A reed player other than Anthony Braxton, for a change

 

I mentioned briefly last time out that I had been back in touch with Atanase (whose Church Number Nine blog really kick-started my own journey of exploration into free jazz and improvised music, around fifteen years ago*), but at the time it didn't feel appropriate to say much more than that - although I did say that he plays reeds now. This is not a new development as such: even before he left London, he was playing tenor sax (latterly having lessons with Rachel Musson, somewhat known these days for her own association with clarinet wizard Alex Ward). Since Atanase moved back to Georgia, he has also been playing bass clarinet and, most recently, shehnai (although he is most dismissive of his playing on the latter instrument). 

A. sent me a link to an album which he has recorded with two friends. He was at pains to point out that it's not the kind of music he expected me to like, or that he himself would usually be involved in; the two other musicians - a guitarist and a synth player - are both professionals, but both come from backgrounds in pop and dance music, not the sort of bandmates A. would immediately have chosen if he could. I do know that he has struggled to find people back home that come even close to sharing his taste in music; in the end, he embarked on a project which was a sort of middle ground for all three (even then, it didn't end up exactly the sort of drone music which they started out intending to play). And he's right enough: it's not my usual cup of tea, or any of my usual teas for that matter**... but I did quite enjoy listening to it, mainly because I really dug the reeds on this. You can hear where all those hours of practice have gone... I certainly hope he carries on recording, and is maybe able to find some more sympathetic playing-partners as time goes on! He has given me his blessing now to mention the album on here, so if anyone's interested... go check it out :)

***

There's still pretty much a week of December left, and it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that I will post again before 2022 evaporates, but if I don't... well, it's been good to get going again on this, finally, even if the world has moved on in my absence - even if hardly anybody is reading - even if I still managed to find time to get myself "stuck", as I mentioned just recently: well, that's not gonna last, and I have every intention of continuing to post into the new year and beyond. This already ended up being the most productive single year the blog has enjoyed since 2011; indeed there have only been three years which saw more activity than this one did, in the end. It feels good to be back. If anyone is reading this "live" - happy festive season, however you and yours might be celebrating it. Back soon! C x

* I've somewhat lost track, but I am pretty sure C#9 actually started late in 2006 and was active into 2007 - well, it must definitely have been active in 2007 because its eventual demise was swiftly followed by McClintic Sphere starting this one (little knowing that I was about to run away with it... I didn't know that either, until I got going on it). As for my listening tastes and all that - I was already listening to jazz before C#9 came along, and my tastes were far more geared towards the freer end of things, but I had not really "found my ears" yet. If anyone really wants more information on this, they can find it here - a post which also happens to sum up my conclusions regarding the state of the Braxton quartet up to and including 1976. 

** My own music taste is still sort of oddly-unbalanced: wide in terms of the variety of sounds (etc) I will tolerate, quite narrow in terms of what I actually listen to. Besides (mainly free) jazz and creative music, I do still listen to (some of the more extreme subgenres of) metal, but these days I'm more into hardcore punk - especially the more intense and brutal strains thereof (fastcore, grindcore, powerviolence etc). I also listen to some less outlandish rock-based stuff, but not that much. And that's kind of it, because I seem to get enough sustenance out of that lot to keep me going... 

Once again, I lost sight of what's important

 

This is - apparently - so easily done: I slip back into an all-too-familiar pattern of treating the blog, and any music associated with it, as "work" and hence putting it off. Evidently it's not just habitual dope-smokers who suffer with habitual procrastination.

In entirely predictable fashion, it was the long-deferred Thumbscrew album which really brought this to the fore, but in truth it's been building and it just feels like a good time to admit that, get it out in the open. (Part of the blog's function for me has long been to delineate my own process, such as it is.) I wrote in early November about acquiring several releases featuring Braxwerks, and not only have I not managed to write about any of them yet, I haven't even been listening to them over the last few weeks. The Locals CD I bought, played once (and enjoyed it way more than I thought I would, when I first saw it had been released) - and then promptly shelved, because it's "work"... and therefore is mentally filed away in some sort of in-tray rather than in the enjoyment and recreation pile (where it properly belongs).

The actual underlying reasons for this are all far too obvious to be worth analysing here; it only feels worth confessing at all because it shows how quickly, how easily, I can slip back into an old and self-limiting habit.

Of course, there was also a complicating factor where Thumbscrew is concerned: having laid out my conclusions (such as they were for the time being) regarding the vexed question of the album's seventh track, I was almost immediately "set straight" by being pointed to a piece by Carl Testa on the TCF site - although it's not that simple*, and will stand further consideration at some point (not now... I'm already fed up of talking about it for a while at least). What this did do, though, was prompt me to think about my own activity, back when I was a far more active music blogger (during the 2000s especially). At the time, I regarded part of my own contribution as being to help clear up little details wherever I could, so that if someone posted, say, a live recording with incomplete or inaccurate information, and I was able to supply missing details or make some corrections, I would do this with the minimum fuss and as quickly as I could. There was never any element of criticism intended: rather, as I saw it, we were all part of the same community, which wanted basically the same things, and since I didn't tend to post much in the way of actual music, if I could help sort out some of the information surrounding it then so much the better. And I don't think most people took it as criticism, but I know ( = eventually found out) that some people did**. Anyway, I hadn't really though about this for quite some time, but I did find myself revisiting it recently... it's all useful material...

- Not that this has really got anything to do with why I'm stalling (again) over posting some observations on the actual music. No, that's just the sort of thing I do - still do, obviously. I'm not going to keep indulging myself in this, however. I only have to go back as far as September this year for a time when I was listening to B's music every day, and making my own daily life better as a result (as well as finding plenty to write about): before this newly-reacquired habit (of avoiding listening to music on the supposed grounds that I can't listen to it recreationally, but must always approach it with full focus and taking of notes) becomes completely crystallised, I am going to break it. So that's that.

***

Some people will remember my old friend Atanase, formerly the editor of the semi-legendary free jazz blog Church Number Nine. At the time C#9 was active, and for a good while thereafter, he lived in London - but he has long since moved back to his native Georgia (the country, not the US state). He does, however, play reeds these days. I'm not saying any more about that just yet..!

*All the article proves is that the band were justified in believing that they were indeed interpreting Comp. 61 - something which I didn't doubt in the end. This doesn't, however, mean that the handwritten score which the band had access to for purposes of recording their album actually represents the piece that was originally intended to be Comp. 61 - there are a number of features specified clearly in the composition notes which appear to be directly contradicted, or at best disregarded by that score... and that's not even mentioning the fact that the same tune had already been recorded under a different opus number. No, we're some way off having a proper answer to that question...

** One person in particular - not someone I'd ever dealt with directly - took the whole thing very personally and eventually made it clear that he thought I was just "finding fault" with him. This had literally never occurred to me - I mean that anyone might take it that way - and it came as a bit of a jolt. (I was still a few years away from being diagnosed on the autistm spectrum at that point..!)

