“Almost like a scientist.” That’s what someone says near the beginning of Ingredients for Disaster, Julian Phillips’s new 67-minute documentary about the music of the Swiss composer, pianist and bandleader Nik Bärtsch.
Almost like a scientist. Well, yes. When Bärtsch talked after a screening in London this week, words like “architectonics” and “topography” entered the conversation. And Phillips chooses to illustrate the polymetric structures of the music through cunningly devised computer graphics that actually illuminate the structures of pieces which tend have the four players working in different time signatures simultaneously.
Ingredients for Disaster: Ingredients for Disaster offers a transformative cinematic experience, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the spellbinding world of one of contemporary music’s most visionary talents.
This film blends live performances – at some of the world’s most prestigious venues – stunning visuals, insightful interviews, and mind-blowing computer graphics to immerse audiences in Ronin’s three-dimensional music.
The film explores the evolution of modern music, highlighting how pioneers of minimalism, serialism, and the avant-garde paved the way for greater musical freedom.
It showcases how Bärtsch, inspired by a diverse range of influences – from The Meters to John Cage, Thelonious Monk to Igor Stravinsky – has crafted a unique blend of music that defies categorization.
His band, Ronin, all master craftsmen, weave layers of rhythm, melody, and texture together into a trance-inducing musical space, attracting a diverse fanbase drawn from the worlds of Jazz and Techno and everything in between. About the Filmmaker Producer / director Julian Phillips is a BAFTA and Emmy winner for his work with the BBC, and a BIMA and Lovie award winner for his digital work for the UN and Channel 4.
About Nik Bärtsch and Ronin Zurich-born pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch began his musical journey with childhood piano and percussion lessons. He founded his zen-funk quartet Ronin in 2001. The band, including Kaspar Rast on drums, Jeremias Keller on bass, and Sha on bass/contrabass clarinet, tours relentlessly.
Their latest album, “Awase,” was released in 2017, with a new album set for autumn 2024. Runtime: 67 minutes.
On the other hand, not like a scientist at all. Not in effect, anyway. Listening to Bärtsch’s bands, either the “Zen funk” of Ronin or the “ritual groove music” of Mobile, can be a profoundly emotional experience, particular when he gives one of his shouted cues and the whole band changes gear like a sudden shot of adrenalin.
But it’s certainly complex music, particularly in its layered polyrhythms. He made me laugh yesterday when he briefly turned the conversation to good old 4/4. If you work all the time in less conventional metres, he said, then you decide to play something that superimposes 4/4 on, say, 5/4, it’s 4/4 that ends up sounding odd, implying that it gives you something new to work with.
In the film, he talks about some of his influences: the pianists Lennie Tristano (whose polymetric “Turkish Mambo” he recorded on one of his early albums), Ran Blake and Monk, and Stravinsky. In the discussion after the film there was also mention of James Brown’s band and of Zigaboo Modeliste, the drummer with the Meters (drummers are important to Bärtsch; that’s how he started out). But his great success is to have metabolised his influences so thoroughly that they became invisible as, over the years, he developed a music of true and complete originality.
This month marks 20 years since he began his Monday night sessions at the Exil club in Zurich, where the music has taken gradually shape. Ronin currently consists of Sha (Stefan Haselbacher) on bass clarinet and alto saxophone, Jeremias Keller on bass guitar, and the drummer Kaspar Rast, with whom Bärtsch has been working since they were nine or 10 years old.
Each of them has something illuminating to say in the film, none more so than Sha, master of the bass clarinet, who demonstrates how one of the parts written for his instrument can lead, as the piece unfolds in its long narrative, to variations such as “ghost notes” and percussive tapping.
Like the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, the MJQ, the MGs, Astor Piazzolla Quintet and the Chieftains, Ronin is a band with a highly evolved, distinctive and patented character. There’s a new album by the basic quartet, called Spin. With the addition of three horns and a guitar, it becomes the Ronin Rhythm Clan, which performed at Kings Place in London a few years ago. I liked that line-up very much, and Bärtsch guided me to a couple of tracks released on Bandcamp earlier this year.
I wrote about Nik when he performed with the London-based visual artist Sophie Clements at the Barbican in 2019, and when Ronin played a night at Ronnie Scott’s last year. Tonight I’m going to see him playing piano duets with Tania Giannouli at the Wigmore Hall, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. He’s one of the most interesting musicians around, and it’s a pleasure to keep up with him.
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