Sense Goes To the Moon

 

I wasn't having a good evening at all; it had been a very trying afternoon at work, and just before I called it a day, I got some - you can't even really call it bad news, but that's how I took it, and everything went downhill from there. The clocks have just gone back here - so it was already almost dark when I finished for the day; it was pouring with rain - again - and I was thoroughly cold and miserable. I wasn't doing anybody any good with my presence, so I withdrew upstairs and tried unsuccessfully to get warm: but my extremities were just frozen now, and all my attempts at insulation achieved was keeping the cold in. 

And lo... I spent fifty-seven minutes in the company of the Syntactical Ghost Trance 12tet... and I emerged transformed. This is a true story.

***

I have thought quite a bit recently about why my reactions to Syntactical Ghost Trance Music should be so different from my reactions to B's operatic works - which I still can't seem to befriend... this year has seen me take in a great deal of new (to me) music from B's massive oeuvre, including a very sizeable proportion of the NBH material; but I've only really dipped a toe into the Trillium seas, and didn't (yet) go any further. I couldn't - I can't - penetrate it. Out of all his music, only this and (arguably) the solo piano music remain too difficult for me to get inside - and the solo piano music is still something I can at least listen to, albeit sparingly. The opera - it doesn't help of course that I couldn't stand opera to begin with. I have very limited experience of it, and that's basically the way I planned to keep it... of course this is the maestro's opera, and that makes a big difference - in theory, anyway: in practice, I don't seem to be able to get into it yet. It also doesn't help that - unlike my colleague McClintic Sphere - I've never seen any of it performed, and the glimpse of it that is provided in the recent film by Kyoko Kitamura suggests that watching it performed is the only way to go, really. 

It needn't be a huge surprise to anyone who's read any of my blathering over the years that I would struggle with (creative) vocal music, even when B. is writing it. But this does not seem to apply to SGTM at all. On the contrary, I find this absolutely delightful - and always have, from the first time I heard it performed. Here, though, the human voice is above all just being deployed as another instrument - even when it is being used to utter identifiable phonemes. Because of the increase in my daily workload recently, I have found less time for exploring new music, and have thus far only got halfway through the giant 12-disc set which documents these works; but the ones I have heard have all proved extremely enjoyable, something I can't yet say about the operatic works. Still, the next opus on the list happened to be Comp. 254 - which is both much featured in KK's brilliant video, and unusually replete with segments of actual text. (Some of this is almost certainly from the full libretto of Comp. 173, some of it may be from 172 or 174; some of it presumably must derive from one or more of the operas themselves..?) Would this prove more challenging for me than any of the previous five readings..?

- But the answer is: no, apparently not. In this context, even written text given voice proves no more challenging to my ears than any of the other utterances to be found here - and these are many and varied, to say the least. The actual words are quite witty, of course - but then, this observation can just as readily be made on behalf of the operas, and that alone has not yet been enough to win me over. Here, though, the continual juxtaposition of non-verbal utterances with the scripted lines seems to frame the latter in a wider context which is completely unpredictable and joyously chaotic. For one specific example of this, you can zero in one the passage around 25.15 and onwards, when one of the male voices begins saying "I have a vision about this period in time" - a very Braxtonian phrase, right there - and this is met at once by the most extraordinary series of sucking/clicking/lip-smacking noises from one or more of the ensemble. The entire performance is basically like this: from one moment to the next, you really have no idea where the music is going to take you. It is crazy - in the best possible way. I hadn't listened to all of the other pieces through headphones - indeed, until very recently I had gone for a number of years without really using headphones at all  - but I did hear this piece that way, and didn't even attempt to give my attention to anything else while I was playing it. Just the number of times I laughed out loud with delighted amazement... The time more or less flew by, whilst simultaneously being crammed full of movement and detail - 

- and it is true, long before the end of the piece I felt so much better. In all honesty, I am sure I knew deep down that this was likely to be the case, and had denied myself for as long as I did out of nothing so much as bloody-minded self-sabotage; but in any case, I was sensible enough not to keep denying myself indefinitely, and once I started, there was no stopping. By halfway through the piece, I had even warmed up at last*. The rest of the night, and the following day, had a completely different complexion from what would have been inflicted on me otherwise. Braxton saves! Hallebloodylujah, and happy halloween! 😈

* This is not an exaggeration at all, so I had probably better attempt to explain it - lest it sound as if I am actually trying to impute quasi-miraculous powers to this stuff. The music alone did not warm me up physically: rather, what it did was lift my spirits out of a locked-in, "poor me" state of determined misery and into a far more open state - in which the qi could flow freely, and the blood could follow. That would be my reading of it, anyway. Whatever the mechanism, my feet in particular had been frozen cold for hours by this point and I couldn't get properly comfortable at all. Within thirty minutes that changed completely, without my noticing at first (too absorbed in the music). 

Oh, and yes, this is of course yet another interim trifle until such time as I get my act together to write about Comp. 136... but fuck it, this felt as if it was worth saying :)

Repertoire: The Locals

 

The Locals Play the Music of Anthony Braxton (Discus, 2021)

I never saw these guys live, but I eventually talked to several people who did; everyone remembered their (sporadic) performances very fondly - and rumour had it that B. himself was a big fan. A project of the maverick British keyboardist Pat Thomas*, The Locals had a unique shtick: they played exclusively Braxton's compositions, but played them as if they were jazz-funk numbers. Or something like that, anyway: I don't know exactly what the band's original self-imposed remit was, but it evidently did involve electric instrumentation, and repetitive and groove-based rhythmic vamps.