Thumbscrew pt 1a: the mysterious track 7

 

OK, so in that previous post - specifically in the third part of said post - I highlighted one problematic aspect of the Thumbscrew Braxwerks album: one piece listed thereupon as Comp. 61 has been previously recorded (by B. himself, in duo with Mario Pavone) as Comp. 29a (technically, at the time of release it was listed as being just plain Comp. 29; but that, at any rate, I can categorically say was a mistake - see below). 

I said I would refer to the Composition Notes for guidance on this, and I have done so. Did this clear the matter up, once and for all? Weeeeeell... not exactly :-S

First things first, # 29 is in fact a short series, comprising Comps. 29a-29e - so, clearly whatever this piece is, it's not "Comp. 29" since that doesn't actually exist. (Probably. Let's not forget that B. and Martinelli were putting numbers to many of these pieces retrospectively, in some cases years after they were written, and if the odd detail got confused along the way... that wouldn't be the first time, now would it..?)

Secondly, there is at least some (internal) consistency to be found in the two conflicting recordings: the Pavone duo CD gives a diagram for track 2 which matches the graphic title for Comp. 29a in Composition Notes Book B, and the Thumbscrew CD gives a diagram for track 7 which (nearly) matches the graphic title for Comp. 61 in Composition Notes Book C (very nearly, but not quite: the three numbers which appear in the graphic title on the Thumbscrew CD are 67, 3 & 23 whereas the middle one should properly be 32). So we at least know for sure that the respective artists were clear about which piece they thought they were interpreting.

Thirdly... look, this is all bewilderingly vague and one can see (ish) how such confusion might arise. The notes say that Comp. 29a was composed "in the early seventies", and Comp. 61 dates from "circa 1976"; Composition Notes Books B and C are both copyrighted 1988 (although B's introductions to both books are dated August 2nd, 1984); the Pavone duets were recorded in January 1993... you can see how there is plenty of scope for things going awry here. Just in case it's not already fairly obvious where we're going with this: both pieces have very brief notes, and neither one of them includes any actual formal notation, so it may not be definitively possible to establish from the written notes exactly which recording was correctly attributed. (For all I know, neither of them is correct!) Who knows what the scores look like, or how/when they were produced? The Thumbscrew album (and I may have had a teeny whinge about this already) contains no information whatsoever about how the scores were sourced or where from, even if it seems an obvious inference (from the thanks list) that they were sourced from an official TCF archive with the assistance of Carl Testa. To be honest, I am tempted to say in principle that the Thumbscrew attribution is more likely to have been correct, simply because they will almost certainly have been working from a written score, whereas B. - in leading his own session with a close musical cohort  - might not necessarily have felt the need to do so; it's a simple enough theme, which he could easily have taught Pavone by ear (and then titled from memory after the fact). Unfortunately, it's not that straightforward. (I mean, why would it be?!)

One thing we can say for sure is that Thumbscrew tried to match the music to the written notes, if that is what they were doing: their version of the piece is clearly presented as a march, with Fujiwara rattling out a smart 2/4 line on the snare, and the notes for Comp. 61 do describe the piece precisely as a "march structure". Then again, the notes go on to say "... for extended improvisation", and Thumbscrew's three-minute sprint dispenses with that idea, at least. The rest of the notes are typically opaque, or rather typically Braxtonesque: that is, I'm quite sure they made perfect sense to him (and they probably do to students if he is explaining it all to them, or if they are already thoroughly immersed in B's system of thought), but for the rest of us, with the best will in the world, what are we to make of glosses such as this: "Composition No. 61 is a solidified structural moment that can be utilized as a germ factor for creative interpretation..."? Well, OK, with a bit of squinting we can actually glimpse the idea of what might be meant by that - but the crucial point is that such descriptions tell us only about what the piece might be or could be in the performance, rather than anything concrete about what it is. Still, we are told that it "was probably written in ten seconds (or something)"... so we can't perhaps expect too much in the way of hard detail.

Where the idea of Thumbscrew's track 7 being Comp. 61 starts to break down, though, is in the second paragraph of the written notes. Here we actually do get some specific detail, just no actual musical notation; the piece is declared* to be "in its most basic sense... a two-part phrase statement", which description does actually fit the tune well enough; but "the first part... is a fifteen-beat phrase grouping construction (actually thirteen and a half beats with one and a half beats rest)", a piece of rubric which really doesn't match the recorded music at all well. You can sort of jam it in sideways, and say that it fits: in march time, the first phrase of the recorded piece does indeed last fifteen beats; only no, it doesn't, because the written phrase includes a rest - which quite clearly occupies a sixteenth beat. In any case, the first written phrase occupies no fewer than fifteen beats, whichever way you look at it - not thirteen and a half. This section repeats, and the second written phrase which follows (played once in Thumbscrew's version, more than once in the original) really does not match the description in the notes at all. This "consists of two sections of pulse (notated) phrase groupings..." and that is where the written rubric definitively deviates from the audio recording. (At least I think it does... sigh...) 

Comp. 29a is another short piece, "written to meet the dictates of whatever project was happening at the time"; we are told it is "simply constructed and easily executed - so as not to be the focus of too much talking or rehearsing", although it, too, is a "material platform for extended improvisation" (...**). Again, we have brief notes which tend to focus on what the piece might be used for in performance - indeed, this piece "was written to express its own form": "the concept form has been superimposed... only as a means to have a criterion to comment on the work... the music came first, then the form".  However, once we get down to the technicalities, these seem a far closer match for the recorded music than do the specifics of Comp. 61. 

Composition No. 29a is a monophonic line* whose form is divided into four basic parts...

*There is one harmonization in the work (on one pitch)

- This neatly matches the music that we hear on the Pavone duo album, at least, down to the single harmonisation in what is otherwise a monophonic line.

Form in this context constitutes phrases, rather than time parameters. This is so because (it) is a short work only consisting of 56 notes in two phrases.

- Again, if I am counting correctly, this a dead match for what we hear in the Pavone duet, at least. Given that there isn't much to go on - and notwithstanding the temptation to suppose, as I did above, that B's acolytes might have taken more trouble to get their primary materials straight than the maestro himself would have done - it's beginning to look as if somehow, whatever their copy of the score might say, Thumbscrew were not playing the piece they thought they were playing. The final nail in that coffin would appear to come in the last paragraph of the notes: 

The work also contains several different levels of operating materials (i.e. short phrases, or fixed long sound beams)...

- In both recordings, the second phrase begins with a long, held note. OK, so that doesn't add up to any conclusive proof, but cumulatively, on balance, I would say that Thumbscrew just got this one wrong. Absent-minded he may occasionally be, but the (future) professor knew what he was taking into the studio. Track 2 on the Pavone duo album and track 7 on the Thumbscrew album are, 100% definitely, the same composition; and that composition is (not 100% definitely) Comp. 29a. There, I'm calling it.

Of course, as I already complained last time out, this means that we can't be overly confident about the attributions of any of the hitherto unrecorded pieces with which Thumbscrew have blessed us, but that's just an annoyance I'm going to have to live with. (Spoiler alert: taken purely as a musical recording, the Thumbscrew album really is a blessing.) - I will, at some point, have a good look at the notes for Comp. 14 as well... but that ain't happening tonight.

