The Poets Walk

Friendship as a principle
A superb case, like a quiver. Inside, magnificent clarinets. That’s all it took for Joe Fonda, passing through Brest, in France, to invite their owner to play with him on his next visit to the US. After all, anyone who owns these beautiful instruments ‘can really play’. And that’s how New Origin began.

From the very first bars of Vers le soir, the double bass leaps onto the springboard, cast by an urgent call from the drumsticks. Urgency, energy, decisiveness—it all comes from far away, from almost forty years of making music together and, shared by Joe Fonda and Harvey Sorgen, continues in a wide range of contexts. In his brief introductory solo, Joe Fonda establishes this equation of rhythm and melody in a register all of his own: firm, discursive, eloquent and always stretching forward. And what follows is the song. Christophe Rocher’s bass clarinet is a blossoming of everything that was already present in the opening bars; their thrust becomes voluble and their rigorous construction a scaffold for what now bursts forth—timbres, colours, registers: joy.

The music is reformulated several times—a swinging march drawn from the crackle of a snare drum; a brassy passage like a sunset; a rising of gongs; a tender confession, abandoned and trusting—as if, always, in these often nested pieces, one obvious truth conceals another, with no time limit, and without the need to be concerned about it.

As in the poem by François Cheng, whose verses are reflected in the program, it’s as though we have a ‘double destiny’: an unwavering presence in the here and now and a longing for a distant elsewhere. These are two sides of the same condition: our own and, particularly, that of the improvisers. This quality of ‘inhabiting the heart of the landscape’ is what gives strength to this music, as fully and deeply rooted in the moment as it is stretched toward what is to come, ‘beckoning to the shooting stars’, luminous, swift, elusive.

The ancient Greeks had a concept that allowed them to link moral concepts—loyalty, sincerity—and ethical and political ideas—freedom, mutual assistance—to a cosmogony governed by harmony: that of philia (φιλία), which can be loosely translated as ‘friendship’. New Origin is all that. Philia draws ‘all beings toward all beings’ (Iamblichus). So it is with Christophe Rocher, Joe Fonda and Harvey Sorgen, and with their songs, densely present yet always open, which together create the musical image of a joyful cosmogony governed by philia: friendship, the principle of a new beginning.

Philippe Alen