Keith Rowe
Keith Rowe (born 16 March 1940 in
Biography
Rowe began his career playing jazz in the early 1960s with Mike Westbrook and Lou Gare. His early influences were guitarists Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian, and Barney Kessel.[1] But he grew tired of what he considered the genre's limitations. He began experimenting. An important step was a New Year's resolution to stop tuning his guitar—much to Westbrook's displeasure.[1] He began playing free jazz and free improvisation, abandoning conventional guitar technique. He was featured in 'Crossing Bridges', a 1985 music programme based around jazz guitar improvisation, and broadcast by Channel 4[2]
His change was partially inspired by a teacher in a painting class who told him, "Rowe, you cannot paint a Caravaggio. Only Caravaggio can paint Caravaggio." Rowe said that after considering this idea from a musical perspective, "trying to play guitar like Jim Hall seemed quite wrong." For several years he contemplated how to reinvent his approach to the guitar, again finding inspiration in visual art, specifically American painter Jackson Pollock, who abandoned traditional painting methods to forge his style. "How could I abandon the technique? Lay the guitar flat!"[3]
Rowe developed
Percussionist Eddie Prévost of AMM said Rowe finds radio broadcasts which seem to blend ideally with, or offer startling commentary on, the music. (Prévost, 18). On AMMMusic, towards the end of the cacophonous "Ailantus Glandolusa", a speaker announces via radio that "We cannot preserve the normal music." Prevost writes that during an AMM performance in
In reviewing World Turned Upside Down, critic Dan Hill writes, "Rowe has tuned his shortwave radio to some dramatically exotic gameshow and human voices spatter the mix, though at such low volume, they're unintelligible and abstracted. Rowe never overplays this device, a clear temptation with such a seductive technology – the awesome possibility of sonically reaching out across a world of voices requires experienced hands to avoid simple but ultimately short-term pleasure. This he does masterfully, mixing in random operatics and chance encounters with talk show hosts to anchor the sound in humanity, amidst the abstraction."[6]
Rowe has worked with
In 2008 at Tate Modern, London, Rowe performed a live collaborative work The Room with film makers, Jarman award winner Luke Fowler, and Peter Todd as a part of the programme accompanying the major retrospective of the painter Mark Rothko. The Room featured films by Fowler and Todd and live guitar improvisation by Rowe with subsequent iterations being presented in France and Spain and the Netmage festival in Bologna Italy.[7] The Room is also the title of a work by Rowe issued on CD in 2007 followed by The Room Extended in 2016 on a four CD set both from erstwhile records.[8]
References
- ^ a b "Keith Rowe". paristransatlantic.com. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
- ^ Crossing Bridges website
- ^ Dan Warburton (January 2001). "Keith Rowe Interview". Retrieved 23 March 2011.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-55652820-0.
- ISBN 0-9525492-0-4.
- ^ "Catalog:Erstwhile Records reviews". Erstwhile Records website. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
- )
- ^ "The Room Extended, by Keith Rowe". Erstwhile Records. Retrieved 1 June 2020.
External links
- Discography, links, mp3 samples
- A 2001 interview
- A 2007 interview
- In Conversation with Richard Pinnell on the Audition Radio Show, Dublin, 01.04.06
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