It's worth adding one delightful little detail here: the notes for Comp. 29a conclude "(it) is a short delicacy to be served quickly and consumed to whatever depth is possible". (**)

Next time I post about this album, I promise I'll be writing about the actual recorded music...

* I say "declared" advisedly: these parts of the text are presented with every individual word underlined.

** This seems to imply a contradiction, in that the piece is both "short... to be served quickly" and a "platform for extended improvisation". It's not necessarily a contradiction, though: I think B. means that the written, crystallised form of the piece is short - but that it may easily prolong itself in the performance. Whatever we are dealing with here, assuming the recordings represent either Comp. 29a or Comp. 61 and not some other piece entirely (...), they are intended to support extended improvisation. Thumbscrew apparently just didn't have enough time to develop the music as fully as one supposes they must have wished; that observation is certainly not limited to track 7, either. 

Thumbscrew pt 1: background and context

 

Thumbscrew, The Anthony Braxton Project (Cuneiform, 2020)

Not for the first time, I've had to approach an album sideways, so to speak - or perhaps it would be better to say I've had to take an unusually long run-up at it... anyway, let's hope it doesn't turn out to be another one of those false starts (ahem). 

There are several different reasons why I have found this a difficult album to write about - or, more accurately, a difficult album to think about (since I haven't precisely tried and failed to write about it... I just haven't got round to it until now). Some of these reasons overlap a bit. Some of them I have touched on before. All of them will be laid out and examined here:

1. Insofar as I ever gained any reputation at all, I'm sure it would be fair to say that I gained one back in the day as a pedantic and difficult bastard who had to have every detail just perfect (and who got decidedly short-tempered and impatient, at times even downright unpleasant, with anybody who I perceived to have fallen short in this regard). This in turn can't have been especially helpful to the original cause of the blog: spreading the word about B's music and (ha!) providing a place for people to talk about it. Obviously that's long (loooong) gone, but still, I have it in mind when approaching things like this album, the release of which "should", it seems, have been greeted with joy. Just having such things in existence is basically a blessing, after all. To have such a project undertaken/overseen by an experienced former Braxton student/collaborator such as Mary Halvorson is more or less the kind of thing which might appear on an imaginary wish-list. So to have such an album in the hand - as I first did back in January 2021 - and have such mixed feelings about it as I did... that is, as they say, kind of a bummer. It left me feeling really quite conflicted, and I hated having to feel that way, being all too aware of what a rare treat the album's release - the project's being brought to fruition, if not necessarily the actual finished product - was in the first place. Hence, any time I played the damn thing I tried quite consciously just to switch off my critical faculties and allow myself to enjoy it as a collection of music, played by a very good band. The fact that I was fairly successful in the attempt also, then, helps to explain why I never seemed to get any closer to the point of being able to write about it. 

2. It's annoyingly short. Not so much the running time: I mean, OK, that too actually because in the CD era, although there is absolutely no reason in principle for an album to run any longer than albums used to back in the vinyl/cassette days - forty minutes is fine, generally - there is very much a compelling argument for shoehorning in as much material as the format will tolerate (eighty minutes, as it happens) in a case such as this, where rare items from B's back catalogue are being given an outing, in many cases for the first time ever. (For more on this last point see 3., below...)

- The album clocks in at well under fifty minutes, and comprises eleven tracks - but only nine different compositions. (Three different versions of Comp. 14 are included, each a solo interpretation by one member of the band.) However, as stated above, my main gripe here is not so much even with the overall running time - or with the glaring fact that they could have utilised and included more material, under the circumstances - but rather with the brevity of the readings themselves. Two of the eleven tracks run between seven and eight minutes; one further track lasts just over six minutes. The remaining eight pieces are all under four and a half minutes. Indeed, six of them last less than four minutes, and four of them last less than three minutes - in creative music terms, over when they have barely begun*. (The truism that is the "three minute pop song" most definitely has no currency in this context - as if that needed to be pointed out.) It is just impossible for me to suppose that the band finished working on this with the collective sense of having done the best they could do. There HAS to have been some inevitable sense of artistic compromise,  whether this was in the preparation, the researching/acquisition of scores, the recording itself - who knows - but it is just not possible to conclude that this project turned out exactly the way the musicians had hoped, or anywhere near it, really. The text on the CD tray makes a point of saying that the music was "developed, recorded and premiered during an artist residency at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh" - before explaining what the latter consists in. One is rather given the impression from this that favourable conditions prevailed throughout. The recordings were done over four (consecutive) days in the studio. So, what happened? Why was a tribute to this famously detail-rich composer brought off in such a brief and inchoate fashion? 

Just to hammer (or screw) the point home: compare the tracklists for Thumbscrew's other albums. I mean, the ones which feature the band members' own compositions. You won't find a lot of pieces under five minutes on those. Seriously, what the actual fuck?!

3. I can't remember where exactly I read it now, and nowhere does it say this on the actual album, but I swear the whole point of this project was to bring to light pieces from B's vast canon which had not yet been recorded. OK, so quite clearly that wasn't exclusively the case: the album kicks off with Comp. 52, which most definitely has been recorded before, and several times (by various players). Nevertheless, a lot of these opus numbers are ones which the even most diligent friendly experiencer - with access to the full online discography (before it was taken down, or in a genie-granted parallel universe where it never was) - would seek in vain amongst the recorded catalogue. Looking through the tracklist before I played the CD for the first time, I saw practically nothing which looked familiar.

- Imagine my surprise, then, at hearing something entirely familiar, assigned an entirely unfamiliar opus number. Track 7 purports to be Comp. 61; which is 'passing strange, to be sure, because the (many) previous times I had heard this piece it was known as Comp. 29a**. I recognised it instantly because it was something of a favourite of mine, in the early days of this blog; I even wrote (rather briefly) about the album on which it appears. It's not a hugely well-known album - and I daresay some of those who have heard it still wouldn't recognise the piece from this version, which has completely different voicings (B. originally laid it down as a duet for contrabass clarinet and Mario Pavone's (string) bass); it just happens to have been something I listened to a lot and thus know very well. OK, so... now what?! which is it to be? I know B. is regarded in some quarters as an "eccentric professor" type (and has arguably even played up to this image himself), but not even he can have written the same piece twice.

