nmperign?

Greg Kelley and Bhob Rainey explain

by Ed Hazell

Since 1997, Boston has been home to one of the most provocative working groups in free improvisation -- nmperign, the duo of trumpeter Greg Kelley and soprano-saxophonist Bhob Rainey. Unlike many free improvisers, these two usually work at a whisper, etching the silence with their exquisite lines and cross-hatchings of pure sound rather than crowding the air with loud splashes of noise. Their attention to the architecture of improvisation, control over a huge palette of sonic material, and ability to explore the extremes of musicmaking with subtlety and wit mark Kelley and Rainey as two of the most original thinkers in free improvisation today.

"We're not letting ourselves be won over by the cheap thrill of making weird sounds," Rainey says. "We're interested in making compositions. And we're in practically 100 percent agreement as to how that's to be done. I think of us as being composers using a very special compositional tool, which is playing together. The idea is to work in real time but not be overtaken by the urgency of the moment, to have a wide view of a single moment, and be very engaged but to have perspective."

Kelley, a North Attleborough native, came to Boston in 1996 after a classical education at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory. Rainey, who honed his jazz chops with drummers like Mickey Roker and Edgar Bateman in his home town of Philadelphia, was drawn here as a New England Conservatory composition major. Their paths eventually intersected on the city's burgeoning free-improvisation scene. Kelley was a frequent audience member at concerts by drummer Masashi Harada's band, which featured Rainey. "I didn't even know he played an instrument," Rainey remembers, "until I met him and [saxophonist/Zeitgeist Gallery music curator] Dave Gross on the subway and Dave told me, `This guy's a kick-ass trumpet player.'" In 1997, the two performed in separate bands at the first Autumn Uprising, Boston's annual musician-run new-music festival; they began working together shortly thereafter.

At first nmperign constituted a trio, with drummer Tatsuya Nakatani, but within a year, he was gone and Kelley and Rainey continued as a duo with occasional guests. During two lengthy tours of the States, they discovered it was difficult for a third party to fit into their tightly integrated improvisations, though San Francisco drummer Gino Robair, shakuhachi player Phil Gelb, and Boston-area tape-loop improviser Jason Lescalleet have all had success entering into the duo's electrifying and elegant soundscapes. Nmperign's short but eventful history is documented on two excellent Twisted Village CDs, 44'38"/5 (with Nakatani) and this is nmperign's second cd. (with Gelb and Nakatani on one track and Lescalleet on another). Kelley and Rainey share In Which the Silent Partner-Director Is No Longer Able To Make His Point to the Industrial Dreamer (Intransitive) with Lescalleet. A fourth CD on the German Selektion label, their first as a duo exclusively, is due in early fall.

"In the beginning the main thing was not to attempt to be exciting," Rainey explains, "but to allow things to be as exciting as they are. It's not that we were trying to make boring music. But we thought that there was this forced feeling of trying to get to some fantastic point in improvised music, and that forcing it was actually causing the music to miss the fantastic point. We were interested in creating a context in which moments of extreme intensity were highlighted by the more spacious, reserved moments. We wanted to create a space with low volume, a highly detailed, small-volume world. There are a lot of very interesting sounds on our respective instruments that simply won't come out louder. We were also both interested in electro-acoustic music and musique concrète, and we wanted to explore sounds other than the ones the instruments were originally designed to make."

"I was getting bored with the `rubber ball bouncing around in a room' style of free improvisation," Kelley adds. "With Bhob in nmperign, we can use new sounds, but more important, it's about control and about the placement of those sounds. We can lay off and get sparse; we can play in a busier way. We can play with the form, use rapid juxtapositions, and be very quiet, then burst out. What we do is most analogous to counterpoint. We're often doing separate things that meet up at places."

"We're constantly waking you up as the piece is going on," Rainey continues. "As things change -- it could be sudden change or gradual movement or one person maintaining something while the other changes -- you're brought back into the piece and your senses stay awake."

And the name? "After we were asked what it meant after every gig we ever played, we went through a period of simply saying we didn't know what it meant," Kelley laughs. "And we have a whole list of phrases that it could be an acronym for. But the truth is it comes from a Latin phrase, `ignotium per ignotius,' which means, `the unknown through the more unknown.' We liked that, but obviously ignotium per ignotius would be a pretty bad name unless we decided to get a prog-rock drummer and a fretless-bass player. So we just cut letters out of it."

Nmperign perform at the Zeitgeist Gallery, 312 Broadway in Cambridge, this Friday, June 30, at 8 p.m. The Bowed Metal Ensemble open.