When I first heard about this, I had to admit it did sound pretty cool. The idea that anyone would use this outrageous formula as the foundation for a live band is, after all, utterly and irresistibly charming. Unfortunately I discovered that in practice, the approach can be somewhat problematic, even (arguably) self-defeating: the very nature of the material's recontextualisation leads to an inevitable smoothing-off of (most if not all of) the music's jagged edges. As soon as I listened to the band for the first time**, this presented a major problem for me; indeed at the time it seemed to be an insuperable problem, and in my own mind at least - and therefore in the half-(in)formed opinions which I spouted on the old BBC R3 messagebored - I wrote off the band completely as an experiment doomed to failure. 

This was still the case when I first exchanged emails with Alexander Hawkins (yep, him again***), back in... whenever it was exactly#: Alex mentioned how much he enjoyed the band and that he had some great recordings of them; I responded that (... as detailed above). He obviously had quite a personal connection to the band, being very close to bassist Dom Lash in particular - and given that Lash seemed to me to exemplify the problem (in practice) with the band's approach, that didn't precisely win me over, but it did at least give me some real pause for thought, since it was so obvious that AH knew his stuff and also was genuinely interested in B's music. But then, I never got to hear these recordings that he was so fond of, and months and years passed, and...

... and eventually this album came out##, and by the time it did, I had warmed to the idea enough to stick it on a "wants list", though I still didn't buy it straight away. It didn't take me too long, though. 

***

The album was recorded live in Austria, at the Nickelsdorf Konfrontationen Festival in 2006. (No more precise date than that is provided with the CD, but the festival website confirms that this concert took place on the Friday night, i.e. 14th July.) The following pieces were played:

Comp. 40b

Comp. 6c

Comp. 115

Comp. 23b

Comp. 6i

Comp. 23g

- although there is some doubt as to whether this was, in fact, the entire set###. Besides Thomas and Lash, the band comprised clarinet wizard Alex Ward, guitarist Evan Thomas (who may or may not be related - anyone?) and drummer Darren Hasson-Davis.

The CD itself is pretty nicely put together, to be fair (whatever one might think of the Kandinsky-cum-Klee-cum-Miró cover art courtesy of Mark Browne): some actual thought has gone into it, and some effort at making a product which somebody might actually want to buy. There are no photos of the band as such, only a smallish one of Thomas - which is fair enough: it was his brainchild, after all - and three larger ones of the maestro: one (recent) full-panel shot in colour, with our man looking intensely off into a distance nobody else can see, as is his wont; and two half-panel b&w shots. These are presented as "then" and "now" portraits of B. taming the seamonster, a nice idea which gives some real character to the physical product. (The earlier shot is probably from the '70s or early '80s; the later one is of much more recent vintage. Full photo credits are given, as well as the basic recording and mastering info.)

The band's logo - shown inside, and on the disc - is a cool creation (even if it does slightly resemble some sort of '80s clothing emporium...), riffing on B's own diagrams and schematics. (We're not told who came up with this.) The track listing may seem unnecessarily spaced, occupying as it does an entire inside panel; but this in fact allows the label to do what some others don't, i.e. present the titular diagrams large enough to be worth showing. The actual disc is tucked away inside one of those panels, and another nice touch is that it comes inside a protective plastic envelope^. All in all, it's quite a pleasing album to own and I certainly don't regret buying it.

***

Did the music win me over, after all this time? Basically, yes - though I still have some reservations about it. I certainly shan't undertake a track-by-track analysis here, mainly because most of the pieces follow a very similar pattern: often beginning with a brief (completely free) intro featuring just some of the band, the music quickly settles into a groove laid down by the (electric) bass and drums, giving no clue which number is about to be unveiled; Ward will then start to reveal this, while the leader provides an accompaniment entirely devoid of conventional harmony, and the guitar fits in where it can. (In some of its noisier moments, the guitar actually threatens to drown out the clarinet; the live engineer is not credited, and you can make of that what you will^^.) As the pieces progress, the bass and drums remain completely locked-in, while the other three players provide the actual movement. Lash's role in particular is fairly thankless, though I imagine he still had some fun playing in this band.

Ward - as anyone familiar with him will not need to be told - is a brilliant player, one of the most creative clarinet specialists since the late John Carter; and Thomas manages to furnish support which cleaves closely to the rhythm of whatever theme is being played, while smashing the harmonic structure to smithereens; but as anarchic as this sounds, he does it in a manner which always sounds completely controlled and deliberate. These two players between them are responsible for almost all of the actual music being played, on a bar-by-bar basis; Evan Thomas contributes to the overall sound without necessarily playing anything very memorable. Of course, the band's ethos being as it is, all five of the players are essential to the formula; and as limited as the roles are which are assigned to the bass and the drums, this could not be done without them.

