If You Know What I'm Saying

braxbites: birth and rebirth

2012-01-31T17:26:00.000-08:00

i'm taking the piss really by covering this one in "journo mode", i.e. shortened and simplified, when it's really only just up the track from the starting point of the next/current (ha!) braxtothon phase... but back here in the real world, the train is still half in, half out of the station and who knows how long it might take me to get as far as september, 1978... in any case by the time i get there i'll have spoiled the surprise somewhat through repeated familiarity with the material, since i've been getting into this one recently (*1). fuck it, if and when i come back to it there will be a different emphasis, but in the meantime there are two posts intended for this month started and not finished (ha!), so i thought i'd create an opportunity to see january out with some casual observations on a very remarkable recording.

on the face of it these two "weren't" fully natural partners, mr roach being very much from the previous generation and generally associated with music less experimental than that of the aacm masters (generalising horribly here - told you this was journo mode)... but of course that assumption would be pretty much crap anyway, the drummer being a long-standing supporter of outward-facing music and musicians, and noted for other successful associations with revolutionary (later) creators (c.t. springs readily to mind). but even if that were not the case, this meeting is far more auspicious than naysayers would ever guess, for the simple reason that the two men are (among other things) master subdividers.

- b. subdivides everything - breath, utterance in all its forms, even silence ( { } ).
- max roach subdivides his playing surfaces into regions, deploying such precision in his attacks that the well-mic'd kit can foster the illusion of comprising dozens, perhaps even hundreds of separate pieces. he subdivides sections of horizontal space - the same as any other drummer - but does it with exceeding fineness, often sardining more discernible attacks into a tiny packet of time than ought to be possible for a human arm... and lastly he (like - and unlike - andrew hill) at times subdivides the rhythm and then re-renders it in such a way as to imply limitless variability; this last habit, incidentally, can sometimes create an entirely different illusion in a careless ear, namely that of the drummer's being unable to hold a steady beat (here a potential issue in the gentle, beautiful "magic and music"). roach actually can beat you into the ground with it all day if and when he chooses to, but he is above all always, always looking to be creative and varied in his voicings and (as i understand it) this is above all why he is/was/will be cherished among musicians.

the opening and (esp.) closing tracks both rip it up mightily; there is wondrous subtlety at work throughout, from both participants (as always mr doofus); and in "tropical forest" they co-create a glorious miniature with tempered, skewed and bent attacks. this album may or not may not currently be available in its basic form: the occasion for my hearing it in the end (*2) was after the camjazz box set last year ( -no, i didn't buy it or even know about it until) when a friend ripped a few of the discs that i didn't already have, for my still burgeoning archives... if it turned out that the album is not in print on its own then i might not be averse to sharing the files, but we'll have to see. (still haven't sorted out the re-ups of the few uploads i had on the go before. at this rate, after the recent earthquake down under, how long has filesharing got left anyway? false alarm..?)

... point is, one way or another, all devotees need to hear this recording, which really does exactly what was claimed for it: honours and extends the tradition(s) all at once. no wonder they enjoyed each other's company!

* v. comments

the trillium (comp. 126) mystery: update

2012-01-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

since last week i have corresponded with mr feigin regarding the contents, etc, of disc 2 of this set, a vexed question which i have been (gradually) trying to investigate since last year. briefly, act "two" of trillium dialogues m , i.e. track 2 on the disc, is actually a duplication of the concluding passages of act one. on this occasion it wasn't even me that picked that up: i had played the cd more than once, but never in a state when i was even trying to give it my full attention, or not for more than a few seconds at a time... and in any case the repetition only added to my confusion over whether or not material was being replicated during the performance. (at the back of my mind, warning bells had been going off - but because i couldn't be sure without making a detailed check, and didn't quite feel like doing that at the time, i just didn't mention it at all during the write-up and then forgot about it altogether, pretty much... until jon-a added a comment to the post, which prompted some further investigation.

for a while that just consisted of waiting for an answer which didn't come... the one avenue open to me was not leading anywhere... but i got there in the end. sort of... getting a bit closer, anyway..! and the story (*1) goes: this was an unusually hard cd to produce, apparently, the project was dogged by ill-fortune from the start - not the performances, but the efforts to release (some of?) the results; back in the days when most people did not have superfast broadband, powerful computers etc etc the back-and-forth with liners, diagrams, and so forth was a lot of work - which basically turned out to be wasted, when some of the members of the ensemble began asking for more money. haha, they are said to have reasoned that the shibboleth braxton would guarantee big sales (!) and held out... until the project was completely shelved at the "reality" end.

it was only years later that clearance finally came through, said musicans having taken (it seems) a very long time to accept that creative music = commercial leprosy [in this piss-awful excuse for a society we have been stuck with all this long time... here's the deal by the way people: SLOWING DOWN is the key to this, they have the whole of "civilisation" set at far too high a mental speed, preventing any sort of self-awareness in all but the most dogged, cussed or disciplined individuals... more than ever before, everyone is encouraged to form "opinions" very very fast no matter how complex the subject...WE CAN STILL CHANGE THIS]... so, finally the choral concert project is green-lit again and it duly comes out, and with all that spent effort (and staggeringly naive, avaricious careerism) in the background, it's perhaps not entirely surprising if the music itself is not given as much attention as might be desirable, under the circumstances... which is unfortunate, because as we know, etc.

well, mr feigin has said that he will try and listen again to the music when he has time (to be fair he does maintain a very busy publishing schedule)... and i've asked him to keep me posted. but yeah, pending those further reports i think it's just a mistake, something which crept in through sheer bad luck perhaps, at who knows which stage of the proceedings. as my ecstatic, possibly unreadable ramblings indicate (i'd calmed down a bit by the time the morning concluded!), the duplication may cause a bit of disorientation or confusion but does not actually ruin the listening pleasure - or, indeed, the spiritual and vibrational value to be obtained from sharing the same energetic space as the music... since, after all, these qualities are precisely the ones which b's music - among others' - has that so much other music lacks... vibrational qualities... the maestro has been talking about this stuff for a long time without many (outside the circle of musicians) understanding what the hell he was on about (indeed, i didn't always know what he was talking about either), but he didn't invent any of the theory, it was all understood in times gone by and it still holds very much true. so, no, don't think that the music cannot still be of great value: you just might want to programme the player so that it only plays act one, which makes up the lion's share of the disc anyway. (all four acts would have required a further disc and a higher price to begin with, so we were presumably never likely to get the whole thing anyway. was all of it even performed/recorded? hmmm.)

... and then again, maybe the message in the libretto for the repeated section is so important that everyone might just as well cherish the error and play the whole thing regardless. twice the message, twice the impact, twice (it can be hoped) the likelihood of retention by the memory... it seems oddly appropriate when considered from that angle. (speaking of odd angles, this post was partly (*2) brought to you by way of the syntactical ghost trance choir. did everyone get that yet?)

* see comments

cent's 2012 manifesto

2012-01-07T18:56:00.000-08:00

... more of the same, right? well, sort of... let's start right off by saying that as far as the braxtothon is concerned, i spend way too much time writing about not writing it so i shall stop doing that for the time being, and that's a resolution, right there - if and when "it" arrives at last, it shall do so without fanfare...

- but yes, this is generally a time of (big) change and not just for me, i know people all over who are experiencing it (in various ways) so it's official, 2012 begins at least as a year of change. whether or not it actually blossoms into the year of change remains to be seen of course.

now, let's see, i fucked up on one score at least - i missed the obvious time to do the james fei post since that album was in the leo records sale this winter, as those (in print) leolab releases always are... hardly much point right now in trying to recommend something which was just available very cheaply when few people will feel like paying full price for something so remorselessly academic in nature - even by the standards of this tiny corner of the blogosphere! - so ... i guess i missed that one for the time being, it is hardly a first for me to have an idea then fail to follow it through.

this last (rather salient/deeply-ingrained) characteristic of mine may or may not change, along with all the other personal stuff at the moment... i can hardly become much less reliable a poster, though last year was more productive than the previous two - and despite my lack of core work last year (would never have believed the year would end with that still unresolved... i might have learned by now though..!), i am basically quite happy with what i wrote over the last twelve months, and only slightly disappointed by how much i failed to "convert" - some of it was just gonna be too time-consuming anyway (châteauvallon revisit, unless i split it into two parts or even three... four, any advance?)... some of it probably will (ahem) turn up this year, assuming there is still an internet. (and if not, there goes my attempt at co-creating an abstruse and obscure original artform... this could only exist on the net or something else just like it.)

i digress... for a change... actually getting back to leo records for a minute, i'm not finished there yet: yes of course i bought a few things, not many this year, but most of them braxtons, all at least 2-disc affairs... some of them, at least, will get some posting attention at some point i'm sure... in the meantime, i am trying to get to the bottom of what happened to comp. 126 otherwise known as trillium dialogues m acts "1&2"... so far what i seem to be discovering is that mr feigin is very quick to answer mails about potential orders, but otherwise disinclined to acknowledge them at all... but i have to speak to him about something else anyway so shall ask him directly at the same time, i think. (he is in fact the listed producer on that album, and indeed very often is, so who better to ask? was it all just a mistake, or what..?) i will of course pass on my findings, if there are any...

- and that concludes this (year's) broadcast :)

state of play

2011-12-21T04:59:00.000-08:00

... as we draw towards the end of another year - one which, if many predictions (and indeed current signs) are reliable, may turn out to be the last complete year of life-as-we-know-it on this troubled and generally underappreciated proving ground of ours... the planet, that is - i just thought the time had come to look back a bit and keep the blog up to speed with my thinking and current activity. after all... this week was "supposed" to see me get that duet monkey off my back once and for all (*1) while the free time remained to me - i have finally decided to take a different, full-time job, since a rare opportunity (round here) had cropped up, which means i am freed at last from the sentence of menial servitude which i had "accidentally" called down upon myself five and a half years ago, just around the same time we moved into this current house, in fact... now bear with me here, i am aware that i don't generally blather on about my private life that much in this corner of the blogosphere (or any corner of it, these days) - but the fact of the matter is that a year which opened with what i thought was the discovery of "where it had all been going wrong" (only to decide again afterwards that my discovery hadn't made any discernible difference) actually is finishing now with genuine, clear, deep and (presumably) lasting change not so much on the horizon as right up close, all around me and everyone in my household.

this is good, this is good... don't worry too much if you struggled to make it through that para btw: the last period of my life has above all been characterised by the feeling of being trapped in a swamp, thrashing around this way and that but never much closer to the sight of an exit, and my ludicrous employment situation (which i don't propose to detail here in any case) has summed that up. well, finally the end is right here, and 3rd jan 2012 will see me begin an entirely new phase of my life... one which has, indeed, been set up layer by layer during the past year (the january "revelations" being important after all; i just hadn't understood how to make proper use of them... so often the way!), but which has been distilling drop by drop in the alembic the whole time, so to speak, with this very blog being the evidence of it as much as anything is... when i look back in that regard, even my becoming a parent seems to be a less significant existential shift than my embarking into the blogosphere and (finally/properly) opening my ears in 2006...initially, as a wide-eyed acolyte of (what was then) the new church of course...

... but this latest shift brings about another (minor - but... ) change in my weekly existence, concerning the one detail of my employed life which i have mentioned here and there in the 'sphere, namely the fact that my working week begins with monday morning off, at home and all by myself with the hounds... furthermore the afternoon of the same day has been the only time mrs c and i got to spend together without the tiny tyranny, so as you can doubtless, etc etc, this is not so very little to be tossing away after all, as if it were just a sweet wrapper... my last ever (...) monday morning, as things have worked out, just came and went this week, and like i said above the plan (ha!) was to read over the notes, preferably the night before (ha!!), listen one final time just to keep it all fresh in the ear memory, and write it up however-long-it-took... well needless to say in the end none of this transpired, and not for the first time recently when given the chance to stretch out and inhabit the house truly in my own time, i surprised myself at slow that desired pace turns out to be... extreme yin to counteract the otherwise self-whipped extreme yang of the gathering intellect... not actually any great surprise when it's articulated like this, you understand, but then it's only sinking in properly as i type it... live from the coalface indeed... (or at the mirror, with perhaps a razor in my hand...) - in any case, though i never did what i intended at all, i had a fantastic time on "final monday" in the end, both portions of it, and the morning did indeed see plenty of braxton... first time i have really used the new (replacement) mp3 player to do any close-up listening as i pootled around... i have thus far put it greatly to use, as much to get the new battery broken in as anything else, but with mainly rock and metal and the odd bit of, say, bobby previte or john zorn... this has not left me empty or unsated, far from it actually (*2) - yet apparently many invisible boxes were still unticked, 'cos when i eventually strapped myself in for the pittsburgh (friendly) experience, it felt as if numerous parts of my system for which i have as yet no names were are at last receiving desperately-craved nourishment... i say in all seriousness... or rather i repeat (as i so often do...(*3)) - man, that was a great hour or so, fucking right on is all i can say... some of it flickered back to me from months ago, most of it was as new of course... such astounding conceptual/structural depth to the music/s that one could never (surely) revisit precisely the same experience as one listens, not over the course... anyway, that in turn led on to a set from the '93 quartet and by the end of the morning i felt older but in a younger body/mind/system, which can only be a very good thing i suspect :))

that's about it for now really - kitchen to do before mrs c and the pink princess return (my bonus prize was a last wednesday, when i would normally be working - haha, gotta do sat instead of course, only four hrs though... easy enough to smile through it now that i'm finally leaving!) - oh yeah the braxtothon - as you can see - has not exactly left the station altogether, even though parts of it have evidently been in motion for months and months now... but it really doesn't matter - from another perspective it's already written... and soon enough it actually will be ;-)

happy seasonal stuff everybody

cent x

* see comments

braxtothon redux: you can go back

2011-11-29T15:48:00.000-08:00

this wasn't the first time i'd revisited town hall: trio and quintet. but, as it happens, this was the first revisit to the actual quintet, as such; i've been back to the trio numbers before. (great stuff. i digress...) it's taken me this long to play comp. 6p (*1) again, for whatever reason (not much time, large quantities of music... obvious enough reasons really).

it struck me how much my hearing has improved (through diligent practice repeated over time = gongfu or kung fu) since those early braxtothon days. and yes, that was phase two but it was still very early, i was very much yet in the flush of enthusiasm which propelled me head-first into the free music blogosphere to begin with, and which had been renewed by (my intitial involvement with) this very project... at the time i remember being struck by how little (b's guest reedman/fellow aacm-member) john stubblefield was utilised on this long piece, and this time round i quickly came to the conclusion that i simply can't have discerned some of the guest's contributions. well, that applies to the earlier parts of the first section, at any rate... this time round i had no trouble hearing two horns all over the place, plus jeanne lee (to whom the piece is of course dedicated, as well as having been written specifically for her - unique occurrence in braxton canon..? *2) after a while too, ghosting her way ever so gently in before any sort of big deal is made of it - no "heyyy! here's the big star", not that we would expect it... it's still worth saying it.

anyway, yeah, i remember the session now... interruptions, compromised listening environment, dog #3 (rip) - always the jumpiest of a high-strung bunch - would not settle, etc etc. and yet i went ahead and drew a whole load of conclusions about the success of a complex work without first allowing for my own failure to comprehend it... yes, that's interesting..! i have not re-read that piece for a long time, and now i do, i am not happy with it at all... well, just goes to show how hard some old habits really do die, because until ten minutes ago i'd have doubted whether i ever ran a piece as blatantly compromised as that one on this website :-(

anyway... like i say, very interesting - yes, my ears have grown a bit sharper but i had trouble in using them properly at all last time out, four years ago and some, and allowed that to pass for a sessionette when it really was nothing of the sort. which is why you have something that reads like a rejected, magazine-demanded thumbs-down, halfway penned and more, in the head, before the actual listening takes place. (not quite, in my case, but i still ran with some questionable conclusions without bothering to recheck or moderate them - this is not, in any case, a mistake which i would make now... i think..!) - so it's very interesting because never mind the extra detail in terms of the two new players, the piece itself sounded great to me this time out, hugely "liveable" and deeply involving space, if one allows it to be, which i evidently failed to do last time. (ahem. mea cupola, etc *3) - OH YES AND specifically, when i said before (i'd completely forgotten this) that "for the life of me i can't see what she contributes to this, and again, this is no disrespect to her but the voice seems to add nothing to the music", i didn't know what i was talking about (temporarily, haha) and really had no right at that time to be asserting so boldly something which i couldn't necessarily back up. like i say, this time i loved the piece even though i still wasn't giving it my full and undivided, pottering about etc etc, it filled the house this time, made me feel a whole lot better and more refreshed, and i certainly did enjoy everyone's contributions, even if it remains the case that mr stubblefield was basically retained as a player of prescribed parts; i am happy to say that i have changed my mind about this piece. and the "quintet"? well, no, it isn't anything like a jazz quintet or whatever, not really, but a) is that what i meant, before? and b) is it important? no, to the latter... and the former, i can't quite recall but the programme did feature (a duo,) a trio and a quintet, straightforward enough, and perhaps the whole purpose of constructing one ad hoc on top of the core trio from a free jazz group - in order to play creative composition - was to show how versatile his trio really was, how responsive to different demands and situations... ok, and in the end i gravitate back towards forgiving myself a little after all, since i know by now that things did not quite work out like that... know being a heavy insistence on poetic license in this instance ;-)

i'm also aware this time of the effect that ms lee, onstage, might have without necessarily even opening her mouth - of course this is not going to translate well to the album, but still, it might pertain to the reasons why b. wrote the piece (doubly) for her... i would do the knee-jerk thing of instantly upgrading the album to a CCCC rating, but i'm not gonna do that just yet, after all i still haven't studied the piece up close at all, and it's long, looong and episodic, phasic, cyclic. magical... to be explored again, and again. i still don't agree with the guy at free the music (as to its being the best album *4) - i don't see the need for "best album" in this case (or many others), and even if i did, i'd have iridium at the top before i started thinking about any sort of top twenty, to be whittled down slowly... etc etc... one masterpiece!, indeed, out of a discography so vast and extensive and... and multifaceted, that's the crux of it after all... but still, i definitely see that i underrated it last time and shockingly failed to pick up my own inadequacies as a reporter. sorry folks. done.

oh yes, and that "b-theme" late on in the piece sounds to me like another potential solo transcription, not a theme as such, but it's still extremely impressive too hear how lee negotiates it even at that speed, i.e. effortlessly, it would seem.

***

brief thoughts on a revisited complete '71, disc one:

1. 6k (which i know reasonably well) is delightful and although it was clearly written with corea in mind, it would've sounded great with crispell too. did it get revived? any ideas?

2. 6j (which i have never fully replayed) is a long one, long and complex and multipartite, and i really wasn't paying any sort of attention not on this occasion. so i have nothing to say about it..!

3. 6a... heh, to think that this was such a "curve ball" on the session, beyond my capacity to classify correctly at the time, couldn't even follow it clearly at first. i mean, why? but then i have heard and heard it, since then, in any number of different versions, this being for years a core canon piece in live contexts. but none are necessarily better than this one, which i've heard the most times also... it was playlisted of course, back in the day (that database long since corrupted alas)

4. i deliberately backed off a discreet distance this time from the mighty comp. 22 - fireworks and all - remembering how emotionally rending it can be if lived bar-by-bar - which i managed in the session and vividly recall even now... much of it still came through, and some of the later sections still sounded very violent and traumatic even without the "ear-lenses" on... man, it's weird now to hear b. playing soprano as such, they were getting that one wrong for years to come on album sleeves (and many of my references to soprano playing in early braxtothon entries will be accordingly incorrect i would guess), but in this case it really is soprano sax, only four times, as specified. now... hmmm, could we not get this piece replayed with some other guys before it's all too late../ messrs. parker and coxhill spring to mind of course... perhaps mr rothenberg... if none of the other south chicago alumni... perhaps one version without and one entirely with those guys? let's not forget, the pages can be arranged in any order so it would never sound the same twice... c'mon, let's see if we can't get something like that off the ground... extraordinary possibilities in this extremely beautiful piece, and with enough focussed attention the spectre of steve lacy would surely bless and attend {{{***}}}

* see comments

warmup/gap-filling #3

2011-11-21T13:49:00.000-08:00

[shock horror, i still haven't got round to the final listen-through which will eventually (we trust) trigger the write-up of the collective impressions resulting from my various musings on the mitchell duets with a.b. album... erm... anyway, in the way of things i have continued my recent (re-)explorations of metal's mine(field)s, but have also lately branched out again to include more creative/improvised music... having taken so long to get round to (the braxtothon-omitted) trio and duet, as mentioned briefly recently, i have now "spun" it three times. (other recent plays have included hook, drift and shuffle by parker/guy/lytton with george lewis, and this brings us to, vol.2 by threadgill/zooid... hmmm, that last group is apparently playing the london jazz festival this year, but unfortunately i shan't be able to go... dammit) - anyway, since once again i have found myself having difficulty posting/focussing/keeping my attention on creative music, i thought i would jot down a few half-formed impressions and conclusions about b's 1974 release, in the hope that it might spur me on a bit...]

trio and duet seems an oddly (un)balanced album, with one long original on the first side and three standards on the second; such a combination would be very unlikely now, but back in the mid-seventies it doubtless made a lot of sense for b. to showcase two very different sides to his music on one album. but if it might, in principle, now seem to a cynic that it was somehow just chucked together, i don't think this is likely to have been the case at all: not at that time, and besides not on sackville, no way. here b. is reminding the world that yes, among other things he does regard himself as a successor to the great (set of) tradition(s) known sometimes by the vulgar label-of-convenience jazz.

