Ten compositions (duets)

 

Anthony Braxton with Alex Horwitz Four Compositions (Duets) 2000 (CIMP, 2001)

Anthony Braxton & Milo Fine Shadow Company (2004) (Emanem, 2005)

David Rosenboom / Anthony Braxton Two Lines (Lovely Music, 1995)

Thanks to McClintic Sphere for the post title... and for everything else

These three albums are being treated - in fairly light detail - together, because that's how I eventually acquired the files, and because all three of them are duo recordings... and all of them are relatively obscure. I don't think any of them is currently available for online streaming (please correct me if I'm wrong), and as usual I am not in a position to attempt to share the music here; so there is little point in going into extensive detail anyway. But having included two of them on my wants list the summer before last, and having written somewhat disparagingly about the very idea of the third a couple of years ago, it seems only fitting to say a little bit about each of them, now that I have heard them. It's understood that most people reading this probably won't have heard them, but perhaps it can nevertheless serve a purpose for those readers who are looking to build up their collections.

[There are not exactly ten duets, by the way - except that there are, sort of: Shadow Company presents itself as one performance, broken into eleven parts. (It really isn't, but... poetic licence being exercised there by Martin Davidson, one assumes...)]

***

1. OK, so this little-known CIMP curiosity is (as stated above) the same album about which I wrote with such a notable lack of enthusiasm back in March 2023. Having seen the album unexpectedly listed for sale here in the UK, I had to enquire what it even was - and having had that cleared up, decided I had no burning desire to hear this one, never mind own a copy. Naturally, it being one of B's releases, I would need to hear it eventually, but... so many other things to do first. If it had been left solely up to me, who knows how long it might have taken..? Anyway, in the end it sort of fell into my lap, in digital form at least, and in actuality it turns out to be simultaneously rather more enjoyable than I would ever have suspected, and every bit as irritating as I had feared. How does that work?

The best way to make sense of this album is to intuit that B. himself probably had a blast making it. The four compositions - interpreted piecemeal, broken up into fifteen separate tracks* - are dedicated to four "master comedians", and knowing that is the key to understanding how this most peculiar of albums got made in the first place. Horwitz, who was apparently described (with typical generous enthusiasm) by the maestro as "poised to make a real impression on the third millennium"**, seems to have lapsed into near-obscurity***, but he was part of a student comedy troupe at Wesleyan; and the acerbic, sardonic type of humour he dealt in was obviously something which appealed to the composer. How well this works in practice is another matter... B. does what B. does - describes all manner of weird and wonderful lines and shapes and figures with his reed playing - while the comedian/vocalist ignores the music completely and simply riffs on modern life. Comp. 281 begins with Horwitz trying to make sense of the idea of the DVD - on the grounds that only human beings can be "versatile", so what does this multi-talented disc actually do? It's a pretty lame basis for a sketch - the adjective "versatile" is not exclusively applicable to people, at least not on this side of the Atlantic - and the resulting material is just unfunny and annoying. That's how the album starts, and... for the most part, that is basically how it continues.

There are fleeting moments wherein it all suddenly seems to make perfect sense: these are the occasional points at which Horwitz avails himself of a megaphone, and intones (for example) "departure paths: number 69-J, local route; number 19, underpass; number 216, centre lane; number 199, express trail"# while B. squeaks away behind him. This sort of thing harks directly back to pieces such as Comp. 173, in which meta-commentary is provided on the territories which are being explored, and it provides flashes of (what 

Zappa fans might term) conceptual continuity. And I do have to admit that there is an entirely different character to the recording from that of any of the solo saxophone albums; "duetting" with the vocal monologues in this way creates something new and sui generis, even while there are instrumental passages which could easily have come from a solo sax recital. And, like I say, I can well imagine that B. himself thoroughly enjoyed making this album. But as to whether it really works... I'd have to say probably not. The more closely you listen to this one, the more likely you are to be irritated by Horwitz's vapid and uninspired material; he has the delivery down pat, but seems to have nothing much to say with it. Treated as semi-background music, this works surprisingly well: the instrumental playing is of course delightful, and the vocal additions work reasonably well if you let them fade into the background without concentrating too hard on their actual verbal content. But this observation - a recommendation to treat a creative music recording as background noise - is itself a red flag, a warning that the album is not the kind of thing that most of B's fans are going to be looking for. Overall, I think it's just as well that it was safely released on CIMP, and thus destined for greater than usual obscurity##. At least this time I had no trouble recognising B's sound in the flat, sterile production. 

