Looking backwards (2023 recap)

 

What a curious year that was.

I was starting out from a peculiar position anyway: having finally done in 2022 what I had vaguely promised to do for years - resume posting on here - I had then (predictably enough) run out of steam at the end of that year, and apparently I carried this inertia into 2023 with me. It was a slow start, and not a promising one. But it's true what they say: sometimes just reorganising your environment can help to achieve the same effect internally, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much of a difference it made to have all my Braxtoniana within (relatively) easy reach at long last. The focus which I had been sorely lacking then seemed to align itself into place, and in March I was finally able to deliver a piece of writing which had been gestating for more than twenty-one months. (This in turn confirmed a long-held supposition: that the more detail I include in a post, the fewer people are likely to read it*. Long-gestating it may have been, but when it finally arrived it was very slow to acquire page-views...)

March was an odd month in general, as I found myself needing to take a step back in my working life, and spent a few weeks away from work while a move to a different department was arranged behind the scenes: this allowed me time to write, and also to read; however, from April onwards what I found was that my continuing attention to B's music came at the expense of my reading, which itself died off almost completely for the next few months. I don't know about anybody else, but I only have so much "mental bandwidth" available, and the change of role at work - which entailed assimilating lots of new information - limited what I could do with my downtime, beyond simply decompressing. I managed to keep posting at a decent rate, but I almost stopped reading altogether. Pretty much anything I do, it seems, requires a certain degree of obsessiveness if I am to do it with any sort of success.

You can fairly well map out what happened after that by glancing at the blog's post count for the rest of the year. By the end of August, I was getting fed up with the piles of unread books and began trying to redress the balance, which meant a dip in the blogging activity. By the end of October, I was reading a lot more avidly again - and you don't have to be a genius to figure out what that meant. Only while I was absent from work was I able to maintain both interests at once. So it came about that a year which I thought for several months might end up being the most productive ever seen in the history of the blog eventually fell some way short; still, 57 posts is far more than we managed in any previous year, except only for 2008. The renewed interest of McClintic Sphere had a lot to do with this, for sure. As for my own stated intentions, I was able to follow through on some of these, while others have remained on my to-do list. And speaking of lists: I put together a long-overdue "most wanted" list, and promptly acquired about two thirds of the items thereupon... I also heard a huge proportion of the digital-only releases from New Braxton House, which I had been putting off for years and years. 

What I never came close to achieving is a greater understanding of how the blog's traffic works, at this late stage of its maturity. At times it seemed as if I could at least be sure that increased posting activity led directly to more page-views, but that has by no means always been the case. Daily "hits" have varied from almost none at all (i.e. 1 - 5) to some number too large to comprehend: I thought June had gone crazy when I started to see daily spikes of 200 or more, and a monthly total in excess of 5,000; but September saw more than 13,000 page-views, and by the last third of that month the daily count was well into four figures. This makes no sense at all: at the height of C#9's popularity, back in the Golden Age of Music Blogging, it was racking up about a thousand hits a day, and of course we were posting actual music files back then, as well as maintaining a lively discussion in the comments section. To see that level of activity exceeded by a special-interest site, on a marginalised and outmoded platform, offering nothing more than written analysis of music which isn't even being offered to the reader (and is, in many cases, not exactly readily available)... is beyond my ability to understand. Clearly the activity is not all human - indeed, in the "mad months" the activity must have been mainly "bot-driven" -  but even then, how this actually works, and what factors are responsible for the rollercoaster graph that would represent this year's page-views, are all things just as unknown to me as they were this time last year. (If anything, I can make even less sense of it all now.)

That's fine, though. However illusory it may be, the sense that "someone is reading" keeps me from feeling as if I am merely wasting my time; and I do know that a few actual, real people do continue to read, for which I am grateful; and besides, my own stark limitations as an amateur musicologist prevent me from being tempted to switch to a more contemporary platform (you know - the type where people actually try to monetise their stuff). I have written enough already about these limitations, not out of modesty but rather with a view to (re)setting expectations; my lack of formal musical training did overshadow much of my writing this year, and it will continue to do so from now on. Still, that won't stop me from wrestling with the problem, or from continuing to delve into the maestro's work. I am, as they say, in it for the long haul... here's to 2024!