... comp. 36 is just beautiful. i have studiously avoided referring to the composition notes for this piece as of yet, noting only (via restructures) that the piece was one of three such for instruments plus synthesiser, all dating from that year, and that it was intended specifically for live performance... which in turn confirms more or less what i felt on first hearing the album, namely that it has cropped up at least once, probably more in live sets which i've heard in the past. (for some reason, pieces from the four small ensemble books are psychologically easier to identify than others, i find this anyway... of course they are the ones which crop up again and again (well... more in some cases than others admittedly), though this is no longer true by the time the collage stuff gets going of course... anyway, obviously the musicians who have played the stuff would recognise it straight away: quite apart from anything else, there is usually a "hook" or melodic tag which identifies most of these blueprints early on, irrespective of how far they diverge from the more-travelled path later, and i can often spot" these in listening without... necessarily being able to give a correct identification. many of the hooks (keys... musical spells... they act as hooks on my attention, that's for damn sure) are maddeningly similar but then, that again is another way in which the music announces itself as b's.

i digress... for a change... i've heard the piece before, not necessarily with synth though (this in itself gives pause for thought). with teitelbaum on the case here, it's just spectacularly beautiful, the results captured in gorgeous (seriously) loving detail by the engineer(s) in such a way that a spectral and spellbinding clarity occurs, within which sounds can only be perfect, as they are; the eye experiences this on certain damp, misty days when one out walking is surprised to see that although visibility is greatly reduced in the distance, up close (and even some way off) everything seems sharpened and magnified, presented for viewing in radiant, lucid detail; the group space created here in the studio by these three players (teitelbaum and the leader joined by leo smith of course) achieves a similar effect for me, - but (of course) in the ear, allowed for these moments to live what is normally reserved for the eye :)

smith fluffs a couple of his early entries, tough notes to nail as "instant" attacks, just popping out of the air like that at awkward intervals... yes, not one but two scrape their feet on the way out, but this sort of thing never did matter so much (at all) in free music, where the freedom is above all spiritual, artistic... here it no more grates than did kenny w. missing out the odd battlement-section of comp. 23b - especially at the da capo... it's not important, and the sound space absorbs and reflects imperfections in their perfect state... as with everything else. by this stage, braxton and smith are both clear (apparently) on how they can work together fruitfully, because the brassman makes a magical contribution to this number, gets right inside the material and is fully involved in exploring its possibilities. those early days when he and jenkins were squeezed into b's groups... that wasn't really gonna work out, but under different circumstances, what could go wrong...

... as for the other two, what occurs here between synth and clarinets is hypnotic and ethereal and generally spookily magnificent, just as the pair would realise again in new york just over a week later... for a while in the middle, the synthman gets to play all alone, and boy does he ever tear things up, expanding the possibilities yet-still further; this eventually bleeds back into the third section, in which a sort of voice-swapping seems to take place, with instruments mimicking other sounds at times (this has struck me more than once on this track, i don't know how planned it was, of course) - a clarinet sounds somehow like a guitar here, a trumpet like a sax there, images shift and merge, magic takes place...

what happens on the flip side (and it still really makes sense to think of this album as a vinyl entity) doesn't witness any actual magic of course, but in truth it's still very good stuff, lively readings of three hoary old standards, b. gradually pushing his course farther and farther off-piste (though whether or not this is how it actually happened... my info on this album does not extend to "take" numbers off the master!), so that by the time we reach track three (or four, on a cd!) "you go to my head", b. is paying only tangential lip-service to the theme and allowing himself maximum freedom, occasionally skating gracefully back towards the imaginary line which represents the "score" and paraphrasing for a second or three before propelling himself away again. this is also, not coincidentally i think, the place to catch holland at his best: earlier in the side i had found myself bored by (yet another) lifeless d.h. bass solo, but his solo on the final cut is full of energetic spark and really quite creative in the final analysis... elsewhere on the side he plays tastefully (of course) and without missing a beat, but -

but... from this 21st-century writer's perspective, the stark contrast in density and conceptual/sonic richness between the two sides is truly salient and (surely) emblematic of where the composer's priorities lay, and lie. (it is arguably also true that holland's eventual use-by date is prefigured here, but i'm not about to press the point.) side one is just a lot more interesting than side two... and this is not surprising, since b's dreaming eye conceived it, and uses it to thaumaturgical ends. as always with these gap-fillers, listening was backgroundish so no rating, but this one is well recommended.

broadcasting to you live (ish) from the coalface

2011-11-14T08:51:00.000-08:00

hello... erm, slight hold-up with the other thing due today (...) - but in the meantime, just caught up with what a friend of mine (and the blog's) came up with by way of swift response to my plea for fresh live materials from the boot-sphere... frédito has kindly provided a good compression from a lossless recording on dime, this being the world premiere (i believe) of the syntactical ghost trance choir.

that gets me hot and i'm not ashamed to say it :)

i mean hey, we all know what problems i've had with vocal music(s) in the past... i've lectured enough poor souls over the years... or whatever... this is something very very clean and uncontaminated to my ears, just actual vocal ritual magic, or ritual vocal magic... take yr pick... so good i had to play it twice in the event, indeed listening to it again right now and dog #2 (only survivor of the three-dog pack which witnessed the early braxtothon sessions (and even participated in some)... for 18 months now he has been accompanied by dog #4, a young "sister") is joining in - tho this has more to do with demands for supper than anything else, nevertheless his piercing staccato attacks fit naturally into the complex group space (perfectly captured, despite supposed limitations of recording etc etc... yadda yadda) - as anything would, within this nurturing space...

... and the really reassuring, nay exciting thing about all this is that although this recording, this concert, was and is a postcard direct from the coalface, the actual oft-discussed-seldom-encountered cutting edge at work, hard at work - yet making it sound as play... it is just one such coalface being worked at the moment - i mean right now, as it were - in a phase which begins - sorry, continues - to see skewed and unfamiliar framings of (what we hope by now are becoming) familiar scenes and aural/conceptual territories. check it out check it out check it out i say :-D

mo'later (is the idea)
, c
x

some omissions...

2011-10-26T15:51:00.000-07:00

damn, i knew i'd forgotten something. (and then i didn't get round to posting about it for another week or so anyway. but then... i'd missed the boat already of course.)

i only found out very late (from thb) and couldn't possibly have attended anyway, but there was recently a major event - esp. in these aforementioned times of no live braxton {{{arrggghhh}}} - , to wit:- energies, ideas, intuitions... a smallish-but-perfectly-formed braxfest. i haven't heard anything about it since, being totally out of touch with fan forums etc for music generally (and indeed for anything else really... i'm not a networker, in case that is not already crashingly obvious - !); i really really hope it went well and was a positive and intense (series of) experience(s) for all involved - as well as relatively stress-free for those such as thb, who were getting stuck in at the sharp end of the organising. (i have great respect for non-exploitative organisers since i myself am so disorganised. ahem).

the line-up for this thang was/is mouth-watering enough - and introduces what to me is an entirely new term, since the first concert began with "pine top aerial music" to be played by the maestro with thb, former giant-ensemble quadrant leader matt bauder on further reeds and vocalist anne rhodes (she of this collaboration, one which i have not yet heard actually), with two dancers by the look of it. no, i don't know what sort of music that is... yet! the final part of that first night, after a solo piano recital (comp. 30), was an eyebrow-raising brax-plus-quartet, the latter all female, something i suspect mr b. has been trying to set up for a while (knowing his long-expressed fervent wish to get women more involved not just in creative music but in all aspects of human life); actually my eyebrow was more raised at the name ingrid laubrock, a german-born, british-based (well... used to be at any rate!) saxophonist who was quite heavily plugged by jazz on 3 a few years back. i wouldn't really have expected to see her cropping up in such illustrious company... well, good for her, and again, hope it all went swimmingly :))

- and dcw on night two, followed by the tri-centric orchestra... a gtm "syntactical choir" plus star-studded echo echo mirror house music on night three (the latter being a term i've seen around a bit, but i've never encountered the music for real)... and two acts from trillium j on the final night. yeah, i'm repeating this cos i don't think that link will last long, but also cos... well, it bears repeating. now, of course, if anything knows anything about recordings from any of these concerts... you know whom to call right? :-D

***

once again i seem to have found myself in a rock phase - after scarcely listening to anything for a month or two, i eased myself back in with a real variety of stuff, but re-established contact with an old friend has seen me delving back into metal for an intense spell (brought to an abrupt close when i knackered my mp3 player. me and technology, honestly). then again, i did finally the other day get round to hearing trio and duet which i had never owned and - having found a rip online weeks ago - was only just getting round to playing at all. and... it was extremely enjoyable! all of those early albums are gonna need to be covered as gap-fillers one of these days. all i shall say in the meantime is that i recognise comp. 36, have defintiely heard it before in live recordings without knowing what it was... it may well be the missing number from the "mystery concert". haven't actually sat down to do a comparison yet. what an interesting piece, though... side two of the album was the duet part of course, three standards with holland, and although that naturally piques my interest less, it was highly enjoyable and intelligent entertainment.

***

i did mail mr leo feigin a while ago regarding the peculiarities in the recording of comp. 126, which have been mentioned in these parts once or twice. not received a reply yet though... not sure i'm gonna get one.

***

practically all of the (not many) files i had up with rapidshare have been wiped. this includes the 65th birthday files which had been up for well over a year, unmolested (no longer) as well as the more recent braxton/parker mp3 files. ok, so... i'll try and put them all back up somewhere that allows multiple-choice downloads: might mean popups unfortunately, but r-share have become a total pain in the arse about killing uploaded files... what you gonna do. assume for the time being that all links are dead; i'll advise when this situation changes.

***

braxtothon phase five will continue shortly(ish) with the details from session 5.01 - !

if it's quarter past october...

2011-10-08T15:47:00.000-07:00

... and the third anniversary of a major change in my life has just been and gone... then this blog must have turned four during the last week. happy birthday to you, happy birthday... etc :)

yep, as before i do find myself wondering at times why i am still plugging away at this - but not so often these days. i've answered that question before: i do it for the benefit of the tiny minority who may be interested here and now, as well as for posterity, for the composer himself... and for me. that's ultimately the point, because i would very probably continue with this even if i knew for certain that no-one ever read it: i feel better for doing it, and tend to feel worse about myself during the periods when it gets neglected. alors, on continue... there will be more on the way, regardless of who is or isn't around to see it..!

braxtothon vol.2/5.01: background "history"

2011-10-04T05:50:00.000-07:00

that is: ~~history~~ ('fin voilà quoi, merci m. derrida)

ok, so... after all this mulling and distilling, plenty of time to reflect deeply and all that... here's how it breaks down:

mr lewis never exactly spells anything out, and heaven forbid the spectre of QT be invoked - oops - (*1) but in ch.7 of his magnum opus he nonetheless wishes us to understand that competitiveness, or the implied threat of competitiveness, was an issue for the aacm when things really got underway (*2). in purely metaphysical terms - or indeed totally pragmatic ones - this is hardly surprising since a large number of alpha genius-level creators had swum upstream and arrived in one small co-operative pool, each with his /(occasionally/potentially) her own ideas about everything: harmony, structure, composition, tonality, instrumental technique and historical interpretation, strategies of self-promotion, the works. that doesn't leave a lot of elbow room at those meetings... everyone better wise up and look sharp, constantly on, the reason above all why the use of psychonautic triskaidekamania (*3) was strictly off the menu on any and all such occasions - iirc muhal chuckled when recalling that little detail (NO DRUGS) in his interview with hank shteamer - not meaning "who the hell would wanna do that?" but rather "haha, no, i've been there once or twice and that way of life wasn't gonna cut it..." - these guys had not arrived at the small pool just to indulge in a pissing contest, they had the team for the job because they knew precisely how goddamn high the odds were stacked against them, and hard work was an absolute basic requirement for involvement - a curious enthusiast would be offered plenty of chances to realise he was in way over his head, nor would it take long...

NOW - that's the basic environmental context, but there is another matter again, focussing in a level closer on the perceived competition between messrs braxton and mitchell, supposedly an open secret among music connoisseurs, or collectors at least... which presumably includes critics too... tongues might be persuaded to wag after a generous single malt or brandy, who knows... scene gossip... whatever... it's widely "known" or at least taken for granted (apparently) in some circles.

the context within which it emerges in a power... regards the question (slightly vexed as it turnes out) of "who got there first" when it came to the aacm in europe - "history" once again told us all that the art ensemble blazed the first trail, and braxton and co came next. right? well, that's not quite the version which unfolds in lewis, it has to be said... the art ensemble did indeed make the journey first (well... sort of *4), but they didn't necessarily come up with the original idea. in their interviews with lewis for his book, b. and leroy jenkins both say that their unit with leo smith was the first to be talking about, hey, let's move to paris and see how that goes; and b. continues: they mentioned this at a meeting and got shot down by the art ensemble especially - "aw man, you guys are thinking about going to europe? we need you here." (*5) before you know it, the aeoc is off to paris and it's already a done deal. see you later fellows... and that in turn, by b's own admission, spurred the others on to get their asses over there regardless, b. himself first, and not wasting any time. (priceless anecdote in one of b's interviews about the look on joseph jarman's face when he subsequently ran into braxton near montparnasse.)

- ok, so we've already established that the south side of chicago is crawling with weapons-grade talent by this time (1969), and within that basic framework, the two outfits thrust out into the hinterlands to scout and build roads are basically the art ensemble and braxton/smith/jenkins... taking the aacm to europe then becomes a specific concern, and a race is begun which the art ensemble win, if only by rather underhand tactics... ok, so we can see how all this could lead to a bit of bad blood (at worst) or serious rivalry at any rate (jenkins himself was clear at least in his own mind about this, as i've said before). but then, for b. at least, paris just never really worked out that well and like miles before him, he was called back (very short version of story) to work while the art ensemble carried all before them with a show so up-front exotic that the french could pigeonhole it and rapture over it simultaneously; few would have concentrated on the quiet one (mitchell) who kept to himself, little or no make-up... one might not necessarily notice him much at all, never mind identify him correctly as another super-intellect like braxton and therefore potentially threatening to french artistic hegemony in this field of serious music: when b. announced himself as a composer not a jazz musician, remember (lock and elsewhere), he reckons he was more or less told to go back to swinging in his tree; in paris it was jazz or nothing for his type, and the love affair was stillborn effectively. mitchell... well, he went about it all a bit differently, only very gradually declaring his interest in "serious composition" (though of course this is precisely how the aacm saw all their musical endeavours, and rightly so) - this difference in approach is in turn emblematic of a more fundamental distinction, as we shall see.

even the rivalries between the two bands - which are all perfectly understandable really, there would more or less have to be some unresolved ego issues (at what was still a very early stage) - is a bit of a red herring when we're really concerned with the relationship between mitchell and braxton specifically. now, b. is several years younger and for a while during his formative years, as he acknowledges later (to lock) he learns more from mitchell than vice versa. when he gets into the army (already mentioned this also), b. works with joe stephenson who compliments him on his incredible appetite for work - joe can only remember one student who was equally driven about his own music, a cat named roscoe mitchell... back in chicago, the latter gets the first record date out, and as a leader to boot; braxton is again slightly behind, and it's a sideman credit first time out (though since the leader is muhal, this is almost a special exception); but b. is quick to catch up and, in any case, within a year or two he has dropped on the music community the depth charge that was/is for alto, stealing a great deal of thunder in the process. so... b's internal drive may well have been fuelled by some mutual rivalry at first, or at least a desire, not necessarily fully conscious, to feel that he was on a level equal to mitchell, whatever else he was doing; but the thing is, these two are both (quite clearly) smart enough to realise early on that they are really no "threat" to each other at all, far from it. they play with fundamentally different approaches to music which transcend mere style (even as the results may sometimes sound similar in a given instance). braxton seems much of the time to need to say all he can say, as quickly as he can squeeze it all in; mitchell naturally thinks in rhythms which are much longer and slower, which take time to develop into a form which can be recognised from without. [this in itself is a gross generalisation but one which (i think) is based on something useful.] mitchell, let's not forget, played that gig in 1976 (*6) where the audience turned up expecting to see braxton and were vocally disappointed; the late arrival's response is that he proceeds to play one phrase, all jagged lines and sharp corners, over and over again with only silence in between, for five minutes before even introducing any tonal modulation, and somehow, somehow this actually did get the rowdy listeners eating out of his hand. it's hard to imagine anyone else utilising such an approach with much success... but then this is typical of the man: although on that occasion he was motivated by a need to bring to heel a difficult audience, he has spoken more generally of his need to warm up gradually before the saxophone tells him "ok, you can play me now". (*7)

by the time 1976 is drawing to a close and the chance to do a duo album comes round, you can't tell me there is still any serious question of unresolved rivalry: on the contrary, using the aacm's turn-it-all-into-art alchemical principles, they encourage each other to the "loftiest heights" critics are so fond of envisaging (but which seldom seem to exist in this imperfect world), producing music in the process which, as we know, had professional producers getting all hot under the collar and saying things they would never normally say... yes, each creator knows the other will be playing at the top of his game, but that need not be intimidating. the album is straightforwardly balanced: two players, one side for mitchell's music, one for b's, absolute equality and mutual respect - and if it's still technically mitchell's show, duets with anthony braxton not the other way round, this is really only a fairly trivial thing, perhaps fitting in any case because of that slight seniority, and besides - within a year the roles will have been reversed, mitchell (and jarman and...) appearing on b's album and playing b's music, too. it all works itself out perfectly and by 1980, if not before, the two men are co-leading a creative orchestra quite successfully on the euro tour circuit. rivalry? really? and this is why i believe b. when he says that it is non-existent - i think perhaps the real truth is that whatever ego-related static may have once pertained to the situation, it has so long since been resolved that it's scarcely worth remembering, at any rate. both men are creators, first and foremost. no time to dick around - and like that, we're finally off and rolling again.

* see comments

a bit of a mystery...

2011-09-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

while i'm sorting out the braxton/mitchell "rivalry" post (which i'll aim to put up before the end of the week), here's a quickie... the artist formerly known as king kennytone recently drew my attention to this audio clip, which (despite the tiny size of the file) is actually 46 mins long, not so much a clip really as an incomplete concert... it's quite interesting, but my main reason for posting about it is to cast doubt on (virtually all) the published details... as you will see if you download it, the concert purports to be the "braxton quartet" (though whoever is playing on this, it's very unlikely to have been a regular working group), wollman auditorium, columbia university (nyc) - the date is given as june 13th 1976, although some doubt is allowed there. tafkaKK found it here, though it probably originates from dime by the looks of it; the "details" which were supplied with the recording are also duplicated here (as i discovered while conducting my own, totally inconclusive, research into concerts b. played at that venue).

ok, so... going from the top:

if the date is correct, this should be the correct personnel:
Anthony Braxton - reeds and flute
A. Johnson - piano
Dave Holland - bass
Oliver Johnson - drums

- why "should" this be the correct personnel? what evidence is there that this line-up was playing with b. at that time, and who the hell is "a. johnson" anyway?! even assuming that's a typo (may have meant to write "a. davis" - anthony davis is indeed a plausible guess for this period, although muhal richard abrams is pretty much equally plausible... and there could easily be other names added to the list), why would one assume that oliver johnson was still drumming with b. in 1976, when he doesn't appear in the discography after 1972? for that matter, i'm also not convinced that this is indeed dave holland on bass - to me the arco technique sounds shakier than holland's, which is normally ultra-reliable. (my opinion doesn't have "casting vote" status here, and i'm not saying definitively that it's not holland - just that my impression was that it isn't. fwiw a bass-playing friend of mine agrees with me that this doesn't sound like dh; he suggested maybe fred hopkins..?)

even though we don't have the definitive date, this is most likely as it's the only time AB is confirmed to have played this venue.

most likely... mmm. b. played this venue on several occasions, though not necessarily as a leader; for example, the leroy jenkins/jcoa for players only album was recorded there in 1975. but in 1977, the same venue saw the four-day aacm residency described by lewis in a power... (if anyone is interested in this, whitney balliett's detailed write-up is available here.) could this recording not perhaps date from then..?

The first 10 minutes are a duo of AB and Holland. Then the drums come in for 10 minutes of trio

- what amazes me here is how the screamingly obvious gets totally overlooked. yes, the opening ten mins are played as a duo (whoever the bassist is... and yes, of course the annotator did at least get the piece right, it is indeed comp. 40f); and around 10.35, during the bass solo which so often with b. signals a change in focus and/or primary materials, applause indicates that other players are taking the stage. we do then get a few cymbal taps (though this is in fact the last percussion we hear for several minutes); but the most noteworthy detail is that two flutes are quite clearly heard in the next section. did the writer actually listen to the music at all, or just guess?? (actually there are times around 15-16 mins where it almost sounds like three flutes, plus bass - still no drums at all - but i can't quite make my mind up about this; what's not in doubt is that there are at least two!)

- at 16.55ish the piano enters and another piece is being played. (this nagged at me - it might be comp. 40n but i'm not certain of that, the role of the bass is not quite the same for a start.) now we actually do get some drums, as well as bass - there are still two flutes audible. in other words, what we are hearing at this point is a quintet (at least!). by 19.30, it really does sound at times as if there are two flutes onstage and another reed, presumably a high-pitched sax - but this impression comes and goes and it's not as if i have spent hours and hours poring over the recording. anyway, this piece continues until 28.00 precisely at which point a descending piano figure, which has been repeated several times already, suddenly leads to free-for-all mayhem; and that's what we get until the abrupt ending during the 47th minute.

don't get me wrong, i'm always grateful when new recordings show up. what irritates me - if i hadn't made that clear - is the way people all too frequently add dubious information to such recordings (presumably in the hope of making themselves look more knowledgeable than they really are) rather than just admitting that they don't know. we are told that orchiddoctor, who supplied the tape, is certain of the venue; assuming that this is reliable, could we not just have left it at that? "venue known, date and personnel unclear, any help etc etc" would have been vastly preferable to information which is likely to be wrong, and is probably only a guess anyway, but which will now reverberate around the trading community till doomsday, this being the way such things tend to go: mistakes are invariably repeated. i myself am quite happy to say that i don't know who plays on this and i won't even try and guess the year, though i would say that mid-seventies is almost certain because of the material; it wouldn't surprise me if at least one other high-profile player turned out to be have been involved (which is why i wondered about the 1977 aacm-fest), but we may well never know for sure. never mind, never mind... there are more important things to worry about than this. still, if anyone can help with any details here - useful ones that is - do please drop me a line!

the experts (1) - thb sextet 2010

2011-09-19T14:59:00.000-07:00

(since i had in mind - still do - a brief post about that first james fei album, the symmetry seemed too perfect to ignore when i caught up with this recording the other day... of the "wesleyan period", these are definitely two of the guys i'd have at the top of my experts list when it comes to b's music..!)

taylor ho bynum sextet at saalfelden jf 2010

this concert knocked me the fuck out, no kidding... it comprises one complex, long-form piece and one long encore, a (not exactly improvised) skewed blues which is just pure pleasure...

the leader opens the first piece himself, taking a little time to establish some of his core vocabulary (and also establishing a pattern as we shall see). the next thing i really remember is a very hot alto solo by jim hobbs which certainly grabbed my attention, but in any case the main section which follows the opening is what sticks in the mind best 'cos this was damn hot intelligent groove-based stuff with all sorts of spikes and concealed pockets, and it had me thinking of charles tyler and steve reid... this the first of several sets of names i shall invoke over the course of this brief enquiry, not with a view to pigeonholing mr bynum, nor even to aiding the reader with an understanding of his music since this was, after all, just one performance..., but rather in the course of making a wider point.

two basic things about the structure of "apparent distance": the leader's cadenzas punctuate it, not only revealing more about thb's language and personal expressiveness each time, but also signalling transitional shifts between territories (sound familiar?); and solos are not quite the same as normal here - wait, that is, they are just the same, but somehow much greater than the sum of their parts, each player besides the leader enjoying one phase of totally dominating the group sound in addition to all the interaction required of them. (thb admits afterwards that it's a hard one to play!)

for a long while in the middle of the piece (which lasts around 45 mins btw) the name which kept coming back to mind was henry threadgill - specifically the sextett, above all suggested by the instrumentation (two brass, one reed plus double strings): the unusual combination allowed for some fabulously rich and "liveable" group textures, and besides which, for anyone with even a little knowledge of thb's past associations, a look down the personnel list brings a frisson of excitement, since one knows this band just can't fail... that too is a hallmark of the threadgill sextett! the music itself - apart from that long main section kicked hard into motion by hobbs, it didn't necessarily remind me of anyone for the most part, it changed and shifted constantly and never let me doze off at all...

