Four Hours of White Heat With English Bassist Barry Guy

English bassist Barry Guy is a would master of "free music," music which relies on the individual musician to translate seemingly incomprehensible graphics from the score into music. On Valentine's Day (and the day before) Guy took up shop with the Harvard Jazz Band, having trekked across the Atlantic as part of the "Learning from Performer's program. He spent four hours over the two days familiarizing us with one of compositions ("Polyhymnia") and more generally with free improvisation.

I admit I was skeptical when I heard that this "Guy " was a renowned composer and player of "free music"--music lacking notes, preordained direction, and any saving anchors in the traditions of structured time, meter, cadence value, and key. It seemed to me that this music was "free" only in the sense that anyone could do whatever they wanted--the musicians were liberated from the composer's commands and the composer was free of any musical responsibility for his creation. Guy had sent the Jazz Band pages of the score with long thick line, short sprinkles of dots, "Batman Blams, " and curly Qs, and my skepticism increased. It seemed that Guy was like a child playing composer; now it was our turn for freetime.

Sunday night the band arrived at Prescott street to find Guy waiting for us. He was engrossed in the seating chart he had just constructed, busy connecting names and faces. Guy's music is not written out according to instrument; instead, he writes parts for individual musicians in his own outfit, The London Jazz Composers' Orchestra. So every member of the Harvard Jazz Band was given a part previously written for some musician thousands of miles away; I was Peter.

Guy stood, a chipper Brit in black, with a shock of pepper and salt locks, leaning on his very first upright bass--an old $150 job. To his right was crooked music stand full of tricks of the free trade: various and sundry kitchen utensils, brushes, sticks, bows, and scrubbers--all of which he managed to employ in his performance that night.

And so we began. Guy led and followed us through the chart, through our individual and collective dips and peaks. And what at first sounded like incomprehensible globs of noise soon development into cascades of sound filled with heat, awkwardness, and raw energy.

I never would have expected what followed. After two and a half years of now playing my saxophone after a bout with lockjaw (don't ask), I let it all hang out (so to speak). I played shapes, colors, impulses. I closed my eyes and imagined myself narrating--no, animating--a "Sick and Twisted" flick with each explosion of sound. At times I wasn't sure if I was playing or if I was just along for the ride. My fingers flew up and down the length of the horn; my lips were tense and taut at one turn and lovingly loose at the next; my throat was opening and closing at the will of the horn; and my tongue had a life of its own.

I was singing, screaming, growling, roaring, and whinnying through my sax. I felt at once like a liberated women-mental patient-slave-stresscase soul. I was jogged back to reality, out of Guy's "free space" and back into the Prescott Street band room, by my own sweat and shaking body. When it was all over, I looked around and saw everyone awed and spent. It was all Id, man.