Safford Chamberlain, writing in L.A. Jazz Scene 2005
Bonnie Barnett Quintet at Club Tropical, Los Angeles, June 23, 2005
Personnel: Bonnie Barnett, voice; Richard Wood, alto sax, flute, Pan pipes;
Tom McNalley, guitar; Hal Onserud, bass; Richie West, drums.
The texts Barnett used, when she was not vocalizing without words, were DaDa poems, her own or others, the words there not to make sense but to introduce sounds, colors, unspecified emotions. No syntax, no grammar, no ideas, words as the undead of language, wandering blind in a broken world.
Behind them, part of them, the music was stripped of harmony, of any kind of established or conventional order.
Negatively, one could hear it as the rhythms and sounds of sub-atomic particles bouncing off each other, music of the death of traditional community, of the end of the world, after the bombs go off.
Positively, one could hear it as five atomized individuals forced to create a new social order, interacting, striving to hear and endure and complement each other while creating themselves, the whole kaleidoscopic, each transient order dissolving into another, nothing stable, nothing lasting—except the rock bottom imperative to interact with head and heart, to make something of each moment as it dies into the next moment.
This was the music of our time, a time when the news not of the death but the utter fictitiousness of God finally reaches us (pace Billy Graham), when we admit that God was always Godot, who never arrives, who doesn’t exist, when we realize that only a miraculous evolutionary leap can prevent us from
fucking up, as we have always fucked up, that without that miracle we are lemmings following our leaders off the cliff, dragging the planet behind us.
Individually, the performers are virtuosos, especially in their ability to interact with each other. Dick Wood plays his alto as nobody before him has ever played it, as no teacher could ever teach one to play it, and it does the impossible exactly as he wants it to. Onserud, McNalley, and West are superb technicians and deeply intuitive musicians. Barnett majestically fulfills her role as the human voice of the abyss.
A few years ago, before the (stolen) election and re-election of George W. Bush, I might have dismissed this music. I like melody, I like harmony, I love Beethoven’s last quartets and Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A Major. But hearing the Barnett group in the context of all the horrors that Bush’s policies represent, including his sneering disdain of global warming and the on-going development of a “bunker buster” nuclear bomb 70 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima--70 times! and exploded underground, where it could set off earthquakes and tsunamis!--I hear it as prophecy.
In the emerging world of the 21st century, the loveliness, the grandeur that traditional harmony has made possible may become only a sentimental memory, irrelevant except as something we must do without, as we learn new ways of surviving with each other.
