FRED TOMPKINS & GREG MILLS - Curving Away
Released by tompkinsjazz.com
Fred Tompkins: ‘c’ flute and bass flute; Greg Mills: piano, melodica
Recorded at St Louis University and Clayton Studios, St Louis, Missouri, USA
Fred Tomkins is an American composer and flute player whose early influences included such diverse artists as Art Blakey, John Coltrane, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith. He is generally known as a composer of “third stream music”. This is seen as a genre “located about halfway between jazz and classical”, a definition coined by composer Gunther Schuller for a lecture. Its key and essential element is improvisation.
Tomkins played tenor sax around Missouri for some years before starting more formal studies in 1964, at the St. Louis Institute of Music. He also joined summer courses at the famous Berklee College of Music and the Aspen Music School, Colorado. Three years on he moved to New York and struck up a relationship with drummer Elvin Jones. Conscription held him back for some years after which, back in New York, his experience and knowledge grew. The 1980s was a decade of setting music to the poetry of such éminences grises as E. E. Cummings and Emily Dickinson. The 90s followed on with works by John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Greg Mills also studied at the St Louis of Music and was instructed in jazz performance and theory by Carl Arzinia Richardson of the St Louis Black Artist Group, with whom he played in the late 1970s. He later formed one half of the improvising duo Exiles which ran into the 90s. They brought together influences from Africa and India, amalgamating them with foundations from Free-improv and classical Avant-garde from Europe. This led to Mill’s applying the raga form to the piano.
Mill’s principle bent in performance has remained at Free-improv on solo piano. Both Mills and Tomkins have remained adherents to their obvious love of freedom in music and their current, shared purpose is to continue their investigations into researching and taking advantage of new approaches to improvising and progressing new systems in improvising on their instruments.
Should the uninitiated to Free-jazz be confused by what they hear, Tomkins has explained that the music is generally free improvisation, choosing to improvise a tonal section in C, then modulating that key upwards in 4ths. It is then pushed further, into atonality, returning to C at its conclusion. Atonal simply means that a piece cannot be defined as being in one key or another. That was precisely what Tomkins was looking at in his investigations into the music of Bartók, who was not strictly atonal, but had harmonic preferences with blocs of dissonance. Well, when you have worked through all of this, feet up and listen.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
Released by tompkinsjazz.com
Fred Tompkins: ‘c’ flute and bass flute; Greg Mills: piano, melodica
Recorded at St Louis University and Clayton Studios, St Louis, Missouri, USA
Fred Tomkins is an American composer and flute player whose early influences included such diverse artists as Art Blakey, John Coltrane, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith. He is generally known as a composer of “third stream music”. This is seen as a genre “located about halfway between jazz and classical”, a definition coined by composer Gunther Schuller for a lecture. Its key and essential element is improvisation.
Tomkins played tenor sax around Missouri for some years before starting more formal studies in 1964, at the St. Louis Institute of Music. He also joined summer courses at the famous Berklee College of Music and the Aspen Music School, Colorado. Three years on he moved to New York and struck up a relationship with drummer Elvin Jones. Conscription held him back for some years after which, back in New York, his experience and knowledge grew. The 1980s was a decade of setting music to the poetry of such éminences grises as E. E. Cummings and Emily Dickinson. The 90s followed on with works by John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Greg Mills also studied at the St Louis of Music and was instructed in jazz performance and theory by Carl Arzinia Richardson of the St Louis Black Artist Group, with whom he played in the late 1970s. He later formed one half of the improvising duo Exiles which ran into the 90s. They brought together influences from Africa and India, amalgamating them with foundations from Free-improv and classical Avant-garde from Europe. This led to Mill’s applying the raga form to the piano.
Mill’s principle bent in performance has remained at Free-improv on solo piano. Both Mills and Tomkins have remained adherents to their obvious love of freedom in music and their current, shared purpose is to continue their investigations into researching and taking advantage of new approaches to improvising and progressing new systems in improvising on their instruments.
Should the uninitiated to Free-jazz be confused by what they hear, Tomkins has explained that the music is generally free improvisation, choosing to improvise a tonal section in C, then modulating that key upwards in 4ths. It is then pushed further, into atonality, returning to C at its conclusion. Atonal simply means that a piece cannot be defined as being in one key or another. That was precisely what Tomkins was looking at in his investigations into the music of Bartók, who was not strictly atonal, but had harmonic preferences with blocs of dissonance. Well, when you have worked through all of this, feet up and listen.
Reviewed by Ken Cheetham
