This time of year typically sees any (posting) momentum I might have built up tailing off, as the festive season approaches: anyone with children can attest to the fact that December evaporates with terrifying speed, once it's underway... there are always plenty of other claims on my time and attention, and the focused mindset required to keep up this sort of work can be pretty difficult to achieve. It's probably no coincidence that interest in the blog tends to dry up round about this time too - bearing in mind that there hasn't been a huge amount of interest this year anyway, especially not since the early summer.
So, if I manage three more posts between now and the end of the month it will feel like a rather heroic undertaking, and nobody should be too surprised if it doesn't end up happening*. Still, after my recent analysis of the 1995 ensemble reading of Comp. 187, I had intended to go back and listen again to Cygnus Ensemble's short rendition of Comp. 186 - included on their 2000 release Broken Consort. I first heard this "cover" - feels a bit silly to call this that - years ago, but at the time I had not made the direct connection: violinist Jacqui Carrasco, a member of William Anderson's group at that time, had taken part in a handful of the early GTM, first species performances, starting with the Thanksgiving 1995 concert referenced above. Having listened closely enough to witness the way in which B. encouraged the ensemble to take repeated "little liberties" with the written material, would I now find more latitude in a reading which I had previously characterised as ruler-straight?
It took me a while to dig out the recording from my archives: as it turned out, I don't have the mp3 file anywhere (could have sworn I did), and have only got it burned on the end of one my old CD-Rs. Now - it is supposedly possible to find it on Youtube, but good luck getting that to work properly (... I couldn't)**. Hence, this post is really even more pointless than usual since I am going to hazard a guess that most readers won't have this obscure album in their collections***.
Buuuuut... here we go anyway:
186 was of course the second of the two pieces unveiled in October 1995 in Istanbul - that concert marking the second ever official GTM recording - and I have no idea whether Anderson and co had access to the score, or simply transcribed it from the Braxton House CD; either is possible, the second option maybe more likely#. I am going to assume though that Carrasco's prior experience was crucial here, not just in the decision to play the piece, but in the group's feeling confident that they could tackle it.
The instrumentation set out in Restructures was slightly wrong - as I mentioned in a footnote to a recent post - in that not only did pianist Haewon Min not play on this##, there is no piano on it at all: the correct instrumentation was "violin, cello, flute, oboe, and two guitars". What this failed to specify is that one of the guitars was acoustic, the other electric; and not "Wes Montgomery electric" either, nor even "Joe Morris electric", but played through at least one pedal, so that there is some actual timbral inflection applied at times - though you do have to listen very closely to be aware of this. I don't know who played which guitar - but this instrumentation - sextet with two guitars - is not only not unusual for the group, it is actually still their standard format###. Carrasco (on violin of course) is at the far left of the stereo image, with the electric guitar on the far right, and oboe, guitar, cello and flute in between.
As is generally the case with this sort of thing, the more closely one listens the more rewarding the experience becomes. The acoustic guitar has a real chop to (many of) its attacks and the ensemble's sound is absolutely lovely. Taken at a brisk allegro trot, the music succeeds in being somewhat hypnotic from the outset, the regular first-species eighth-notes interspersed with occasional legato swoops; and quite early on, inside the first ninety seconds, we do get a breakout of sorts, at least half the group departing from the main written theme to undertake what is presumably^ secondary material, while the rest continue the theme undistracted. This works very well, with each temporary section of the group functioning independently of the other in a manner of which the maestro would surely approve... but of course it doesn't last very long, as indeed was quite normal in most first-species readings. Just after the ensemble coalesces again, the pace slows, and just before this there are a few tiny bow-scratches from the violin, the closest thing yet to any improvisation, though the listener really has to be paying attention to catch them.
The tempo changes throughout the reading are handled extremely well, and it must be said, the musicians all seem properly sensitive to the needs of the written material, really playing every attack. Over time, there are minute fragments of improvisation, mostly from the violin and electric guitar, which reward the attentive ear; it is fair to say that the possibilities inherent in the piece are not exactly fully explored, but then a) in a shortish reading like this that would never be possible^^, and b) the sound of the group really is quite beautiful, and it's easy to forgive, or overlook, what potential they fail to develop. Late on in the second half of the reading, some small effort is made to open up new spaces in the music, and although it would be easy to say there's too little of this, on reflection I am inclined to think that there is just enough, given the limitations enforced by the shortish duration and the "magazine" format of the album on which this appeared. It's not ruler-straight, exactly; neither is it completely liberated, but I reckon they got the balance just about right in the end.
***
Because I had to dig out an old CD-R, like I say, that also furnished the opportunity to refamiliarise myself with other treats I may have neglected... in this case, those included half an hour of shehnai wizardry from (one of Atanase's great heroes) Ustad Bismillah Khan, as well as a boot of maestro B. in a trio with George Lewis and Frederic Rzewski at the Pisa Jazz Festival in 1980; neither of these recordings had pleasured my ears in over a decade, I'm sure, and in both cases there was considerable pleasure to be found in the reacquaintance. But the other disc - as was my wont, I had slotted two discs into one envelope - reintroudced me to an album I have never completely forgotten, but again have not listened to in a good few years: Paul Smoker's QB, whereon his working trio with bassist Ron Rohovit and drummer Phil Haynes was, of course, augmented by B. for three of its tracks. What I had forgotten is that the two "hottest" tracks on the album - "Gemini-Scorpio" on side one and "Blue Jungles" on side two - don't feature the special guest; but there is still some suitably exciting, intriguing and varied playing from him on those three cuts, rest assured. Unfortunately, I don't think this overlooked album is currently on YT; it's well worth tracking down if you can find it.
* Bearing in mind that I wrote those first few paragraphs last weekend and it's taken me another seven days to get round to finishing this (fairly trivial) post, that target looks more ambitious than ever at this point... meanwhile, the blog actually did have two days of significant interest in the interim - but of course one never knows if that is merely bot-related :-S
** Literally every other bastard track on the album plays just fine, but that one gets stuck just before the 2:00 mark... it's infuriating. (Or, I dunno, maybe it was just me - and others won't have that problem...)
# This might also explain why the reading here is so short - although it is also one of eight (sets of) works by different composers on the album, and thus had to compete for disc space.
## Indeed, I was unable to find any evidence that she had ever been a member of this group at all - which does not, of course, prove that she wasn't. (However, she definitely wasn't at the time that this album was recorded.)
### This per the group's own website, which should at least in theory be up to date. (In the photo on their homepage, that would appear be Oren Fader who has an electric guitar with him, though he isn't playing it right at that moment - I believe that is bandleader Anderson who plays only acoustic.)
^ That is to say, it is nothing I recognise as an earlier piece from B's oeuvre - which would make it tertiary material. I will assume for the time being that it's taken from supplementary material provided at the back of the score - which tends to favour the idea that the group did actually have an official score to work from, although not necessarily; Carrasco could simply have had access to this much "inside information", for example. (If they did have the whole score to work from, they never intended to use all that much of it.)
^^ My personal yardstick for a perfunctory reading presently remains that by Ensemble Dal Niente, enjoyable though it still is; at the other end of this scale, the performance (just over a year ago) by Plus-Minus Ensemble struck me as fully embracing the spirit of GTM in all its manifold possibilities. That was, though, a live performance, over twenty minutes long... and the group had help, from (Europe's recent Braxton expert) Kobe Van Cauwenberghe - who assisted them in their preparation of the (unnumbered) music they performed...
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