***

2. So to a completely different type of recording - a far more typical, improvised duo encounter - which nevertheless shares this key feature with the previous release: it was issued on a label run by a monomaniac, whose every project was tied to an unswerving vision of what real music should be. The late Martin Davidson may ultimately have been less divisive a figure within the creative music community than Bob Rusch, but in his own way he was probably just as uncompromising.

When I first came across this release - whenever that was, exactly - I had no idea who Milo Fine was; and for that matter, by the time I finally got round to hearing it, I still had no idea who he was. I had to look him up, and if I'm completely honest, I still don't really know. His potted bio on Discogs (doubtless taken from elsewhere; they usually are) makes him sound somewhat important, but then I have frequently observed that very minor figures in the art world, if left to write their own histories, are capable of greatly exaggerating their own significance, so this need not be trusted very far. A look at his recorded discography suggests that he has not generally worked with what we would call top-flight collaborators; besides this meeting with B., he did work at least once with Derek Bailey (another Emanem release); he has apparently played drums since the age of eight or nine, but his "informal studies" on them appear to have been undertaken with a family member. The list of groups which he has been a part of is not long, nor does it include any well-known names (with one notable exception, but even that is a red herring###). So far this was not hugely encouraging. Still, he was leading his own dates for Hat back in the 1970s, and he met with the maestro on what we will presume were equal terms, so let's see what we're dealing with.

Inevitably, for an album on this label, the music is freely improvised and at least gives the appearance of having been completely unplanned. B. works with his customary plethora of reeds, while his partner switches between piano, drum kit and variety of clarinets, sometimes within the same piece of music. As regards that music: the track titles Part 1, Part 2 etc almost imply that this is one continuous work divided up into bite-size chunks for the listener's convenience^... but it really isn't: they start, and they play until they stop, for whatever reason. The "opening track" comes across as more of false start than anything, lasting a mere sixteen seconds before abruptly ending^^. The longest piece lasts more than seventeen minutes, though, so they did find some coherence, on the face of it; two further pieces last ten and nine minutes, so it's not unreasonable to hope that some real common ground was discovered.

Fast-forwarding here (having promised "fairly light detail", after all), I found MF to be a lively and interesting drummer, an unorthodox but quite creative piano player, and a rather one-dimensional clarinet player, to judge purely by this recording. There definitely are moments when the two players actually make something work, and perhaps not surprisingly these tend to come in the longer pieces, with the shorter numbers really coming across more as brief little sketches rather than containing any genuinely meaningful interplay. Fine's habit of flitting between his different instruments does seem to work to his advantage, in that there are times when he sounds as if he might be perilously close to running out of ideas on one, but gains new momentum by moving to another; his clarinets, as I say, are really what seem to let him down here as although he apparently plays a variety of these, and brought at least two of them to the date, all he really seems to be able to do with them is squeak and squeal, and not with anything like the degree of control and precision that B. can deploy when he chooses to take a similar approach. Unorthodox playing is in principle (ahem) just fine, but if you are sitting down with a world-class woodwind virtuoso, you might want to keep the reed instruments in their cases for the time being. On piano and drums, however, MF is capable of maintaining the maestro's interest and even of keeping pace with him at times; there was even, dare I say it, one moment in my listening to this when it seemed that B. was the one not properly holding up his end^^^. Nevertheless, I found it impossible to shake off the impression of an imbalance, an insuperable talent gradient which relegates this meeting to the less-essential end of B's long shelf of improvised duo encounters. It's not without interest by any means, but I can't imagine that anyone wouldn't manage without it.

***

3. I've definitely saved the best for last, because Two Lines, besides being the earliest of the three albums under consideration here, is also the only one on which B. has a duet partner on his own level. David Rosenboom, best known to most Braxtonheads as the pianist who subbed in for Marilyn Crispell on the Black Saint release Five Compositions (Quartet) 1986, will be someone B. knew from his time at Mills - but, unusually for such a connection, DR will surely have been fellow faculty rather than a student~. Recorded on 3rd October 1992~~, then (per Restructures) "edited and processed March 1994", this music was not released until 1995; DR is credited with "MIDI grand piano, Hierarchical Form Generator, responding sampled piano". I take that to mean that what we hear, at least in terms of the keyboard parts, is not precisely what was played, but rather a factitious representation of it - by way of substituting piano notes (etc) for keystrokes played on a different keyboard. I'm guessing, though, until such time as I can get a look at the physical CD.

