SOLO GIG

Essential Curiosities In musical Free Improvisation

by Davey Williams   

Birdfeeder Editions, Birmingham, Alabama, 2011

The State of Davey

Essential Curiosities in Musical Free Improvisation will reverberate in your mind for a while. Just like any sound, Davey Williams sets free to fall up proving the first statement of his book:
  
  “Rain is similar to music, except that it falls down instead of up.”

Williams always remains the complete package in all his creative actions – music, painting and drawing, a cartoon book, and photography. In his latest writing endeavor he gives us an opportunity to peek inside his delightfully crazy and insightfully efficient way to perceive, process, and express a piece of the universe he claims as his own.

In Solo Gig,  Davey employs his unique capacity to be hilariously wacky and profound at the very same time. Your mind might require some time to warp itself around an insightful curiosity or two –and your chest might be hurting from a burst of uncontrollable laughter.  It might happen repeatedly to an unsuspected reader.

 Williams’ style also manifest clarity and precision – as he demonstrates in his commentary on our tendency to perceive certain sounds as “musical”:
 “In truth, what is there not to understand about series of sounds? Or what to understand, for that matter? When’s the last time we didn’t understand any other conflux of sounds? All these squeaks and whirs, thumps out the window and voices in another room. The soundtrack to whatever is going on at the moment in our lives accepted and understood as part of our environment.”  p.25

He also can be deliciously concise addressing sometimes cantankerous notion of musical form in contemporary: “Musical form itself is playable as another instrument.” p.59

Solo Gig also works as a manual for the casual mind bending:

      ”The world of the living is inhabited by other living invisible worlds, such as the world of sounds. And the unhearable worlds where sounds come from. And apparently unknowable worlds where even silence does not exist.   And the facebook postings for these unknowable worlds,
which under adverse conditions may outnumber the worlds themselves.” p.11

Original drawings, collages, and photos add an extra dimension to the pleasant insanity of the book. I wish – some of them will print better, but hey – it probably would blow up the price of printing.  Capitalism has its limitations. Though captions for the pictures look and read just fine, just take this one on p. 40--
        “Music in dreams, like sex in dreams, rarely actually takes place.”

The book is peppered with William Burroughs’s flavored inserts involving Carl who “crept forward in the dark alert for enemy snipers, his tommy gun at the ready”  p.75   together with other distinct patterns of the irony directed at Davey Williams the writer:” Hey everybody! I’m writing a book! And now I feel a song coming in too. Little, old country thing, goes like that…” p.53, an efficient preemptive strike that makes me think of a Roman stoic Seneca who purportedly thought that an ability to laugh at oneself is one of the main virtue of a human being.

In his book, Williams stresses the communal nature of the musical endeavor: “Somehow, being able to see (or to be a part of) the music creating itself places both audience and the players inside its unfolding.   In its presence, the ongoing interaction explains itself, and we realize that the audible music is simply a sonic by-product of the collective intellect’s spirit play.” P.27

Solo Gig concludes with a dreamingly warped landscape (p.141) with the caption that reads:
      
         “All-terrain sonic: there’s wild country out there, hombre.”

*And here the post-scriptum message from Davey Williams:

“By the way, if you are interested in music improvisation or want to know more about the scene, please check out the online website the-improvisor.org, where you will find  -or contribute –articles, reviews, profiles, and many links related to this global community.”

                                                                        -Misha Feigin 2013

Solo Gig is available on Amazon.com.