Ben Bennett - Answers

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos

The opening track, of this great long play vinyl (that made it in my top ten list for this year) sets the record straight. Titled “What a normal day is like” it utilizes several sound sources that are percussion-like (or he makes them sound that way indeed) but unrecognizable, unless you see images or a video of him producing sounds, it provides all the alternative ways of what sound is and what a sound source should be. It is really an answer to the “what is” question posed by his long time collaborator, saxophonist and improviser too, Jack Wright.

Yes, Bennett is an improviser in the purest form of one can be. His music, if you are lucky enough to catch him in the act, borders between sound and un-sound making, with each leg on one side. Utilizing every, and I mean every, object possible, he frees sound making from any restraint possible ... even though in 2025 there shouldn’t be such dialectic, but what can you do.

Trying to be radical just for the sake of it can easily feel boring and pretentious. The sixth track on this LP, titled “What my dog would sound like if I had one” is a clear case of the struggle anyone has to make in order, not to sound “different”, but to be himself or herself. Being you and creating music is almost un-describable, certainly very hard to review. Free improvisation, still proving its radicalism, is a marginalized form, but I don’t want to pin Ben’s music just to this. Even though “this” (meaning free improviasation) is very broad and open in any sense.

So, Answers can easily be described by the aforementioned genre, but also as electro-acoustic experimentation, musique concrete or just fragmented and dissipated rythmology that uses unknown (sic) sources. In any case, or to many other possible, Answers, is brave and radical.

Listen here:
ANSWERS by Ben Bennett

@koultouranafigo