There are some specifics which are worth highlighting. In all cases, the themes are eventually spelled out by Ward in some way utterly unlike any previous recordings of the pieces being played; in the case of 6c, one of B's "circus marches", the spacing of the written line both tessellates neatly with the wacka-wacka rhythmic groove, and captures somehow the intrinsic spirit of the original theme. 23b, meanwhile, is slowed right down and rendered almost unrecognisable, in a way which really has to be heard to be believed; here, the original spirit of the theme is transmuted into something else altogether, but it is nonetheless pretty clever and creative. Anyone who knows the material reasonably well will find plenty to hold their attention while listening to these readings. (Anyone who is not paying close attention might struggle to recognise 23b even once the theme is fully underway.)

6i, an old favourite of mine from way back, is given a reggae-flavoured lilt to complement the '70s-porno-movie guitar, and although as always it's Ward who picks out the written theme, (Pat) Thomas himself provides much of the actual movement on this number, even though (Evan) Thomas and Ward do get stuck in during the second half. The leader here, playfully joins in with the theme, even though all he is really joining in with is the rhythmic figure, "playing the theme" in such a radically reharmonised manner that it almost makes Misha Mengelberg's approach to the Parker Project seem conventional by comparison. It is, however, very exciting to listen to and - as noted above - never sounds remotely haphazard. 

The piece which I was most curious to hear when I first bought the album is Comp. 115: this, for those who don't recognise the opus number, is B's "accordion-time" piece, originally rendered in such a way that the tempo continually accelerates and decelerates as the theme progresses. The problem here is surely obvious: given the essential nature of the source material, the approach taken by this band does not so much constitute a reimagining of the piece as just a simplification of it, removing from the work precisely the element which made it unusual in the first place. However, when I came to listen to it with open ears, I realised that this element has not actually been stripped away at all; it's just that only Ward gives voice to it, while the rest of the band remain locked into their unchanging groove. As the theme develops, the clarinet does indeed begin to introduce the accelerandi and rallentandi which characterise the original composition, and the fact that he is able to do this while all around him remains fixed in time is a testament to how much care and thought actually went into this project. The leader, again, is so thoroughly out that he provides the perfect contrast to the enforced stability of the backing players. This piece, along with the closing 23g - the prototype pulse-track, much collaged later on - seems a risky choice for this approach; but in both cases the overall rendition is so thoroughly and delightfully messed up that the band succeeds in making it work.

The blueprint, then, to sum up: the bass and drums provide the anchor, the clarinet fills in the melodic content as well as providing a great deal of the fire, and the piano and guitar counterbalance the rooted rhythms by demolishing the harmony. Thus, one could argue, whilst not playing B's music the way he would play it at all, they do end up covering its various bases - having a great deal of fun doing so, and treating the very appreciative audience to a generous dose of the same. I do still think that the formula has (quite obvious) limitations, and this was always going to be an occasional "festival band", but it has more going for it than I originally considered, for sure. When the time came, I did really enjoy listening to it, and it's an album I will be happy to play again from time to time. 

* I did actually see Thomas live once, though I had no idea who he was at the time, and it wasn't until years later that I figured it out... When I saw John Zorn play at the Barbican (with Fred Frith, Bill Laswell and Dave Lombardo - a band retroactively dubbed Bladerunner, though they were never billed as such at the time), the opening act was a trio led by Derek Bailey, plus two musicians whose names immediately disappeared from my memory: I only remembered that one played a keyboard, and the other turntables. Eventually I pieced together that it was none other than Thomas on the keys - and presumably Steve Noble on the decks (though I'm not quite so sure about that)...

** The only time I heard them, back in the day, was courtesy of three tracks broadcast by Jez Nelson (Jazz on 3). Even at the time I felt a bit ungrateful to be criticising an actual Braxton-rep band of all things, but it seemed to me on first acquaintance that the sacrifices entailed by the formula were too great to be worth making. I like to think I have mellowed out a bit since those days ;-)  As for the broadcast itself, see also ### below.

*** Hawkins was most recently mentioned here, of course.

# For some reason I don't seem to be able to find them right now, but there were two posts which date from this time: one in which I discussed a recording of Hawkins' group, which I had heard for the first time, making various erroneous conclusions about it; and a follow-up in which I detailed all the manifold ways in which I'd been wrong (the pianist having contacted me in the meantime - people sometimes did back then, the blogging scene being a lot more active in those days). I did look for them, but I'm not going to take all night over it. Dammit.

## The blurb went like this: Discus asked Pat Thomas which project or recording of his would he most like to see released - and naturally he said this one. That seemed like a pretty good vote of confidence, if true...

### Jazz on 3 played three tracks - which purported to come from this very same performance. Two of them are on this album: one, a reading of Comp. 23e, is not. The editing on the CD is quite close to being seamless, but if you pay very close attention, you can hear how, for example, track two and track three might be concealing something which was originally between them. (Why the full set was not released, one can only imagine; it's nothing to do with running time, but could of course be a familiar sad story of corrupted tape, etc.) Much to my irritation, not only can I not find those two posts mentioned in # above, I can't even put my hands on the CD-r which includes those three radio recordings - despite all the work I put in earlier this year. They can't have gone far, but... again, I'm not spending too long on this. In the meantime, I can't currently even confirm what the other two pieces broadcast actually were. {tt}

^ One problem with CD digipaks of this type is that, with the disc itself tucked away tightly inside a fold-out panel, sometimes it can be a right pain to get the fucking thing out without damaging it (or at the very least covering the laminate with fingerprints). Adding the plastic sleeve must jack up the cost a fraction - but it is a great boon to the consumer.