The band must have had access to a decent variety of scores for this project, but the (very brief) notes don't go into any detail about this at all. Yes, City of Asylum provided the time, among other things, but it seems unlikely that a full range of Braxton scores happens to be permanently available in Pittsburgh, a city which (as far as I know) bears no direct connection to B. at all. No, these had to have been sourced via TCF, in which capacity one presumes Carl Testa helped out: he is thanked along with the TCF and this would not otherwise have been necessary. (Halvorson and Testa played together many times and must know each other pretty well.) Of course, I am in no position to comment on how professional the archiving is or isn't at TCF; we know that B. used to have a lot of trouble with record labels messing up the graphic titles on track lists, that sort of thing, and the maestro himself may sometimes have allowed things to get a little confused after the fact, or so he has suggested in the past to this writer at least***. Nevertheless, one rather presumes that he has arrived at the point some time ago where he can get other people to take care of that kind of thing for him, allowing him to get on with the more crucial stuff like playing and composing new material (always, always pressing deeper into new mines). I've seen - we've all seen - title pages of scores with the opus numbers written at the top. What happened here, to allow two unrelated pieces to become conflated like this? Whatever this is, it's not a case of a simple typo: the graphic title assigned to track 7 here is completely different from the one included on the album with Mario Pavone. The band this time genuinely believed that they were reading and playing Comp. 61, even while B. himself had already recorded it under a completely different premise. (If the band were aware of the earlier attribution and wanted to release the piece under its correct title and opus number, to make a point, then surely there would be a note to that effect on the CD. The absence of any such note suggests very strongly that they are unaware of the problem.)

Mary H. has extensive experience with B's music, obviously. Michael Formanek, to the best of my knowledge, has no direct experience with it at all; Tomas Fujiwara is a bit of an in-between case, having what you might call extensive indirect experience (by osmosis, as it were, via his long-standing musical partnership with THB, and various more recent connections#), and some direct experience, albeit in a very specific context##. Obviously, I don't know if any of them have heard the duo album with Mario Pavone###. Also obviously, it doesn't matter how much I ramble or rant about this here, we're not going to figure out how/when/where the mistake got made just by speculating about it. What I will do between now and "pt 2" is look at the composition notes for Comps. 29 and 61, just to see if that clarifies things at all. But the point is, the irritation I felt about this is not limited to not knowing the correct opus number for this one piece. Rather, it's the implication raised by such an anomaly coming to light in a project of this nature: that we can't actually be sure of any of the titles given for the previously-unrecorded pieces (i.e. most of them). In theory, one should not need to worry about this kind of thing at all: the band were doing this with B's blessing for sure, and presumably with his knowledge as well, and one would think they would have had full access to officially certified, accurate scores in making their selections of what material to perform. In practice, that's all up in the air now. In theory, there is considerable value for the Braxton community (for want of a better term) in having this type of project undertaken: I don't mean just an album full of his pieces generally, although there are few enough of those in existence (as recently discussed) and that alone gives this some weight, makes it desirable; I mean specifically an album of premieres, pieces which have never previously been officially recorded (in some cases, perhaps not even publicly performed). In practice... well even I would stop well short of declaring this to be of no value; that would be absurd, ridiculous. But unfortunately to have it in this form, with these doubts hanging over it, lends an ambivalence to its reception that I really wish I didn't have.

OK, breathe... that's most if not all of the venting out of the way...

4. ... and what remains has nothing really to do with the recording, as such, but more to do with my own essential (unavoidable) shortcomings as an analyst. This has been nagging away at me for years, on and off; a long time ago now, I wrote about my own (lack of) musical education, explaining why I come to have such knowledge as I have, while also making it clear why it doesn't go any further... more recently I have found myself banging my head against my own ceiling, so to speak, in trying to delve into the innermost workings of music which normally presupposes a pretty fair degree of formal training without, in my case, actually having any.

I didn't really think (much) about this aspect of the problem when I first mooted the idea of writing about this album. (It was there in the background, for sure; but given that I knew I was going to do this writing "at some point", rather than imminently, in the background it remained.) It really came sharply into focus when I made the first steps towards a comparison between two different versions of B's Comp. 305, as discussed briefly here; I have also been watching some of Chanan Hanspal's video analyses of Frank Zappa recently, and it's not been at all lost on me that he is able to use detailed analysis of the actual scores to unlock layers of the music which have in many cases remained pretty obscure to me until now (I have been listening to Zappa a lot longer than I have been listening to Braxton, and I wouldn't even pretend to understand some of the more advanced pieces). I never learned to read music, and even if I did, I doubt it would be of much use to me in analysing work of this degree of complexity. Plus I don't even have access to the scores... so why am I even bothering? One acquaintance did more or less ask me this way back in the early Braxtothon days... but back then, the answer seemed obvious enough because even without formal training, or being able to use transcriptions in my write-ups, I was assured by a number of people that I had helped them hear B's music a lot more clearly than before. However it worked, for a while back there I really felt as if I'd been somehow "looking over the composer's shoulder". (B. himself was kind enough to confirm a little later that I wasn't simply imagining this.) That didn't last forever though; and while it lasted it was greatly aided, undeniably, by the use of cannabis while listening. I haven't smoked in well over five years now - and although my appreciation of music definitely continues to grow, not diminish, with time and age and experience, there is no doubt that I did for a while have access to a dimension in it which is now closed to me. (Don't ask me how any of this works - it just does. Or doesn't, as the case may be...) Without it, is there really any point in my trying at all?

So that's yet another thing which presents difficulties in writing about this album - and indeed other recordings, but this is the article I've been promising to write. Hence, this acute awareness of my own ignorance now appears to block the road for me, just as I'm trying to move forwards.

***

That's it: that's all of it, I think. I needed to get points 1-3 off my chest before I could even think about tackling this, because until I'd got all this properly laid out and acknowledged, I didn't feel able to listen to the music with any sort of critical ear at all. 

How much the problem outlined in point 4 will prevent me from doing that anyway is, of course, something which remains to be seen...

* What seems really galling about this is that the graphic titles for two of the pieces - listed on the CD as being Comps. 274 & 150 (although I can't, alas, take that for granted - see point 3. above) very much suggest that these are longish compositions. Comp. 274 must presumably be GTM, although I don't recognise the graphic at all (and maybe this is one of those pieces which has not previously been recorded); Comp. 150, too, has the type of graphic which B. usually reserves for the sort of pieces which take up an entire CD in the reading. The latter is disposed of in less than three minutes, and even though the former is one of the longer pieces here, that's only a relative thing: it's still only just over six minutes. I have pondered before why B's own GTM performances tend to last so much longer than the same pieces when interpreted by other musicians; this album really takes that principle to an extreme.

** The original Music & Arts CD lists it simply as Comp. 29, a mistake corrected by Jason Guthartz in his much-missed online discography.

*** Shortly before B. contacted me for the first time, I had wondered aloud whether recreational substances might not have interfered with the matching up of the pieces on For Alto with their intended dedicatees (leading to the much-repeated, nonsensical dedication to John Cage of the piece intended for Cecil Taylor, for example). He didn't exactly confirm it, but he certainly didn't try very hard to deny it...

# I'm thinking specifically of The Thirteenth Assembly, a grouping of THB + Fujiwara with another long-standing musical partnership, Mary Halvorson + Jessica Pavone. The group Illegal Crowns (with Benoît Delbecq) is another example. 

## Tomas F. may well have worked with B. in another context around that time; there was a lot of stuff being released by NBH back then, much of it on a digital-only basis, and I only heard a fraction of it. I was at least aware of some releases which I didn't actually hear - including the four-CD set in a trio with Tom Rainey, as referenced in the post. I don't delude myself that I didn't miss some things altogether.

