Alvin Curran by Duncan EdwardsThe opening event of the Bergen Kunsthall's exhibition File Under Freedom was an intimate, astounding, and hugely enjoyable solo performance by Alvin Curran. Entering in a wheelchair with his ankle/foot in a cast, he sat quietly glancing at his watch and sipping a pint of beer for a few minutes before suddenly announcing it was “showtime.” I did not expect to hear that phrase, and haven’t heard it since 1992 when I found myself standing at the urinal of the Maple Leaf club in uptown New Orleans next to Alton Jay Rubin aka Rockin’ Dopsie the legendary zydeco singer and accordion player. “The Crowned Prince of Zydeco” always seemed to go through the same pre-show routine, drinking at the bar with younger (mostly) female fans, before disappearing to powder his nose and adjust the plastic crown he always wore, and then leaping onstage to blast the place into orbit.

Alvin Curran's performance had a similarly visceral effect on me, although in his case he wore a small hat, and had a conch, a piano, and an 80+ key Midi keyboard programmed with some of the thousands of individual recordings he has amassed over his 84+ years. From this he could produce a vast array of sounds: a foghorn, a roaring lion, some hip-hop beats, a distant field holler, clacking machinery, roaring engines, a hyper-fast Indian chant, and countless others. In the wrong hands this approach - blending and juxtaposing disparate sounds - could easily be a complete mess, but Curran's ear, and his lifetime of experience and curiosity in composition and improvisation, did not fail him for a second. I have never really heard anything quite like it, even though his many albums should have prepared me.

We were treated to a version of his piece "Endangered Species," although this was far from a note for note version of his record of that name, but rather a wildly unpredictable application of the same approach. His methodology must always result in a different performance. As he himself has said, he presents "stories told in a language I have invented about people, places, songs, things, events, machines, musics, animals, rooms, skies, airs and dreams…each performance is a new story told with the same old sounds, thrown like a muralist painting "al fresco" newly configured each time and in each moment with the unknowable duration of one's own creative energy. As if, in fact, I were simply telling my own story, with the sounds of its worn pages, or our story with its endless cycles of sadness and joy and its inexorable pursuit of unity.” What a gift for both audience and performer to know he will never play the same thing twice.

Alvin Curran also composes his pieces as written scores and, lest anyone was tempted to wonder, he dropped in several minutes of virtuoso piano playing, as with the last section of his extended piece the 1978 release Fiori Chiara, Fiori Oscuri. This is one of the best concerts I have attended since 1972, and Curran communicated a clean music, devoid of cliche, a pure art, an accumulation of moods, richly eccentric and startling, yet incredibly musical. He sat as if in the eye of a hurricane, like a man conducting some vast time choir and drawing us beyond the superficial to some other place. My mind wandered to thinking about his friend and colleague John Cage, but also the visual artist Bispo de Rosario. I spoke briefly to him afterwards and foolishly mentioned being “surprised, that absolutely everything he did was so musical"—whether blowing through his trusty conch to announce his presence, or jamming his elbow down on the Midi. His reply was simply "it’s what I’ve been trying to do my whole life.”