^^ Chances are, this signifies nothing at all beyond the fact that the information was not forthcoming at the time of eventual release. Given that the label didn't even nail down the precise date of the performance, we can't seriously expect them to have identified the sound man...

Doctores subtiles*

 

Abraham Adzinyah (sic) / Anthony Braxton - Duo (Wesleyan) 1994 (Leo 1995)

Anthony Braxton & Ben Opie - Duets (Pittsburgh) 2008 (OMP 2010)

Yes, this is another "placeholder" post - until such time as I get my head organised enough to deliver the analysis of Comp. 136 which I've repeatedly promised - but it does give me a chance both to revisit something I wrote about just over a year ago, and to put down in writing for the first time an observation which I have several times made (to myself).

Last September, in the middle of a house move (and also in the middle of a Braxton binge which went on for weeks, being after all long overdue), I wrote briefly about the (album of the) duo concert which B. gave at Wesleyan with the Ghanaian master percussionist properly known as Abraham K. Adzenyah (sometimes also credited as A. Kobena Adzenyah). At the time, I had just listened to the album - in two halves, on separate occasions - on Youtube, and such is the bewildering scale and variety of the maestro's discography that it took me almost thirteen months to get back to this recording; but this time I did get hold of the CD. It feels as if I am now hearing it properly for the first time; some of the subtlety present in the drumming, in particular, didn't really come across the first time. (I wasn't using headphones; one can't expect miracles...)

In that previous article, I said that I'd made the initial mistake of assuming that the percussionist must have been one of B's students, since that would usually be the case with a recording made at his (then) place of employment. But although I got that misconception straightened out in due course, I still hadn't realised the actual background to this concert: the percussionist wasn't present as some sort of "special guest" on a visit to the US; rather he, too, was on the music faculty at Wesleyan - and indeed his tenure may have been longer than B's own. (I only found this out very recently when double-checking the correct spelling of Adzenyah's name online: that took me to a post about how the university eventually honoured him with a building named after him, something I am pretty sure B. himself has not yet achieved.) I honestly can't remember now whence I gleaned the idea that "the concert was a special live performance, billed at the time as a highly unusual opportunity"; I wouldn't have just made that up, so I must have read it somewhere, but the hassles of moving must have distracted me sufficiently that I failed to cite my sources*. Anyway, I don't know how rare an opportunity it really was, given that at the time of the performance these two musicians were technically also work colleagues, but it certainly is an unusual item in B's vast discography...

... and it does draw from him some rather unusual playing. The opening section of the concert has B. on what is presumably a standard concert clarinet, but in response to the tribalistic percussion, he manages to make this sound almost like a shehnai; any friendly experiencer worth her or his salt would have no trouble recognising his voice within a few bars, but as the performance unfolds, he keeps coming up with things I wouldn't expect to hear from him. He does of course produce phrases and strategies which anyone familiar with his work would expect, but he also worries away at these melodic fragments or - cells, I suppose we might call them, phrases which other players might come out with on a regular basis, but which sound quite startling coming from this guy's horn. Needless to say, it works: more to the point, it works perfectly within the context, makes sense as an artistically-authentic response to the percussionist's patterns. Adzenyah himself demonstrates an ability to produce the subtlest of variations in rhythm, timbre and dynamics, remaining responsive and creative even while he lays down a beat which at times borders on the hypnotic. These two players may not seem, on the face of it, to make a natural pairing; but they shared both a degree of mastery and an affinity for fine distinctions. They had no trouble meeting somewhere in the middle.

It's not an album for which I made any detailed notes - actually it's been a pleasure just to listen to it, without the added pressure of analysing it in any real depth - and for that matter, when I said last year that it's unlike B's duets with Andrew Cyrille or Max Roach, I was being a bit cheeky there since it's years since I heard any of those recordings (all of which I do, however, have in my collection... in one form or another); I was better placed to make comparisons with the maestro's duo album with Gino Robair, having only very recently heard that one. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy hearing it "properly", and it did still impress me as being unusual... and I can recommend it without hesitation. Oh, and there was one detail which I wanted to clear up: in my post from 22 Sept 2022** as linked above, I referred to a passage in the second half of the concert where  B. "plays his saxophone in such a way that it sounds more as if he is talking through it". This is definitely how it struck me at the time - I can remember thinking exactly that - but I don't necessarily hear it exactly like that now. What I did hear this time was a passage in which B. seems almost to cry through his horn, and this does, for a while, sound rather like a human voice. I wouldn't have been able, at the time, to make the connection which I can make now: the same technique is deployed to great effect in Sextet (Istanbul) 1996, as reported here. That album, despite its title, captured a performance given in 1995, the year after the duet with Adzenyah. Had B. used this technique prior to 1994? I don't know, but I will be keeping an ear out for other examples of it from now on...