### It's a curious coincidence if they haven't: the Pavone duo set concludes with a cover of "Stablemates" by Benny Golson, and the exact same standard kicks off the Thumbscrew album Theirs, an album of cover versions which the band released (in conjunction with an album of new music, naturally entitled Ours) in 2018, two years before their Braxton album. This could, of course, be precisely a curious coincidence: Golson is not exactly underrepresented in the world of jazz standards, and many musicians have covered tunes of his. It's just another twist... (Yet a further one is abstruse enough that I didn't even allude to it in the main post: it's tempting to assume that Mario Pavone was related in some way to Jessica Pavone, although I have not been able to confirm that. Even if he was, that doesn't of course mean that Mary H. would necessarily have heard everything he recorded, just because she was a close friend of his daughter/niece/etc. Coincidences are everywhere.)

From my lips...

Nothing new about this, as such: I missed an Anthony Braxton live concert, thanks to being too far removed from current goings-on to know that it was even taking place. That's right! Having talked recently about missing the ZIM septet (to say nothing of the "standards quartet" with Alex Hawkins), I managed to miss yet another performance just over a week ago - so, since I resumed blogging. You couldn't make this up. But yep, while I was taking far too long over a post about the '84 band, B. himself was in London, playing with his New Acoustic Quartet under the auspices of the London Jazz Festival (and on a double-bill with Henry Threadgill, what's more). It would be quite easy to give up hope altogether, upon realising that: it's as if I have slipped into some awful parallel universe where everything goes wrong, all chances are squandered, all effort thwarted - and every so often the universe just makes a point of rubbing my nose in it. 

And yet...

... although I did not know it at the time, I was somehow synchronised with the maestro, intensely focused on his music while he was onstage. There is still a connection. 

Now, the parallel-universe-where-everything-went-south idea is far from limited to my trivial meanderings (and underachievements). Braxton has always worked from a starting point, not of (merely) creating music, but of striving to make the world a better place. His musical strategies are extensions of his philosophy, and the energetic matrices which support the soundscapes his groups create are consciously designed to foster positive vibrations, enhancing human experience. Music to save the world... but wait, look at it. The world seems to be poised, a fraction of an inch away from irremediable ruin. B's music, in turn, actually does enrich the lives of a small number of people who allow it to touch them; but they form a vanishingly minuscule drop in an ocean of indifference. Even that would not necessarily matter: the hermit who lives in a cave on the far side of a mountain may yet hold in his or her hands secret levers which invisibly move distant engines; power does not need to be seen in order to make itself felt. But where, then, is this influence felt? More than ever before, it seems, the world's dwindling resources are controlled by a tiny minority of plutocrats who cannot see past the immediate expediency of the next moment. The planet might yet survive, but, surely, only by purging itself of the race which has failed so egregiously in its stewardship thereof.

And yet...

... I still breathe, and where I breathe there is life, and with life, hope. I could allow my inner gaze to focus exclusively on the damage inflicted, the gathering dark; but the massing of the dark only concentrates the light and makes it burn brighter. I choose instead to train my gaze on that which I can encompass and control: this present moment, in my own consciousness. I locate the seed of hope and nurture it.

Others may yet do the same. And they must choose whatever focus helps them in nurturing that seed; for myself, I am fortunate to have a number of such things. Among these blessings, none is greater than this man's music, and the knowledge of the fierce joy it brings to those who play it. I contact this joy when I listen... and thus is the downward spiral reversed. 

22-11-2022 

If you only watch one video...

 ... that is to say, if you only watch one Braxton-related video clip, located on Youtube, recommended by this monomaniac blog, this year - make sure it's this one. 

Yes, I did promise to write about Thumbscrew next (and I will), but all these great pieces of video footage keep showing up on Youtube - I'm not even looking for them - and almost immediately after I posted the "duo stuff" thing last night, I came across something which may be somewhat famous * for all I know, but which I have never seen before: a nearly-fifteen-minute excerpt from a filmed concert in (purportedly) Antwerp in August 1985**, a trio with George Lewis and Mark Dresser. If that sounds as if it could be incredible (and will therefore turn out not to be), well, it actually is. 

B. and Lewis have "form" when it comes to this sort of thing: I still remember babbling hysterically about the '82 Pisa trio with Derek Bailey when I first encountered it; once I'd calmed down a bit I posted about the same concert in these very pages... (a little later down the line the same concert - in expanded form, I think - ended up being published on TCF as an official "Braxton Bootleg"). So this is not the only chance to hear the two hornmen in a trio improv setting - although of course it's still great to be able to see them as well. But to be able to watch them interact with Dresser, himself very much still learning how to get to grips with being B's regular bassist at this point: that's just invaluable and man, the clip doesn't disappoint in the slightest. There is an absolutely astonishing bass solo towards the end of the clip in which MD sounds at times as if he is two or even three musicians playing simultaneously - it's great to see Lewis still moving to the pulse of the music throughout, despite having laid out at this point. This is obviously the kind of little "cherry on top" which you can never get from an audio recording. (B. himself, mind you, appears to be locked away in his own expansive world even while Lewis is grooving.)

The fact that the performance was professionally filmed would tend to suggest that there must be more of this footage, and in due course I shall have a hunt for it. In the meantime, for all I know everyone else - anyone who might even accidentally find themselves reading these lines - may well already be familiar with this excerpt, but if you're not - do yourself a huge favour and check it out at once!

***

Further confusion surrounds the "ringer" clip from the Braxton/Frith duo recording (as previously described in the fifth para of yesterday's post). I already warned that Soundohm's samples for that release include a clip from something completely different; when I'd finished writing - just before I was gifted the trio video raved about above - I discovered that the Youtube index for the fifth piece on the album is actually this same "intruder clip", lasting just over three minutes. Quite clearly it has nothing to do with the duo concert: even though the core recording sounds as it might involve live playing over a tape or similar (which is what led me to think it might possibly be an Echo Echo Mirror House excerpt), there is a live drummer on this and a live trumpeter (not THB) too. What's more, a quick check of the timings for the official release reveals that the last section of the music is just over eight minutes long. God knows what happened here, or which website originated the mistake (and how the hell nobody noticed that what they were posting as a duo recording couldn't possibly be anything of the sort) - but just be aware. I have not been able to find the fifth segment of the duo concert on Youtube yet, although the first four chunks are all there. It's not the first time I've had to explain some anomaly with a recording posted on that channel, is it? Dear oh dear. Never mind, four out of five is still decidedly better than nothing at all...

* Calling a creative music event "famous" is a bit like calling a politician honest - not a literal contradiction in terms, but not far off...

** The clip itself, which for once has actually got plenty of views - more than thirteen thousand in nine years - has no information with it, not even the personnel, so that this sort of thing had to get sorted out in the comments section (as is so often the case). Viewer Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg provided the missing details, though not the exact date. I wonder if I have this recording in my collection of tapes..?

Some duo stuff (... and other stuff)

 

Even though I'm trying to write about (some) matters in more detail, not every post has to be like that... right? So this one is really just a pointer to some things that are out there...

