Ancient Egypt

Holger Schoorl, guitar, vocals
Scott Thomson, trombone
Pete Johnston, string bass

Formed in 2009, Toronto

Climb Every Mountain, released 2024 All Set! Editions

  1. Climb Every Mountain
  2. It’s in A minor
  3. Holger
  4. That’ll do
  5. Early Evening
  6. Also in A minor
  7. What’s That

Recorded live at Tranzac in Toronto, Dec 2023 

Liner Notes:

Toronto is both melting pot and mosaic, one of the world’s most multicultural cities. Its musical culture is rich, diverse, but its best-known products are giants of the manufactured slick, continuous with the city’s long-standing role as an epicentre of the North American jingle industry, defining the city’s bland jazz, universal folk and empty pop for decades. The flipside of this is that it can create brilliant individual deviations in the cracks around its unceasing commerce.

In Toronto in the 2000s something very special happened among a younger generation of musicians, a blurring of genres, a shift that seemed both natural and revolutionary, but in ways so gentle and strange that one could not label a music without being misleading. What was one describing? How might one capture its disconnection, its resonance? The Southern Cross Lounge of the Tranzac was its Café Voltaire, more surreal than dadaist, like a sci-fi take on Western swing. Eric Chenaux was a key figure – a musical changeling, co-founder of Rat-drifting Records and member of the bizarre Reveries, a trio singing a waterlogged Great American Songbook with micro-transmitters in their mouths. The same scene launched bassist Rob Clutton’s long-running Cluttertones, a lyrical quartet including trumpet, synthesizer and guitar or banjo.

It’s in that milieu, favouring genuine individualism and wit, that a group like Ancient Egypt and its members – guitarist and singer Holger Schoorl, trombonist Scott Thomson and bassist Pete Johnston — could emerge, a trio defined precisely by its openness to its individual members diverse predilections, its extended improvised dialogues regularly giving way to highly developed songs that might suggest a century of cabaret culture. Employing a method practiced by groups like Dave Douglas’s Tiny Bell Trio, which mixed compositions within long improvisations, Ancient Egypt have taken the collage principle in their own direction.

Like Ancient Egypt itself, the music is both exotic and unknowable, but the trio possesses a homespun quality, the knowledge that the tossed-together might be extraordinary. It’s music that communicates intimately, perhaps made for small rooms in which musicians and audience are in close quarters, in which the music is so purposefully social that it might open naturally to the ineffable.

It takes a while to catch on. In the first sequence of material there are versions of empathy and license that haven’t been previously issued. First there’s a guitar pattern, melody and rhythm, then a vocalic, plunger-muted trombone for emotion, then a bass line for structure, but there’s no immediate necessity that they coalesce; they’re complimentary, though not precisely aligned. One might feel something similar in the music of Albert Ayler, but there the over-the-top intensity serves as an immediate sense of purpose. Instead, this really feels like an Iberian anarchist village band, developing an extended collective exploration of a singular melody. The elements are relaxed, left to make their own forms; synchrony gradually gathers, the extended exploration of melody is collective and personal: the yip of a village dog, some sudden sad recall, the trombonist’s sudden animation, the morose gravel of the singer’s wail.

The casual laughter that opens the second sequence is definitive, giving way to

Schoorl’s ideal rhythm and Thomson’s quavering bathos. It’s a playful expedition launched on wobbly rails and high seas, soon conjoined to Johnston’s complex ostinato. Thomson’s upper register pigeon sounds and Schoorl’s universal lament call to home and homelessness everywhere. When things quiet down, they may take a different tack, rhythms and pitches testing themselves, inciting mixed accord among the band, eventually all of them accelerating forward. There is no telling where such adventure might lead. Its success is its continuation, the explorers bonding in their pursuits, mutations and changes of theme, the goal an extension of the music’s independence, until it is no longer clear if anyone initially launched it, but with the collective knowledge that sentiment laughs (and cries) loudest and Charles Mingus leads a street band in Sevilla. Schoorl, Johnston and Thomson are virtuosos of the neglected sentiment, delivered in provisional ballads that will never be truer.

Stuart Broomer

••••

Ancient Egypt: Folks Form Folk Forms

Holger Schoorl’s proposition seemed –– and mostly remains –– a simple one: he, Pete Johnston, and I would start improvising freely, perhaps developing something along the way, but eventually segue through aural cues to any of about seven of Holger’s (title-less) tunes. Once there, we could improvise on and extend the tune material, preserving its contours and tenor or not as we please, until eventually we’d find ourselves in another open-improvisation space. An Ancient Egypt set might comprise four tunes over 35-40 minutes of music, usually without a pause. Since we started in 2009 (never mind the hiatuses inspired by geography and life circumstances), it’s been an enormously satisfying way to make music.