... till another last cadenza by the leader had me marvelling at how much richness he could infuse into simple close-mic'd exhalations of breath, then mixing this in with his playing (in a manner which reminded me at once of b., though the spirit of bill dixon also seemed to hover over the performance *1,2) - what these references really indicate though is the level of mastery being achieved here, the sound of a vocational creative musician after countless hours of hard work and detailed soul-searching; towards the end of this final major statement by the leader, tomas fujiwara starts up a dry, rattling march to the scaffold and an echo of another (possible) funeral drum appears (comp. 23a *3). the gravity of the theme which takes us out, when it eventually arrives, had me thinking this time of the early mothers of invention (with the superb-as-always mary halvorson filling in here for don preston, occupying much the same areas of the group-space). it really is an impressive ending to a most interesting piece.

(i hope that it is really superfluous to repeat that) none of these reference points above is cited for any other reason than to give a sense of how listening to this band allows us to hang out with masters past and present... precisely the value of witnessing such a performance is that it reaffirms that special experience of the fully committed, which is that one's attention and wholehearted desire to learn is rewarded with access to the great continuum, and one begins channelling energies from outside - from the collective knowledge pool of the great minds... i have experienced this myself in martial arts practice, and can therefore imagine it applying in the same way to music - and indeed to numerous other artforms; one arrives at a state of focus wherein any questions one has are immediately answered, as if from within... and for a short while in our confused lives, all is laid out and clearly visible... in any case i don't have to imagine anything here, not when i can hear it for myself, can recognise the (heightened/sharpened) state by the effects it has on the ensemble.

i haven't mentioned that the drummer's role is pretty demanding above all on this long piece, everyone has to concentrate hard for a long time (though everyone gets to lay out at times too) but the drummer is called upon to provide a great deal of fire and momentum, and tomas fujiwara does not let us (or his regular duo partner) down.

the encore is just announced as "a blues", a light relief for the band after such a hard main course but, naturally, this is game playing of a very high order, recalling of course the piece simply entitled "blues" from mr lewis' masterpiece homage to charles parker - in some ways, and merely because it cannot possibly be unaware of it - and with shades of many other highly-refined practitioners of artistic entertainment... the dutch spring to mind, more braam-de joode-vatcher than icp perhaps, but that sort of level of sophisticated play - the name mostly other people do the killing also leaps to mind, although this deep-cleanse debrief (after the intense opening number) is far less manic than MOPDtK: in any case it is easy, relaxed-yet-watchful ludic mastery on all sides and just sheer "earoticism" for the listener... the ending is totally unexpected, simple and highly effective!

when mr bynum tells us afterwards how lucky he feels to have this band available at this time, etc, it could all get a bit gushy but in truth, after a performance like that (and with deeply-bonded players in some cases... jim hobbs and thb go way back, he and halvorson have been through a lot together too..!) we can well imagine how astoundingly privileged he must feel, looking round the stage at his marvellous players, all of whom are gathered here to play for him... it gives shivers, rather than any nausea - ! the sort of non-arrogant pride which no heart need ever feel shameful about reflecting.

***

i mailed thb to gush a bit, later the same day..! then the next day i dug out another recording, this one from (i think) the last time i recorded a show from radio 3, namely this one - and before i even got to the music i heard (prob. for the first time) the little interview in which bynum talks of how interested he is in (writing and arranging for) unusual instrumentations; he doesn't namecheck threadgill as such on this occasion (though that is the obvious comparison, for medium-sized ensembles especially) but he does communicate his evident fascination for unorthodox sound groupings and collective timbres. on this earlier occasion the sextet has two (unconventional) guitarists - mary halvorson joined by evan (not ed - sorry taylor!) o'reilly - and jessica pavone on further stringage, plus (another former braxton lieutenant) matt bauder on tenor, the ever dependable mr fujiwara on drums... so a totally different set of combinations of course, and indeed totally different music since this was a suite of three distinct compositions; but, again, as alive and vibrant and filled with the unknown as a rainforest at night.

- and finally there remains the (large) question of b's influence... of course it is there, and openly acknowledged; and traces of b's music can also be heard at times in the (super-)structural blueprints for bynum's "suites of rooms": he seems to favour longer, developed pieces in concert at least, whether several numbers segued together, or a single collection of experiences linked by the same guide or narrator - and it doesn't take a huge leap to see that this latter description could easily apply to diamond curtain wall or, especially, to gtm. BUT this music is not the same as either of those modalities, nor the same as anyone else's concept: this is taylor ho bynum's music, and the two concerts i heard over the two days, utterly different as they are, have more in common - in terms of shared artistic animus - than either has with anything else i can think of. highly highly recommended.

* see comments

tangential intersect with centrispace

2011-09-12T15:57:00.000-07:00

much movement behind the scenes, round these parts... this last weekend has been a long one, no work on sunday, and with the girls gone overnight on saturday, i had the long-awaited opportunity to expand and relax, fill the house with music all day and into the night, actually clean up the place somewhat, do some tai chi, some typing and even watch a movie (something i often think of doing on "me time" but rarely achieve - it was time well spent. *) - as well as the parker duets post and sorting out the location sheet for the slideshow, i have written the long-promised "rivalry?" preamble piece, bar a little minor tweakage/date-checking: it will be ready to go up a bit later this month. there is also another vignette on the way about james fei's first solo album on leo lab (hardly recent or anything, just overlooked). we'll see about students studies 3 (can't see why not) and then... shd be about ready to polish off the actual braxtothon session/s for those pesky duets after all this time. like i say... it's properly underway now, no more circling around and around...

... and yes, jon-a, that really is right isn't it, "act 2" of comp. 126 is just a recap of that last section of act one. how did i not pick that up... mmm, i'm gonna blame that on my friend mary jane, she is a terror for taking my attention this way and that at times - if i'm not really focussed on something (which i wasn't, as i said at the time)i can lose the plot a bit really... iirc i did think something was a bit odd but then got confused and certainly didn't go back and check. (if the truth be known... even for me, couldn;t be arsed to go down that road right then and there. thanks again to jon, for the heads up) - i shall mail mr leo feigin to see what (if anything) he remembers about this... the chance of getting the full story at this stage in the proceedings seems rather feeble, alas...

more soon, c x

* comment

slideshow one

2011-09-12T09:08:00.000-07:00

just occurred to me a few weeks ago... in case anyone is interested... here is a folder containing all the original pics i've used so far. there's a few extras in there too... and a text file with all the location details and a (very) few anecdotal remarks... almost all the shots were taken by me, two exceptions i think, and the vast majority of them date from a five-month driving trip round europe undertaken by mr and mrs c. in 2003 (april-august). well... i always knew it had been the right thing to do, for a variety of reasons :)

it shd be clear to most by now that i am not a real photographer (fauxtographe we can say in french, a perfectly homophonic pun implying one is a "false/fake" photographer - doesn't work in english alas). i have an artist's eye for (simple or complex) composition and that's about it - even when i used an SLR (for years growing up) i never learned how to master the camera properly, too lazy a student even then, but i usually managed to take shots that were and are good enough for me, and that's all that's important really - besides, who knew how much use i would end up getting out of some of them once i got confined to a low-end digital (most taken with an old canon powershot A40, more recent ones with an A80, that's that!)... i wonder if i haven't sort-of created an artform here, or helped to co-create one, at any rate...

slideshow with music works wonders! repeated exposure may open up doors in your dreams {{{@@@}}}

***BONUS - if there are any hardcore c#9 fans left out there, this much smaller group of nine pics will bring back a stab of nostalgia ;-)

london (new york) masters

2011-09-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

*** music file included*** - see end of post.

man... it seems a looooong time ago now, even by the delays-as-usual standards of this 'ere blog, that i first planned to write something excitable about this concert; and for a whole variety of reasons, i just never ever did. (it's hardly a singularity in that regard.) since then, i acquired this album and that (naturally) changed the nature of the still-planned post (still planned because - i repeat myself once again - the photo was already earmarked!); now it was more a matter of generalising about what the two recordings had in common, etc. or was it? i still didn't get round to writing about either of them.

in a (very real) way, there isn't much to say about them anyway - even for me (compelled as i am to describe and delineate that which others would leave to speak for itself). like all fully (or largely) improvised music, the sets cover too much territory to be usefully "mappable"; and besides... is it not enough, just to know that you are guaranteed to hear two world-class grandmasters, wholly absorbed in the process of co-creating? what reader of this blog is going to require any further incentive..? but there remain just a couple of things i wanted to share about them (as well as a further point which will follow)... first, one might think it would be common knowledge by now (but it probably isn't) that these two men are not always defiantly "awkward" sounding or intellectuals-only in their playing: far from it, and indeed when i first heard the new york boot, the opening few minutes had me thinking of lee konitz and warne marsh rather than any two free firebreathers. (admittedly this doubtless had a lot to do with the fact that i had just been listening to those two gentlemen in the car on my way home..! back when the car stereo still worked, aha...) the earlier london concert begins with a similar passage of quiet restraint, both players essaying very hushed, breathy attacks which only gradually become something more forceful... of course, once that force is achieved it's as if it had always been there in the first place, though initially inaudible... the sheer tensile strength of both players' timbres is a continual marvel. parker, incidentally, usually sounds nothing like marsh who often played with a sound which belied its tenor origins: in these duets, parker's tenor consistently "outweighs" braxton's alto, and it's usually easy enough to hear who's playing what - although there are moments too when both players are letting rip and it becomes harder, the sound more fully enmeshed...

... which is the other thing i wanted to mention, because in those (glorious) moments when both men are really pulling out all the stops and using various extended techniques (multiphonics, circular breathing etc) at the same time, the ensuing storms seem to be more like the work of a saxophone quartet than a duo :)

now, that other thing... mr parker had of course been b's last instructor on the saxophone: sometime in the mid-seventies, he taught b. circular breathing. (i have still not been able to pinpoint this date in the recorded legacy yet... we'll get there. doesn't have to be me..!) he is also one of a pretty small number of guys whom i would consider to be on an equivalent level of mastery with b. quite a few of the others have either left us or are numbered among the usual aacm suspects... i'm not about to undertake an exhaustive list here, you understand - but it's worth mentioning at this point that in an interview for bbc radio 3 in 2004 (*1) b. began by saying that since he found himself in england again he wanted to express his love and admiration for... the following six players, a short list which i (being me) at once committed to memory: i remember it was derek bailey first, then five reedmen in no order... parker coxhill osborne harriott watts. (nor would that have been an exhaustive list; 's just those were the names - the voices - to which b. felt compelled to pay his respects on the night. if i used the same shortlist as a starting point i might add, say, john butcher who is clearly not just a master but a grandmaster of some standing. alan wilkinson would be on the list too.) ANYway... the point: these two hold each other in great respect, so when b. declined parker's invitation to renew the acquaintance in duo (for what i soon found out was this residency two years ago), this was not, he made clear to me, any sort of snub against mr parker - far from it. no, he was simply sick of seeing his music be hijacked for someone's else's 10-second coffee-table trend, i'm putting words in his mouth there you understand, but i know he did dread too much the thought of reading reviews in some journal or other to the effect that the performance was "the best thing he'd done in years" - what invariably passes for a compliment among the chattering classes (*2). - and yeah, he had reluctantly declined, as i heard it told.

isn't that a shame? that a culture which supposedly values the (true) performing arts tends overwhelmingly to produce glib, shallow "critics" who scarcely really even pretend to be paying attention, then expect you to be grateful for some prepacked pleasantry just because they were smiling (mouth only one suspects) when they said it? isn't that really just a load of shit?! pretty much... no names, no names... there'd be no end to it anyway if the truth be known, i hate the music press and have done for years (no longer hate it in fact since i never read it!) - there are people out there at present who are trying to write intelligently about creative music; not that i'm the best person to ask - but of course there is always eartrip... and i have enjoyed point of departure also (though at least one of my "unfavourite" crits, yes that one, regularly writes for that very organ). (*3) BUT ahhhh fuck it, i've already said it... no more banging on right now.

it's all due to change anyway, 's what they tell me...

so, anyway... the new york duo recording, i rediscovered recently, was only ever in flac at i.sol so if anyone would prefer a smaller, quicker, perfectly serviceable hq mp3 rip (and there's an oxymoron, right audiophiles? heeey): it's... here

(get it before rs lose interest in it...)

* see comments

...and further confessions!

2011-08-31T14:29:00.000-07:00

dear oh dear, pouring out of me like a tidal wave, they are ;-)

ok, well, the first one is easy enough: in one of my (numerous) comment-footnotes to the previous post, i thought i detected rhythmic assonance between dave holland's "four winds" and b's comp. 23c, but didn't check the date on the latter, being pushed for time and with a lot to get out (!). composition notes actually date that one to 1973... which makes holland's the "prior art" in this case (thanks to neil f. for that one!). except it pretty much doesn't, because b's piece is considerably more ambitious and would in any event be a case of only minimal convergence; if the other way round, holland's simpler and shorter theme might be deemed to show sings of influence. all we've been able to deduce here is that in this instance he/it didn't. not quite the same as influencing the maestro, but it's worth at least clearing that up.

staying on the subject of conference for a minute: fwiw i playlisted four of the six tracks from that album, back in the day (specifically 2002-3) and thus heard all of those, at least, on numerous occasions. the title track was indeed on one of my ballads compilations and "four winds" was on another. besides these, my favourite was of course "see-saw" which i've talked about plenty of times before (though i'm not about to chase up the links right now, maybe later if i remember to come back to it!) - loved it (frequently anthologised it for friends also)... until i discovered it was just a less ambitious reworking of b's comp. 6i. naturally that did take the gloss off a bit. the fourth one was "interception" which to my ear is a more interesting theme than "winds", though maybe not by much. it used to remind me of zappa somewhat too, though i can't now think (off the top of my head) which zappa piece/s it resembles.

***

now: i don't know how much relevance this has, probably some, it's really only just occurred to me to bring it up...

but:

I WAS A (failed) TEENAGE HEAVY METAL GUITAR MAULER

's true, 'strue... i must have been 14 when i started, and of course it's dead easy in principle: these days you would start with green day or something, but for me it was 1984 and learning began with the sex pistols, and other basic riffs like "iron man" by black sabbath or "smoke on the water" by deep purple... amazing how encouraging it is when you "play" your first "tune" - and how quickly one can start to put on airs when one "knows" some "chords" (this set of inverted commas refers rather to the (true) joke that what passed for chords in heavy rock back then and since time immemorial were more often than not a root-and-fifth, beefed up a bit if necessary with an octave... the ironic thing about that is that in my case, before i could get my hands on an axe of my own, i first had to indulge my curiosity with my mother's spanish guitar and chord book, thus learning the fretboard shapes (though not understanding the use) of all sorts of exoticisms which, of course, were seldom if ever employed in the realms of the tight trouser brigade - not back then; in these post-slayer days, all bets are long since off)... it lasted a few years, i played rhythm guitar in a couple of mates' bands, briefly attending rehearsals etc... nothing much came of that... was in a band called satan's choir when i was 15-16, playing (competent) rhythm and (duff, formulaic) lead - the other guitarist, my best friend at the time, was much better than me and also wrote all the original material - not that it ever got finished, and the only public performance the band ever gave was all covers and one joke original (which i shan't name right at this moment, ahem...). so... i didn't exactly set the world on fire. i had no formal training at all on this instrument and was entirely self-taught, copying records (as they were then)... and any attempts i made to dip a toe into theory ended up with a sharp withdrawal, so that i only ever had a motley, magpie's collection of (verbal and conceptual) terminology at my disposal - but, you know, i have known better musicians than me in my life and when i hear interesting things, i file them away and never forget them so... if i sometimes appear to use terms that only a pro would use... i pinched it somewhere, somewhen or picked it up at a bus-stop one day, it wasn't learned in college. but i think this is obvious enough ;-)

anyway... this is why i've never brought it up before. (some of my online friends probably know already, it's not a secret or anything, it never occurred to me that it was relevant.) but yes, thinking about it, i do have some background and here it goes... what now strike me as the relevant bits: raised on both classical and rock music, not much else, able to talk my way through rock and pop, and identify numerous major composers/pieces of music by age eleven, twelve (education in classical music frozen at same age, as it turned out)... one aunt was a music student, proficient on 15-20 instruments, good enough on piano to teach kids and play church organ for hymns/at family weddings etc - was once (as i understand it) a national standard recorder soloist, one of not many at the time, now much involved with the national youth recorder orch. of britain and a singer in the city of birmingham symphony orch's choir. she was my favourite aunt when i was a little boy, but she failed to make any headway teaching me recorder, which i didn't really want to keep learning and soon dropped. it didn't rub off at all, but the aptitude is in there somewhere: we did the "bentley ear tests" when i was at school (age 11 i guess) and i came second out of 2-300, however many it was (the guy who came first, my other best friend in those days, was the school prodigy, grade eight piano by age 11, remember him playing beethoven sonatas etc, i believe he is now a professional organist in the south of france). that in turn led me to being talked into piano lessons, and in theory violin also, but the latter never quite happened, partly because the former just didn't work - i quite enjoyed messing about on the piano for about a year or so, and for that matter enjoyed the pieces i had to play for grade one, but i couldn't read at all, could only play looking at the keyboard and if i made a mistake, i basically had to start again since i could not return to the score. all i had ever wanted to be, ironically enough, was a drummer, but again, at a private school that means learning (on a rubber pad) to read scores so you can stand there in your penguin suit reading page after page of rests and then going "bong" - no, that killed my interest in that stone dead, and my parents could afford neither a kit nor (i suspect) the room for me to practise it, so...

... forward a couple of years and the guitar comes out from under the sofa one evening after i'd been listening to something or other... probably the pistols... just getting into heavy rock etc... now, i've already outlined the extent of my glittering career, but for a while back there i did at least put some work into it... once thrash metal really bit in 1984-5, i was hooked and spent many hours figuring out riffs and trying to learn solos... as most readers here won't necessarily know, thrash raised the bar for discipline and technique in rhythm guitar (did less for the other instruments... although it also produced some very notable drummers - bearing in mind that modern metal drumming is all pattern-repetition and not much rhythmic sense in many cases, death metal being the exception - but then blame keith moon and roger taylor jointly for that one, i reckon *1) - and although most thrash was military-stiff, - either fast or slow, but in either case still pretty simple - there were also natural virtuosi in the scene from very early on, such as dave mustaine (megadeth, ex-metallica) and gary holt (exodus) who were excellent soloists and also capable of great rhythmic subtlety and sensitivity, so that not all my templates were "braindead headbangers". (haha, i myself could do a pretty passable impression of one of those at the time, mind you.) i practised and copied - could never write for shit, one of the things that led to my jacking it in - which eventually meant transcribing solos (in guitar tablature), so that i did have to learn how to distinguish tonal effects and different timbres, etc as well as varieties of attack, and so on. ok, maybe i actually learned more back then than i have bothered to realise. (*2)

yep... i am that cliche, the frustrated musician turned critic - except that i'm not, because a) i am not exactly a critic and b) i am not frustrated: have never stopped loving music, never had to forgive it for the fact that i was never anywhere near as good as i would have wanted to be. i always did have high standards... or at least, i wasn't born with 'em, but they sure got in there early in my development ;-)

- these things have (sort of) come up again... no, i am not a "proper" music student and never was (or even close - except via osmosis..!); and i cannot therefore be a "proper" musicologist... but still, i'm not entirely ignorant of these matters either. (though again - all modesty aside - is that not kind of obvious by now..?)

***

a comment was left recently by "jon-a" and although i acknowledged it, i haven't yet found time to give the matter my attention. it was left against, and concerns this post... anyone care to weigh in? i still haven't enjoyed much listening time lately (though as you can see i have been at least thinking about music again); although, the more i think back, the more it seems that i did notice (e.g.) some of the spoken passages repeated; i did not take the time to verify whether a part of the recording is actually duplicated. if so... i guess an email to mr leo feigin might be in order, to ask what that was about..? (i will ask the maestro too, though i rarely get answers to direct questions!)

