Edouard Bronson - Night Spirit

Price in Australian dollars (postage will be added when you complete your order and check out). $25.00: / Unit

Edouard Bronson was born in Moscow but his home these days is in Australia. Eddie is considered a pioneer of spontaneously improvised jazz in Australia. This 1997 release showcases some of his work. Bronson currently plays with ARIA award winning line up Monsieur Camembert.

interview from Charles Sturt Uni website:Edouard Bronson was born in Moscow in 1946. While not professional, both his parents were musicians. "My mother always fooled around on the piano; she had no problem picking up a tune," he remembers. "My father played the violin and he was extremely difficult to please; if you played a wrong note, he would tell you exactly what it was supposed to be." Having acquired a scholarship to the Gnessin Institute of Music, Bronson learnt piano, accordion, saxophone, clarinet and flute. He was forever trying to persuade his classical teachers and the ensembles in which he played to play more jazz, yet jazz was considered Western and anti-Soviet and at 25, Bronson left Russia for Israel.

"When I first arrived in Israel, I was so enthusiastic to be in a new country, I didn't care if I was a musician or not," he recalls. "I was just happy to be there and wanted to contribute something." Yet Israel turned out to be very interesting from a musical point of view. "In Russia, when we listened to music, the purpose was to find out what it was, what this phrase was, this syncopation. Outside Russia, however, I started listening to how the music worked, rather than what it was. It opened up a completely different world."

In 1973, Eddie came to Australia, joining the three-member band Free Kata a few months later. Almost 20 years down the line, some of Australia's most established contemporary musicians still regard Free Katas contribution to the improvising tradition as highly significant.

What made Free Kata distinctive, says Bronson, was its emphasis on spontaneity. "We were experimenting with spontaneously improvised music, which nobody had done in this country before. People considered us pioneers. The players' emotional involvement in the music and their use of their instruments to full technical capacity made the music very unconventional for its time."

Yet even though Bronson's music is spontaneously created, there's a philosophy behind it. When people ask where he gets his ideas from, or why he plays the way he does, he tells them it comes "from above your head and down to your intellect".

"When we question our minds, a very delicate process of creativity takes place," he explains. "We have no exact answers but we can assume original ideas come from a spiritual source which is beyond our understanding. After this first, the highest-level, ideas go to the intellect, where they are processed. Finally, your processed ideas, your statements, reveal themselves through your instrument, in your playing."

"There are two types of music, conventional and unconventional," he goes on. "If the music is unconventional, it can't be played in a conventional way. This means it is more demanding on both a technical and emotional level. You have a vision in front of you and at the same time ideas far more intense than ordinary thoughts are speeding through your mind. It is essential to mine these ideas."

Bronson stresses that musical improvisation is a demanding art form. "If you are a composer, you can go into the woods, take a notebook and pencil. You wait for inspiration and then write the music."

"For an improviser, this process takes place right on the stage. The music comes to you, you sort the good from the bad and you immediately reproduce it on your instrument." He likens it to a boxer in a ring, alone with his adversary.

"You have to face the fight and take on that opponent by yourself. The same happens with abstract music. Not many people can take it on; they are afraid, they think they can't do it. But when they try and succeed, they experience a spiritual world, and they feel fantastic about it. They then want more."

Some music lovers find unconventional music-making difficult to understand, Bronson says. "People often have an exact vision of what you can and can't do, which is just not possible with this type of music, because it doesn't even belong to this world. It belongs to the spiritual world and only its reflections are revealed in this world."

Musicians, he feels, owe it to their art to learn music independently and not just rely on someone else's thinking. "A musician has the responsibility to open his mind and use his potential, develop his ability," he says.