Where do ideas come from? 

Jacques lays his double bass on its back. He plays it kneeling, with sticks and mallets, and there’s a sheet of A4 paper inserted under the strings near the scroll. The piece he produces reminds me of two rivers flowing into one another. The fast moving currents of one disturbing the calmer movement of the deeper stream, creating twisting eddies and turbulence before the two settle. Dragonflies and wasps buzz near the surface. 

I close my eyes with this image and it’s harder to connect the sounds I am hearing with the bass. My habits of listening and my assumptions about the instrument are destabilised. What I’m hearing is ‘of’ the bass but at the same time it doesn’t really sound like the bass.

Jacques says that the process of developing this approach to the instrument began, “by experimenting with using objects and preparations on the bass – putting stuff in between the strings, like paddle pop sticks or metal chopsticks or putting paper clips on the strings.”

He tells me that John Cage was important and that hearing his prepared piano music had a huge impact: “I became fascinated by these methods of extending an instrument’s sonic palette.”

His piece begins with high marimba like rhythmic gestures played with the sticks on the short strings between the bridge and tailpiece, and I can hear Cage’s ideas refracted through Jacques’ sensibility and through a radically different set of materials. The tailpiece also becomes a percussion instrument and Jacques tells me he thinks of this section of the bass as, “four short-sounding mid-high toms and a woodblock.” 

The influence of Cage is clear but there are other things going on in this piece. Jacques also mentions, “the energy of several percussive traditions around the world, including Korean shamanic drumming, Indonesian gamelan, Cook Islands drumming ensembles, the Senegalese Tama drummer Assane Thiam, and Ghanaian gyil virtuoso, SK Kakraba.” 

The spattering, high pitched, opening phrases develop and lengthen developing rhythmic complexity. After a couple of minutes the current changes as Jacques moves from playing the short strings below the bridge to the longer strings on the other side of the bridge. The rhythmic material played with the sticks continues but the shallow tributary of sound produced by the after bridge strings hits a deep resonate flow from the full body of the bass. Jacques is ‘activating’ the instrument as much as he is ‘playing’ it. 

I’m back at the conflux of the two streams, which have spread into a larger, deeper body, darker and calmer. Mallets. Buzzing paper. I’m thinking about ideas and the way they move through people, through time, through culture. And I find myself picturing a specific place: the estuary of the Snowy River near where I grew up and where several small rivers and streams join the Snowy and gather in a complex network of waterways before moving out to sea through a narrow entrance.

Solo Series #12
Performance: Jacques Emery
Photo: Sarah Walker
Audio and Video producer: Leo Dale
Text: Peter Knight