* see comments

a confession

2011-08-29T16:06:00.000-07:00

... perhaps a belated one... i'm probably not the best judge...

the blog was contacted recently - well, i was personally really - by a youngish (i think) bassist going by the moniker mars will send no more. i'm guessing that someone had told him about the conference entry from all that time ago... back in the blog's second rush of blood... and that he had hopped over specifically to check it out. in any case, i responded (as i always do and will, unless it's just anonymous abuse) to some of his points and discreetly left others unanswered * - anyone who is interested can of course read it all for themselves (if they haven't done so by the time they finish this sentence!). but the main reason i have returned to this matter in post form - having told mars... that i was disinclined to say any more about the whole business of conference in particular - is that i directed him to the quartet autopsy for evidence of my more measured, explicated and even-handed take on the "holland question" (i am more than usually happy with that piece btw)... and when i subsequently re-read the article myself the following day, i found myself thinking that maybe my correspondent had already read it; and that at any rate, if he hadn't and then proceeded to do so he would not be much reassured, would indeed probably fail to finish it (or even get very far through it perhaps) - which would be a shame, since the (very) good things i had to say about mr holland's abilities were mainly reserved for the last section (so as to go out on a good note, as it were).

so apparently again i find i am not finished with this. that needn't be so surprising either since i have never withdrawn the "go (directly!) to hell" warning from the blog sidebar - though until recently it had been a long time since anyone bothered to try and give me a hard time about "it"; several times i have thought about removing that superfluous and rather belligerent remark, and have always decided not to (again just this week). there is something about the fact that a (rather halfhearted, certainly informal) "review" that has been considered so far beyond the pale by some people should nevertheless be regarded as the best one published, by one of the four players who participated in said recording * - it brings out something in me that is not necessarily that likeable, but it's not on display very often in these parts and there may as well be an acknowledgement that it's there.

i digress... the other thing that struck me the day after i responded to the recent comment, was an old twinge of guilt or remorse or perhaps just embarrassment: as if on some astral plane i had found myself just then bumping into mr holland in person and having to introduce myself... would i not feel the compulsion to apologise, first? yes, i would for sure, though it would probably be accompanied with a laugh... after all, i can't very well take any of it back, nor would i wish to (none of it was intended personally anyway of course)... but yes, i would feel that way; and if it turned out he had read any of various blog entries himself, not to mention that one, i am honest enough to imagine that the apology might force itself out before i could even stop it. now, i am not necessarily very likely to run into dave holland in real life (though who knows... who knows) - so, and not without a great deal of preamble of course, here goes: mr holland, i am sorry if i have caused undue offence to you through the candid and at times rather irreverent way in which i have assessed your contribution(s) to mr braxton's music, or to music in general. it was not intended to be insulting, ever; but (of course) i was always aware that it could be received that way if you happened to find your way in here. after a long time of not properly facing up to that, i did feel that an apology was in order.

now... one apology was in order, and that was it. to those who have taken up "arms" on mr holland's behalf, since by now they may be awaiting their turn: much as i can sympathise with your motivations (and i can - i too have felt the need to defend someone else's reputation on occasions, including musicians living and dead), i don't feel the need to apologise to you guys and i'm not going to. (*) you just have to take it... that's how it goes... console yourselves with the knowledge that the devastating triumphs you have already enjoyed over me in your heads are as good as it gets in that regard; if we met in the flesh and you had your chance, it wouldn't go anything like the way you imagined it; that's not me puffing my chest out either, it's just... the way it goes.

***

ok, so... that longish gap between posts has finally been closed... the most likely next few posts are: one dealing with - or occasioned by - two of b's duo concerts with evan parker (or maybe the only two, i don't know); "student studies 3" which gathers up observations on some of the interviews with b. included as appendices in the composition notes; and then, haha, and then the frigging braxtothon which still somehow feels as if it's just round the corner but, like tomorrow, never comes... it will come, unlike tomorrow... but in any case the other posts and "postettes" variously promised or at least dangled under the reader's nose this year are not likely to be written any time just yet, which is not to say that they'll never turn up... keep checking in, you never know...

... there will also be a little "bonus post" in a couple of days, for once nothing (directly) to do with anthony braxton..!

* see first comment

* see second comment

* see third comment

(yet) another hiatus

2011-07-25T15:42:00.000-07:00

sigh... this is all very disappointing - not that it'll come as a surprise to anyone - but i just haven't been able to knuckle down to any writing recently. as a matter of fact, i seem to be in the middle of a non-musical phase: i've scarcely listened to anything over the last month or so, and when i have, it's rarely captured my attention. this is strange, but i'm sure it'll pass: it's happened before, and it never lasts too long. meanwhile: there is not yet any sign of the "rivalry" article that i promised in my last post; and yes, that is pretty frustrating since i'm quite clear about what i want to say, i just don't seem to be able to say it yet. well, like i say, any regular readers will be used to how i operate by now... in the (rather unlikely) event that anyone out there is actually waiting for said article, please be patient, it'll come. who knows, perhaps by expressing my annoyance at my own lack of productivity, i will trick myself into getting my finger out ;-)

something that has occurred to me - and i'm not just making excuses here, since after all it's no secret how unreliable i am - is that my own lack of inactivity may be (somewhat) related to something b. told me the last time i spoke to him on the 'phone (this was a few months ago now): he is not getting booked for gigs these days. he has "no work coming in", as he himself put it. can you believe that? we all know that life as a creative musician is an uphill struggle, with little or no money and practically nothing in the way of media attention, but this man is one of the most famous names in the scene - "famous" of course being a relative term here. when paul rutherford died a few years back, some people (mainly stateside) expressed shock at the fact that he had been living in poverty and had hardly worked at all for some time; but rutherford, for all his (very considerable) talents, was nowhere near as well known as b. i still can't get my head round this one... and yeah, i do wonder whether this little bombshell is in some way linked to my own lack of activity, my withdrawal from music for a while.

***

one thing i have done - i finally FINALLY got those damn discog links fixed. all of 'em! at long last... that is, i think i've done them all - if anyone happens to spot one which is still dead, do please let me know and i'll get it sorted. (yes, i know that some of my music links are dead - you can blame rapidshare for that one... i am going to try and get those reupped one of these days, but it's not my top priority at the moment.) things have been moving v-e-r-y slowly around these parts lately, but at least they are still moving. just about ;-)

braxtothon vol. 2... explanatory preamble

2011-06-30T15:54:00.000-07:00

...and here i am again, again... this time facing a large-scale vista both somewhat foreboding, and filled with the promise of tantalising detail, much of which is as yet vague and undefined...

when i completed volume one of the braxtothon last august, i (very over-optimistically) announced that volume two would commence the following month. given my track record over the last few years, this was never hugely likely - but then i had already carried out the first listening session, just before i finished typing up that long piece. at the time, it didn't seem that unrealistic... and technically, i did make good on my promise when i first laid out some plans for volume two; and then it just didn't materialise. by november, i sort of tried to force myself into getting my finger out by putting this up; but weeks became months and although i did start writing up the session, i never got very far with it and gradually pushed it further and further down the "to-do" list. so far this year, i've found other things to concentrate on and, as regards this blog at least, even those didn't all get done (yet). in the words of barry adamson... it's business as usual.

looking at all this now, i realise that braxtothon phase five just wasn't ready, however excited i got during that listening session; my thinking on the subject was far from fully clarified. as previously established, the mitchell duets album is first up in the next phase and that presents a particular problem as far as analysis is concerned; it's only much more recently that i've begun to see which way i want to approach this.

so: before the actual album itself gets covered, i will post on the subject of the supposed rivalry between these two master musician-composers (already briefly mentioned once before). it would be impossible for me to discuss the album in any depth without touching on this, but i don't want it getting in the way, as it were (and who knows?, the two musicians themselves may have felt the same way on occasion..!). hence, i will try and get it all out of the way beforehand, so that we can all just get on with the music.

- and with that finally worked out... perhaps i can get my arse in gear ;-) it's been such a long time coming now, the whole thing has begun to look like another one of my notorious intimidating peaks...

late birthday card (blush)

2011-06-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

yes, so, i've already outlined in the post below how and when it all got bogged down again; but neveretheless, when i realised last night that i had missed b's birthday - and by more than a week at that - i was genuinely quite shocked. just goes to show how little time i've found lately for the matters germane to these environs. like i say, over a week!!, but still -

- though it be tardy indeed -

*****^^@@^**many happy returns of the day sir!**^"^^@@^^*****'**

( - with love and respect as always; you are truly a credit to the human race.)

c x

[some may know that our man is a big fan of choo-choo trains and related imagery...since the date was missed, only appropriate to present a suitably botched photo, with the vehicle's face sundered by the signpost... but i trust the recipient will recognise said coveyance and the background establishment thereof, he having seen it from the front as it approached, captured a mere second or two earlier :)) ...]

easter festival (2)

2011-06-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

[regulars will not be overly surprised to see that my recent list of planned posts was followed by... not much in the way of blog activity. i did have some time free this month, but this was accompanied by more computer problems, then internet failures; and by the time all these got sorted out, i had lost all my momentum completely (sigh). the châteauvallon 1973 revisit is actually partly written, and will get finished soonish i hope; though i am also having headaches over what to do about the sound samples for that article, since rapidshare have deleted most of my files recently (ugh... weak), which leaves me reluctant to use them in future... and the use of downloadable files doesn't seem like the best option for this sort of thing anyway... well, i expect i'll work something out eventually... meanwhile, i can at least get this one up..!]

- as mentioned in my previous post, the morning of april 18th didn't just see me listening to comp. 126. after that, i still had plenty of time alone in the house and i made sure i used all of it - ! this was the rest of the programme:
      2. eugene (1989)
      3. comp. 23e from news from the '70s
      4. comps. 277 & 287 (i.e. disc three of this baby)

(all three of these have been mentioned before on the blog, in varying amounts of detail: eugene was covered here and again here, the live version of 23e was an actual station stop in braxtothon phase three... and the four-disc set was recommended way back when.)

2. the main thing that struck me about eugene this time around is that with the programme he's chosen, b. works the audience very hard (and the musicians! mike heffley says in the liner notes that there were times when the music seemed too difficult for the orchestra to perform - though in the event they rose to the challenge marvellously). there are several "crowd-pleasers" in the form of comps. 134, 45 & 71 - each of which is based around a different repeated rhythmic figure, all three generating a great deal of tension; but four out of the first five pieces performed at the concert are really quite demanding, characterised by complex, dissonant tonalities and considerable structural density. yes, of course these are primary qualities one often associates with b's music - but still, with this set of music, b. chose to make the participants jump through a lot of hoops to get their treats. nothing wrong with that; actually, quite the reverse: since part of his task was to raise the performers to the highest level they could reach - a level presumably higher than they knew they could reach - the maestro needed to put difficult music in front of them. but that's what i kept thinking anyway: damn, he's working the audience hard here!

- comp. 59, which closes the programme, was originally one of several braxton pieces designed to showcase two soloists (comp. 63 being another*) - but unless i just zoned off completely, and i don't think i did, this version turned into a feature for one soloist, to wit, the composer-conductor. i suppose it is only fair to assume that no-one else in the ensemble was remotely close to b. either in terms of experience or instrumental virtuosity... i've played this album enough times now that several of the names on that personnel list are beginning to "ring a bell", but i'm pretty sure it's only because they played on this very album - !

- comp. 93 is a synth number with fucked-up major sound warpage right from the off. it therefore reminds me at once of stockhausen. admittedly this owes much to my crashing ignorance of modern orchestral music, i.e. my conception of stockhausen is over-influenced by that incredible solo performance by his (joint) last student, kathinka pasveer. (read about that - a bit - here. we'll come back to stockhausen in a minute.) but it's good one... for sure! still a toughie for inexperienced audience members, such as those perhaps attending out of friendly loyalty to players in the ensemble :)

- the three "treats" as mentioned above (134, 45, 71) really are very very exciting to witness, i.e. if one is privileged to be in the same room. a palpable frisson of exhilaration runs through each of these and there are some very good performances by the locals. a lovely atmospheric vibes solo by charles down, for instance. (it really took yet more repeated exposure today, for me to remember to say this.)

- and finally: the last time i picked a copy of that head-battering doorstop that is a(ny) penguin guide to (recorded) jazz, this album was awarded a crown. which sounds great - still not that many of those per 100 pages i don't think - but is actually wilfully perverse rather than knowingly informed and inspired: the damn iridium box is included in the same volume, which makes the singling-out of eugene seem... well, i've already said what it looks like to me. yes, and "they" make mention of stockhausen also, and cite this album as concrete proof of b's abilities writing scored music for larger ensemble or small orchestra; which again is fine, but bearing in mind that no-one else of note was involved (excepting heffley who remains best known through his connection with b., if not as an author rather than as a trombonist) and the maestro's insanely inclusive played-with list... and the iridium box in case i didn't mention that mega-metamonster already... of course they may have good reason for not singling that one out, namely a lack of familiarity with the material beyond disc one, for example ;-) i jest of course.

3. this was primarily flagged up for re-attention because i had remembered it as not-quite-there, unfinished, and wanted to see if this one still held up or was due for "opinion upgrade"... while i was working on the french '73 quartet stuff anyway... comp. 23e is "perfected" for perpetuity in the studio, a month and a half after this (probably). that's not long really, bearing in mind that my recent experiences with this piece have led me to concude that the piece was really figured out on the road, in order to get it (or at least the moment of transition into the fully ecstatic state) totally right; for some reason i was still persuaded in my head that this version was a lot earlier than it was, like 1974, even though of course i had known that the printed date lon the liners was incorrect. now, the bremen version as described here actually "turned out" ( = purports) to be three or four days earlier than groningen (pls. visualise umlaut on that "o"!) - this is a very plausible itinerary btw, even a generous one, the distance between the two cities involving one border crossing and not many miles - and that one had seemed to me to have been played after the studio version was waxed. go figure... well, i know now that in those days, b. spent far more time than he would have liked criss-crossing the atlantic to go on the road, solo or otherwise; and the dates on boots are never reliable until confirmed... but still, go figure... cos the weird thing is, this borderline-ropey archive version does indeed sound unfinished, the transition itself being completely blurred or glossed over... we gradually realise that it is already behind us now, without having heard it as such. so the retained impression was actually correct enough, though the explanation for that may be a lot less straightforward than supposed, and entailed a fundamental misremembering in any case ;-)

4. unbelievable stuff. these two quintets are the fucking shit, as they say, and in the state i was in by now, after all that uplifting music, my ears were very well attuned to pick up many of the subtleties. a great proportion of these are supplied by the amazing gino robair, who has of course been working on b's music for a good long time by this point; his approach to the music is to change his attacks seemingly from one to the next, scarcely repeating a sound - at least, this is my impression as i stand there open-mouthed going fuuuuuck... robair is just an ideal collaborator at this juncture, with a very full and deep understanding of what is required of him, and what is permissible for him (everything, of course!). we also lost a real talent in matthew sperry, dammit... left far too few audible souvenirs for the creative music community, and in the context of b's music especially, a fearless young player not daunted by the spectre of dresser whenever the bow is called for. scott rosenberg - this time as before, i was not listening intently throughout and didn't ever stop and notice what he was doing (for that matter i don't remember much about john shiurba's contributions this time round); but the sound is certainly very greatly enhanced by the addition of the second horn. somehow i managed to squeeze in the whole disc on the day, and mrs c. only had to endure the last few notes as she arrived home. i was to remain buoyant for some hours to come!

c x

* see comments

easter festival (1)

2011-05-10T07:07:00.000-07:00

[ok, let me clarify something here: i am not religious, that is to say i don't adhere to a(ny) religious body or set of codes; i have what i consider spiritual concerns or (if you must) beliefs (- i don't much care for the latter word and tend not to use it often)... easter for me is a time of bank holidays (few of which mean much change to my daily or weekly routine at present) and too much chocolate (especially since i became a parent to a toddler). nevertheless... and a few days early (i've mentioned before (*1) mrs c's insistence that actual observance of special dates may vary according to the year or the individual) some sort of profound celebration did seem to be in order; and the time and place for it became serendipitously available, and that was that, more intensive (semi-attentive, i.e. closely attentive on a sporadic/continual basis) listenings did take place. besides, the main event had begun conceptual life as a braxbite... but as it transpired, something far more philosophical was called for - well, read on: and here endeth... etc ;-) ]

any longtime readers will know of my highly ambivalent feelings towards vocals in the context of creative/new music, or in my case in the specific sub-context of jazz-related and (western) freely improvised musics. on the other hand, since i no longer hang out on the bbc jazz messagebored (have long since lost-through-disuse the privilege of accessing my account) i have attracted fewer and fewer visits from my old mates in that spher(icl)e and the subject tends not to come up these days, scarcely at all; hence, readers of more recent acquaintance may not know that i have "issues" with singers. (my various private correspondents probably get reminded of this pretty regularly..!)

anyway, this borderline-prejudice goes right across the board, starting with rock music: having been attracted to heavy metal at a formative age i got deeper and deeper in (as it continued to meet my emotional and intellectual needs) and finally gravitated towards the underground after i hit twenty, just as death metal was beginning to flower (there are flora of putrescence also...) - the subsequent (second? third?) period of intensive learning warped my sensibilities permanently as regards rock singers and i've had a very uneasy relationship with clean-toned or orthodox vocal styles ever since. now, in addition, as far as jazz is concerned - hah, where do you start?! i have unresolved poetry "issues" too, half the chicks sound like blokes and the material (almost) invariably tends towards standards... these don't really float my boat either, as (again) some readers will know, and that's just from a musical point of view; when the lyrics are factored in, i'm collecting my coat and making a speedy exit... that area above all is where the great american songbook fails for me, the one aspect in which the status of the message-within-vehicle reveals itself as (above all) entertainment, and the practice of the (original/traditional or neo-traditional) form is seen to be, essentially, craft rather than art.

(i understand that some might consider this to be outright blasphemy, and/or at the very least scathing or contemptuous... and all i can say is that i'm beyond needing to feed that particular demon-pack, at least at this precise moment... the way i've laid it out is perhaps tactless, but it's what i needed to tell you, this is the way it emerged on the night of writing it...)

- but in any case all this is nothing compared to how i feel about orchestral vocal(ists). in these contexts the pure-toned, or at least timbrally-refined human voice has been a turn-off for me since... well ok, not since year dot, as a pre-adolescent i was latterly in the school choir and had singers in the family, but of course there's long been a bunch of those tedious arse-aching "issues" with all that family stuff as well (oddly enough)... in any case as a teen and older i've always fucking hated opera, lieder, bel canto, etc etc and the more intense and committed my exploration and enjoyment of tonal and timbral distortions became, the less tolerance i had with any of it with terribly few exceptions. i greatly admire diamanda galas and can take her actual music in small doses; there's a coupla zappa things, maybe, and so on. needless to say i've not explored much... ANYWAY, the point of all this, naturally, concerns our main man; because my head is not completely up my own arse and i am aware that his trillium opera cycle is not merely an existent and continuing concern but is arguably his major project of projects, and probably has been for some time (along with gtm - but fundamentally that's a system, not a project); and who knows, always assuming the human race survives at all, it may yet even turn out to be considered his magnum opus. in turn, that knowledge could in theory (re)present more of a problem/challenge for me than any other since of all the penguin clans' fancy-evening social diversions, opera repels me the most and on the most counts (wasteful; bloated and artificial; any actual conceptual/structural density probably lost on the typical audience etc etc).

that's most of the background... so of course i knew there were vocal recordings for me to get to grips with eventually, and the question was: how would i cope with the voices themselves? 'cos i'm not even kidding here, orthodox classical vocal technique so often seems to me to be something extraordinarily unnatural to do with a human voice. it's just... ok, it just doesn't work for me, this is all i can say about it. i had heard my old china king kennytone say that b's operatic work was way-out even by his (b's or indeed kk's) standards, which was basically encouraging... but then a long(ish) time passed and i didn't hear any... in practice, how would i get on with this stuff? and then late last year there was that previously-mentioned leo's (mailorder-only) sale... perfect opportunity for a few of those multiple cd sets to fall into my shopping cart... one of them has already been "done" and another is on the backburner... but the third was always gonna need a little bit of special preparation, this time above all i was going to need to be in the right mood for it.

***

in point of fact, the first disc of the set - comp. 175, being the (presumed) first half of this 1994 london concert - was played on an earlier occasion than the *early easter* which was celebrated back then (monday 18th april as a matter of fact) and is being commemorated now... i can't remember the date for disc one; it was an evening with no pressure to get up early the following morning, i listened with headphones... and gradually gave the piece less and less and my attention until i was somewhat rudely jolted back into attentiveness only by the sound of applause... is how i remember it... anyway... sure enough, i first had a whole series of hurdles to negotiate (in terms of timbrally rigid, prescribed voices delivering b's already idiosyncratic written prose): with vocalists at this level, one cannot expect too much familiarity with/mastery of extended technique/s - this term of course is bandied around very freely in creative music circles, though in truth it has little or no meaning outside the posh-frock-and-tux-brigades: anyone who thinks there is such a thing as "orthodox" technique in jazz and related musics must leave me scratching my head in wonderment that s/he can conceive of what the term means at all (*2) - and so a composer/conductor (in this instance both roles are filled by the same man of course) is left with no recourse but to spell the otherness of the voices' text/s by way of non-diatonically based written parts; the effect is rather semicomic (or so i found) and although to be fair this is, in itself, not actually unsuited to the relatively light-spirited, ludic ethos of the piece (as i perceived it during a non-focussed "sessionnette"), the tonal palette for the vocalists/actors just struck me on numerous occasions as way too limited and i was not really able to shake this impression off. however: in a seeming paradox, i did find myself within fifteen mins or so thinking that, well, if vocal music was all this much fun then i might be persuaded to give more of it a go from time to time... there was also much to enjoy in the instrumental passages; and, well, there was also much to enjoy in the instrumental passages, because at root i couldn't help feeling that this approximated sprechtgesang effect (*3) of the voices up-and-downing the escher staircase (which could after all be one compelling image of the aformentioned ludic conception which is the piece) was not really what the composer would ideally have wished. hell, why am i beating about the bush here?! listen to one of the guy's own solos and tell me you've merely heard the same timbral effect replicated passim with only harmonic, scalar/modal and/or melodic/contrapuntal exploration being engaged; these voices don't quite cut it for this listener, not just them personally but this type of vocal arrangement. for what it's worth, the singers may be trained up and down and inside-out for all i know, the group is clearly somewhat prestigious and well thought-of at the time of the concert at least, so much so that the music director (who takes no part in these performances) is credited even before the maestro on the official personnel listings; conservatories can only prepare one so (not very) far for this kind of fast-moving music, though - they don't call 'em conservatories for nothing. though i was enjoying the music overall, insofar as i was paying it (at least some of my) attention, somewhere around the halfway mark i flagged and never recovered, eyes and intellect fully hijacked by the various other facilities on the computer...

... for the record, the only names on the list which ring significant bells with me are: mike walker, guitar (whom i know i have heard on several different occasions and in divers (british) contexts, albeit not for a few years now... since i very rarely listen to any radio these days) and nikki iles, piano (just a name to me prior to this cd - richard iles, one of two trumpets must be her brother or husband i presume).

now: the easter festival (for that was, indeed, pretty much how i thought of it even at the time, with the whole morning to myself and no need to leave the house - knowing full well i'd be lucky to get so much as one hour at a time to myself over the actual "calendar easter" weekend) did not revisit disc one, but plunged right ahead into disc two and comp. 126 - trillium dialogues m (acts 1 & 2 of 4) which is clearly the more important of the two works presented, as it's part of the (putative) magnum opus. entirely fitting that this is the second half of the evening's presentation/s...

... and many may be pleased to learn that this one was so much simpler in terms at least of what i have to say about it: it was a profoundly beautiful experience and left me feeling truly lit up and inspired. some more detail, just a bit by way of backing that up? yes, i can sort that out before i put this one to bed, let's see...

