“BOTH versions of the piece were recorded live. Audiences and musicians felt a powerful solidarity and connection, both with the material and Robert Wyatt’s beautiful performance of the song, ringing out like the final precious traces of a beloved voice played again and again to try to assuage the heartache of absence. I think we all believed in the work.”

So declared alto-saxophonist, improviser and composer Caroline Kraabel about the recording of her album Last 1 Last 2  at London’s Cafe Oto in March 2016, with the proceeds of every record sold donated to refugee charities care4calais.org and utopia56.org.

Kraabel, born in California in 1961, the daughter of an engineer and university librarian, came to London as a teenager “because of punk. I started on saxophone in London, my first inspirations being Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman.”

She explained to me the genesis of Last 1 Last 2. “That’s also the title of the song featured on both pieces of the album. The song starts and ends with the word “last” in two different meanings: “Last time I saw you I didn’t think to ask you to remember this time and this smile. Our number I still recall, I even went to call it the other day. If I hadn't hung up, feeling foolish, I might have spoken to my old self. I might have spoken to one of you at last.”

She continues: “The song refers to the irrevocability of uprootedness, the yearning of displaced people for those whom they have left behind in another space, and/or in the past.”

I asked her why she used a large group of 16 musicians in Last 1 and just four in Last 2. “They seemed different enough to justify the repeated use of the song. The large group improvises under special instruction mostly, whereas the small group is much freer.”

Why did she ask Robert Wyatt to sing the repeated verse? “We’d met in a non-musical context when my children were small. After we’d chatted he asked to hear my music. He liked it, and I asked him if I could write a song for him, to be part of a larger improvised or semi-improvised piece, and he said yes.

“Robert is a musician I feel very close to. There may be other musicians who would have been as kind and open-minded as he, as well as being artists close to my heart, but I can’t think of any off-hand. I wrote the song for his voice, his range and register, his way of singing.”

I told her that I thought that Last 1 has the sound of a secular hymn, bringing back the words we used to sing in school assemblies in the 1950s: “Oh hear us when we cry to thee/For those in peril on the sea.” It has the sound of loneliness and jeopardy, akin to the blues but not the blues. You can feel the menacing sea and the dangers of a small, tossing, crowded dinghy. I ask her, what soundscape was she seeking to create?

“This is very difficult to answer. I wanted the musicians to improvise genuinely, but also to give them instructions that would lead to them FEELING certain things, or in certain ways, so that some of the sorrow and danger of migration would come through, without any LITERAL description. 

“None of the musicians heard Robert’s recording until we were actually performing the piece live. I asked them to respond to it so they were listening to it carefully and fresh for the first time yet I also asked them to drown it out at first.

“And I asked each of them to prepare BEFORE the performance or at the single rehearsal a very short phrase they could remember and repeat exactly. The piece begins with all these pre-prepared phrases, each its own world and clashing with the others.

“It’s true that thoughts of water, the sea, swimming, the fine line between its joys and dangers, the way it can connect people or separate them, or kill them, were very present in my mind then.”

In Last 2, Richard Harrison’s drums, John Edwards’s bass and Kraabel’s saxophone and the astonishing voice of Maggie Nicols add to Wyatt’s defiantly vulnerable and disarming vocal: “For this piece I asked the musicians to listen to the song until they knew it well. Maggie is drawing on her immense skill and emotional connection, and specifically on her Scottish heritage.”

Last 1 Last 2 is music unlike all other; the sound of utmost surprise and solidarity with the repressed and abused whether in Syria, Yemen or Ukraine. It’s a challenge to the mind and spirit. Hear it, internalise it! Think hard, deep and wide about it!
    
LAST 1 LAST 2 is released by Emanem Records.