Back at the beginning of September, on the verge of moving house, I first mentioned on here my having listened to the new release Duet (Other Minds) 2021, with James Fei. I had just listened to the music online; the actual CD was not technically even released yet (although I think it was out the following day). [At time of writing, and to the best of my knowledge, this is actually the only new release under Braxton's name this year. Times are hard.]

In that same post I linked to another site, Soundohm, because in its listing for the CD it gives more detail than I could find anywhere else: specifically, it provided a name for the new musical model employed by B. for this piece, Composition 429. The new system is called Lorraine (apparently). As it turns out, all this same info is available on the Other Minds webstore page linked above: everything on the Soundohm page, including the false identification* of the electronics as "Diamond Curtain Wall", was taken directly from Other Minds. (Whether that wasn't the case on 1st September, or I just somehow missed it, cannot now be established with any certainty. Ahem.) And don't bother trying to order the CD from Soundohm either because it shows as sold out. However, they do list various other Braxton goodies on there. The Bologna Duo with Jacqui Kerrod is available, and they are also still listing copies of the 1995 album Two Lines with David Rosenboom; what's more, they list as available a CD which commands rather higher prices elsewhere, the Victoriaville duo concert with Fred Frith. As it happens I don't (yet) have any of these recordings in my collection, but the one with Frith caught my eye in particular as it's one I have always especially wanted to get.

Frith is a player far better known to many others than he is to me: in truth I only came to know of him in the first place via John Zorn, who cast the British guitarist as a bass guitarist in his group Naked City. Much later I discovered that Frith had a long career already behind him playing experimental rock and that kind of thing; but (more than) thirty years after I first heard Torture Garden, I still basically only know FF in connection with Zorn, really**. Nevertheless he has always impressed me any time I've heard him. On the face of it, he didn't seem a natural playing partner for B. - but then since when did that ever stop anybody, in the predictably-unpredictable world of free improv..? (Nobody expected B. to play with Wolf Eyes, either, but that same Victoriaville Festival in 2005 saw precisely that meeting.) Somehow, though, this recording never fell into my lap and it was only very recently that I heard any of it. 

The Soundohm page includes some samples, although caveat auditor: four of these appear to be provided, but the fourth has nothing to do with this release (if it is a Braxton recording at all - which it might be - it must presumably be an excerpt from the EEMHM album, yet another Victoriaville release - albeit this time not from their festival as such). Rather jarringly, even if one plays clip 1 it will then segue without warning into clip 4, bypassing 2 and 3 completely (these are from the duo meeting with Frith). Still, between those first three clips it is possible to get a pretty fair idea of how strong this meeting must have been. There's nothing essentially new or surprising on there, that I heard; B. does what B. does, in various moods, and Frith supplies expert and intriguing backing. (At least some of the pieces are available in full on Youtube; I can't work this out because the first and second tracks, for sure, are posted via the AB channel I've mentioned before (virtually passim in September's posts); but the reason I hadn't noticed that before is that if you go to the actual channel page, these pieces don't show there..? not gonna mess my head up too much trying to get to the bottom of that one.) Actually, I am listening to these full pieces right now and they sound fucking amazing. The sheer multiplicity of Frith's approaches to guitar playing seems to bring out a particularly inspired performance from B., or possibly B's renowned virtuosity brings out the best in FF, or... more likely, both of them have reputations which rather precede them and they both made certain to bring their "A game" to the stage. (Not that B. ever really brings anything less... maybe we should think in his case more in terms of his "A game" and his "A+ game", I dunno...)

I do have to get this recording, sooner rather than later. If I end up buying it from Soundohm, I will report back on how that goes***. [They do also have some other stuff showing as still in stock, although they also list plenty of stuff which is out of stock, rather unhelpfully; the sextet from Victoriaville '05 is available at time of writing, as is yet another Victoriaville event, the solo concert from 2017. They also seem to have copies still of the 4CD-set Old Dogs with Gerry Hemingway. (Honestly, trying to keep up with all this stuff is practically a full-time job... )]

***

More duos: I recently came across a listing on Youtube for a reading of B's Comp. 305 by Payton MacDonald and Gideon Forbes. Neither name was familiar to me, but MacDonald is evidently a percussionist and Forbes a reedman, although it's posted on the former's channel (which sort of makes it look as if it was his idea, etc). I had to hunt first of all for where - if anywhere - I had come across that particular opus number before; and eventually I located it, on the album which B. cut with his heir apparent in 2002. I don't own a hard copy of that one, but I do have the mp3 files, so I dug out the original (?) version of Comp. 305 - which presumably, then, is specifically a duet on the score - and earmarked it for listening, the idea being that I would attempt to make some sort of comparison between the two renditions. This, however, proved beyond me for the time being; which is to say, I could probably do it, but the result very probably wouldn't be worth reading. The version with THB is dense, absolutely beautiful (of course), but covers a lot of ground - and there is some collaging, as Comp. 44 is worked in there at some point, as well as some "language improvisation"; the recent interpretation - which has been up for about a year or so and has rather fewer than 150 views, at time of writing - looks to be a faithful reading of Comp. 305 only, straight from the score... although even that is somewhat perplexing, as I couldn't help noticing that when MacDonald turns the page on his music, Forbes doesn't; very possibly, the written score for this piece has different materials for the two players - ? The vibraphonist turns the page as early as forty-four seconds into the piece, and at around 8.30, he turns it again, but appears to go back to the page he was on originally. Forbes, as far as I could see, doesn't turn any pages at all although he does seem to have a wider set of pages on his music stand to begin with, so maybe he just has all his sheets laid out at once... who knows. Playing soprano sax here, Forbes appears to follow the score very closely - although it's quite hard to work out how he can possibly have more than ten minutes' worth of notated music in front of him at one time. What do I know? Both of them play gorgeously on this, I can say that much; Forbes in particular - given that he has the unenviable task of replicating the maestro's part on soprano - really gives a great performance, and overall both of them fully commit to the music. It definitely deserves more attention than it's been getting, but (again) such is the lot of the serious artist, in our world of reality TV and shallow celebrity culture - and for that matter, such is specifically the lonely lot of the Braxton interpreter, since MacDonald's Youtube channel has rather more than three times as many subscribers as this particular video has views... 

... it definitely needs some love, and I haven't completely abandoned the idea of trying to do a comparison piece; that's just more ambitious than I thought, at first. Something for the future, then... in the meantime, I am going to stop teasing McClintic Sphere and write about Thumbscrew, at long last..!

* DCW, just to clarify this point, is a musical model unique to B. It entails small-group playing over interactive electronic backing, the software for which was called SuperCollider (if I remember correctly). The write-up for Comp. 429 online wrongly assumes that Diamond Curtain Wall was the actual software itself and hence further assumes that the electronic backing for the recent performance uses the same application. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't... but either way the resulting music is not DCW.