- first of all i remember the piece being immediately more taut and springy, delightfully so in fact, nikki iles in particular being a continual aural treat on this rendition (and again, some "older" readers may know that piano is not my main bag either -!). this time out i am reminded very quickly of what many listeners must already know: namely that the reason the human voice is trained and used in this fashion is because of its consequent terrific (*4) power as a resonator - under these circumstances actual semantic delivery of written, verbal text is a sort of optional extra, it can go either way potentially but in classical circles at least, said buzzing-membrane-engine would usually be called upon to tell a story and enchant the hearts and minds of the paying seen-and-seeing audience; in principle of course a magic/kally inspired composer-conductor might put the complex mechanism of several such resonators to altogether more critical use (*5); BUT - in any case, here it is a void argument since the delivery of the words is, this being trillium, utterly crucial to the spirituality of the composition and indeed of the performance (which i remember being roundly excellent - artistic director nick purnell has clearly learned how to make a smallish palette go a long way... i daresay he deserves his kudos well enough).

- the suite is subtitled joreo's vision of forward motion and it is (on a human level) reassuringly confusing to find early on that joreo (played by the vocal bass) is nevertheless not wholly a "goodie", at any rate: well, that's how it came across to me, unless i somehow got my bass and my baritone mixed up, but it seemed to me in those opening exchanges that the titular character is the one attempting to deny or limit entry to the other..? or perhaps not... impressed and (often) enchanted as i was, still, i was not paying full attention at all times and the combined memory of the ambient collective vibe and the closing scenes - which seared the listening into the "experience archives" in my (alas poorly-organised) internal reference library - is what seems to be important, what i must convey here to anyone who strays upon this bit or has kept his concentration thus far (*6): because the verbal text/s in this operatic suite are effectively core braxton ethico-metaphysics, as i understand that (*7), they eventually bely the bewitching silhouette of the lithe, dancing spectacle which is the CJO in full flight by revealing deep, gut-familiar truth as the bone of the substance which cast that beguiling combined-shadow... and real weight, accordingly (which is never attained, i guess, in comp. 175 (disc one) - nor attempted, as i suppose). the truth:

CT-6 "I have watched a whole generation of young people be side tracked into materialism and repression -- and it is not their fault....but ours. We have only ourselves to blame for this tragedy."

CT-7 "ourselves to blame."

CT-6 "Our children must be told about what ethics really are -- and why the world of spirituality is serious. And we must tell them!" (*8,9)

- only in the performance the last five words are declaimed with such force - and by more than one voice - that the impact is at least partly visceral (*10): the effect of such powerful, simple and stark truth presented in such strikingly effective fashion as is achieved here - and needless (i hope, by now) to say, comp. 126 itself is waaaay more ambitious than can be presently appreciated by an unschooled country boy like me ;-) ha! - so i'm not getting into any hardcore analysis of it at all; yet - was to leave this listener temporarily stunned into deeply reflective silence.

not that one would have guessed from reading all that ;-)

- but in any case, if it isn't already clear by now, it really was a religious experience in (arguably) the only meaningful way, i.e. between this heart and its understood-universe... and from then on the morning was filled with music and magic, and lo, there were three courses further prepared, and time adequate to the very last second available to me... so it came to pass, and thus may it be recorded {{{@@@}}}

* see comments

[nb: there will be a follow-up post in the near future detailing items 2-4 on the festival programme - festival both curated and attended solely by myself! no really try it, i recommend it wholeheartedly... i came away feeling massively uplifted and lightened, yet grounded... effects which lasted at least the rest of that day..!]

broadcast/update

2011-05-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

"april is the cruellest month"... well, it was an unusually hot month here in the u.k., day after day of bright blue skies and brilliant sun; and if the last few years are anything to go by, this may actually have been the british summer over and done with early - but quite apart from that, from my point of view it was a month of more or less continuous frustration. if it wasn't something to do with the computer, it was problems with the internet: one damn thing after another, so that several posts i'd hoped to get sorted out remain at the planning stage. i do still intend to get these done... there's a list of 'em coming up below.

before i forget - those discog links i needed to get changed... not surprisingly, i haven't got any further with those for the time being. it wasn't the sort of thing i was gonna sit and do in the library, and since we got the computer back, i confess that i forgot all about doing it. it will get done! it hasn't exactly been top of my list of priorities, but it doesn't sit too well with me to leave a bunch of dead links up here, and i am going to get round to it sooner rather than later.

one thing that has happened recently: the resources page at tricentric now has a link to the blog. yes, i do feel somewhat validated by this development and no, that's not entirely an ego thing (though doubtless there is an element of that). i am trying to do serious work here (as time and my own lack of discipline permit), and it is gratifying to feel that the work is being recognised where it most counts... if not in many other places ;-)

- oh, and following the acquisition of the friday night sets from the knitting factory, november '93 (as detailed here), mcclintic sphere fixed me up with another one, this a single set, dated the 14th and purporting to be the "last quartet performance". i don't know if this is actually true, but it is my understanding that the great quartet was disbanded for good in that year (at least until last june's one-off reunion), so it may well be the case that a short residency in NYC was how it got sent off... it didn't seem to make much sense that the band would have played two sets each on thursday and friday without sticking around at least for the weekend, so i'm happy to believe that there will be recordings from the saturday and sunday out there somewhere as well. for the time being, there is only this one extra set that i've managed to get hold of and i don't know much about it... and indeed i haven't yet found the time to listen to it; but what i can say is that it is definitely not the same as any of the four sets i already had. this one begins with comp. 40b, which was not played on the 11th or 12th... the bitrate is rather lower than those others, so i'm not sure yet whether it will be worth sharing it here, but i will check it out very soon.

ok, so the planned posts, as mentioned above... some of these were already alluded to (hurriedly!) here, but there are more besides those, and of course i am still trying to get the next phase of the braxtothon launched, though it never quite seems to be ready. anyway... here is the list of what is in the pipeline:
- a re-examination of the châteauvallon 1973 recording, complete with some downloadable sound clips (*)
- a quick write-up of the hamburg 1975 gig, following on from antibes
- a gap-filler covering this time
- something or other regarding vocal music, specifically this recording
- and possibly some other stuff! but let's not get too carried away here... given my track record, it'll be something of an achievement if i manage to get all that lot posted in the near future... i am on it.

and that is that, for now... peace out, as they say... c x

* see comments

student studies 2 (the return!)

2011-05-03T14:53:00.000-07:00

haha, it's been rather a long time since the first one -and that's only somewhat appropriate since, erm, that one was a bit of a false dawn anyway. who was i kidding?! i didn't have the time and single-mindedness to chew through hundreds of pages of hyper-dense musicological philosophy; and i didn't get very far really (30-40pp) before i figured that one out and stopped, for the time being. and i'm not at all sure how long it will end up taking me to get back to the tri-axium writings (or any other hyper-dense philosophy for that matter!) - but i have been delving into the composition notes of late. specifically, this means book a: my long-delayed search for positive opus id's for live sets had eventually led me to read about some of the 6 series pieces in some detail; there are numbers from that first creative songbook which i've only (knowingly) heard once, and wouldn't necessarily recognise if i heard them in a concert set - for that matter, some of those early pieces have never been recorded officially... so the only way to get a positive id for a live rendition is to get to grips with the composition notes and listen very carefully. but so far, being me, i have not attempted to read the whole lot... well, anyway, you'll see if you read on.

what was most interesting about this last burst of sudden enthusiasm was that it brought an almost immediate reward: a couple of days later i received a (second) phone call from mr b., totally out of the blue this time (and very enjoyable it was too!). if the first conversation i had with the teacher had been somewhat surreal, albeit hugely gratifying, this time it all felt much more natural and relaxed... and in the end it's just a bit of a shame that for the time being, at least, we can't just sit there for hours on end and bore the pants off everyone for miles around ;-)

as for the actual observations... well, the books are arranged so that each one carries a proportional amount of text on the compositions, and also of extra material at the end of the volume; there are lots of useful interviews (though details for them are alas thin on the ground). these interviews are actually fantastic and provided me with loads of useful points for discussion - which i'll get around to next time! right now i'm about getting a few of the 6 series observations down on the blog, while i remember..!

1. comp. 6f is dedicated to stockhausen. i'm pretty sure that there are other pieces - or at least one - which also have the same dedicatee; this one is really a bit of an eyebrow-raiser though, it doesn't seem the most obvious candidate. the original (publicised) repetition structure is weirdly forgotten now, considering how many versions there are of it in the official catalogue: after a certain point, pianists in particular decided definitively that they preferred playing comp. 40(o) and that was pretty much that for the earlier piece... so far i have not come across a rendition of it after the '76 berlin quartet one. still, it was obviously utterly crucial to b's development to get this sort of piece heard on a regular(ish) basis - there will have been others of course, different repetition structures in several different orders of classification, but they haven't necessarily been aired much, if at all; the origins of the diamond clef device are right here in this number; and (as we shall see shortly with this time) it has open spaces built into it which can allow occasionally for the truly exceptional. just don't expect it every time... anyway, the importance of the piece to b. personally, and the nourishing magic space which is woven into the fabric of this one perhaps, between them, indicate why stockhausen is a natural choice for dedicatee after all.

2. comp. 6h is a good example right away of a piece which i have heard in live recordings but not been able to identify (and very possibly have failed to identify even as a composition rather than a long and drawn-out transition phase). so far, i haven't managed to locate a live version - i haven't really known about this for more than a couple of weeks, so have had limited opportunity so far to go back over all my listening and find one! anyway, it'll turn up i'm sure. for the time being, there were a number of things i thought worthy of mentioning here:

i) like several other first songbook pieces, this one was written specifically with the creative construction company in mind (just in case anyone doesn't know: this refers to the combination of b. with leo smith, leroy jenkins and steve mccall; for a while back there this group rivalled the art ensemble of chicago as "most significant visible project" to represent the aacm) - it's not at all surprising, bearing in mind that this, too, appears on this time (indeed it contains most of the album's meat); just worth mentioning briefly that it was in fact written for that line-up (as opposed to the extreme cynic's possible suspicion, to wit: that b. found himself having to come up with something which could stretch to that band and was forced to delve into past material... i'm not alone in thinking that the project was fundamentally doomed - it's already birthed at least one great recording and that was very probably its simultaneous zenith, the top of the curve... there's no mileage in it, the teacher needs younger players to teach)... as always the piece is designed for use outside/beyond its initial context and in this case the explicit prescription is for any three single-line instruments, plus optional percussion.

ii) b. regarded the completion of the piece as being "a major step in the formulation of alternative composition tenets for my later compositional growth (and focus)". although the opening phrase is composed and governs the tessitura of the piece ("...transmits the basic idea germ of the composite structure"), the piece is described clearly as "not thematic" and any performances of it will therefore vary greatly. very easy to see how this is a crucial idea for the composer, and for his development. (just think about the last twenty years or so!)

- the details of how this is to be achieved make the piece sound more like a ritual or magic/k spell than a "composition" as such (although by this point open minds were used to a great variety of notational techniques, and many more were in the post): "the science of this work is designed to operate as an isolated formation that affects the working floor of the ensemble's procedural dynamics". instead of generating "recognizable ingredients" for thematic development by the improvisers, the piece is designed to "establish a vibrational state of being that is maintained throughout the whole of its treatment". as i say, this more or less guarantees that no two versions of the piece will sound the same, but until such time as i track down a live rendition of it, i can't actually vouch for how that works in practice..!

iii) one of the specifications of the piece is that it includes the use of pre-recorded tapes. this sort of experimentation never really outlived the creative construction company - that is, not in b's work - but will presumably have been necessary to the (temporary) survival of that line-up. there are other, similar, strategies employed on this time (which don't really work imo) and it's very hard for me not to see all this sort of stuff as a slightly desperate way of keeping together a band which was (unfortunately) destined to add up to to rather less than the sum of its parts... braxton, smith, jenkins, mccall: on paper it reads like a dream ticket, but in reality there are just too many cooks in the kitchen (if you'll excuse a mixed metaphor). now, as regards the use of recorded material in particular, b. did eventually return to that idea: the echo echo mirror house music system is, as i understand it, an extension of the principle (pioneered during the collage phase and very widely used in gtm, but predating both systems, as the composition notes make clear) that material from any composition may be inserted into any performance; this very recent development sees each member of the ensemble tooled up with an mp3 player, loaded with albums from b's back catalogue, in order to incorporate said material into the mix as and when. however, as far as i know there are not yet any recordings of this system extant, nor has it been performed publicly (?).

- as i mentioned in my previous (very rushed!) post, there is an article about this time on the way. (like its byg predecessor, i did not have a copy of the recording when i covered that period in the braxtothon.)

3. comp. 6i is a favourite of mine, as i've said on many occasions before. as well as the original version, recorded in the studio in london (it was one of several pieces written for specifically for that date: the composition notes wrongly date it to the summer of 1971, which is clearly impossible!), there are several live versions in circulation, a couple from as late as 1976... i have yet to come across a later one. also, as i've (again) said numerous times previously, "see-saw" by dave holland - the closing track on conference of the birds - was obviously influenced by this piece. (i keep repeating myself knowingly, since i have to assume that there aren't too many people reading the blog! and those who do can't be expected to remember everything i say...)

- the most significant discoveries i made about this one: firstly, that although it is a "light structure that contains very little notated material" and was usually interpreted "in the traditional A B A structural context" (i.e. theme-solos-theme; or at least, that's how i understood it), there remains the possibility of other treatments, and the piece has been given extended renditions; secondly, b. considered this composition personally significant in his development, like comp. 6h as mentioned above. as regards the first observation, this explains the ultra-long version of the piece from avignon, 1974, which contains all sorts of weird and wonderful things; also, the fermata section which precedes the restatement of the opening written material (and which was again emulated by holland for "see-saw") "can also be viewed as an optional platform for extended improvisation" and this option, too, was apparently used "many times in concert... sometimes for as long as five minutes". as far as the second point goes, the composer considered it to have been a "turning point in my creative growth and future direction... reawakening my awareness about tempo structures and traditionalism in general". throughout the rest of that decade, b. continued to write decidedly jazzy themes as well as all manner of more outlandish, ambitious or sophisticated material: evidently this particular number helped to kickstart that trend.

- addendum comp. 6i is dedicated to multi-instrumentalist joe stevenson; this is not a name many people will be familiar with, and didn't ring any bells with me, but a quick check in lewis reminded me right away of who he was: b's saxophone teacher in the army. (there are two mentions of him in the book: roscoe mitchell describes him as "incredible on the saxophone" and says that he influenced b. greatly while he was stationed in korea; later on b. himself talks of studying with stevenson, who couldn't believe what a hard worker his student was and said that he had only met one other like him - a certain roscoe mitchell! he had no idea that the two knew each other, not being from chicago himself... i had remembered this anecdote from lewis' book, but had not recalled the name of the teacher.)

there will be more to say about other pieces at some point... that's enough to be getting on with, for now :)

[apart from those in the addendum, all quotes are of course from anthony braxton, composition notes book a]

warm weather woodshedding

2011-04-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

another little mini-'thon over th' last 24hrs (give or take) - after a nightmare again with the computer... new chargers/adapters/whatever seem to last about ten minutes these days, wtf - anyway, i'm managing to be slightly more productive in a library than i would be at home no doubt, so it's not such an ill wind... i mean really... last night with nothing to eat up my free time (i.e. the demon internet) i warmed up with a bit of skewed piano jazz tonality (elmo hope, herbie nichols, misha m., sonny clark etc for a bit of pure indulgence) and then plunged back into the châteauvallon 1973 pool for another deep dip (**1); replayed the town hall '72 trios for pure pleasure; and finally japan 1973 which i have not revisited in ages (wow, what a fucking great album! definitely one of the handful of truly essential albums i've heard thus far).

four hours rather fitful sleep followed, after some rather advanced qigong at about 01:20...

- this morning i got back on it, warming up today with bobby previte's pan atlantic (which also served as the immediate warmup for the new braxtothon phase, still quintuple-distilling in the deepest part of the retort..!), and album i like and admire in equal measure (can't say that about everything)... then back to france '73 and the "lost 4tet" with "jif" jenny-clarke and "bobo" shaw; jump or die just to re-hear a different 23d as a sort of palate-cleanser; a tiny bite of comp. 6a from boston, 1975 (still with wheeler just) and then hamburg, 1975 also, but from the euro tour the band undertook (in two parts? apparently, separated by a journey back to the apple) (**2); comp. 249 just for pure pleasure, and finally (after a burst of "kwambe" by gerry hemingway while i showered and shaved) this one, another gap-filler (**3).

and that's that, time is up, gotta go! c x

**1,2,3 on the way!

antibes quartet '75

2011-04-11T07:19:00.000-07:00

one of the things i try to do here from time to time is provide track listings for braxton boots which are circulating on the net... some of these articles end up spiralling out of control and becoming "extra" (i.e. unscheduled) braxtothon stops; usually i try to avoid saying too much about the music itself, and limit myself for the most part to general comments about the primary materials, noting when a given territory is entered, and making the odd observation which seems relevant at the time.

this time the concert in question is from b's 1975 european tour, and it comes from a continuing series of audience recordings posted by riccardo at inconstant sol. the sound quality in this case is not fantastic, but it's perfectly acceptable for a small group, all four players being clearly audible throughout. (as is often the case with such recordings, people can be heard talking in the audience, but here it's only an issue early in the set.) there is quite a lot of tape hiss at times. it's not audiophile quality for sure, but anyone with a genuine interest in the music will find a way to listen past such limitations... the programme is just over an hour long, one set and an encore, and although it's not specified it was presumably presented as part of the famous antibes jazz festival.

braxton/wheeler/holland/altschul - 25/7/75, antibes

main set

comp. 23e

comp. 23j

?? (transition phase inc. clarinet solo)

comp. 40f

comp. 23g

- it's actually quite refreshing to come across a live set from this period which doesn't contain any of the fall 1974 side a pieces (i.e. comps. 23b-c-d)... i had been getting just a little tired of hearing those, especially since our man sounds by this time as if he himself is rather less than inspired by playing them yet again; and of course i've mentioned numerous times before that comp. 23b in particular runs the risk of allowing this rhythm section to nod off. looking at the set-list, the other thing which is most obviously missing is one of the repetition structures (apart from comp. 23c itself, which is technically a repetition structure but which has extra characterisitics of its own, there would very often be a rendition of either comp. 6f or comp. 40(o)) - during the course of the braxtothon i found myself concluding that these pieces acquired a new lease of life when george lewis joined the band, but in the meantime it's not at all unusual for this band to play at least one of those numbers. they are, therefore, notable here by their absence... finally, there is a first (for me) in this set: i have never previously heard comp. 40f played by this version of the band. [when i covered the dortmund version of this, i wondered "aloud" whether or not it had been written while wheeler was still in the band, and didn't check... this recording answers that question. it's not a "full" reading - see below - but here it is, already being unveiled to audiences more than a year before lewis got hold of it.]

the recording begins just after the beginning of comp. 23e, this majestic piece seemingly etched permanently onto the set-list around this time; and that's not too surprising since it had just recently been "perfected" in the studio in new york - when i wrote about the bremen concert, i tentatively came to the (apparently wrong) conclusion that the studio version had already been waxed (*1); in this instance, it seems certain that the band has already been into the studio with the piece and is well used to playing it, even a little over-comfortable with it, since the actual moment of transition which completes the written theme does not really occur very cleanly, and is if anything rather anticlimactic. still, it's a great piece and if it sounds slightly odd to be hearing at the start of a set, it's suitably dramatic for the occasion.

round about 12.30 (*2), with b. on flute, there are trace elements of 23c after all, and possibly other things too (?), but 23e is always a long number and there is no actual change of territory until 18.15ish, when there is a sudden and somewhat unconvincing shift into comp. 23j. as with the montreux version, i am left feeling that wheeler does not possess enough firepower to be taking this one on, and there is not quite enough energy in the mix; but the leader does not seem to be held back by that, delivering a scorching first alto solo of the day. holland's bass solo is not bad either... when the restated theme finishes abruptly around 32 mins, the audience (all of whom will be hearing the piece for the first time) doesn't realise, so there is no applause; the band immediately wanders into a transition phase, which itself quickly gives way to an unaccompanied clarinet solo - if this, or any of the other materials played during these few minutes constitute an actual composition as such then i can't place it. gradually other voices enter and there is a little more meandering along. [STOP PRESS - arf! - yeah, could well be a solo piece in there somewhere, one of the 8s or 26s i would guess... haven't nailed this one down yet by any means. further work in progress...]

at 37.30ish, a very fast comp. 40f begins. as i said above, i've never heard this played by wheeler and it's clearly still in development at this stage; it sounds a little directionless and b's alto solo quotes comp. 23g, at which point the band quickly begins moving in that direction. around 42.55 23g proper commences, the original pulse track piece (new readers will need to bear in mind b's own very specific use of this phrase, since what he calls a pulse track does not necessarily represent what most listeners would expect from a "pulse"). just after 44 mins there is what sounds like a sound fault but is probably a (well-)spliced tape flip - it results in "continuous" play, but we have missed a little bit of the performance. there is another terrific alto solo in this number, really full of energy and heat, the inherent tension in the theme-plus-pulse-track exploding here in a way that the studio version never quite does.

encore

"see-saw" (holland)

- i've never heard this played by a braxton quartet before (well - not until very recently *3), but it shows that holland's pieces were occasionally dropped into the live sets before the graz concert - there is a neat symmetry here actually, since graz finishes off with comp. 6i... and just in case there was ever a question of borderline plagiarism over the nature of this theme (i was a big fan of this one back in the days before i was familiar with the braxton number which blatanty inspired it)... no hard feelings at all apparently, which is only as need be... anyway... wheeler seems very comfortable playing this, producing a very agile solo which never sounds lost at all, in contrast to some of his performances during the last year of his tenure. possibly there is a big clue here: holland's tune, that much simpler and less knotty than one of b's, maybe makes wheeler feel slightly more at home. in any case, he will eventually show himself to be happiest when dealing with relatively conventional tonalities. here and today, it's a good encore which guarantees a rousing finish.

and that's that... i found this an enjoyable if non-essential performance, the playing generally very good, some of the readings of the repertoire a little sloppy at times. as always... it's worth hearing!

* see comments

music here/corrigendum

2011-03-31T15:31:00.000-07:00

just a quick one... i mentioned recently that i'd acquired both sets from 11/11/93, to go with the two from the 12th which are available at TCF (thanks to atanase for sorting me out with these); if anyone is interested, i've now uploaded these as high-rate mp3s and it seems only fitting to offer them here... just to reiterate, this is the classic quartet with crispell, dresser and hemingway and the music is so good that for once i'm not even going to try and describe it. i don't have track lists for these sets at all, and i haven't attempted to provide them - there were a few themes which i recognised for sure, but none which i could identify off the top of my head. if anyone can help out, please leave a comment or drop me a line

braxton quartet - knitting factory, nyc, 11th november 1993

~~set one~~

~~set two~~

- enjoy!

