collaboration by George Burt+Neil Davidson+Jer Reid

George Burt acoustic and electric guitars
Neil Davidson acoustic and electric guitars
Jer Reid acoustic and electric guitars

[Jer Reid]
This was my first time in the studio since the covid restrictions eased. Neil sent his files from the Hebrides; George and I had a clear approach: We asked Jim who was engineering to tell us whether Neil was using electric or acoustic on the file and how long it was. We would choose the file and decide whether we would play electric or acoustic based on that. A quick level check in the headphones; Play the file; me and George respond; Next file... (we did two takes of just one piece).
During covid restrictions I had been sharing files and improvising with Clelia Ciardulli and Rafe Fitzpatrick as Time Triawd. The approach we had with Neil’s files - keeping the process feeling as much like the process of improvising - came from playing/ sharing files with Clelia and Rafe.
Since October 2018 I have been running the monthly open small group improvisation night called GIOdynamics for the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. After a six month break at the start of covid we moved the session online and I am constantly blown away by how connected to people I feel through the screen and the web. We are still responding in ’real time’ even if the idea of real time has been modified.
There’s lots to say about that, about how robust and adaptable improvising (obviously) is, and about how the universality of personal and collective decision making practices (y’know, people working together) are rooted in the skills of improvising.
I knew it would work out fine to play to Neil’s files even though he wasn’t in the room.
Through the last 16 months it’s been profound to feel the glow of the importance of improvising and how it opens a door on people working together without a vertical hierarchy in the time of peak disaster capitalism and the couldn’t-be-more-vertical decision making of the UK government.

[George Burt]
Every musician has complained about the difficulties of recent months, so you don’t need more of it from me. But the lockdown was an opportunity to think about guitar-playing and what it means.
Like Jer and Neil, I came to playing and listening to improvised music the long way round, having taken part in many other ways of music-making. With improvised music you are excused from all the usual baggage that goes along with “listening”. You don’t need to tap your toes, you don’t need to dance, you don’t need to sing along with the chorus, you don’t need to buy-in to the “artistic vision” or the “politics” of the musicians. All you need to do is listen. And you don’t even have to listen all the time. Such is the strength of the meaning-making abilities of most humans, you can pick up what’s going on between the players very quickly.
And then there’s the nature of the guitar itself. It’s a natural instrument for leaning on and watching the activities of the world. You don’t have to strain at it and sit up straight with it like the violin or the cello, you can put your arm around it and sing it the blues like an old pal. When you do play it, the sound doesn’t swamp everything around it like the piano or the drums, with all their facile arpeggios and flamboyant paradiddles. It doesn’t command that you pay attention like the trumpet or the saxophone. Every note from the guitar is the result of a complicated co-ordination of the most delicate movements, and you can hear the results in these pieces I think.

since 1994

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