***

At the end of my most recent post, I brought up another duo album, this time an encounter between two saxophonists. And I said that I needed to play the album again, if I could find time for it; I then surprised myself by promptly doing just that. - Actually, when I thought about it, I remembered that when I bought this double CD, I only played the first disc, and never quite got round to hearing the second one***. That, then, needed immediate rectification: I played disc two a few nights ago (and replayed disc one just tonight). This, in turn, reminded me of something which (as I said above) I have noted before, but may never have really mentioned here. A recording comprising a duet between two saxophonists may not, in principle, sound like something very appealing - may indeed conjure up images of something dry and cerebral and, you know, not very enjoyable at all. But when I've heard such encounters between B. and another reedman, I have found almost the opposite to be the case - not that I myself would expect such meetings to be "dry and cerebral", given that I (more than most) know how inaccurate, how unmerited these epithets are when applied to the maestro; but even I can sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that recordings featuring nothing but saxophones might turn out to be hard work. And yet, they pretty much never are, at least not when our man is at the wheel. I recently heard for the first time the second half of Sax Quintet (Middletown) 1998 - having heard the first half back when it was released# - and it was a riot. Of course, there's a lot more you can do with five saxes than with just to, but still - 

- as it turns out, you can do a hell of a lot with just two, as well. The two long duets with Opie are consistently fascinating: varied, lively, witty, continuously creative and never, ever dull. It irritates me a bit that after all this time, I still can't recognise Comp. 173 when I hear it played as an instrumental only (it is very easily recognisable when its verbal text is quoted), given how many times it has been used as tertiary material, as well as being played as a standalone track; but that's just something I shall have to pursue in due course. That, it's fair to say, is the only irritating aspect of these listening sessions. It's not a well-known album, I am pretty sure; and contrary to what I surmised last time, Opie probably wasn't one of B's students##, so his is not a name that even fairly well-informed Braxtonheads are likely to know. But if anyone happens across a copy of this for a sensible price, they should snap it up at once. More subtle mastery in evidence, even in what might appear an unlikely context.

* It strikes me that I am trying to be too clever with this title, and thus failing even to be comprehensible. So perhaps I had better explain: doctor subtilis was the sobriquet bestowed upon the monastic philosopher Duns Scotus in the middle ages (Roger Bacon having been known as doctor mirabilis, and Aquinas as doctor angelicus), and when I first considered writing again about the 1994 duo, that title popped into my head as being appropriate for Adzenyah. But of course it would apply equally well to B. - and for that matter, once I'd decided to scoop up the 2008 duo in the same post, it would apply pretty well to anybody able to cut it in the context of "reed meets reed". That left me needing to pluralise it, as I have attempted to do; whether many people will figure out what I meant is another matter. Still, I am above all pleasing myself at this point, am I not ;-)

* I'm amazed now that I managed to post so many times last year at all, especially in September. I must have been writing more quickly than I can manage now; oh, and I suppose for some of that time, while the move was approaching and then underway, I wasn't actually at work so I was less mentally drained in the evenings. And I needed the distraction from day after day of sorting through boxes and drawers full of papers, etc... even so..!

** The other half of this post talks of the box set with Eugene Chadbourne, something else I was planning to come back to "at some point soon"... again, it took me some time, but earlier this year I did manage to hear the entire thing. And most excellent it is, too :-D

*** This was right in the middle of my "doldrums years", unable to write, and not listening all that much either - or not to this type of music, anyway. I did at least make occasional purchases, trusting that at some point I would be more able to listen to them... it took a while, but as you can see, that worked out...

# NBH006.1 was a "recording of the month" back when TCF was doing such things for its members. I never did feel comfortable with shelling out for digital recordings, and it would be years before I got round to hearing the various other releases on NBH; indeed there are still a few that I haven't heard. Getting there, though...

## The 2008 album was recorded the day before (what would become) the very first NBH release: Septet (Pittsburgh) 2008. The liner notes for that recording are by Opie, and he explains (some of) the circumstances by which the trip to Pennsylvania came about. (He did have a friend and bandmate who was also on the faculty at Wesleyan. Have a look at the notes if you're curious.)

Standard form

 

I may perhaps have let slip just once or twice that I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of jazz standards, even when B. is playing them - although that does depend on what we mean by standards, and also on who is in the band at the time... anyway, I'm not looking to belabour the point, but when McC first suggested to me earlier this summer that I might want to check out the mammoth NBH release Quartet (Standards) 2020, I didn't quite leap to it. I was already aware of this huge undertaking, of course: some of the material came from concerts I'd missed out on in London, for a start, and I knew the band included pianist Alexander Hawkins, for my money one of the more consistently interesting British player-bandleaders in the new millennium; I also knew - though I only found this out within the last year - that the liner notes for this box set had been penned by one of my former BBC Radio 3 "messagebored" comrades, David Grundy. All points in favour, one might say... but... thirteen discs? I am as susceptible to giant box sets by the maestro as the next friendly experiencer - more than most, I daresay - but sixty-seven standards just seemed like too many to bite off, never mind chew*.

Still, I spent much of the summer working my way through a considerable proportion of the NBH back catalogue, and at a certain point I just found myself thinking: why not, let's give it a go. 

So, my initial impression was: wow! The band is so good, and the approach so fresh and creative, that I was easily able to avoid dwelling on the core material itself. I wasn't previously familiar with bassist Neil Charles or drummer Steven Davis - but they weren't plucked out of the air: both of them play with Hawkins, for some time now in Charles' case**; the pianist himself, a longtime admirer of B's, seized this opportunity with both hands (literally...) and plays at a high level throughout. 