***

i don't post much music here, which is possibly one reason why people tend not to notice when i do..! just in case anyone missed it who would be interested, there is still a very good, sax-laden gtm concert available here. (probably i have written enough about the 65th birthday concert that even occasional readers are aware of that one, but if not, there is some music here too, indexed and identified - the same music is available elsewhere, but not with all the relevant details!)

***

back to new york '93 briefly - i detailed some corrections recently to the track lists for the boots up at TCF; this included the new york (12th november) sets, but i forgot to mention one more, namely that the encore for the second set is actually the arco march comp. 6a, not 69n as listed. it's beginning to look as if the whole listing is pretty unreliable, unfortunately :-S

[oh yeah - and i'm very gradually still working my way back through the blog, correcting the discog links..! i'm up to here so far... appropriately enough, given the previous post...]

braxbites #3: the '97 ninetet

2011-03-29T16:05:00.000-07:00

(not a nonet, notice)

this was volume four i was listening to - the one i acquired over the festive season from good old leo records; i already have the other three (also purchased directly from the label) and wrote briefly about one set here. this is a line-up which really isn't designed to welcome newcomers much, those considering the idea of flirting with b's music not likely to feel unintimidated by the mental image of six sax players and a three-man rhythm trying desperately to make itself heard. or, as it turns out, the problem might be just the opposite, namely that the very spare and economical "head" arrangements for this group (in which players are often initially "hidden" by attacks being perfectly duplicated) might engender an immediate assumption that there won't be enough variety in the sound palette. in any case wrong, wrong, wrong. this music is packed full of treats for the ear once it's up and running - and it's surely understood by now that all gtm takes a while to get up and running, the theme being always necessary to suck one into the required receptive listening state; again - this in itself is a sort of paradox, since the "organised awkwardness" of a diamond-clef theme must be an instant turn-off for a lot of unconvinced jazzers out there; but for the initiated the effect the themes have is precisely that they take us there, to the place where nothing is true and everything is permitted.

with two discs to work from here, there are general points to be made - in addition to what i've already said above - as well as a few choice miniatures to single out for the reader's attention.

it's a feature of b's music generally (certainly from the "collage phase" onwards, if not before), and i've mentioned it before myself, but it bears repeating: the density of the musical ideas once the pieces are fully underway here is astounding. with no sense of rush, the music moves at tremendous "speed", therefore - that is, the information being exchanged between players and listener is delivered at a terrific rate (*1). at this relatively early stage in the evolution of gtm, it may perhaps some surprise some readers that this already the case; indeed, plenty of people seem to have convinced themselves (usually on short acquaintance) that b's composition took a step backwards round about this time (*2) and didn't start to expand again until the third species, accelerator-class pieces began to appear, well into the new century. this is a mistaken impression, naturally. what might sound at first like stiff, mechanical themes or arrangements are actually filled with life and breathing space, inspired by true creative magic to engender all manner of musical possibilities. for this listener, at least, the effect whenever i listen is invariably "holistic": it satisfies me intellectually and emotionally at the same time, fostering in me a sense of happiness and joy that at times becomes outright, childlike delight. yes, i've said all this before and, again, it's worth repeating (as many times as it might take for the message to sink in!).

when listening to groups from this era i often forget temporarily that i'm not listening to mary halvorson on guitar, so used am i to her presence by now; kevin o'neil doesn't actually sound like her as such (and of course mary h. would generally announce herself pretty early on with one of her signature "wobbles"), it's just that it seems as if she must always have been present! (*3) - o'neil struck me as a little subdued on the second set (comp. 214) in particular, not really getting a chance to nudge his way into the spotlight until 25 mins are on the clock, but then it's all been about the horns up till then, and no great surprise there. (he does get to finish up all by himself, this not being a piece which ends mid-theme; some gtm performances do, some don't. the fact that a string player gets to close out the piece reminded me at once of comp. 63, from berlin '76 - among other occasions it's been performed *4.)

the rhythmic "collisions" in both pieces are frequently amazing. already there will have been sectional playing at work (at least i presume so) and the separate sub-groups will have been allowed autonomy at certain stages of the performances; one way in which this is expressed is in the different rhythms and tempos which are taken up by each trio at times. the resulting complexity is at once mind-boggling and simply beautiful. at one such point during comp. 213 i found myself visualising an "impossibly unpredictable complex clock-structure" - the image of a clock mechanism being one which has come to my mind before during such listenings - and a little later in the same piece it suddenly occurred to me that b. has a total fascination for the rhythms of the rail - at a later stage of gtm, trains will become an explicit part of the title-imagery for the compositions (*5). but the idea was already there, and as if to prove it, at 15.50 in comp. 214 one section launches into comp. 34, this proving so infectious that it quickly spreads to the whole ensemble and transforms the stage briefly into a crazy street party, though still with a sense of the locomotive somehow running through it (*6).

five minutes into the same piece (no need to do this "in order" for a change), we witness the unfolding of a highly complex extension of one of b's early-70s ballad structures; within another minute, this in turn has spawned its own extensions and outgrowths, speeding the listening ear way beyond the starting point. and of course comp. 213 also contains numerous moments which leave me sighing at the beauty of it all, and others which generate real heat and excitement - well, this in itself is nothing new, obviously, it was (again) a feature of the "great quartet" (*7), but throughout the 45th minute of this piece, for example, the band shows it's certainly not all about finesse and filigree, norton whipping up a sandstorm and everyone quickly getting involved. there are spellbinding blasts of concentrated dissonance such as the one which kicks in at around 34 mins (can that be anyone other than the leader, dominating the sound there?). and comp. 214 has plenty of excitement of its own, a fabulous cacophony around 7.45 suddenly making me think of some immense shipyard, just for a few seconds... the musical landscape seems to shift so fast at this point in the proceedings that it's as if we are viewing it from a helicopter - which in turn is whisked around at the mercy of a gigantic length of elastic :)

well, you get the idea... i didn't give either disc my full and undivided attention, and if i had, i'm sure i could have written far more about the music... but it's always the case with this sort of thing that mapping the journey from start to finish would be inviting insanity. in any case, there were plenty of times when the sounds claimed my ears completely and drew me away from whatever i was doing - this, too, is always the case when i "listen" this way. i love this music. enough said!

* see comments

broadcast from centrispace

2011-03-16T07:07:00.000-07:00

rrrrright.... after the burst of enthusiasm summed up in the previous post, i found myself totally computerless for almost a week; maddeningly frustrating, but there it was - and just got back online yesterday. i am currently on one of my "holiday weeks", i.e. paid not to go to work but not actually away anywhere... alas, these weeks are not what they once were, not since parenthood... hence the "week" basically ended up being a morning and an afternoon. never mind, never mind... no, not enough time for any serious braxtothon work (and to think i once tried to spend a maximum of thirty mins on those write-ups..! fuck... lifetime ago... not that i usually managed to stick to the time limit anyway) - but then i still haven't quite got that one going again, have i? not yet - the station remains empty for the time being.

- but there is enough time to recapture some of that recent excitement, especially since we are now ten days further into spring... as well as catching up with some blog admin (see second section below) and detailing a few discographical corrections (... third... ) i have a few hours in which to write some stuff up, namely the ninetet braxbite (coming next) and the châteauvallon revisit (up after that). and listen to some music of course... well, that's the plan anyway.

incidentally... one could be forgiven for not noticing, but i did FINALLY get that stubborn, unwilling-to-be-birthed john tchicai concert piece done. (the post which followed was a sort of afterthought.) don't bother reading if you're looking for a detailed account of mr tchicai's playing (or indeed of anyone else's...) ;-)

***

as previously noted, the recent restructuring at restructures meant that all my links to the discog were gone, 404'd... and i set myself to fixing that, starting from the beginning... and got further than i had expected by the time we lost the computer. i've had another crack at these this morning and i now find myself (in blog admin terms, you understand, not in braxtothon time) in april 2008. which is actually not such a bad place to hang out, since that, too, was a pretty happy and well-aspected time (*1). the three playlists are all done, by the way, properly linked up for the first time ever. (*2)

***

with my (generally) shit workrate i'm not necessarily the best man for the job, but i could work well as part of a team: those new braxton house boots offer some fascinating gems, mostly new discoveries for me, but there aren't half some corrigenda. (and to be fair they do put forward the customary disclaimer.) what i am still curious (i.e. unenlightened) about is at which point the communication broke down. jason guthartz and jon piper are both on the board at tricentric now, i see (which is great - very encouraging). but apparently the tracklists for the boots just went onto the page as found, without anyone running them past b's (self-appointed) discographer and gigographer (*3). time musta been tight! anyway... let's hope that we can all get that sorted out in the fullness of time, and meanwhile, i shall do my bit and report on my findings as they are made (*4).

the story so far:

a) solo (france) 1971. this is the strangest of the bunch, since j's entry for the recording must be very recent, yet his tracklist is different from the one that accompanies the recording. i have already mentioned the corrections which come next, albeit tucked away in a comment on an old post where hardly anyone was gonna find them: the first two pieces, as is stated everywhere, were included on the "rarities" compilation news from the 70s (every home... etc) where they are identified as comps. 8c and 8g respectively; these have been re-examined at some point, and jason now gives them as comp. 26d and comp. 8b. this is not, of course, what it says on the NBH bootleg page so i double-checked, using the solo alto albums for reference, and satisfied myself that the identifications at restructures are correct. well spotted, whoever got those... (i haven't yet checked the id's for the three "new" tracks, given the same way in both places... it's on my to-do list... yes, i know...)

b) quartet (avignon) 1974. jg is happy to endorse the (truncated) tracklist for this one, but differs as to precise date (20th vs. 21st july). the idea of a 35-min rendering of my old mate comp. 6i seemed pretty unlikely but sure enough, that's exactly what it is - and it is fantastic, consistently gripping and filled with stuff i've never heard before but not, apparently, taking in any other primary territories (or indeed secondary ones, at least not named territories as opposed to spontaneous outgrowths). HIGHly recommended...

... but whatever the second piece is, it's not comp. 6l as far as i can see. the distinctive "slow-stepping" theme is entirely absent - and it is above all this device which characterises that piece (*5). but it's still really good. it's also pretty surreal because at a certain point [only listened to that one this morning but have already forgotten the time, i'm afraid] the sound "of" a synth or electronic processor kicks in and proceeds to modulate slowly up and down in (sort of) time with the music, i.e. in a fashion absolutely, nay quintessentially braxton (and i don't use that word lightly, nor will you read it hear often) - yet in 1974? just a howling ghost which took refuge in the recording at some stage during the (tediously long and involved) transfer lineage... or was mr teitelbaum involved, suddenly popping up at the side of the stage? surely that would be listed on the info, partially inaccurate as it is; and besides it really doesn't sound like him... perhaps a teenage masami akita was in europe at this time (he wasn't) and gatecrashed the stage with a modified theremin... anyway... it's all good, whatever it is, lots of energy at this point in the quartet's existence, and it all still sounds as fresh as the day it was recorded (obviously).

c) quartet (bremen) 1975 - i already wrote pretty, ah, extensively about this one so i'm not gonna repeat myself... i have actually downloaded this version as well just to see what the differences are in presentation/editing (folly ftsw's needed quite a bit of work doing to it in that regard) but haven't even opened the file yet. [actually i'm in 1993 right now "listening" to the great quartet - not that one, see f) and g) below - every time i focus in on it for a bit (instead of blathering to the great god blog) i realise how absolutely incredible this music is/was/will (always) be] - no diff's between TCF and guthartz.

d) quartet (graz) 1976 - nice to have a complete listing for this one. but, as i have already shown (and shall continue showing..!) the identification of the long third file as comp. 40l/comp. 40d is not necessarily 100% reliable, and i haven't checked it (yet). guthartz has it the same.

e) orchestra (paris) 1978 - haha, off the topic a bit but the sound on this one is so shit that even a guerilla commentator (i.e. non-audiophile) like me has not yet found the stomach to listen to it... shame as it's a really fucking great band (i must speak again to mr naughton re this one)

f) quartet (new york) 1993 - set 1 - that's not 40m, that's rather comp. 40k second up...

g) quartet (new york) 1993 - set 2 - ... and that is actually comp. 69b kicking off the second set, not 69m. no trouble identifying that one, since i'd already had to locate it when the same quartet, minus leader, played it first up (i think ms crispell likes this one) at the tribute concert last year. (the next two selections, comps. 23c/40(o) were rather less imaginative choices... and/but who knows where they were heading when b. jumped onstage and took them into/towards "impressions") - there is also a simple and clear duet available for comparison. [69m sounds totally different, a fast and playful theme typical of the quartet(s) with ray anderson.]

- this was also the only number on which i id'd a secondary territory, in this case comp. 6n which is played with the bow by dresser (beautifully - as if that needed to be said).

(restructures rather sensibly chooses not to commit at all on these)

- there is bound to be some collaging going on here (both sets) but maybe not so much. what really typifies this band - other than the sheer "incredibility" factor alluded to in c) above - is the clean economy of it, all the players so well and truly grown up by now that they can get right inside the music without needing to break sweat and make life extra-challenging for themselves, hence there doesn't seem to be much collaging, not compared with 1985.

and they really do get right inside the music... utterly wonderful... and you know what, the band didn't just play one night on that engagement, they played the night before as well (and was that it? or did it continue all weekend, a mini-residency just like our man specialises in - whenever he gets the chance..?) - this one is not up at TCF but i have just (yesterday) got hold of it and again both sets are complete and the sound fidelity is extremely good. and no, i can't put numbers to any of it yet and although some of it is defintiely familiar, i haven't tried - the coalface has moved much deeper in than the four songbooks now, and my learning edge is still trapped back there in 1976 (or edging round the corner into '77 depending on how you look at it)... listing concert sets from this era is very very hard and i'll gladly shake the hand of anyone that even (seriously) attempts it - many themes sound similar, at least prima facie (but 'twas ever thus, and not just with this composer), and there are many to choose from, some of them only popping up in the discog once and others perhaps not at all... nightmare... but we'll get there i expect..!

***

and that's that for the time being... there will be more... end of "holiday" but ah, spring at last :)

* see comments

hope springs...

2011-03-06T16:54:00.000-08:00

did i say january? it just didn't happen for some reason - well, probably because i still wasn't ready to wean myself off comics just yet, but in any case, with the exception of a couple of days, the planned january braxblitz failed to materialise. but that's ok 'cos the time was (basically) well spent and besides, as it turns out, march 2011 is braxton month, how could it be otherwise when the first of the month brought news of the tricentric foundation's "official relaunch" via the public unveiling of the new website..? - i spent the rest of the evening listening to music, starting with the free download (which is fucking great btw, grab it if you haven't yet done so... never fall into the trap of thinking that you have "enough/too much gtm already": each reading is just one among many such possible, literally anything could turn up, just show up out of the blue like that... old faces, old tunes, old old old atavistic dances round long-dead fires... and also new new new since, let's not forget, most other musics are still lagging way behind this sort of stuff. in terms of sheer ideas per minute gtm is way up the top of a pretty rarefied list as i understand it *) and going from there, mailing a few people i know partly or mainly through a shared interest in b's music; - and remembering yet again something which i seem to have somehow forgotten over the last few months, which is how to use this music purely to give myself a lift, to fill my head and heart with joy... and it's always just there waiting for me, but at some point along the line it came to be that i could no longer approach a braxton recording purely with feelings of pleasurable anticipation since there was always a feeling at the back of my mind that it could very possibly lead to more work. having been an unhappy teenager i have a very troubled relationship with this concept, one to which many more solidly-based adults reconcile themselves early on (and thus come to welcome it... up to a point); well, anyway, i'm trying, i'm constantly trying and it's beginning to look as if i might be getting somewhere...

... and this comes at the same time as all this other new growth - i am very happy to celebrate the new venture and will look forward to helping out if i can... i have corresponded briefly with thb during the last week and the blog will eventually be linked directly from the site - and there may turn out to be other ways of getting more involved, ways which don't entail immediate relocation to the states..! (although...) anyway, for the time being, it's enough to join in the general rejoicing and good-luck wishes, may the foundation flourish and reach many lives! {{{{@@@@@}}}}

- and enough to get back on that good-time vibe, because i wasn't just exaggerating or bullshitting that time before (nor was it the first such time... as i implied), this man's music is not entertainment for me, nor is it even mere brain-fodder, it is actually food, energetic and spiritual nourishment which on some occasions i swear i can actually feel seeping into all my pores and cleansing everything... that's just how it is with this guy... what can i say. i can't promise to fix my work hangup just like that, but i have continued listening to b's music all through the week (working my way through the tcf's as-yet-small collection of boots, for a start!) and there's been no sense of a chore about any of it. long may it continue... and bring on the spring :))

***

STOP PRESS- STOP PRESS - jason guthartz has recently had to divide the discography over two pages. (it was taking time to load.) that means that until such time as i get the chance to fix the links, all links to the discog in my posts are invalid. i will correct at least the main links appearing in braxtothon entries starting with the earliest, starting today, and those of you who know my rate of progress by now will know better than to wait around for it... but i am on it. thanks for listening :)

london postscript

2011-02-28T03:43:00.000-08:00

... so, anyway, as atanase and i made our way from the overland rail link to the tube station for the second leg of the well-timed journey back, we agreed that we have (as an unfortunate side-effect) become spoiled by the condensed self-imposed educational regimes we have both undergone. "we have heard so much, in such a short space of time", said a., "- perhaps if we saw that concert a few years ago, we would think it was great, you know." and yep, i did know cos it's precisely true. there was nothing wrong with it - and indeed much right with it. yes, at times we probably ask too much (of ourselves and/or others)

creative free jazz - it is true, one never runs out of steam so long as there is fuel in the setup, never runs out of potential because (as with improv) one is required only to bring oneself fully to the date, a basic essential requirement for making the scene in the first place... yes, just for turning up - but this rather than some checklisted bag of trix.

but as regards any sort of cutting edge, right now in the distant hinterlands where only frontier posts yet subsist, this was a long way back from even getting news from there, not so much as a postcard. as regards the state of the avant-garde... i have been planning to make an examination of whether that particular french borrowing is salvageable, can be reclaimed from the dustbin of polite utility... watch this space, just don't hold yr breath, y'all know the drill by now :)

feet of clay

2011-02-28T01:24:00.000-08:00

john tchicai with john edwards and tony marsh
cafe oto, london e8
monday 27th september 2010

the scene: as i said recently, it had been almost three years since my last return to london (mrs c. and i lived there from 1995 until 2003). and, despite the continual talk of recession between then and now, it's obvious that parts of the capital are still being bombarded with money. little by little, london is becoming more of a "science-fiction" city - certainly it looks it compared to swansea (where i live currently), which is still struggling to drag itself out of the 1980s, never mind into the 21st century. much as i hate being made to feel like a tourist in a city where i used to live, that is now pretty much the reality for me. public transport in london these days is best accessed with the "oyster card", which is read electronically and is designed to save both time and money - but also (apparently) to trick the unfamiliar into paying more for their journeys than they needed to, if one is not told how to use it properly. (i was lucky in this regard: when i arrived at paddington, i encountered that extreme rarity, a helpful london transport employee, who explained to me how to avoid getting ripped off.)

quite a lot of the stations have undergone extensive cosmetic and structural work since my last visit - some of them i wouldn't have recognised from my days as a resident. a lot of the trains are new and (gasp!) clean; the london underground used to be notorious for how dirty its trains were. down by the tracks, there are now advertisements which function like video screens; somehow, these seem to fit into the background so easily that i'd been standing right in front of one for a few minutes before i realised what i was seeing. yes, all very futuristic - and you don't see anything like that out in the sticks. (one friend that i caught up with during my visit said that when these "moving ads" were first introduced, it was like something out of blade runner: a lot of the stations themselves were being totally gutted, wires hanging out all over the place, debris everywhere, nothing working properly apart from the new video screens. that, at least, sounds about right and kind of familiar..!)

- the relevance of all this is that plenty of the capital looks just the same as i remember it. naturally, the money has not reached everywhere. as atanase and i took our bus north from the city (london's financial district), we passed several huge, and hugely expensive, new buildings which have sprung up just in the last year or so, looking almost obscene in times of general belt-tightening; but it didn't take long for things to change. within a mile or two of the city, the scenery began to look exactly as it had ten or fifteen years ago. as the bus continued on towards dalston, the lack of money most people are experiencing became more accurately reflected in our surroundings. a few miles further on, by the time it crosses the north circular, the A10 has become the great cambridge road; this far south, it's just plain old kingsland high road and looks every bit as run-down and depressing as it used to in my day. i remember it as being the sort of place one would not want to stand still for more than a few seconds, and that's the way it looks now: no new buildings, no tarted-up shops, just the same filthy old store-fronts and forbidding housing estates. it's pretty close to the city, but the money hasn't stretched this far and probably never will. so it came as a bit of a shock to arrive at our destination, tucked away just off the main road, and find it a very trendy-looking bistro serving japanese cuisine and organic beer. what the hell is the cafe oto doing here of all places?(*1) yet it seems to be flourishing, and in the few short years it's been open, its's hosted hundreds of creative musicians already. it's a decent space to play in too, roomy yet intimate - not the easiest combination of qualities to achieve.

the music: aha, yeah, the music... about that shit... my lack of interesting detail retained from the actual set(s) has nothing much to do with the time which has elapsed between then and right now, writing after one of my (kinda patented - if you know what i'm saying) unseemly delays, one of my continuing (as yet) down-phases for creative expression. no, even at the time i struggled to grasp hold of mr tchicai's transmissions as they were unfurled into the willing audience's "welcome space": most of my observation at the time ended up being hijacked somewhat by the interaction between edwards (whom i had never seen before) and marsh (whom i'd never even heard of, though by the time our third hand for the evening - see below - had finished explicating marsh's background and connections to me, it felt as if i "should" have heard of him (*2)).

... tchicai - we were discussing on the bus the guy's "free jazz cv" etc. atanase forgot about new york eye and ear control for a minute there, but we pretty much agreed that a) that's not exactly one of the first few ayler sessions you'd place at the top of the (any) list, good line-up though it is, and b) neither of us has ever had much enthusiasm for ascension as it happens. it fell again to the third set of ears at our table tonight, the presence formerly known as king kennytone (tPFKaKK) to remind me later that tchicai was always the voice of moderation on these occasions anyway, had never been a balls-out player in the first place - though he was never averse to participating, clearly...

