George Nelson’s Moment’s Notice: “There’s a lot of different things you can do with just the feeling of a night, or the feeling of a record”

Barring the first-ever Moment’s Notice – a socially-distanced affair which took place in January 2020 just as the Covid-19 pandemic was spreading – seasoned photographer and events producer George Nelson has recorded every single performance of his now well-established, regular events series.

“So the [mixing] desk broke on the very first one, which was, you know, not a good omen,” Nelson says with a smile as he recounts the origins of the project. What began as the ‘pilot episode’, a launch for his photography book Scenes (featuring six musicians improvising together for the first time), has evolved into a monthly event which takes place under a railway arch at Amp Studios on the Old Kent Road in South-East London. That first instalment now resides only in the memory of those lucky few who managed to catch it, but every gig since has been preserved. Nelson now possesses a formidable archive of one-off performances which he plans to drip-feed to a wider audience via his new record label, Red Dust.

Over the past four years, Moment’s Notice has grown into a standardised format. Nelson has brought the musician count down from six to five, which he assembles into smaller groups of twos and threes for an evening of open-ended improvisation in front of a typically sold-out, 100-strong audience. The participants are drawn from multiple genres and subgenres, ranging across jazz, folk, afrobeat, classical and spoken word.

But crucially, through Nelson’s manoeuvrings, they are, in most cases, performing together for the first time, brought together through a shared improvisational sensibility and a willingness to be challenged.

Nelson explains his curatorial approach to shaping an event as a scientist would describe an experiment. Everything is carefully and meticulously considered, from each musician’s style of improvising to their distinctive, sometimes competing temperaments. It’s a juggling of variables which Nelson has gradually honed over the years. Now, he brings them together with practised ease, creating a space for his well-chosen test subjects to reach out confidently into the improvisational unknown.

“Really chopsy players tend to play with other really chopsy players," he says. "But sometimes it’s with the wrong ones, it ends up being like a cat fight. If you observe enough, you can see really 'super facility' players, but with very different temperaments. Which suggests that if you put them all together, you would get somebody who is naturally going to be a little more accommodating. They can’t all be Batman.”

Cassius, Plumm and Danalogue

First and foremost, Nelson is passionate about films.

“If I think of the last hundred years of art across all the disciplines, there’s something that the great cinema artists do that is like nothing else to me”, he explains. In a truly interdisciplinary manner however, he sees no formal barrier between cinema, literature and music, in fact using the former two art forms to reinvigorate the latter.

“This is difficult for me to say because jazz is my go-to music. But for all the incredible playing, all the facility, all the great writing, I do find that the storytelling can be a bit prosaic. Exposition scene, slow build up, boy meets girl, boy messes up, boy loses girl, boy redeems himself, they all live happily ever after. Metaphorically, that honestly feels like the basic storytelling arc of so many gigs and so many albums that I listen to. But I think it can be way more interesting than that. It can start at the end, for example. There’s a lot of different things you can do with just the feeling of a night, or the feeling of a record.”

It’s this outsider’s insight, built from being a cinephile non-musician in a jazz world, which forms the backbone of the Moment’s Notice events. The intent is to be disruptive, to shake up the status quo, and to move musicians out of their comfort zones. It’s through cinema that Nelson also understands improvisation, and by extension, human interaction. He uses the Scandinavian Dogme 95 movement (led by directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in the mid-to-late-1990s), as an analogy.

“With Dogme [...] it was a manifesto of stripping cinema of all its artificialities, so stuff like no unnatural light, all music had to be diegetic, no continuity edit. The end result with most of these Dogme films is that they look more contrived than the thing they were fighting against. Because the whole point of having all those tropes is to give cinema a kind of organic flow that replicates real life.

"So it’s a good analogy for improv. There’s this idea that it’s not really improv unless it’s atonal, which is a ridiculous notion. Improv is based on all of your life experiences, the accumulation, conscious or unconscious, to that point in that moment. The best examples of improv I can think of, to my taste, are wildly atonal at points, with huge levels of tonality at other points. Just like my favourite films, just like my favourite books, just like my favourite speakers, just like my favourite scientists.”