Almost inevitably, though, it wasn't long before clouds began to threaten my sunny mood. I've said numerous times that for me there is quite a significant difference between "modern standards" - composed by jazz musicians - and numbers from the Great American Songbook***, whether that means old Tin Pan Alley hits or show-tunes. In the case of the latter... something very creative had better be done with them, is all I can say. (By the same token, just because a given tune was penned by a jazz musician doesn't automatically mean that a cover version of it will be worth hearing.) By the middle of the first disc - or the set of five numbers, since I don't have the physical box set - I was already struggling a bit through "Desafinado", which (purely from my heavily-skewed perspective) rather falls in between the above categories: it was written by a modern composer, sure, but with all due respect to the "Father of Bossa Nova" (and to his numerous admirers), Jobim didn't make the kind of music I am ever likely to listen to voluntarily. [My taste may be peculiar, but it is my own... and I know what I don't like.]

Entirely predictably, then, by the time I'd got through the first couple of sets/ discs, I'd already concluded that the best way for me to approach this monster album is... slowly, bit by bit. The preponderance of material which I would never normally want to hear just proved a bit too much for me, and even the excellent musicianship wasn't enough to maintain my enthusiasm. Amongst those first ten cuts, Andrew Hill's "Pumpkin" sticks out like a sore thumb as the only piece which I would ever actually seek out; I'm sure most of the tracks here did sound pretty good in these interpretations, although it's now quite a few weeks since I heard them and I can no longer remember the details, not having made any notes. But I did decide to take a bit of a break, if only to give myself the best possible chance of enjoying the rest of the music.

That turned out to be a good idea, because as I carried on gradually listening my way through, I found myself warming to the album more and more. This was not always limited to the more obvious selections, either; B. really dug deep into the bag to pull out "standards" that probably nobody else would play, such as "The Inch Worm" (disc six) and - no, really - "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" (disc nine), but these sound fine enough with this treatment; I would probably never want to hear the old Cole Porter chestnut "I Get a Kick out of You" at all, if asked - let alone a rendition of it lasting twenty-two minutes - but the version which opens disc six pretty much blew me away, its superb playing taking the music way beyond the source material. (I don't share B's enthusiasm for Paul Simon, suffice it to say - I am sure I am firmly in the minority there so I really shan't elaborate much, but some of his numbers came closest to wearing me down. I didn't need to hear Johnny Cash doing "Bridge Over Troubled Water", and I didn't need to hear it here either.)

I still haven't finished, because I really have been stretching it out, but so far I would say probably disc nine - or the five tracks which are included on it - proved the most enjoyable for me. Some old show-tune I've never heard of opens this group (I can't very well call them"sets", since the tracks are presented out of sequence, not in the order in which they were recorded), which also includes "... Big Bad Wolf", as noted above; B. has great fun with that one on sopranino sax. It's rounded out with the rather obscure "Double Clutching" by Chuck Israels#, "Sue's Changes" - also not one of the better-known Mingus compositions - and "Nardis", which is actually a Miles Davis number##, although Hawkins seems fiercely determined to play it like Andrew Hill. The upshot is, this approach of eking out the discs one at a time seems to be working out well, because my enjoyment of the music has only increased; dare I say it, these may be some of the most enjoyable standards of B's I've yet had the pleasure of hearing.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say on this for the time being - and that's just as well, since my attention seems to be elsewhere just now, and even this feeble excuse for a post has taken something like four days to write. Still plenty more in the pipeline though..!

***

On a completely unrelated note, I got briefly excited the other day when a Discogs notification led me to the reed duo album Duets (Pittsburgh) 2008, with Ben Opie###: the master record had been updated to change the reference to 298 (in the tertiary material on the first disc) to 29b. I actually have this album on CD, but I bought it six or seven years ago (i.e. during the period when I wasn't listening to much of this kind of music) and only played it once, so far; it suddenly seemed to offer the chance of some backup for my contesting the accuracy of TCF's identification of Comp. 61, something which is currently still up in the air (and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future). But then I remembered that the piece on the duo album with Mario Pavone is 29a, not 29b... never mind. It's reminded me to play the album again anyway, if I find time for it... until I can clone myself, finding time is always the problem... 

* It doesn't help that I never got very far with the three box-set albums of standards on Leo. I was put off these very early on, and basically I never went back to them. (In those cases, the fact that the fourth voice is supplied by undistorted electric guitar presents an additional problem for me; but B's own playing on that material had a completely different effect on me from normal. Strange but true.)

** Neil Charles must have replaced Dom Lash as Hawkins' go-to bassist round about the same time I sort of stopped listening to Hawkins' music; there was no real reason for that, it was just a natural development at the time, but when I found myself listening to a lot more jazz and creative music again more recently, I didn't re-establish my interest in Hawkins. Yet. (Still time, of course.)

*** I had to force myself not to put this phrase in inverted commas, or strike it through, or couch it in irony some other visible way... such is my resistance to the whole concept which the phrase itself represents. Various reasons for that, and... I've decided to leave it there ;-)

# The original can be found on the one and only recorded meeting of Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, which was effectively sabotaged - or at least heavily undermined - by the unsympathetic presence of Kenny Dorham, not the first choice of trumpeter on the date. (Most people probably now know the resulting album as Coltrane Time, although Taylor was actually the session leader and the album was originally released, with a different running order, under his name.) I don't know of any other covers of this tune. 