... in any case [another phrase you'll have to sit through many times in these ramblings...] YES as i was SAYING - marsh and edwards, very fertile partnership there, impressed by both over the course, by edwards especially who popped by between sets to exchange catch-ups with one of my companions - very energetic and creative player, great engine to have in the arsenal so to speak... mr tchicai - impressed me anyway, in the end, more by his manner of inhabiting his body with poise and grace and continuing to communicate with a horn (tenor sax these days of course, though tPFKaKK said later to me that he might as well still play alto, his vocab still comes across as alto-based and i would concur with this, in so far as i am even qualified to express an opinion on that given my difficulties focussing on mr t's playing at times and resultant large gaps in my ear memory of the gig *3) in much the same way, with the same grace, the same poise and with quiet, serene dignity. in my "living legend" polarity he is at the gayle end of things rather than down in the muck and entrails with mr sonny simmons. occasionally during the evening he produced a timbral distortion or three, usually a short string of firecrackers and sounded immediately compelling, but never seemed or looked or sounded likely to follow these up... and didn't. the trouble with that for me is that those distortions are what my listening soul needs and craves, the family of languages which i speak with most familiarity after all these incarnations - and you know, there was plenty to distract me in the engine room where edwards and marsh, as previously stated, worked really well together.

john edwards has played around the british scene (whatever that is) - or southern english (?) scene for years now, and as i rediscovered last year, played with the band GOD way back in the "dawn of the nineties" - atanase has seen him before on several occasions and ...aKK is well familiar with him too, but my first live impressions were, ah, very impressive... comment dire impressionnantes ;-) the guy is all over his axe and never looks like slipping into a groove or going off the boil even. constant intereaction with the drummer and fast pickup, both ways. scattershot approach to kit from marsh, standard euro free improv calling-card used on this occasion, presumably, more as a "flag of convenience" since mr marsh has played in numerous different types of modern ensemble and would not, one guesses, have played fusion in this way... but plenty of energy is co-created and for sure, if i have trouble (and i do, i do) pinning down the tchicai transmission as it unfurls and dances in the audience-created "after-air", this is not to say that he ever sounds out of place or ill at ease, far from it, his manner of being here is exactly as stated above. poise... grace... lots of practice at being at ease with oneself and one's surroundings... and in this way i can see to what extent the experience was inspiring, can continue to be inspiring.

otherwise all i remember from that first set at this distance is that when edwards got the bow out, i wasn't greatly convinced by his arco technique. (this impression was sharply overturned during the second set!)

there was an intermission which did not last long, the organic beer was sampled... was delicious actually (... and although four quid a pint seemed like a total burn i am also well aware that a nite-venue elsewhere in london, or in that swansea for that matter, would doubtless see me extorted to the same tune for a smallish bottle of something nasty... after having to shout at the bar staff, playing human dodgems, etc etc)

second set was latterly spoiled a bit (for me, alone among the three of us as it turned out) by a familliar problem since i left london, i.e. the tourist's dread of being stranded at last-tube time: the last number went on and on and on and then wound down and started up again, in such a way as to leave one in no doubt that there would be even still yet further rounds of what was basically a pretty groovy closing number, for all its protracted length, and i would have been happier if we could have started earlier (no support act, plenty of time sitting around waiting etc) and fucken finished earlier so i didn't have to give my neurotic arse a minor aneurysm. (dalston not on the tube, don't forget... overland rail or nightbus - as it was: we couldn't have got there any later, but we arrived at walking pace just in time for the right train and were back at a's way earlier than anticipated. which was nice) - up until this point i was more fully involved in the second set, and also had plenty of leisure to observe how wrong hasty impressions can (all-too) frequently be, during a number penned by one of mr t's scandinavian friends, a finnish guy whose name alas has gone now (hadn't heard of him) - but i believe the piece was called "undertow", or the equivalent thereof in finnish, and it was to a great extent dominated by edwards rock-solid arco playing with some very close control required as regards dynamic shifts, etc. (in the first set, sounding off-note and awkward to my mind with the bow, mr e was possibly just doing that thing, fucking shit up to see what bursts into being as a result - sometimes maybe nothing, but sometimes something, so hey...)

i do remember that there was at least one outright "sax solo" in an evening of freely-flexible, partly-prestructured free jazz that i did really enjoy - it hasn't stayed with me though. at one point mr t stepped up to the mic without his sax in his mouth and at least two thirds of our table held its breath in "little dread", but - well, the whole delivering-the-message-through-words part of things is inherently problematic for me 99% of the time (for reasons... mmm, *4), and wasn't especially enjoyable here, but the brief knowledge that john tchicai wanted to share with us had resonance with me at once, reminded me precisely, in fact, of something so profoundly linked to my current (and recent) patterns of living that i shan't quote the wording now so as not to get into any of it, not now - but even at the time i took note, took it in bodily and openly and in (slightly embarrassed) silence.

thassit really - no more specifics forthcoming, not now - but that's enough, for me to get to my point. if there is one:

is it fair - to oneself or to anyone else - to demand that a real-life encounter with a "living legend" (and tchicai's free jazz cv is basically still impeccable, no matter what) be life-changing, huge? is that in fact what i was expecting? no... atanase and i had discussed this beforehand - and ...aKK had seen mr t's "battle of the red rose (ahem)" encounter with mr parker, had never thought of tchicai as a fierce energy player, and indeed he probably never has been, though he can deploy the vocab base as and when - so no, i was not expecting a life-conversion. but i did struggle consciously upstream, as has been my wont these last few years, to see what new information can be mined out of the experience, and i kept feeling that i just wasn't getting it. i don't think anyone else took it as being massive or fabulous or amazing either, though i'd be surprised if anyone left without feeling at least somewhat cheered and uplifted, the ambience of the event being so warmly positive... what was there to get or "get"? still not sure about this, but maybe the non-pushy reminder that even living legends remain just human is itself enough to have mulled over slowly, these five months...

* see comments

braxbites #2: solo bagpipes

2011-02-16T17:19:00.000-08:00

having said a couple of posts back that i wanted to hear matthew welch's 10 [Solo Bagpipe] Compositions 2000 (album credited to b., as composer), i was pretty quickly hooked up courtesy of a friend of mine, and found myself just this afternoon sampling this extraordinary creation. (said friend had affixed a post-it over the cd envelope with cover your ears! written on it and sure enough, the dogs weren't particularly chuffed about the afternoon's aural treats i don't think, but i did find it a pretty interesting listen and not overly terrifying... (perhaps it does wear you down a bit after a while - well, read on).

straight away one of the (few) advantages of the instrument is on display - the inherent capacity for multiphonics introduced by the drone, against which the melody line is usually set; this actually provides quite a hypnotic sound environment which is very definitely a good start when dealing with this composer's music. so initial hopes were quite high once the album was underway... and the player's skill on his instrument is pretty evident early on also. i enjoyed the first cut and then found myself zoning off a bit during the second and third. too literally hypnotic? well, at any rate i was jerked back to attention by the start of the fourth piece (comp. 106a), which is played without the drone... and this immediately got me thinking about the clear disadvantages of the instrument, and specifically the fact that use of the drone automatically chains the player tightly to one key, every damn time, this being a bit of a problem really for a solo instrument. furthermore the keying action of the melody pipe(s?) tends to produce quite similar attacks each time, at least when the drone is being sounded at the same time; hence, not surprisingly, with this on as semi-background music i found the drone-accompanied performances (seven out of the ten) pretty interchangeable. this is NOT proper listening and therefore not a proper assessment of the performances, never mind of the interpretations which may well be skillful and faithful. (one day - though god knows when - i will try and make direct comparisons with other versions of the same pieces.) still, the way it worked out, the three remaining pieces were by far the most interesting for me and ultimately the only ones which fully commanded my attention.

welch's 106a grabs the attention right from the start, then, partly because one is immediately aware of what's missing (i.e. the drone) but also because of the variations which welch is able to bring to the attacks once he can give all his attention to the "tuneful" part of the instrument. the piece begins with a lovely falling and rising effect and immediately follows it up with a very precise timbral distortion. over the course of the piece the player is finally able to give a clear picture of just what he can do in terms of close control (another essential quality for taking on b's music). it's an intriguing performance and track seven, comp. 119g, is if anything even better, weighing in at just over two minutes but again utilising a variety of extended techniques (tonal distortions and modulations, sub-vocalisation, multiphonics - at certain pitches the single reed itself throws off all manner of complex higher harmonics) which the maestro must surely have been delighted by.

even these two pieces, however, fade in the memory compared with the penultimate track, comp. 118e which sounds as if it's played entirely on the mouthpiece alone. comparisons must immediately be made with zorn's classic guide to strategy (master)pieces, nor would these be unfavourable since welch again demonstrates remarkable powers of control, concentration and precision over the course of these eleven fascinating minutes (well - i found it fascinating anyway! i love this kind of thing). as with zorn's (or george lewis's) mouthpiece performances, there is plenty of dry humour here also. (this of course is another key braxton characteristic, albeit one which is too-frequently overlooked.)

i have not finished with this one by any means - though it might be a while before i return to it - but it demanded a brief mention in the meantime. i have no doubt that b. was pleased and proud with his student's work on this recording. can i necessarily recommend it as listening material? mmmmmmmmmmmmmmrrrmrmrmrmrmrmmm that's really a very personal choice i think, i just can't say for sure! but it's definitely an intriguing entry in the canon and i'm glad someone was mad and obsessive enough to do it.

braxbites #1: jump or die

2011-02-07T17:03:00.000-08:00

[the night of music (sunday 16th jan) was indeed followed by a morning of music on monday 17th, but that was about it until now, the way it panned out. i still had a small pile of partly-heard and unheard cds and a bunch of unheard live material. however, the very first cd i bought with my xmas money was one i managed to play a few times, and under different circumstances each time...]

jump or die - think fast!, in other words, and then commit yourself - this is the name under which two small groups of high-impact, left-field improvisers left their mark on modern music in the early nineties, with the enlisted help of three additional players. splatter trio, it seems, was led by composer, percussionist, arranger (etc) gino robair with multi-reedist dave barrett and myles boisen on chordophones; debris, from a completely different part of the united states was apparently headed up by multi-reedist steve norton with cornetist keith hedger, drummer curt newton and utility man arthor weinstein on a variety of "wildcard" instruments. once the two groups had been linked together, with two recording sessions to be produced by norton and robair, three further musicians were pulled in: a trombone, another multi-reed and a mallet percussion specialist. the pieces played, all by mr b. in this case of course, were collected in sheet-music form at wesleyan by guest reedman randy mckean; they are (mostly) collaged and vary each time as regards instrumentation, all then players never being heard at once. the two pieces (cuts 5 and 9 on the album) which feature a nonet are both conducted by robair, who does not play on either.

the album... is just a remarkably well-aspected and -favoured meeting of like minds, and the musical record of it buzzes with excitement like a live wire, right from the first few notes.

***

as promised, i'm gonna cut back on my ambitions for these interim articles, so i shall limit myself to two general points of discussion here. after all, each and every selection on offer has been lovingly chosen, arranged and rehearsed (?) just for this one-off date (*), it would be so easy to succumb to temptation and examine each and every performance; ah, but then it'd never get written up knowing me and besides... this is nonetheless not core canon, brilliant as it is.

1. the band chooses material which in a number of cases has never been recorded by the maestro himself. some of these pieces were doubtless performed in concert over the years, though how anyone apart from the band members in question would know their opus numbers... well, anyway, it's great to have these works undertaken here. (and of course some of the pieces have been waxed before, as regards which, see below...) the very first cut on jump or die, a collage structure for the two core groups as one septet (with subgroupings as arranged beforehand), begins with comp. 40e, a number which left me scratching my head - until a check in at restructures confirmed that the piece does not appear in the core discog as such - and which hides behind its numbered door another barking-mad march, indeed a mad hares' march, all springy in the first part of the theme and pinging all over the place in the second. how did we never get an official version of this? praise be to norton and robair :) - we are also treated to a "mash-up" of comps. 50 & 53 (where the former is again unrecorded and the latter but recently issued as secondary-territory material on the rastascan dvd... mmm, must try and get hold of that..!). comp. 48, one of four "straight" readings (i.e. with no secondary materials) was a "premiere" at the time: b's own (second? third? etc) great quartet would reclaim it a year later, at yoshi's, and indeed unveil it as the opening number... but these reprobates actually got there first. (sort of.) comp. 15, again, is otherwise unrepresented in the guthartz discography.

- this is just great, that these guys managed to put so much love and heart and edge and stomach into the project and were prepared to get unheard music out there as part of the agenda, ah! makes one glad of the human race after all. (sank 'eavens... for free jazz, not leetle girlz on zis occasion... down, maurice)

- that first cut btw - it takes in five different sets of material overall, the most notable and eventful collaging clearly rehearsed, with debris' collective incursions of comp. 69q broadsiding the down-and-dirty rendition of comp. 40p being teased out by splatter - 40p so memorably brought to life by b. and muhal before, sounding oddly light on its feet here voiced by sax(c)ello, but very effective rhythmically; and its that rhythm which is casually undercut when the faster 69q is joined by the other four guys. this (critical) forcing together of parallel horizontal strategies in an unstable balance is a really crucial (er, critical) element of b's music, as was well understood eighteen years ago by these guys here in the experimental chamber. as it happens, today i last heard this piece an hour or so after listening to '97 era gtm and this clash-of-tempi therefore ended up reminding me of that... but preceded it by more than five years. terrific opener, needless to say. (and the first entries of singing alto early on are very braxtonesque indeed... someone's really been working at that!)

2. this album contains the best and most exciting version of comp. 23d i have ever heard, not including the "original" (i.e. the '74 studio version with wheeler & co), though it is actually quite a lot more exciting than that one even, given the way it gets turned inside-out long before the pulse track (108a) even pokes its nose round the door - the actual collaging doesn't begin until 6.30ish (out of an 8.30 track), but this one has gone stratospheric long since, has actually come down to a more earthly orbit again by the time the pulse track kicks in... along the way there, the stripped down combination of robair + boisen, norton + newton is a highly flammable recipe as it turns out, and all manner of controlled mayhem erupts from what remains a very sedate, wistful-yet-cheerful exposition; with the fireworks over, it's the two lieutenants who pick up 108a and the leader-producers who are left to rub up against it. just... fabulous.

yes yes... "every home should have one"... any bigtime braxtophiles want and need this album. they all jumped, every time. there were no casualties

* see comments

65th birthday (re-)revisited

2011-01-31T03:16:00.000-08:00

my first two blog posts in august concerned the braxton birthday benefit bash which took place last june in new york. at the time, only some of the music played at the main concert (june 18th) was available, namely the parts of it which featured the "birthday boy" himself; the rest of it turned up here, one month ago today. (i left them a comment correcting their personnel details for the gtm set, though i wrongly assumed at the time that the actual music files would be taken down after a couple of weeks; this always used to be the case with that site, but apparently hasn't been for some time now... evidently it's been a long while since i last visited their pages!)

it's a very interesting and varied line-up to be sure. the evening kicked off with an "invocation" by matthew welch (bagpipe specialist and - i believe - former wesleyan student, previously known to braxtophiles from his participation in the recorded version of comp. 247; he also recorded a full album of b's solo compositions, which alas i haven't heard *). the bagpipes are a strange beast, originally as much a weapon as a musical instrument (used on the battlefield by the scots, both to stir up the blood of the soldiers and to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy), and they have a very strictly limited pitch range and tonal palette, but they are well-suited for certain ritual purposes and do a good job of opening proceedings here. in the last minute of the performance, welch introduces a subvocalisation into his playing which completely transforms the sound, to thrilling effect.

the intricately-interwoven duet which followed, by steve coleman and jonathan finlayson, is listed on bigo's page as "unknown braxton" but there is no explanation given as to who supplied this info or how they know it's b's material being played. i certainly can't identify it, not that that means it wasn't a braxton piece; after all, there are so many to choose from! the most obvious place to look for comparisons was the april 5th 2003 concert at tonic by b. and wadada leo smith, released on two cds by pi recordings; the music played on that occasion included three braxton compositions, but the coleman/finlayson duet doesn't match any of those... i'm at a loss really to know where else to search! in any case the music is very much in the required spirit, and coleman's amusing speech (in the second part) strikes just the right balance between respect and irreverence. [coleman needs no introduction from me, of course; and although he's never been associated with b's music as far as i know, his status as a hugely-influential alto player, bandleader and composer in his own right makes him an ideal choice for such an occasion, a torch-bearer of sorts... finlayson is rather less well known, but already has an impressive cv; besides his membership of coleman's groups, he is currently associated with mary halvorson (among others) and plays on her much-debated saturn sings album.]

next up on the night was the richard teitelbaum set, which unexpectedly became a duet with the man of the day - this one, along with the other two sets featuring b., is discussed briefly here (fwiw my own indexed rips of the music are ~~still available~~ for download). this in turn was followed by nicole mitchell's black earth strings (though bigo's rips place these on "disc two", out of sequence in order to fit them in together). unfortunately, no data is provided here as to precise personnel or track titles; one or two of the pieces almost sound braxtonesque, but i don't think any of them are b's compositions. as the band's name suggests, strings dominate the sound palette here, but for me at least mitchell's own magnificent flute playing is what demands the attention.

the fifth set was the all-star, one-off (?) grouping of john zorn, dave douglas, brad jones and gerry hemingway. perhaps unwisely (or perhaps it's just me) they chose to open with their very energetic reading of comp. 23d, after which the remaining two numbers come as a bit of anticlimax... these are one piece each by douglas and zorn (apparently - i'm reliant on the info provided by the site for that). the braxton number itself, considering it's essentially a ballad structure, is attacked with real vigour. suffice it to say, the excitement suggested by the quartet's line-up is realised in the performance.

- and that brings us to the final two sets, both also discussed previously on this blog. (the trio/quartet reunion set is one unindexed file on bigo's page; my own version of this set is split into its separate components.) what i hadn't heard before was braxton's speech, preceding the climactic gtm performance. this in itself is well worth hearing, of course... and let's all hope that our man's wishes come true and that the future sees more opportunities for real musicians and real music, not just radio-friendly entertainment. (seems unlikely, but yes, we can hope!) the same speech also confirms something i had previously wondered about, namely that the piece played by the 12+2tet is, indeed, comp. 361.

and that's it from me for the time being... as always at this time of year, i am pretty happy to see the back of january, with its grey days and long nights: roll on spring! if you haven't already, go get the music :)

* comments

cent's 2011 manifesto

2011-01-17T01:51:00.000-08:00

1. so, the year ahead... insofar as we can plan these things at all (not that that's ever stopped me...) - well, for a start this was "supposed" (in my during-xmas head) to be braxton month - having acquired a small pile of mr b's back catalogue recently, thanks to a leo records sale (for mail order customers only)... and having also picked up numerous live boots in the last few months which i really haven't heard yet, such is the "mental scaffolding" which gets attached to the "task" of listening to a braxton recording these days if i'm not careful... i planned to listen to at least of these various recordings this month then spread out my impressions over remaining winter and into the spring - but here i am halfway through the month and none of this has materialised yet. i have not listened to very much music at home since new year, full stop - just the way it's worked out, and as usual it's the combination of parenting and the lower energy levels that being 40 tends to entail for me (*1).

BUT

it's still gonna happen, it's just gonna get squeezed in a bit. tonight and tomorrow, and till the end of january, i shall be giving house room to at least six live concerts, i hope, in addition to the four cds i have yet to play (three of them doubles). the write-ups will be different from usual, picking only a max of five points for discussion in each case and trying to keep it brief. (ish)

... other than that, eventually phase five of the braxtothon will unfold in earnest, starting sooner rather than later, and that pesky live review will get published also (still relevant since, like my last concert reviews, it ultimately deals with something rather deeper and more wide-ranging than the details of one performance).

- and, y'know, whatever else crops up over the course of the next year... more on the way, in other words..!

***

2. so, about that picture then. please bear in mind that if i actually did have the messiah complex that publishing such a photo would seem to imply, i would have done it three years ago (well - two years eleven months in point of fact). actually it would have been a bit less since i did not yet understand why the photograph got taken. that only hit me like a thunderbolt in june 2008 when i went looking for pix taken on the maestro's birthday, and found myself in two coastal towns beset by a bewitched smuggler's fog, with an unusually high number of resonant and memorable images to select from - and, no fucking way, hang on, you mean that picture was taken on b's birthday, that's... ahhhhh, ok, i get it..! - !!

-obviously i had noticed the captured ~~coincidence~~ of the image well before - indeed, the very same evening of 4th june 2003, when we got back to the tent and i had downloaded the photos to the laptop. "shit, look at my wings!" "uh..? oh yeah..!" - (as you can see) mrs c. had the camera that day - at least at first - and for once i was standing around aimlessly waiting for her.

ahem, anyway... i genuinely didn't see where i was ending up when i wandered off - the resulting aspect of staring-vaguely-into-the distance could have been taken of me on any one of thousands of such occasions - and neither did mrs c. who, herself, was taking her time looking back uphill, setting up another very good snapshot. when she looked back down she was only filling out the composite view for herself and took the pic very quickly.

even at the time i didn't suddenly get obsessively ego-wanky about it because i never concluded that wow, i am an angel. that's not what this means. the painting of the wall and manhole cover has (presumably!) been of human agency, after all. nevertheless, something of a blessing from the other side has been received, and directly received, by both of us, and hence by anyone who meditates upon the image. trace elements (relic traces) remain which immediately establish their own psychic frequency in an open and relaxed mind's eye. {{{@@@}}}

- not until five years later did i understand the deeper signficance of the picture's background and context. in visiting salvador dali's childhood haunts - we started out driving across the hills to cadaques, then moved on a little further to port lligat and encountered the same unearthly morning microclimate in a different environment, equally resonant and memorable - (i) (we) chance had unconsciously delivered us to catalunya ready for that day. and you gotta understand that in my head, braxton's was just one name among dozens at this point (*2).

ok, so that's that really. actually the choice of pic was forced on me this time - i have temporarily misplaced the masters of the europe tour pix - that idea would be scary if i ran with it, but there's no need (they have not left this room); - and the choice was therefore whittled to a small handful of images left in the "pot", - but at some point it was always gonna be revealed anyway. (and i'd already had it up on my blogger profile page for a few weeks, a couple of years ago.) - once i'd thought about it for a minute, this seemed a most auspicious occasion on which to unveil it on the blog. [ i did send it privately to mr b., on the same occasion that the port lligat birthday shot was posted on here. i mean how could i not. didn't gush about it too much i don't think. (hardly any need...!)]

