Star Quality: Speculations for Guitar and Voice brings together British soprano and experimental performance and sound artist Eleanor Westbrook (winner of the Elisabeth Schumann Lieder Duo prize and a trained clown) and electric guitarist-interdisciplinary artist Keir Cooper (who c-leads the jazz-rock big band Sweet Niche, that hosted Westbrook in its last album, and co-author of a punk prose revision of Shakespeare) who perform a set of ten songs that blur the distinction between jazz guitar, free improvisation, opera, contemporary music and sound art. This ambitious project initially debuted as a cinema film revisiting a 400-year-old tension as old as opera between the voice, words and music and searches for a shared power.
Only the first song, «Willow Tree: A Dialogue», is based on an actual song, an English traditional song «Willow Tree». The other songs are based on dramatic and, imaginative, Dadaist, quite eccentric and mischievous vocal improvisations of Westbrook. Cooper laid down his guitar parts on these free-associative improvisations and subjected the vocals to extensive manipulations and digital editing, distancing the outcome from familiar works of singer-songwriters and guitarists. Cooper himself used these vocal improvisations as sonic labs that allowed him to experiment with the electric guitar as an orchestral instrument in an operatic setting and reassess it from possible angles.
Cooper lists the guitar works of Elliot Sharp, Fred Frith, Annie Clark (St. Vincent), John Zorn and Derek Bailey as seminal influences as well as novelist Kathy Acker, visual artist Gerhard Richter and electro-acoustic composer Anna Meredith while Westbrook’s vocal art owes much to the work of Nina Hagen, Elaine Mitchener and Diamanda Galas. This duo employs the soprano voice with all the grandeur and drama and extends its vocal qualities to create surprising, captivating and highly resonant aesthetics. Cooper and Westbrook insist that all these digital, studio techniques and manipulations only solidify Star Quality’s eloquence, great wit and tangible warmth of fingers and flesh, vocal cords and blood, joy and sweat, that express so beautifully the human ingenuity and creativity.
Eyal Hareuveni
Keir Cooper (electric guitar), Eleanor Westbrook (voice)