## Davis himself never recorded it, and the tune became more associated with Bill Evans (apparently - says Wikipedia! I had to look it up as I couldn't remember where the piece was originally from). Miles didn't really write much - at least not once he'd got himself firmly established on the scene - and generally preferred to have other people around to do that for him, when he himself wasn't mining standards. Any later numbers with his name on tend to sound as if they were "composed" in a few idle minutes in the studio; it will be noted, though, that B. particularly likes playing "Four", and did bring it out again for this project.

### I personally only know Opie from this recording, though his name crops up in the discography a couple of times besides... a decade prior to the duo meeting, Opie's Water Shed 5tet had recorded Comp. 23i (+40c) on their album Circuit Breaker; later, he took part in the Three Rivers Tri-Centric Ensemble, which turned out this fascinating-looking recording (which, alas, I may never actually get to hear; it seems so obscure that I didn't even bother to include it on my wants list, though properly speaking it does belong there...). I'm not sure if he studied under B. at Wesleyan, though that seems at least plausible.

What PMP2301 might tell us

 

No, I haven't got hold of a physical copy of this - it may be a while yet before those start to find their way out of Eastern Europe - but (as McC pointed out to me the other day) the whole thing is now available on Youtube (and no doubt elsewhere). So as much as I can't vouch for what - if anything - the liner notes will clarify for us, I have listened to the whole album now; and, if I don't yet have a clear explanation for what was going on with the music, I do at least have a working hypothesis...

I pondered recently how we might interpret the meaning of "track titles"* such as Composition No. 366b (+214, 365b) or Composition No. 364e (+346, 363a). Bear in mind, these are both to be found within a release entitled 12 Duets (DCWM) 2012 - of course, anyone can see right away that in each case, one of the territories listed is actually a GTM piece**; still, that in itself is hardly problematic. A performance from 2000 of the second-species GTM piece Comp. 277 incorporates as tertiary material Comps. 6n and 40(o), among others; the reading of Comp. 278 from the same occasion includes Comps. 114, 23c and 40i***, but this does not somehow rule out the classification of the performances themselves as GTM. So, there is no inherent reason why a DCWM performance might not utilise part of a GTM score as tertiary material; indeed, by this stage it seems to be par for the course that many such readings do just that.

But what are we to make of the presence of the other opus numbers thrown into the mix? The 2016 Brazilian release Ao Vivo Jazz Na Fábrica goes much further, presenting us with the intimidating rubrics Composition No.366d (+214, 366e, 366f, 366g) and Composition No.367b (+70, 364g, 365a, 366b). These latter performances are again primarily to be considered as DCWM, but are we really to understand that the musicians worked from four different DCWM scores in each case, as well as the listed tertiary material? Are the listed works from the 36x range themselves to be considered as tertiary material? How would that even work? Many questions here, and no particularly obvious answers.

Oh, and just to make matters more complicated again, I had already remarked back in August that opus numbers within the exact same range might appear under the aegis of Falling River Music instead...

 - Lo and behold, with perfect timing we are then presented with a new release of four full-length recordings from 2013, which might be DCWM or FRM or - somehow - both at once. The label certainly seems to want the listener to think of this as an example of FRM, whilst I have already observed that the music sounds like DCWM; that latter observation was of course based on just a few short samples. However, now that I have heard the entire thing from start to finish, I can confirm that this is definitely Diamond Curtain Wall Music, with all four pieces featuring the "classic" SuperCollider sound (as heard on numerous previous recordings). So, has someone just made an embarrassing error, confusing two different strategies within B's compendious musical system? That is of course possible, but I'm disinclined to think the answer is that simple.

The programme for the new release is as follows:

1. Composition 364F (+364G +272)

2. Composition 366E (+220)

3. Composition 364E (+367B +366D +264)

4. Composition 363A (+363H +219)

- which is to say, it's all very similar (at least on the face of it) to the 12-disc 2012 release... which was, just to remind ourselves, packaged as DCWM. The template: a primary territory in the 36x range is presented along with at least one other such territory, plus a GTM territory as (presumably) tertiary material. (It will be noted that disc 2 on this album doesn't follow that same pattern, listing only the primary territory plus a tertiary; there, at least, I am inclined to think that a simple mistake could have been made.)

The music, too, sounds indubitably like DCWM from the get-go. As I say, this already appeared to be the case from the sound samples I had found online; but hearing the complete performances just underlines and reconfirms that impression. There is no doubt about it. I can unequivocally state that... ah, but, but. After all this time, can I really be that sure about anything, where the maestro's music is concerned? It's probably best if I back away from that. What does an open ear tell me, at this point?

The first impression, though, is just what I said above: this is not FRM, but rather DCWM. As previously mentioned, it's not even "experimental" DCWM - such as can be found on some of the discs in the 2012 set; the soundscape generated by the SuperCollider software here is effectively indistinguishable from that used in the very earliest DCWM performances. What is different, of course, is the instrumentation: with no disrespect at all to Taylor Ho Bynum or Mary Halvorson, it is rather refreshing to hear some "new" voices interpreting this stuff. (For a number of years it looked impossible for a recording of this type to exist without THB's involvement... It's another reason why the 2012 box was so invigorating#.) The music kept drawing my attention in, not for the overall shape of it - which remains pretty much beyond my understanding at this stage - so much as for fabulous details in the playing. The sounds - the human-generated sounds - are consistently fresh and intriguing. In particular, Roland Dahinden's range of extended techniques really gets showcased on these recordings; in fact all three players are on peak form for this## - it just so happens that I was especially captivated by the trombone wizardry. Anyone who might be wondering whether the quality of the musicianship here warrants checking out the whole recording can rest assured that they will find no shortage of marvellous moments...