Whatever the details might be regarding this one, and notwithstanding my own personal preference for hearing music which was physically played by musicians rather than processed and edited, this album is both exhausting and thrilling to listen to, with B. playing almost flat-out for much of the running time, and the keyboards - however they were achieved - matching him. Here, the shortest piece played is the opener, entitled "Lineage", and it is more than eight minutes long; the centrepiece of the album, the titular "Two Lines", lasts more than twenty-six minutes. This is the one fully composed by Rosenboom; the other four are co-credited to both players, which I take to mean that they were more or less improvised, though probably within established and agreed frameworks. (Intriguingly, Rosenboom's piece is the most Braxtonesque piece, at least to my ears, reminding me at various points of Comp. 136 in particular.)

Despite this being a very exciting and stimulating album to listen to, it's also exceptionally difficult for me to write about - because I can't pretend to understand a fraction of what the two players are doing, or not in the way they would understand it. What I have been left with, every time I have listened to this, is the sense that this is the sound of two hugely-advanced musical minds, revelling in each other's company. Though I can't analyse any of the music on its own terms, I can still hear it, and the shared explorations which are laid out for the listener are just as satisfying as the virtuosity on display is dazzling. I am pretty sure it's never been an easy album to get hold of, but I would strongly recommend this to anyone who happens to be reading. The fact that it's the only one of these three albums which I can wholeheartedly recommend does not make this a case of "damning with faint praise"; on the contrary, all three of the albums discussed here have their merits and points of interest for the serious friendly experiencer... it just so happens that the other two have numerous drawbacks and reservations to them, and this one really doesn't. Two Lines, above all, was well worth the long wait for me to hear it.

* Just trying to get your head around the track listing is perplexing: Comp. 283 - in which Horwitz deals very superficially with social anxiety disorder, and which is the only piece in which the vocal and instrumental attacks make any real attempt to interact meaningfully - last just over two and a half minutes. Comp. 280 lasts around three minutes, broken up into two parts (one purely instrumental, one mixed). Comps. 281 and 282 are both considerably longer, each broken up in into numerous segments and scattered somewhat around the album; it is pretty hard to derive from this a real sense of what characterises or links the four pieces, besides the fact that they are the materials which B. brought to the date. 

** I don't have the liners for any of these three albums available. The quote comes from Derek Taylor's 2001 review of the album for All About Jazz.

*** He would appear to be the same Alex Horwitz who now makes documentaries - or something, meaning that he is not completely obscure in the wider world of contemporary media. I don't think he took off in the world of comedy.

# From Comp. 281, pt. 1-1.

## Anyone releasing an album on CIMP would surely know that very few people are ever going to hear it - even by the standards of this type of music, generally. In B's case, he recorded at the Spirit Room four times: or rather, his sessions there yielded four separate albums. Two of these contain modern standards, mostly by Andrew Hill; one represented a specific cul-de-sac or dead end, and the fourth was of course the one we've been discussing. None of them is likely to feature on most listeners' "favourite albums" lists... and while in principle this most specialist of labels "ought" to have made a great match with this highly specialised musician, in practice I think it's fair to say that didn't quite work out. 

### The names Reform Art West and Reform Art Orchestra will likely ring some bells with readers, as well they might; but although both groups featured Fritz Novotny, MF was not strictly a member of the original Reform Art Unit as such, and his tenure seems to have come some time after the involvement of Clifford Thornton.

^ This is quite often the way such improvised recordings are divided up, after all. But then, those are very often (more or less) continuous explorations, whereas the eleven pieces here very clearly start and stop, and just to hammer the point home, a few extra seconds of silence is provided in between.

^^ The indexing of the CD suggests it's almost twice as long, but the playing begins at 0:05 and ends at 0:21...

^^^ For the benefit of anyone attempting to keep score, I noted this during "Part 7". (The players don't seem to find each other there, but it didn't seem like MF's fault.)

~ This is an educated guess, but must be accurate, I think - I am also reasonably confident that I have actually read that somewhere, at some point (?). 

~~ The official bootleg Orchestra (Los Angeles) 1992 (BL011) - one of the very first official boots to be made available, if memory serves - was recorded two days later, also at CalArts (though not at the same campus). George Lewis and William Winant were featured players on that one, as well as Rosenboom, again (credited with electronics on that occasion).