* This puts me in good company, of course - as B. himself could attest. As a general rule of thumb: the more time and effort that goes into any human endeavour, the less anyone will be inclined to pay any attention to the results. Whether it surprises me that such a rule should extend to something as specialised as this blog, and its output, is another question. But given that I didn't post a rip of the Thumbscrew covers album along with the article, and that not everyone will have a copy (or otherwise be able to hear it), it is probably natural enough that few people were seduced by the prospect of an overly long and detailed analysis of said album...

Still here...

 

... just about ;-)

My "Hallowe'en post" contained no exaggeration at all, but it was a one-off: I failed to follow it up. This is ultimately just a cyclic thing, and does not signify any greater shift in my tastes or opinions or interests; I listen (in depth) to several unrelated* types of music, and in spending so much of my free time in B's world(s) this year I have inevitably neglected some of the other areas which are close to my heart. That imbalance rectified itself over the last couple of months.

It's also definitely the case that, once I decided I was no longer** going to be able to match or exceed the blog's post count for 2008, I withdrew my attention from B's music completely for a while. At the beginning of November I did listen to one long-unheard item from my collection over the course of three or four days, the misleadingly-named Quartet (GTM) 2006 (recorded in 2005, released 2008); this, though, was a set which I found rather uninvolving when it first came out, and my experience this time (having not heard any of the music for the best of a decade) was somewhat similar. I didn't find the impetus to write about it - despite my recent close examination(s) of the GTM phenomenon - and indeed I probably went almost six weeks after that without listening to any of B's music at all. Of course, by the standards of previous such gaps in my listening... six weeks is nothing; but still, I hadn't yet finished even listening to the Standards or SGTM "megaboxes", so this definitely qualified as unfinished business. 

Last week I got an ideal opportunity to put an end to that, and as is often the way, I gorged myself. On a couple of days when I was working from home, with a task to do which required quite a lot of time but only some of my attention, I managed not only to press on with those two box sets (working my way through another two discs of each), but also to replay some of the huge quantities of NBH digital-only content which have found their way into my ears over the last six or seven months.

The music making up disc ten of the Standards box is heavy on modern jazz rep and light on (what I will insist on calling) cheese: in fact it has an oddly-unbalanced feel, comprising three Coltrane numbers, plus one each by Mingus and Monk, and one - I don't even know what it is, a show tune or an ancient Tin Pan Alley pop song, but Bing Crosby (of all people) gets a co-writing credit on it, and that's sufficient to tell me that it's not the kind of material I'm looking for in my life***. Disc eleven, again, mainly features pieces by modern jazzmen; although one of these numbers - "Skating in Central Park" by John Lewis (... I don't know it) - sounds saccharine enough that it could easily be out of the "other category": this being followed, as it is, by something called "When Joanna Loved Me" - definitely out of the "other category" - the cumulative effect on me was almost nauseating#. As regards the Lewis/MJQ number, if what B. likes about this is the chord sequence, it did occur to me that he could have achieved much the same feel by playing "This I Dig of You" by Hank Mobley, constructed over very similar changes and not nearly as sentimental-sounding... but there we are.

These feelings aside, I found much to enjoy on these two discs, where for the most part, at least, the leader and his pianist (plus the latter's sidemen) are able to explore the outer implications of the music without resorting to - you know, playing tunes or anything so incongruous. Oddly, both B. and Alex Hawkins seem to struggle to get to grips with Mingus' "Self Portrait in Three Colours" - both of them apparently thrown by a decision to play rubato, even though presumably this was something they discussed beforehand - but I did find much to like about most of this music. (Hawkins continues to be drawn irresistibly to the same Andrew Hill-isms I've observed from him on this collection before: specifically, he is apparently fascinated by a sort of "rocker" motif in the right hand, where (presumably) the thumb and little finger alternate notes in a fast figure, the former remaining static while the latter ascends a partial scale.)

The SGTM material is, of course, utterly astonishing. Over those two days I heard Comps. 255 and 256, the latter of which I have heard before##, but not sounding like this. The ensemble for these recordings was at such a peak of collective creativity, and so secure in the support of the composer, that they pushed these works into completely uncharted territories, resulting in music which is never even slightly predictable and which covers pretty much all bases from childlike "vocal scribbling" upwards. Given my own awkward relationship with "clean" vocals###, it says a lot for this music that I love it as much as I do; I really don't think I could ever get bored with it.