... and I did take note of some of these while I was listening; but it would be an unnecessary distraction to go into them here, because none of that is directly relevant to the question of what this release might tell us. 

I wasn't very far into the first piece before I realised I was just listening to the instrumentalists, without any electronics. I hadn't been giving the music my undivided attention, so it was more the less the case that shortly after I figured out what I was hearing, SuperCollider patched back in and the temporary spell was broken; however, it wasn't more than a few minutes before the same thing happened again, and now that I was primed to notice, I found quite a few examples of such passages. 

What that got me wondering, of course, was whether these "unaccompanied" sections might not be where the FRM strategies were being deployed.

Here, then, is the hypothesis: these four pieces - or at least three of them! - may be "hybrid" performances, in which the first territory listed is to be interpreted under DCWM protocols, and the secondary territory/-ies as FRM; tertiary material will presumably always remain just that, as with any other long-form performance. If this is correct then we can pretty safely assume that whenever the software drops out of the mix, the music system has itself reverted to the secondary type and a different score is being used for that. As I say, this is all hypothetical; but it would explain why the interactive software frequently vanishes from the soundscape, and it would also shed light on why FRM is now being talked about in the promotional material, given that it has never previously been associated with the use of SuperCollider. 

It's an idea, anyway... and naturally, once it had occurred to me, I found myself wondering whether some other (later) DCWM works - or rather other works which I had assumed were DCWM - might not be set up the same way; although that possibility really raises more questions than it answers, since surely we would expect there to have been some mention of it before now. Releases such as the 2012 box itself, or the duo with Miya Masaoka, might seem tempting places to look for further evidence to support the hypothesis; but, with those all comprising duets, it must surely be pretty obvious if the software falls silent for any length of time. (The Brazilian release, on the other hand... I only heard that once, around a year ago, and can I say for sure that I would have noticed if there were prolonged passages with no SuperCollider..?)

So, of course my next task - in this regard at least! - is twofold: firstly to read the full liners for the PMP box, as soon as they become available to me, and secondly to keep a close ear out for any other "DCWM-primary" performances which follow the template outlined above. - Needless to say, the other three readings in the new box did indeed follow this template; or rather, the third and fourth did, whilst the second did a bit, but to a lesser extent. Here, when I finally encountered a sustained passage with no electronics I was left to suppose that it represented the point at which the tertiary material - in this case, the SGTM piece Comp. 220 - was being exploited; that really was a best guess, though, and in practice I can't hazard much of a guess as to how instrumentalists would begin to render material designed specifically for the human voice (and including actual syllables, etc), B's general principle of "anything can fit anywhere" notwithstanding###. Even though the second disc is the shortest, by a few minutes, and even though it seemed to incorporate fewer moments of "human-only" activity, I am still not 100% convinced that the published track listing - with only two territories for the second piece, but four for the third - is actually correct and not some sort of mistake.

Anyway, that's what all this has left me thinking about, and since the post on Comp. 136 is theoretically ready, but doesn't seem to want to be written quite yet - THAT feels awfully familiar - I figured I would squeeze this in first. Regardless of whether any other friendly experiencers feel like wading into the theoretical waters with me, listening to this album purely for the music will surely repay their time.

* This term seems pitifully inadequate, and it irritates me a little that I can't think of anything better just at the moment...

** 214 is first species, first unveiled as one of the "Yoshi's ninetets"; 346 is third species, probably (...) accelerator class, and can be found as a primary territory here and here, having also seen quite a bit of use as a tertiary. (The composition index by RYM user smartpatrol - as mentioned in the last post, section 2 - was useful at this juncture. Nice one, whoever you are...) 

*** In these - and all analogous - instances, tertiary materials never get listed; we are left to catch them as they drift past the ear. It occurs to me that this may be at least partly because they are not (or not always) pre-selected, but may be thrown in ad hoc by sections, or by individual players as the case may be. (Does that mean that if a piece is listed, it's not actually "tertiary material" at all, but something else altogether? My head hurts...)

# Of course, of B's three duet-partners in that box, one of them - bassoonist Katherine Young - had taken part in (group) DCWM previously. (She still seemed like quite a bold choice for a duettist, though. Bassoon is not the most versatile of instruments, especially if we compare it with the human voice, or with the violin...)

## It scarcely needs saying that B. himself is always on "peak form". I mean, you find me an example - any time after 1970, or thereabouts - of a date when he wasn't. I've remarked before that he may (notionally) have an "A game" and an "A+ game", but nothing like a "B game" really (lame pun not intended). Still and all, there were many occasions while listening to these four long pieces that I found myself thinking "wow, that just sounds fantastic" - so it feels only appropriate to flag up the overall quality of the playing here.

### Two of the "extra" territories fall into this precise category: disc four uses 219. (The other two use second-species GTM works; 265 is SGTM, but 264 is not.) Obviously, (parts of) any score can be deployed in any context, but the use of vocal pieces in a purely-instrumental context does seem a trifle perverse, although... Comp. 173 has been interpreted both ways, and at varying length... I daresay nothing about this need surprise me, at this point...