** Frith duetted with JZ for one of the latter's 50th birthday concerts - one of the ten or twelve (? can't remember offhand) which were deemed good enough for official release. He also played in the quartet with JZ, Bill Laswell and Dave Lombardo which is retroactively known to collectors as Bladerunner - although as far as I know the band was never billed as such. It certainly wasn't when I saw them, at the Barbican in London more than twenty years ago now. (It was a memorable concert for various reasons, but I do remember being fascinated by the range of sounds conjured up by FF.)

*** We all know how my last foray into the world of online-shopping-from-untried-sources went. Soundohm gives the impression of being quite well established at this sort of thing, and tempts the potential buyer with the idea of becoming a member and getting free shipping; what that actually means, though, is paying 60 euros a year for membership - and shipping is only free if you're buying at least 140 euros' worth of stuff. OK, shan't be doing that, then... but I may well end up ordering something from them, so wish me luck..!

The not-quite-there quartet

 

I had been thinking quite a bit recently about the Prague '84 quartet concert, intending to dig it out and play it - I don't own a proper "hard copy" of this CD, but I do have a CD-r that a friend burned for me, back in the days when I was actively collecting as much of B's stuff as I could get my hands on* - but hadn't yet got round to that when, lo and behold, an obliging Youtuber stuck it up online. 

Before I get to the specifics of this actual concert, then, we have to get the "frame story" out of the way...

These days, where B's name is known at all, it is probably fair to say that it's associated quite strongly with GTM in particular, and with some of the other later developments in his music/thought system; so that we may already have passed the time when jazzheads would talk of his "great quartet" as if that marked the pinnacle of his music (... and all downhill from there; mind you, some older jazzheads - not so many of those guys left these days - would try to tell you that nothing B. recorded after the 70s is really worth hearing... all that means of course is that they stopped paying attention at that point). Nonetheless, the mid-80s band retains a definite cachet among the better-informed creative music listeners out there, and when we look back from where we are now, it's very easy to see that the quartet with Crispell, Dresser and Hemingway was a band in which B. invested a great deal of time and effort - and one which rewarded him with special performances, resulting in a number of very special recordings. There's even a book about them! Graham Lock's justly-celebrated Forces in Motion details the band's 1985 UK tour, just in case anyone is not already aware of that marvellous book; for obvious reasons, that line-up is sometimes known as the Forces in Motion Quartet. - Hence, the appearance in the discography of this "prequel" line-up, with Crispell and Hemingway already in place but John Lindberg still holding down the bass chair, inevitably has the feel of a band on the verge of becoming a classic group, but not quite there yet. Wouldn't it have been nice and neat if that line-up had been convened all at once, out of nowhere, as it were? But of course life seldom works out like that... and in this case, the band came together gradually, with all the lines blurred as B. continued to develop his musical strategies and (in particular) to redefine the possibilities of what his core working group, his creative ensemble, could do.

Back in 1979, the working group - the creative ensemble, for which the extended composition books were written** - comprised Ray Anderson, Lindberg and Thurman Barker. It seems likely that B. would have known Barker (who is only a few years younger) for a while, but in any case, the first appearance I can find for any of these three players in the discography was, as it happens, the same one for all three of them: the 1978 expanded-and-enhanced Creative Orchestra (Köln) 1978 - largely an all-star affair, which the more famous 1976 version hadn't been, really - features Anderson as one of three trombonists, Lindberg as one of two bassists and (of course) Barker on drums and percussion. This album was recorded on May 12th; B. played again with Barker - and six other percussionists*** - on Roscoe Mitchell's "The Maze", recorded on July 27th (and subsequently released as one of four side-long pieces on a Mitchell album for Nessa), but there is a notable quartet-shaped hole in the Braxton discography for 1978, although I'm absolutely sure that I remember reading somewhere# that Lindberg was already in the band at that point. In order to find the next instalments of this continuing story - the continuous development of B's small groups, as well as his writing for same - we have to skip forward to 1979, as I say: specifically, to September 1st at the Willisau J.F., and to a typically superb performance captured for release a couple of years later (and subsequent reissue a trio of times after that). The (fairly) well-known studio album by the same quartet - Seven Compositions 1978 - was actually recorded in November 1979 and released in 1980; the Moers people have a bit of a habit of being less than scrupulous with their dates. (This album, like others on Moers Music, has never been reissued on CD.)

The next small-group recording we have under B's name dates from early in the new decade## - a concert in Bologna, April 20th 1980, released (much) later as Composition No. 94 For Three Instrumentalists (1980) - sees the maestro accompanied by Anderson, yes, but with no conventional rhythm section at all; rather, the third player is guitarist James Emery - this being the sort of trio instrumentation not really seen since the days of Jimmy Giuffre. [The relevance of this to the matter in hand is to demonstrate how B's approach to the creative ensemble books only ever constitutes one aspect of the music(s) with which he is actively involved at any given time.] Once again, whatever configuration the regular, working group had in 1980 is not recorded by way of the official discography; and things don't necessarily get much clearer in 1981, but in January of that year, we do see the first appearance of Marilyn Crispell. Again, this is not a working group, but a one-off line-up for a specific piece of music: Composition 98. Anderson is once again included, and B. "borrowed" Hugh Ragin from Mitchell; as excellent a success as this endeavour was, over the next year or so we get no suggestion that Crispell will be continuing to work with B's groups. Indeed the next drink from the creative-ensemble well (recorded over two days in October '81, released '82) sees a completely different line-up again: Mark Helias had actually been a member of B's group before, in 1977; but that's really a red herring, since at this point B. is basically just using Anthony Davis' rhythm section, including Davis himself. Either there was no working group at this stage, or for whatever reason, B. chose not to take it into the studio for this date; the results are so fabulous that however it came about, we can all be suitably grateful for the way things turned out###. 

OK, so... you get the idea: there is no clear-cut continuity as regards the core quartet during this period. - Or, at least, if there was then that's not - yet - reflected in the official discography: where B. was getting the chance to do recording sessions, he was using these either for special projects, or for one-off line-ups (sometimes both). In 1982, he cuts a duo album with Lindberg; it's tempting to say that this itself implies the latter had a certain degree of familiarity with B's music at this stage, but it doesn't necessarily indicate anything of the sort. Really, we have to wait until the following year again for the definitive evidence of Lindberg's continued involvement: Four Compositions (Quartet) 1983 is clearly the latest instalment of the working group's on-off narrative, Lindberg and George Lewis are both back in place, and we finally now get the first appearance of Gerry Hemingway. Obviously, with this two-horn instrumentation, we are nonetheless some way removed from what will later be considered the "great quartet"... ultimately, regardless of what may have been going on in the undocumented background, as far as the official recorded output is concerned we don't get our first look at the prototype for the "Forces" group until 1984. In September of that year, a quartet with Crispell, Lindberg and Hemingway goes into the studio to lay down some brand-new stuff; the following month, the same group is out on the road in Europe, unveiling (some of) the same material... and that, finally, is where we came in.

