Three Hundred Seasons and Some: Alan Silva at 80

Pierre Crépon
June 2019

Alan Silva, photo courtesy of Olivier Ledure

Alan Silva
L’atelier Tampon-nomade at Le Temps du corps, Paris
May 18, 2019

While Paris was being drenched by a storm, a concert celebrating Alan Silva’s 80th birthday was unfolding in a small venue of the 10th arrondissement with Chinese calligraphy adorned walls. The bassist, synthesizer player, composer, and educator’s birthday actually took place a few months earlier, in January, but occasions to play for musicians like Silva are rare these days, in the United States or in his adopted France.

Silva made an introductory speech in good spirits, explaining how free jazz had long been an affair of small spaces, from the Cellar Café of  New York’s Upper West Side that had hosted the October Revolution in 1964, to Paris’ Vieille grille, where Silva played with drummer Sunny Murray during his first extended French stay a few years later. In Murray’s band, then, were a couple of Frenchmen, Bernard Vitet, Beb Guérin, and François Tusques.

Tusques was there to listen tonight. Both Tusques and Silva’s wife, Catherine, received rounds of applause, something the unassuming pianist always seems to welcome with an air of surprise, as if…​ Silva mentioned age and death, bringing up names with whom he had build his career, now all gone: Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Sun Ra.

Back in 1970, when Silva’s massive Celestrial Communication Orchestra shook the stage of the Maison de l’ORTF, somewhere among the close to 900 spectators was a young Japanese student of French literature. Makoto Sato had not yet taken up the drums at the advice of Don Cherry; tonight he was manning the kit. Facing him, Itaru Oki and his trumpet continued the work started in Tokyo’s coffeehouses fifty years ago. A much younger player, Frenchman Richard Comte, added a new voice using his electric and electro-acoustic guitars.

For roughly twenty years, Silva has favored the synthesizer over the instrument he made his name on. Silva declined an offered bass to play a Yamaha keyboard. For the encore, the group was joined by saxophonist Georges Gaumont, veteran of the IACP era’s Celestrial and member of an illustrious musical family. There was definitely a great deal of history on the stage tonight.

As for the music, one might ask? Perhaps a follower of the Buddhist philosophy might mention impermanence. At a point in life, one has nothing to prove. When an history contains enough to continuously recompose, merge, and spawn anew, it is the unmistakable sign that the state of continuous change has been inflected, and a great deal accomplished. The music was light-hearted. Happy birthday, Mr Silva. 

Makoto Sato, photo courtesy of Olivier Ledure

Itaru Oki, photo courtesy of Olivier Ledure

Richard Comte, photo courtesy of Olivier Ledure

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Pierre Crépon is an independent writer based in France. He has contributed to The Wire, New York City Jazz Record, Point of Departure, and Current Research in Jazz, among others. His work deals with the history of avant-garde jazz, with a particular focus on the American and French scenes of the sixties and seventies.