LIVE AT MONTREUX JAZZ FESTIVAL

TRACKLISTING


A. Jeff Mills - The X-Factor (Live at Mon treux Jazz Festival)
B. Jeff Mills - Super Solid (Live at Montreux Jazz Festi val)

C1. Jeff Mills - Ultra Violet Prelude (Live at Montreux Jazz Festiva l)
C2. Jeff Mills - Twilight (Live at Montreux Jazz Festival)
D. Jeff Mill s - Residence (Live at Montreux Jazz Festival)





INFO


Jeff Mills - electronics; Jean-Phi Dary - piano, Fender Rhodes, syn thesizer; Zaf Zapha - electric/upright bass.

With the release of The Paradox: Live at Montreux Jazz Festival, techno legend Jeff Mills and keyboard w izard Jean-Phi Dary embark on an exciting, ground-breaking musical trip that tak es Techno and electronic dance music to a new level. In the past Jeff has spoken of the need to, "take a few steps back and try and assess what has been done, a nd what might need to be approached to be able to go forward." Paradox: Live at Montreux is the result. "Trying new things is important, it's reminding people w e have not exhausted all possibilities with what we can do with electronic instr uments," he says.

Jeff argues that the form of Techno we know today f ormulated itself around the '80's and the early '90's, after the bang of the rav e culture, yet audiences today are still content with the conceptual heritage of Studio 54 and Paradise Garage - that minimal form of music and repetitive loop- form of dance music that everyone dances to today. "I really think creatively we have exhausted ideas to a certain point and I think it's healthy to look to oth er genres and the key elements that make them interesting," he continues. "You l ook and compare and maybe borrow some ideas, and bring those back to electronic music, to see if it can further our creativity."

The Paradox's direct ion of travel into unexplored musical territory should come as no surprise since the Original Techno Wizard has never stopped pioneering new ideas. After all, w hen he originally burst on the scene in Detroit in the 1980s he was ahead of the game - mixing on three turntables, introducing a Roland TR 909 drum machine in his sets, and co-founding Underground Resistance in 1989. Throughout his career he has been exploring the creative possibilities of techno and electronic music, pushing at its boundaries to broaden the music's possibilities, such as introdu cing a programmatic element to Techno with his the score for the 1927 silent fil m classic Metropolis or his 2001 classic Time Machine, based on H.G. Wells' nove l of the same name. Never content to outstay his welcome by staying in the same place for too long, in 2005 he revealed the breadth of his imagination with his conceptual classic Blue Potential, an album with the Montpellier Philharmonic Or chestra that saw techno happily co- existing alongside symphonic sounds.
And now, Jacquline Caux's Man From Tomorrow - the title of her film document ary of the Techno maestro - has cast his eyes over the musical horizon and borro wed a couple of ideas which he believes can transform Techno and take it to the next level, "I thought maybe it's not to late to bring or transfer some of the i deas from jazz over to electronic music, and look at the machines differently - to play the machines and not just 'programme' them. I had the idea of trying to find the common link between free jazz and electronic music, so I reached out to jazz musicians to see if we could create something new that might be a benchmar k that we could start from to create another step forward for electronic music."

Turning to keyboard player Jean-Phi Dary, with whom he had collabora ted on the late Tony Allen's album Tomorrow Comes the Harvest, he remembered the musical ideas he had exchanged with the pianist while the sound engineer was do ing his stuff during sound-checks on tour. They were akin to having a conversati on that could move in any direction until a topic emerged for discussion they li ked and could develop. Musically, they threw ideas out there to twist, turn and develop until they hit a groove and moved forward with that. Jean-Phi takes up t he story: "During the sound checks we use to improvise with Jeff, and one day he called me and said 'why not record these moments.' I already had an answer - YE S! I love improvising. To me it's a combination of freedom and discipline, a rea l feeling of being deep inside yourself and in the same time being aware of ever y sound coming from your co-improvisors, from your co-creators." The result was their first album together as Paradox called Counter Active.

It was a bold move, leaving the rhythmic certainties of Techno to explore alternative, f ree flowing paths that allowed the breeze of change to blow through its highly c ompressed rhythms. Next came the challenge of presenting their ideas in live per formance. They chose the demanding Montreux audience, and with the addition of Z af Zapha on bass, the resulting album captures their spontaneous musical inventi on as it happens in the moment. It's a high risk, high reward strategy that was pulled off with conviction and aplomb. While each track has it's own story on Mo ntreux, Jean-Phi says, "'X-Factor' is a big trip and 'Super Solid' is a real gro ovy track to dance" - what's happening here is the electronic sounds of Techno a re used to spontaneously interact with the piano, producing a deep musical conve rsation not pre- determined by tape loops, a MIDI presets, the 96 rhythmic patte rns stored in a TR-909 drum machine or the bass patterns of the Roland TB-303 el ectronic synthesizer-sequencer and all that technical geekery. Everything was up for grabs, Jeff even pared his electronic set up down to the minimum - "I didn' t even use a MIDI" he explained - so the music could go in any direction the cre ative impulses of Jeff and Jean-Phi wanted to take it.

"We decided to stay closer to the tracks from Counter Active like a city map, but move as free ly inside them as possible," explained Jean-Phi. Tracks like 'X-Factor' and 'Sup er Solid' provided a starting point and framework for the duos explorations, "Th e Montreux tracks are different variations of those tracks we created in the stu dio," explains Jeff. "We just knew we were going to do a track that's supposed t o be called 'X-Factor' or one that's supposed to be called 'Super Solid' - I thi nk it's safe to say that we didn't know what was possible, we didn't know that u ntil we got together to perform. In that recording I did a lot of new things tha t I've never have done before, 'The Concept' and 'Paradox' basically come from t he soundcheck jam sessions we used to do with Tony Allen when we used to tour to gether, and once we took the [Montreux] stage and began to play it was the exten sion of those musical conversations."

What could well be a small ste p for Jeff and Jean-Phi could be a giant step for Techno and electronic music. B reaking new ground, they have loosened-up the music's rigid structures to let a little sunlight in while introducing an element of unpredictability and danger t hat moves from the mechanical to the intuitive. Pushing the envelope like this i n search of risk and adventure poses questions of where it all might lead. Who k nows? But what we can be sure about is that the future looks bright, full of une xplored potential and possibilities. "It's not necessarily the form of jazz I'm interested in," says Jeff, "it's what you can create in the moment is what is go ing to be the key element of how long this genre of Techno music will last."

-Stuart Nicholson