As for the replays, there will need to be many more of these before I feel even vaguely au fait with the massive treasure-house of NBH digital material... I chose a couple of these pretty much at random on the day, but did also consciously pick out two "all-star" creative orchestra projects: NBH034 and NBH028, each of which is far too complex and layered for me to have absorbed it properly while working, never mind attempting any sort of analysis. They are recordings which will withstand much repeat listening, being interpreted by musicians who are chiefly (034) or wholly (035) selected from among B's own former students, and thus thoroughly familiar with his methodologies; that sets them apart from recordings undertaken by musicians of short acquaintance, and indeed from recordings made by experienced creative musicians, who nevertheless may not have had much experience of playing B's music. Who knows... maybe one day I will feel qualified to undertake some sort of comparative analysis of these three sets of possibilities.

For the moment, that's that; although I do still plan at least one further post before the year is out. It feels as if a "2023 retrospective" is in order... and in principle, if I am able to recover my own train(s) of thought, I would still like to be done with that pesky Comp. 136 piece as well... but it wouldn't surprise anyone, least of all me, if that doesn't materialise until next year...

* Zappa considered everything he liked to be "from the same universe": he posited some sort of qualitative connection between the (post-)modernist neoclassical stylings of Stravinsky, Charles Ives and Edgard Varèse on the one hand, and his beloved doo-wop on the other, not to mention all points in between. But the chances are that nothing really connects these musics apart from Zappa's own taste, unless it be a degree of artistic authenticity ( - which he felt was lacking in much commercial music). If that is the case, I can sympathise: but of course that doesn't mean that I would like everything which he liked, and it certainly doesn't mean that FZ would have approved of everything that I like. These distinctions eventually melt away into subjectivity and ultimately become redundant.

- Insofar as I have identified any common features in my own various musical pleasures, the matter of structural density arises fairly frequently, but not always... I am happy to indulge these pleasures separately and severally, and not look for commonalities on the whole. Would I feel that way, if I had studied under B. myself? Probably not, but I will never know. (I read an interview with Tyshawn Sorey where he said that B. had encouraged him to compose music which reflected all of his own listening - and in Sorey's case, that really was a very wide range of musics indeed. Whether the student succeeded in meeting this challenging remit is not something I am qualified to judge.)

** For much of the past year, I was intrigued to see whether I would be able to sustain the rate of posting enough to hit "the magic 64", and at the start of November it was still "on" - but it became apparent pretty quickly after that that it wasn't, any more; and once I accepted that, it freed me up a bit to step away for a while. (I am still slightly amazed at how much I actually managed to get done this year.)

*** It is clear that B. loves playing standards - he must do, he's done it often enough - and he seems to take some specific pleasure in rooting out obscure old numbers that nobody else (with the possible exception of Sonny Rollins) would dream of playing. I can respect that, but at a distance; I don't have to like everything which he likes, which is just as well, since in practice...

# ... I am simply unable to do it. If I were merely exaggerating grotesquely in using words such as "nauseating", I would long ago have forced myself out of the habit; it's a genuine reaction, both powerful and unpleasant, and I have spent quite a bit of time trying to work out whence it derives. It's not that I'm incapable of appreciating a pretty tune played simply, for all I might joke about being allergic to pop music, etc; but I do seem to be unable to tolerate it when it's done by the maestro, for whatever reason(s). With his voice, there (apparently) must be a minimum degree of complexity and harmonic abstraction in order for the results to be palatable to me. If I had to hear him lead a quartet through a "straight" reading of "My Funny Valentine" or something like that, I might actually be sick. Some of the stuff on this gigantic box set comes perilously close to it.

- I don't expect this to be a popular opinion, and (believe it or not) I do try not to bang on about it for that reason. But it is genuine, and it does only seem fair to unpack it a bit.

## The first ever recording of a SGTM performance to circulate among collectors was, in fact, a reading of Comp. 256; it was later released digitally as NBH031.

### The designation "clean" for uninflected vocal timbre is one derived from extreme metal, where it is usually contrasted with "harsh" vocals. I first heard the terms used in the '90s, by musicians whose first language was not English; the term "clean", at least, does seem to have caught on somewhat.