IN PARIS by The Ames Room

'The elements of the Ames Room are simple. Velocity. Repetition. Momentum. Maintenance. Tension. Little release.

Over the course of 7 years of intensive touring, we pushed our love of free jazz through the key-hole of minimalism, bringing various influences of electronic musics, cyclic traditional musics and heavy handed noise. Through a system of rules, we tried to avoid certain things in the music, such as the well worn emotional / romantic take on free-jazz, and one dimensional interactive playing, preferring to contribute to the culture we love by setting up boundaries that side-stepped the emotional, and our individual intentions as far as self-expression.

Relistening to this live concert, recorded in Paris in 2015, the ecstasy that oozes out of the music sums up a very common human experience – collective intelligence exists. And, at the end of the race, we had to admit that we were three witnesses to The Ames Room, more than any kind of creators: we were working hard at something that couldn’t be reduced to any one of us, and through the rules we had created we managed to play in ways that felt like we were executing The Ames Room's music, and sometimes looking at it from the outside. It often felt like the music was up top, while we were down below running the ship and being the crew.

There's an irony in this. An Ames Room, by its nature, is an illusion. They change the perspective of objects inside them. Things look bigger, or smaller, shifting scale as they change relation to each other in a space that reconfigures perception. For us, being in the Ames Room did a similar thing. As players, we subsumed our own approaches and personalities, styles and sensibilities to make the music that defines The Ames Room. It, as distinct from 'we', made the music you hear on these recordings.'

The Ames Room - May 2023

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'The music of The Ames Room is formal, to do with proportion and scale, ‘like’ the ‘room with a view’ it’s named after.

And ‘like’ the ‘room with a view’ it is not quite what it seems. Its ‘big’ form, rests – like the room’s sensual pivots, sharps, peep, angles, vistas – on sensory pivots, fingertips/flexors, grips/bites, sweat/spit, the cline of decaying (time) versus the eternal fresh (time) of now.

One example of this Ames-y stuff always comes to my mind – it seems to sum up, how this music (might) move through time, in two ways.

In 2010 (I think?) I sat at the front of an Ames concert at Cafe OTO. Enjoying things, I noticed Jean-Luc had two mouthpieces that day. One on the go, the other ready on a chair. He changed them, with discrete dispatch, about half-way the set – switching when the first reed was sogged-or-split to bust. The salient attrition of this even-so-discrete-a-switch seemed to jar with the sensation of the (un)passing of time in the music. And this one example implies an array of other hidden drum(Will)/bass(Clayton) versions of the same tension: tests of physical endurance, temporal decay, within the illusory temporal stasis of the group sound.

In later years, and this recording is late Ames, from 2015, I know Jean-Luc didn’t need to change mouthpieces, but learned to push as hard, or harder, and ‘keep’ the reed. Again, this learning implies an array of other hidden drum/bass versions of the same evolution.

These four versions of the passing of time. The static (group formal), short (switch) and long term (pracitcal evolution), within the near and far of the formal whole, seem to me ‘like’ The Ames Room.'

Seymour Wright, London, April 2023

Double bass player and founder of the NOW now, Splinter and Splitter Orchestra.

Plays with thanks to William Parker, Barre Phillips, Jim Denley, Jon Rose and Wilber Morris in particular, and humanity's better side, in general.