Simon H Fell 1959–2020
July 2020
Julian Cowley on the life of the UK bassist and composer who died on 28 June
It was almost exactly 20 years ago that composer and double bass player Simon Fell agreed to speak with me about his life in music. Our conversation led to an article published in The Wire 198, August 2000. We met in Cambridge, where at the close of the 1970s Fell had studied English Literature. At his suggestion, we sat and talked in the sunshine beside a stretch of urban pasture. Birds were singing and insects buzzed. Cattle sidled by occasionally, looking inquisitive. Even in that relaxed setting Fell was brimful of energy and enthusiasm for all aspects of music making. At the same time he remained intensely focussed and perceptive. That combination of passion and clear-sighted practicality was striking and memorable.
Fell took up the bass while at school, because an instrument was available and nobody else in the orchestra wanted to play it. From that banal beginning he developed to become one of the most dynamic and adventurous bassists in contemporary music. Frank & Max, a collection of his solos released by Bo’ Weavil in 2011, pays tribute to his teacher Peter Leah but also to fellow bass players who helped his love for the instrument to grow, including Charles Mingus, Barre Phillips, Harry Miller and John Edwards. Some of those solos were recorded in central France which by then had become home for Fell and his wife Jo, a photographer. In 2015 he gave a riveting solo concert in a church in Toulx-Sainte-Croix, later issued by Confront as Le Bruit De La Musique.
It is perhaps significant that neither of these releases appeared on Bruce’s Fingers, the label Fell had established in 1983. An invaluable archive for his own music with a wide variety of groups, it has also been one of the finest independent ventures of its kind, as diverse in content as it is consistent in quality. Fell may have stood at its heart but the label’s catalogue suggests that he found deeper fulfilment as an integral component of group interaction than through featuring himself alone in the spotlight. In 2017, in his PhD thesis for the University of Huddersfield on freedom, collaboration and compositional paradox in British improvised and experimental music, Fell wrote: “I am a practising improvising musician who believes that it is possible to compose (ie to at least partially predetermine) a piece of music that is to be played by other musicians without any implicit assertion of creative superiority, special insight or technical exceptionalism.”
As an instrumentalist he relished contexts that challenged him physically, stretched his abilities and tested his imagination. For Fell, to play with others was to unsettle preconceptions of his own identity and to extend himself. In the 90s he could be heard exploring theme based jazz in a fine trio with drummer Paul Hession and saxophonist Mick Beck, but was also to be found embedded within the noisy onslaught of Descension, along with shock guitarist Stefan Jaworzyn, drummer Tony Irving and Charles Wharf’s ferocious reeds. A decade later Fell was still pushing beyond his own limits in a thrilling quartet with powerhouse saxophonists Peter Brötzmann and Alan Wilkinson and drummer Willi Kellers. All the while he was inviting other orders of challenge, such as meeting stringent requirements of delicacy and nuance with harpist Rhodri Davies and cellist Mark Wastell in the pioneering acoustic improvising string trio IST.
Listening back to the tape of our Cambridge interview, a quotation leapt out as the starting point for the article: “The classic situation for me is listening to an orchestral piece by Richard Strauss or Mahler, listening to maybe Stan Tracey, listening to an Anthony Braxton quartet composition, and listening to Derek Bailey, and thinking, wouldn’t it be great if you could have all these things at once?” The compositional side of Fell’s activity rested, in broad terms, upon the basis of that recipe for chaos. And it resulted in a series of exhilarating and often startling musical collages and non-linear assemblages that exuberantly crossed generic boundaries and mingled styles. So, the wonderfully perverse animating idea behind the “Stockhausen Mancini Head” section of Fell’s Composition No 62, was that Henry Mancini might provide the score for a film based on the life of the German avant gardist. While The Ragging Of Time, a suite for sextet commissioned for the 2014 Marsden Jazz Festival, provided an occasion for Jelly Roll Morton to rub shoulders with Anton Webern.
Fell didn’t allow the strands of music’s history that intrigued him to weigh him down with their authority; rather he took them to be conduits of creative energy, flashes of illumination, glimpses of possibility that might converge within his own activities as a musician, moment to moment. He wished to reach listeners who shared his own insatiable curiosity and delight in discovery. Playing, composing, organising groups and events, recording and promoting, reading, talking, listening, learning and thinking about music – cumulatively through such means he formed valued relationships and enriched the meaning of his life. “I think a lot of people have ideas,” he told me on that summer’s day in Cambridge. “The difference is often technique, it may be playing technique, compositional technique or administrative technique, but technique to carry out those ideas – that is often what makes the difference. Actually to do it.” Simon Fell actually did it and shared it, and for that he will be remembered with true gratitude and admiration.
Mark Wastell, Alan Wilkinson and Alex Ward have organised a two-day event celebrating Fell and his music at Cafe OTO on 9 & 10 February 2021. More information to be confirmed.
Comments
An exceptionally moving and accurate piece about Simon.
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