Thanks in part to Nelson’s psychological insight into the mind of the musician, as well as his consistency in branding and format, Moment’s Notice has become a successful project. The line-ups have gradually become more expansive over the years as Nelson has widened the scope both stylistically and geographically. Chicago-based wind players Angel Bat Dawid and Matana Roberts have both participated, as well as Irreversible Entanglements pair Aquiles Navarro and Luke Stewart. The acclaimed poet and spoken-word artist Kae Tempest also performed at the November 2023 edition next to Moses Boyd and Miriam Adefris. For this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, a special event is being held at London’s Union Chapel, for which Nelson is planning one of his most ambitious line-ups yet, one that is likely to include household names.

It’s evident that Moment’s Notice is a favourite among musicians. In fact, according to Nelson, a number of line-ups have gone on to form bands off the back of it. Guitarist Tara Cunningham and drummer Corrie Dick now have a duo following their October 2021 performance, while vocalist Plumm, synthesist Danalogue and drummer Cassius Cobson also have a nascent project with a single on the way, unannounced at the time of this interview.

Yet, not all musicians feel the same way: “There are musicians out there who, if they’re being truly honest with themselves, find it a bit scary to be matched with other musicians, who they don’t know that much about. Usually it’s the ones who are young and carefree, or the ones who’ve been in it for a very long time and are maybe a little tired of having the same kind of live music experiences, who just say yes.”

For those who have taken the leap, their experience has been captured. Nelson has a penchant for documentation, as can be seen from his books, website, and Instagram.

“When I think back to certain documentarians from within the world of music, I’m always incredibly grateful that they had the foresight, or maybe just had the love of the subject enough to capture it.”

Nelson names field recordist Alan Lomax, filmmaker Jean Rouch and jazz photographer and filmmaker Guy Le Querrec as examples of documentarians he admires.

Which brings us back to Red Dust. According to Nelson, the name is taken from the 1980s sci-fi television series V which he watched as a child. In the series, 'Red Dust' is created as a defensive weapon against an invading alien horde, who naturally want to wipe out the human race. At this point in the series, the aliens have managed to infiltrate the government and media; in this sense, Red Dust is an act of defiance against propaganda and authoritarianism, a concept which Nelson is drawn to.

At the same time, the name is also a homage to his Nigerian heritage, a reference to the fiery suya pepper which is used to season Yoruba and Hausa cuisine. Nelson plans to use Red Dust as an outlet for his archive of 150 hours worth of music, depending on the appetite of the musicians concerned. The inaugural album, titled 44:42, was released on vinyl in March of this year, with the digital follow-up appearing in July (see review in July's Jazzwise). It features Tamar Osborn on woodwinds, Yohannes Kebede on keyboard, and Will Glaser on drums; it's a sonic capture of their September 2021 performance.

The vinyl-first approach to the release reflects the physicality of Nelson’s relationship towards music. “Records, for me, that’s conscious listening. Simply because of the way my head works. It can sometimes be a bit scattered around, so it’s useful to know that in 20 minutes time, I need to get up and change the record again. That’s one way of locking in. For some people, I’m sure, it’s a nostalgia thing, but for me it’s not. It’s a direct connection. And visually, I have something to look at. How can I think of, I don’t know, let’s say Tijuana Moods by Mingus or The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color by Rahsaan Roland Kirk without thinking of the album covers. That very first visual experience makes an impact.”

The artwork for 44:42 is designed by British artist Charlotte Mann, who has developed a similar concept for the Moment’s Notice live event posters. The cover depicts a mirrored reflection of a blue sky, within which sits the numerical title, a representation of the total running time of the improvisation. It’s a sparse, open-ended aesthetic which invites the listener to cast aside any preconceptions and engage with the music first and foremost.

For Nelson, it’s a conscious choice: “For one set, or for one evening, the music is king, or queen, or whatever you like. The individuals have to work collaboratively to make this thing happen. Therefore, I’m not obsessed with the names of the individuals. It’s about the music. If you really want to find out who’s playing, it’s not that far away. Just turn the record the other way around, and then you’ll get the names of the musicians. But the first thing I want you to know is it’s 44 minutes and 42 seconds, and the possibilities are infinite.”

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Whether you want to enjoy Jazzwise online, explore our Reviews Database or our huge archive of issues, or simply receive the magazine through your door every month, we've got the perfect subscription for you. Find out more at magsubscriptions.com