It was never an original approach. Before I’d started playing trombone in 2000, I’d been captivated by various species of inside-out improvised music that employed its players’ free-playing skills as a useful formal conduit, a way to get from one bit of written music to another. The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Urban Bushmen, a continuous concert recording with many discrete compositional episodes, portrayed a ritual quality suggesting a mysterious profundity, and Anthony Braxton’s mid-1980s Quartet combined systematised, complex, oft-angular material that I could scarcely tell if composed or improvised. I was charmed by the Amsterdam supergroup, Clusone 3, as they moved from remote territories of sound exploration to swinging elegantly on a Herbie Nichols tune (for example) and back again, drummer Han Bennink’s unique musical personality glimmering throughout. From there I discovered the genealogical brains behind the Dutch approach, Misha Mengelberg and his ICP Orchestra, a laboratory for these methods with Bennink and the other Clusone 2, saxophonist Michael Moore, and cellist Ernst Reijseger, serving as key investigators. Somewhere, Dutch jazz chronicler Kevin Whitehead has described these musics functioning like breathing, in and out, in and out. Meanwhile, Moore, Reijseger, and the astonishing ICP trombonist Wolter Wierbos helped to galvanise a related approach by American composer and drummer Gerry Hemingway, whose 1990s quintet played what felt like total music to my young-ish ears. (Hemingway and bassist Mark Dresser, fleshing out the band, had matriculated from Braxton’s legendary Quartet.) I could not believe what I was hearing, but how I was hearing it at all depended on an intuition that oscillations between free and composed group music held enormous potential for syntheses of individual and collective creativity.

I’m not certain that Holger knows these groups, but it doesn’t matter. There’s an oral-culture quality to my intuition; others around me were no doubt picking up what was in the air, probably by different routes and models. Trumpeter Dave Douglas’s star-status was firmly in place by the early 2000s, and a group like his Tiny Bell Trio (which I’d heard, thrillingly, at the 1999 Vancouver Jazz Festival) demonstrated an unmistakeable ICP/Clusone influence. My friend, the late Toronto guitarist and composer Ken Aldcroft certainly knew his work, as well as that of Douglas’s New York peers who were developing related ideas and approaches, so it was appropriate that, in his emerging role as a producer and instigator, Ken organised a 2005 Toronto concert and workshop by Mark Helias’s trio, Open Loose. The aural-cue free-to-composed ideas that they demonstrated were an unmistakeable impetus for Ken’s approach with his Convergence Ensemble, a band in which I played until Ken’s untimely death in 2016.

Holger and Ken were good friends and collaborators. Maybe he got the idea from Ken. I’ve never asked.

I suppose that, just because Holger’s Ancient Egypt proposition seemed like a simple idea to me and Pete, it was never necessarily so. A key part of the challenge, unlike I’d guess most or all the examples above, is the lack of paper (papyrus?) in Ancient Egypt. Holger taught us the tunes aurally and, seeing as Pete and I have each played reams of other music during the band’s 15 years, re-taught us them as needed. They are simple tunes with radiant melodies that feel near-timeless, so I’ve never struggled to keep them, at least, hummable. (My friend Christopher Cauley, having heard an Ancient Egypt gig at Toronto’s Tranzac Club, called them “national anthems from imaginary places I’d love to visit.”)

The challenges became clear though when I prepared to move from Toronto to Montreal in 2010. I’d thought it would be relatively easy to sub for me, allowing Holger and Pete to continue the increasingly interesting work we’d started without waiting for me to pass through Toronto (and I could always sit in if I did). The thing is, the sub I proposed, a positively brilliant musician, wanted paper, couldn’t metabolise the orality of the proposition, didn’t trust his hummability recall, and thus couldn’t help but preserve a composition-improvisation opposition that Holger, Pete, and I (in general and, on our record, demonstrably) dissolve. I think we possess and cultivate, in spirit and in function, a folk impulse, one that makes a virtue of play-for-play, both an ethical and a practical move away from the ‘work’ of reading scores, but all the while working toward a new music of our own built on both hyperlocal vernaculars: free improvisation (ours) and the tunes (his).

Despite my move, plus other ‘details of life’ among the Ancient Egyptians that can undermine the feasibility of such compelling, if often arcane, artistic work, the trio has stuck together. We’ve played primarily in Toronto maybe once or twice annually over the last few years especially, a resurgence of activity that has culminated in this record. Like so many in Toronto’s experimental music field drawing on song or song-like material –– see the Rat-drifting label catalogue, for example –– we have benefited both artistically and socially from the living-room intimacy of the Tranzac Southern Cross Lounge (the ‘Front Room’). So it’s hardly surprising that our first record documents music that animated and is animated by that special room, which, that night as often, was populated by friends and colleagues who are among the finest music-people in the city. This village-network sociability further extends and supports the notion of Ancient Egypt’s musical folkways, forging a site where neither vernacular (the free or the tune) is expelled for its transgression against the other, the mores of the content broadly and affirmatively overlapping with those of the context. And in this music –– the occasional radical frisson, vital and unsettling, aside –– it’s this overlapping, this correspondence between music, the place it animates, and the people therein (both as individuals and as something like a collective) that gives the band its living foundation. To me, this sums up where the joy in this record resides.

Scott Thomson
Warsaw, Ontario
July 2024