance, free of studio enhancements and editing. It's fascinating music, but somewhat resistant to analysis. It's difficult to identify who is playing and what instruments are being heard. Chris Blackford's reference in the CD booklet to "an expansive, mostly non-idiomatic, sonic architecture" does not help very much. 

As I struggled to understand this band and its players, I came to realize I was on the wrong path. The correct path for me was to suspend analysis and let the sounds form images in my head. As Blackford advises, "You dwell on the evocative sounds first, think about the instruments that might have produced them, later." 

Green Room's timbral and textural sounds shift constantly throughout the performance recorded on Live Trajectories. A tinkling piano introducing the title track becomes a swirl of different sounds that includes an anguished human voice, but only momentarily as the group heads off to newly improvised ideas evoking different images. There is no apparent story being told, just the changing modes of expression that might include free jazz, traditional jazz, industrial, funk, and others. 

My inadequate description above fails to account for the sense of structure beneath the improvised flow. No track feels incoherent or purely self-indulgent. The performers are closely attentive to each other's moves and choose to either complement them or purposely move in opposite directions. 

Over the course of the 70 minutes of intense group interaction, the listener comes away not only with respect for the effort expended by the artists, but also appreciation of their artistic vision.