In retrospect, we can see 1983-4 as a watershed period. The 1983 quartet with Lewis features one (lengthy) new piece and three from the fourth creative ensemble book, which latter pieces had presumably been kicking around in one form or another for some time; Lewis is a familiar partner-in-crime by this point, whilst Lindberg represents a sort of continuity at least (we know he has been around B's music since 1979 at the latest, even if his presence in the band(s) has been far from constant), and Hemingway is a completely new presence. The instrumentation itself is a throwback to the working group from the mid-seventies, but the approach is rather new and Comp. 105a, at any rate, is a very different type of territory from anything which we would have heard (at least from the quartet) during 1974-6. Significantly, 1983 also marks the point at which B's album covers begin to list both the graphic titles and the opus numbers together. The definitive switch occurs when Lewis - who was probably only ever "moonlighting", rather than (re)joining as such - is replaced by Crispell, whose multi-linear approach to her instrument finally opens up for B. a whole new dimension to the small-group music he is writing at this point, offering a set of possibilities which he didn't have when he was composing with two single-line instruments in mind. Yes, he has worked with pianists before on his small-group music, but always on a "special guest" basis. I don't know when it became clear that Crispell was actually staying put for a while - in 1981 she was almost certainly hired for that one specific gig (which just happened to encompass a studio recording as well as at least one live rendition of the same piece^) - but with her in the band, B. can now start thinking in a subtly different way. How important Hemingway was to this approach may or may not have been immediately obvious. As for Lindberg, at the very least B. must have felt that the bassist's training and experience gave him enough of a thorough grounding to be able to participate in this increasingly-complex new direction he was going to take. The collage phase is not yet fully up and running, but all the elements which contributed to it are already in place, now; or are they..?

So we finally arrive in Prague. The germination of the collage approach is already underway, albeit at this prototypical stage that consists solely in the addition of pulse tracks to a couple of the pieces: these are the same hybrids which were already worked out in the studio, which is to say Comp. 110a (+108b) and Comp 114 (+108a). This is just the leading edge of an experiment which will preoccupy B's compositional mind for the next seven or eight years, even while he is working on other strategies (and doubtless glimpsing yet further ones); but having said that, although the track listings may only show these two tiny additions, Crispell is already taking the music in that direction, her incredible extended solo on the Prague reading of Comp. 105a being so far-out that (certainly as far as the audience of the time is concerned) she might as well have been playing a completely different piece from the rest of the band. Perhaps this had already been discussed between them, and perhaps not; either way, Crispell - who was (of course) formatively influenced by Cecil Taylor - has a natural tendency to play in such a way as to suggest plural, parallel musical ideas unfolding (at least when she really gets going^^); and this makes her the perfect vehicle for what B. goes on to do next. Hemingway, too, sounds so naturally suited to the resulting complex territory that it's impossible to imagine anyone could have provided a better fit. And Lindberg..? Well... actually no, this isn't quite true of him, although I doubt that even the most switched-on listener, or the harshest critic, would have really concluded that at the time.

Coming back to this album as I did - immediately after immersing myself in the ZIM septet - I was struck at first by how simple this music sounds by comparison (not, one suspects, an impression that the 1984 audience had of it). Recognisable compositions, played one after another! and so on. But even then, it took only a few minutes before the impression of simplicity was dispelled: once Crispell is properly warmed up, the music becomes essentially complex (as well as vibrant and exciting - but those qualities are very often found in B's music, of any vintage). The rapturous applause which breaks out at around 18 minutes^^^, when the piano solo finishes, gives some indication of how stunning the effect must have been on those witnessing this. In any case, this post is not the place for a detailed analysis of the music played in the concert: simple-by-comparison-with-later-developments, and complex-in-its-own-right, the music is just pure pleasure to listen to from start to finish. Lindberg, continually busy and creative in his own way, absolutely plays a part in this; still, I am not listening to the music with the ears of one who was present at the time, but with a very different and vastly-more-informed perspective (this is not arrogance, but rather a helpless acknowledgement of how much of B's later music I have already heard before I returned to this recording). I can hear the extent to which Crispell and Hemingway both sound ideally suited to the long-term experiment which is beginning here; and I can't avoid hearing the extent to which Dresser will later complement them, in a way Lindberg cannot. Above all, it's the latter's arco technique, which is idiosyncratic and creative, but lacking in the authority of Holland (and Helias) before him, and has nowhere near the majestic control which Dresser would later bring... I still don't know exactly what happened in Amsterdam, a little later down the line - so that a first set played by a quartet was followed by a second played by a trio, the bass present on the stage while its owner sat at the bar, having been summarily fired in the interval; but with hindsight, it can be seen how essential that was to the eventual development of the music. Dresser, in Europe on a scholarship to study privately with one of the Italian masters, would prove to be a fourth virtuoso to match the other three; Lindberg, for all his undoubted talents, can only suffer by direct comparison.

But... that's still in the future at this point: like I say, taken just as a listening experience on its own merits, this concert offers any friendly experiencer an hour of sophisticated delight. Lindberg plays his part, and the knowledge that he wouldn't be around for much longer need not obscure that. 

***

Kobe Van Cauwenberghe's Ghost Trance Septet album, you'll be pleased to hear, is every bit as brilliant as I hoped it would be...

* ... back in the "golden age of music blogging", i.e. sometime around 2007. Of course, I am actively collecting again now - but official releases only, having quite enough to work with in general, and no present need to solicit copies of anything (much)... in case anyone is wondering, I don't feel guilty about having pirated copies of any of this stuff, nor would B. expect me to.

** Even B. himself has been known to refer to the 6 series, the 23 series etc as "the quartet music", but as I have written before - in these pages, years ago - they weren't written for quartet as such; rather, they represent music for "the creative ensemble", which in this case happened to be (usually) a quartet. Nuance ;-)

*** The piece was for eight percussionists; only two of the ones on the recording - Barker and (Famoudou) Don Moye, were actually percussionists, i.e. in their "day jobs". Mitchell himself, Braxton, Joseph Jarman and Malachi Favors (like Moye, cohorts of Mitchell's from the Art Ensemble of Chicago), Douglas Ewart and Henry Threadgill were the other six.

# Actually I'm pretty sure this was gleaned from one of the books of Composition Notes, but they are not precisely accessible at present (even though I know exactly where they are)...

## Since I allow full licence to my own pedantry in these parts - indeed, I insist upon it - I feel compelled to note that technically the year 1980 was of course the final year of the seventies, not the first year of the eighties. But nobody actually counts that way, do they?

### The Antilles album Six Compositions: Quartet is a personal favourite of mine. It also happens to be the only opportunity, as far as I know, to hear Ed Blackwell playing on a Braxton record.

^ I'm pretty sure there were several live performances of Composition 98, not just the one which appeared on the original double album (... and which has never been reissued on CD). But I can't be arsed to check right now.

^^ When leading her own dates, and playing her own compositions, Marilyn Crispell can be a much more simple, lyrical player (though I daresay that's not always the case). Put her in fast company, playing other people's music, and she transforms into a completely different beast. (Or so it has always seemed to me.)

^^^ Timing is from the Youtube video, rather than the CD (which has separate indexations for the festival announcer's spoken intro and for the uninterrupted set).