Since his earliest pieces, jazz has been an important ingredient in Mark-Anthony Turnage's music, giving a distinctive tang to his melodic writing and scoring. Until the early 1990s, though, it was implicit rather than explicit, with all his works written for "conventional" instrumental or vocal forces. That changed with Blood on the Floor, the 70-minute instrumental suite completed in 1996, which included roles for three jazz soloists, whose parts allowed for an element of improvisation in some of the movements.
Turnage has continued to write for the concert hall and the opera house, of course, yet there are signs that his composing career is beginning to fall into parallel tracks. His latest large-scale work, Bass Inventions, premiered in Amsterdam on Wednesday by the ASKO Ensemble under Peter Rundel, continues the approach of Blood on the Floor, but juxtaposes a solo jazz bassist with the ensemble. Just as its predecessor was inspired by two jazz musicians, guitarist John Scofield and percussionist Peter Erskine, so the new piece grew out of Turnage's admiration for Dave Holland, who played with Turnage's hero Miles Davis.
Bass Inventions is an ambitious work in four parts, playing for nearly 40 minutes, with the finale lasting almost as long as the previous three movements put together. The writing for the bass, nearly all pizzicato, is part composed, part a framework for improvisation. The third movement, Meditation, is for the soloist alone; Holland has to improvise on a melody Turnage provides, and produces a wonderfully sonorous, warm sound.
The mellowness of Holland's style, never assertive and full of subtle nuances, seems to have determined the character of the whole work. Where Blood on the Floor, an explicit depiction of urban decay and degradation, is often abrasive and highly dissonant, Bass Inventions is far more relaxed and explicitly lyrical - bittersweet, but almost pastoral in some passages.
The opening movement, Vocalise, delays the entrance of the bass until near the end; it is dominated by rippling cello melodies before the bass takes up the main theme and embarks on a little improvised discursion of his own. The scherzo-like second, Riffs and Refrains, is more propulsive and marginally harder edged; here the roles are reversed: the bass sets it off, and the ensemble then takes over with a series of variations that quickly develops into an acerbic dialogue.
The big finale, Workout, takes the same approach as Holland's solo movement: improvised passages alternate with fully composed ones, leading eventually to a peaceful, almost wistful close. In its harmonies and the cut of its melodies, the music is identifiably Turnage's, but it also suggests that he is starting to explore new expressive worlds.