- i bet that LOTS of people have stopped at this exact same point in that steep little street, without realising why they have ended up there for a moment. many of them have probably been captured there in photographs. hey, if you visited cadaques without a camera you'd be kicking your own arse all the way back up through the pyrenees. it would be interesting to know, in these cases:

- whether an obvious synchronicity could be established with regard to the date;

and

- if so, how long it had taken for the penny to drop

***

3. ok, so thanks for listening - now i got to get my arse offa this sofa and outside to do some goddamn gongfu: it's been insane, the relaxation of the winter freeze brought with it seemingly weeks of heavy rain and endless grey skies, and little or no tai chi practice, so my body is full of bent and squashed corners and blocked points. off i go. more soon and all that.

take it easy, give it hard

c x

* see comments

seasonal greetings :)

2010-12-23T17:51:00.000-08:00

so much for recent half-arsed promises of further imminent "posts of substance" - mmm, stop me if you've read this here before; more computer troubles, on top of all the usual predictable stuff, and the heightened stress and hassle which accompanies the approach of a toddler's christmas... oh yes, and then there's always the "arctic" weather currently strangling the united kingdom, weather which of course is not arctic in the least, temperatures of zero to minus six-to-ten celsius being standard at present in my region; all of which is hardly unheard of in britain and would never merit a mention in many other parts of the world. but, bizarrely... it has brought the entire british isles to a near-standstill anyway, and for some reason it feels a great deal colder than the thermometer says it is. the cold just seems to have seized the landscape, right down into its very substance and texture.

anyway... the cold severely messed up the postal system for the best part of a week, and prolonged our wait for a replacement laptop charger (i expect i will have a rant about this whole business in a comment)... but on the other hand it did provide my daughter with a rare white christmas for her first memorable winter... it's an ill wind, and all that... i didn't manage to sort out my own xmas present in time for the weekend, but there is a fat package of cds on its way, more than half of them by mr b, so i expect to report on those in partial detail in due course... and by now anyone who is reading will surely know the long rhythms which govern my posting habits, and will therefore not be surprised to hear that the promised live review and longer-promised next braxtothon post are on their way also... no, really... "some time soon"...

... meantime, best festive wishes of the season to anyone who is out there, whatever that means to you. go well in the world :)

c x

progress report/ comp. 40q

2010-11-30T14:51:00.000-08:00

"progress"... not much at the moment, unfortunately. i was working on the john tchicai gig review; but that one didn't want to be written yet. so i gave up for the time being and concentrated on getting braxtothon phase five kicked off... and apparently that one just didn't feel ready to greet the world yet either. it's all quite frustrating: for once i have actually had a bit of time to play with, but the writing just didn't come. sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't... not that i would want to be, but i couldn't be a professional critic.

ok, so... i am still hoping to get both of those posts up within the next few weeks (fingers crossed). in the meantime - i listened again recently to the album currently under consideration and found myself thinking again about comp. 40q, the crazy march tune which opens the second side of that record... as i've mentioned before (last para of this post), james carter covered the piece a couple of decades later with his regular band of the time, plus guest hamiet bluiett. if anyone is curious to hear what that sounded like, check it out. as regards other recordings by braxton, however... well, a live version of the piece turned up recently, played in concert by the same two masters that originally waxed it; but, this being a third songbook number, in theory there is no reason why it should not have been played by the quartet at some point. if anyone knows of any live concert recordings including this extraordinary piece, do please let me know! for the time being... that's all i'm saying...

braxtothon phase five: prologue

2010-11-19T16:24:00.000-08:00

1976... is not yet quite over. yes, the old rhythm section has gone, and with its passing a major chapter of the quartet's history has closed. but that action-packed year (the thought of which so daunted me back in may 2008... dear oh dear, was it really that long ago?!) is still where i find myself, just about: there is one more station stop to deal with before moving into 1977.

rather neatly, the transition into the new year is marked with an "overlap" of sorts. over a month after the old quartet gave its last concert, our man is in a toronto studio with his old friend/aacm colleague/supposed rival roscoe mitchell, cutting an album of duets under the latter's name; that is actually the last discog entry for 1976, and the first for 1977 sees the pair back in the studio, this time in their home town of chicago, laying down one more duet as part of the sessions for mitchell's famous nonaah. not surprisingly, i worked both of these recordings into one session, the first for this new phase of the continuing journey.

- and after that? however it worked out at the time, for us here and now dealing with the official discography the first few dates following the dissolution of the "first classic quartet" (as one might call it, bearing in mind that there were - at least - two versions of that group anyway) all feature b. as sideman, not leader. well... sideman or collaborator: those duets are not really sideman dates (not at all, in fact), even if they do appear under mitchell's name; and the company week performances are not that sort of deal either. actually, only woody shaw's the iron men has b. playing a genuine sideman's role around this time. but the fact remains that this clutch of recordings does not include any of b's compositions, nor are any of them under his leadership. it is known (confirmed in the composition notes) that there was a regular working group during 1977, but the only official recording from this period which fits the bill is this one - and i've always had trouble believing that abrams would have been a regular sideman in anyone's band by this time... then again, we know that he did play at least one other gig with this group, though that one is apparently something of a one-off (two standards, no originals? and bluiett clearly there as a guest - chances are the bootleg does not contain the entire performance; maybe the band was joined by the guest just for the two standards, and only these have made it into circulation..?). in any event, abrams obviously was in europe at the time, and played at least two concerts as part of b's group; even if he was not a regular member, it's entirely feasible that the rest of the line-up - lewis, helias, shaw - comprises the working unit at this time. needless to say, i have not yet been able to confirm any of this.

i'm getting slightly ahead of myself anyway... for the time being, i have not made up my mind which of the above-mentioned recordings will be covered in phase five. not completely, that is: the company week recordings will definitely be dealt with (at least the ones featuring b - i have no intention of covering all three albums in their entirety), and of course the basel quintet set is also a certainty, as if that needed to be said. the woody shaw album... i'm unlikely to include that one, i think. (though as a matter of fact, i did start writing something about it ages ago now, and one of these days i will probably finish it..! chances are it will end up as a detour, rather than an actual station stop... that seems rather more appropriate.) as for the "covers" sextet boot, i'm not about to make a decision on that one until nearer the time... but two standards? maybe not, eh... again, perhaps it'll end up getting discussed in some other format. or perhaps, by the time i get there, i shall have changed my mind...

first up, then, will be the mitchell duet sessions, and we'll take it from there. it's a strange accident that the discog has a lack of "canon" recordings at this time, but there are other gaps in the chronology, this is hardly the first. in any case, 1977 has its share of important recordings: as well as the basel set (only released in 2000), there is always this to look forward to, continuing the arista offerings. as we're going to see, b's career as a leader has by no means been derailed by the loss of his two longtime companions.

comp. 23j (re-)revisited

2010-11-09T16:18:00.000-08:00

so... before saying anything about the trio version of this piece recently unearthed from the archives of bobby naughton, i read through the composition notes (which in this case are also available online at restructures). it's a piece i'm reasonably familiar with, having analysed two live versions of it and having recently heard another one - and indeed one in the studio, not that i mentioned that one on the blog yet... but apparently there was at least one basic mistake in my memory's version of the theme: in the footnotes to that dortmund write-up, i described the theme's initial phrase as comprising ten notes, when the composition notes say nine, and when i went to that duet version to check, no-one will be surprised to learn that it was the composer who had it correctly..! with only the two instruments playing, it's perfectly clear; probably it is in the quartets as well (i'm not about to check right now), and just my ear memory which is at fault... it's nowhere near as reliable as i would like.

- and with that rather trivial confession (*1) out of the way, let's just have another look at those composition notes... yes, i also find them quite hard to understand at times, just like most readers: our man uses language in his own special way and it's not always evident to the rest of us what precisely he has in mind; he's entitled to do that, he's a genius... anyway... a few salient points to bear in mind when assessing any given version of it (and before i go into those, even - dedicated to t.s. eliot! curious... not the most obvious dedicatee for a "medium fast (to fast) tempo structure designed for extended improvisation... in the post-be-bop tradition"; i wonder which eliot work/s the maestro had in mind?): first, the piece is designed to highlight individual solo styles (one might therefore compare it with "three bags full" by herbie hancock, which was at least intended to point out the different styles of the three soloists on that recording); second, it "was constructed without any applied harmonic basis or preconceived rhythmic structure"; third, a given performance "emphasizes the nature of its material repositioning more than the actual notes used to create that positioning". this last point is made again earlier in the notes, phrased in a different (but similarly abstruse) way, and i take it to mean that the piece was intended to encourage solo improvisations which build on the patterns and accent displacements of the written material, rather than the harmonic structure of the theme. (in any case it's pretty much axiomatic that b's music, even the relatively simple examples of it, doesn't tend to foster straightforward "playing the changes" soloing... nor are those kinds of players likely to be attracted to his work in the first place..!)

as a "post-be-bop" piece, 23j is rather more advanced than, say, comp. 23b (which is doubtless extremely tough to play, but is not especially unorthodox in its tonalities) - but not as skewed as comp. 69g which would come along a little later. played live by b's quartets, it has a pretty irresistible propulsive drive; but let's not forget that there was no preconceived rhythmic structure and it's up to the interpreter to set the pace and the rhythm. mr naughton chooses to slow the tempo down a bit, introduce a few actual (unison) pauses into the written line, and restore an overtly "swung" rhythm to what had sometimes in concert become a bit of a headlong dash. by utilising clearly using this particular rhythmic template (which i believe is basically triplets, with only the first and third of each group voiced, the second being a rest - but i have no formal training remember, so don't just take my word for it!), naughton links the piece to other well-known modern compositions as "skippy" (monk *2) and "gazzelloni" (dolphy) - dolphy especially was very fond of this "skipping" rhythm and frequently fell into it in his solos. besides - fairly or otherwise, any vibraphonist playing in this sort of context post-1964 is almost inevitably going to draw mental comparisons with bobby hutcherson on out to lunch; and that isn't such a terrible thing, bearing in mind what a great album that was for the instrument... the trio does seem to have it at least somewhat in mind during this reading, drummer randy kaye copping a few tricks from tony williams along the way (around 4.30 for instance... see if that passage doesn't remind you of lunch..!).

once the theme is completed, naughton embarks on a solo which does indeed seem to hinge on the material's linear exposition rather than anything else; a key element is the modulation of fairly short, repeated phrases, exploring what happens to these when subtle changes or displacements are made. you can pretty much forget what i said in my earlier post - about how naughton "seems to be concerned with exploring the ways in which b's tonalities open up complex dissonances when voiced by the vibes": let's face it, that's probably true of any number of themes (it is possible to make the vibes sound straightforwardly pretty when they're given something very, very simple to play; anything more elaborate and they at once open up a very complex tonal palette, it's just the nature of the beast)... quite often, naughton "speeds up" by playing complete triplets, and the drums never fail to respond to this gear-shift (fonda sticks for the most part to the walking bass specified in the rubric, though he does pick up from the leader at times too). use is also made of the half-step tonal modulations in the written theme, mirrored at times in naughton's improvised lines. at 3.14, a ringing attack introduces a short passage in which naughton pulls away from the stated pulse, playing completely outside the rhythm section for about fifteen seconds, most obviously between 3.23 and 3.28 when he delivers two different variants of an ascending chromatic run; by 3.30 the three players are back in step, fonda the next to break away briefly around 3.45. again, from 4.08 to about 4.27 naughton escapes completely from the phrase-structures of the written line and this time the freedom is co-opted by kaye, collapsing the rhythm completely and leaving it to fonda to maintain it.

in kaye's solo which follows, fonda first drops the pulse and then lays out altogether, as the drums play without any reference to the theme at all, eventually lapsing into space just before the restatement is picked up. the ending is as neatly abrupt as any of the braxton versions; it apparently comes as a surprise to the audience, who are silent for a few beats before an appreciative "yeah!" kicks off the clapping. (not many in the crowd, by the sound of it - this of course is the curse of the modern-day creative musician, the big audiences mainly reserved for those who put far less work into their music...)

***

i tend to have mixed feelings about "covers" of b's compositions: on the one hand, i seldom enjoy them as much as i do his own renditions, but on the other i am always interested to hear what other musicians do with them, how they rise to the various challenges they present. it's always good to see anyone taking them on, pretty much; for all his is now a trendy name to drop in certain circles, there still aren't too many people treating the braxton canon as modern standards. (obviously there are some exceptions to this generalisation... james carter rather bravely asserted braxton's continuance with the tradition by including comp. 40q on his album conversin' with the elders; actually, that's one braxton cover i particularly like, and coincidentally, the original version is next up under the braxtothon microscope, when i get round to that..!) mr naughton came up with a worthwhile and interesting reading here, one which situates b. within the tradition without sacrificing the greater freedoms he represents. i've enjoyed listening to it :)

* see comments

milan quartet '79

2010-10-30T17:22:00.000-07:00

it's way ahead of time as regards the braxtothon - so i'm avoiding going into too much detail, and didn't necessarily give the music my full attention - but the other day i (belatedly) saw this post, the latest in riccardo's continuing series of italian concert boots... i try and provide tracklists for this sort of thing whenever i can, that being part of my contribution, such as it is; in this case (as so often) i can't identify every territory explored, so there follows a bit of explication. the recording in this instance is perfectly serviceable without being brilliant - reeds, trombone and bass are always clearly audible, drums suffer at times... the actual start of both sets is missing... and the occasional presence of two people talking, close enough to the mic to be heard, is a bit of an unwanted distraction (makes me glad i don't speak italian, or it would be even more distracting!). but none of this is carping - as i've said before, i would choose an imperfect recording over no recording any day of the week, so long as it's listenable.

braxton/anderson/lindberg/barker - 22/4/79, milan

first set
comp. 69m
??
comp.40f
comp. 69c

- the recording starts just after the beginning of comp. 69m, one of several superb circus-style pieces b. had written in the late seventies, presumably with this line-up in mind. (by the sound of it, only a few seconds are missing.) at this stage in his career, b. had found various ways in which to get his non-jazz material played and recorded, so the quartet is mainly playing high-energy free jazz, bearing in mind that this is still "jazz a la braxton" (the reader must adjust his or her expectations accordingly); the fourth (and final) creative ensemble book, like the three preceding it, contains a lot of jazzy pieces (and some not so jazzy)... anyway... the concert still proceeds according to a template of theme-then-solos, the leader going first, as usual.

at around 14.15 (*1), the theme restatement finishes, but instead of any pause taking place the band slows down the pace and moves straight into a transition phase. and here's the first time i got stumped, because for the next ten minutes i didn't recognise anything that was played; whatever it is, it's not the longest link phase in b's history (apart from anything else, it bears no relation to the subsequent territory) - either it's an open space for group improvisation, or it's some piece i can't identify. i'm leaning towards the former... in any case, we end up with a bass solo, a small forced pause to allow some generous applause, then the shortest link phase i've heard in a while before comp. 40f begins at 24.20. this wonderful piece, of course, will be familiar to any braxtothon followers already thanks to its inclusion on the dortmund setlist; at the time this concert was played, it was still seven months away from being waxed for the first time. (dortmund was not actually released until 1991.)

this version of the piece seems rather less anchored than the dortmund rendition, goes much farther out from the score and never really returns, so it's hard to say when it ends and the next transition begins; but by 34.45 anderson is firing off repeated stabs of brass which are briefly picked up by b. on sopranino, short repetitive attacks which clearly foreshadow the next territory, though we then drift away again briefly before comp. 69c begins definitively around 35.15. this piece is characterised by its distinctive, menacing "war march" pulse; it nagged at me for a while when listening to this, reminded me of something which i couldn't quite place... eventually i figured out that it was, ahem, "thank your lucky stars" by whitehouse (and if anyone doesn't know what i'm talking about there, i'm really not sure i want to be the one to explain... in any event it's gotta be a coincidence, william bennett was surely unlikely to number anthony braxton among his influences..!). moving swiftly on... that takes us up to the close of the set.

second set
comp. 23j
??
comp. 69n (i think!)
comp. 40i

set two begins very much in media res, with what appears to be a high-intensity double solo, the two hornmen improvising over a furious backing, and at first it sounds as if we may have missed something crucial; but this is all just buildup to the first territory (unless of course we really HAVE missed something crucial, like ten minutes or more of music, in which case this is a transition phase, the band gathering speed for what comes next; it would be very interesting to know how the set actually began, since it's pretty unusual for the quartet to open up with an approach phase, as opposed to a clearly defined theme). from around 1.20, b. and anderson both indulge in riffing on the comp. 23j theme (*2), throwing out snatches of it (usually the first phrase) without actually joining the theme as such, and for several minutes things continue in this vein until finally the theme is initiated in earnest, almost surrepitiously in the end, at about 3.50. this time it's anderson who takes first solo, the others following in due course, and the ensuing restatement of the very fast theme takes us up to the 21 minute mark. when the piece finishes, with the usual clean ending, there is the tiniest of pauses before the horns begin tossing phrases back and forth, smothering the applause which threatens to break out.

- again, for a while after this i have no idea what's being played. at first it sounds like another open space, and although at times during the next few minutes there are lines played which could be part of a written score, nothing quite coalesces which sounds like a definite composition. by 28 minutes, b. has the seamonster out, but this doesn't actually clarify the situation... hence the ??s. ok, so by 31 minutes it sounds as if something is definitely taking shape, but the insistent drum pattern turns out to be a complete red herring as abruptly, around 31.45, (what is almost certainly) comp. 69n begins, this being a very restrained and contemplative piece with plenty of b's haunting "birdcall" lines (the presence of which makes this a hard piece to identify at first, since so many of b's compositions contain similar phrases; i had to compare it with a studio version and another live one before deciding). by 36.30 we're clearly in transition again, drifting between territories, and from 37 minutes barker is getting up a fair head of steam behind the kit; just before 37.30 b. signs off on alto, and when he re-enters on sopranino a few seconds later, we are fast approaching comp. 40i which begins suddenly around 37.55. this is another great fun-filled piece, perfectly tailored to the strengths of this particular band (although, being a third songbook number, it must predate this version of the group). and that concludes the main body of the concert.

encore
comp. 69j

- this, at any rate, is straightforward enough, a brisk run-through in less than four minutes to close proceedings. (b. has always preferred to keep his encores short and sweet.)

that's all folks... may i just add quickly that this was a great pleasure to listen to, the band never flagging as far as i could tell, always engaging strongly with the music... the point being that, several years on, there need be no doubt that the change of personnel at the tail-end of 1976 was fully justified... new blood and all that... there are a couple of dodgy moments here when barker whips out a tambourine, but basically it's attack from the word go. more details... when i "get there"..!

* see comments

moments captured or missed

2010-10-15T16:51:00.000-07:00

something which happened during the last week or so, unnoticed by anyone - even me: this blog turned three years old. ok, so in my case there were other things to claim my attention, such as the second birthday of my daughter... and besides, exactly when this blog was "born" is hard to say. mcclintic sphere had drawn up the draft version some time before it went live; i got involved during the second week of october, first posted here on the 10th, launched the braxtothon on the 11th (and genuinely had no idea of how major an undertaking that would turn out to be)... mcc's first post actually went up on the 9th, but basically it's not possible to pinpoint precisely when things began. not that it really matters that much: after all, it's not as if i'd been planning to buy the blog presents or bake it a cake. still, it seems appropriate to mark the anniversary, in passing.

i was in london recently, for the first time in almost three years; the last such return visit was to see charles gayle and sonny simmons on successive nights, and it certainly took me a long time to write those up... this time i was actually there for a wedding, but stayed on an extra night to catch john tchicai. i'm rather hoping to be a bit more prompt about getting down my impressions of that one... so, that's on the way at some point. also coming up, a closer look at that version of comp. 23j by bobby naughton (with some tangential thoughts about "covers" of b's pieces in general)... and at some point i will actually be getting braxtothon phase five underway in earnest, as promised. there's a couple of other little things which may or may not get written up any time soonish... you know the way i operate by now ;-)

more on the way... stay tuned and keep the faith...

previous encounter

2010-10-12T15:13:00.000-07:00

(a fairly brief update to my john carter article, as promised)

when i last wrote about "encounter", i had four versions of the piece to draw on - and a conspicuous (eighteen-year!) gap between the first and second of them. since then i have rather assumed that the piece must surely have been revived before '88 - and it turns out that such is indeed the case. this 1979 performance was posted online some months ago now, but i only came across it quite recently... the published track listing is incomplete with the last two pieces played listed as unknown, but the final number is, in fact, my old friend "encounter"... and that discovery, at any rate, splits the gap neatly in half ;-)

5. john carter quintet, live in rome, 16th august 1979.
carter - clarinet; bobby bradford - trumpet*; james newton - flute; bob stewart - tuba; phillip wilson - drums

- the poster refers to a studio album, recorded the previous day by the same remarkable line-up (four aerophones plus drums! off the top of my head i can't think of another quintet with that instrumentation); i don't know this album, but an online search brought up this handy discography: "encounter" wasn't on the date. given its appearance here, though, it seems reasonable to suppose that it might have been used previously, either as a last number or as an encore. here, it doesn't particularly look to go anywhere, just generates some happy excitement so as to send the audience home on a buoyant high. it is very tempting indeed to assume that carter used it regularly to that effect (and that what he did with the '88 band was reinvent the piece, not merely revive it).

this version does not begin with the familiar bassline; that doesn't enter until about the 1.00 mark, which is possibly why such an easily-identifiable piece was missed by the poster (? or maybe he just didn't know the number). still, just wilson's skittering cymbals are enough of a clue as to what's coming, and bradford's improvised flights during the first minute sketch out the basic tessitura pretty well - so that it came as no surprise to me, at least, when the brass bass kicked in with the ascending "perpetual motion" line. soon after, the other horns conjure up the melody; and what ensues is really something of a free-for-all, joyous in its playful energy, newton and carter in particular sparking off each other to great effect. the sense of freedom is infectious, stewart by no means limiting himself to the confines of the written line but departing from it as he feels, never losing the pulse but letting wilson take care of the propulsion. newton, carter and bradford all play delightfully on this closing number, and it's safe to say that the mission will have been accomplished: surely no-one will have walked away from this concert without an ear-to-ear smile and a light heart.

(the recording is fairly ropey in this case; nevertheless the concert itself is well worth hearing for any fans of the horn players in particular. those who are not fully committed to the cause of the audiophile may even use this as an exercise in how to listen past recording limitations and engage directly with the music. as background noise... no, it's not going to work that well. but the quality of the performance is the reward just waiting for the ear which opens to seek it.)

i'm always on the hunt for other versions of this piece... till the next update, then..!

* bradford is of course better known as a cornet specialist, not a trumpeter as such... but carter does clearly say "bobby bradford on trumpet" both at the beginning of the set and at the end (as heard on this cut) - so presumably that's what he was playing on this occasion.

quick newsflash

2010-09-20T08:51:00.000-07:00

the blog was contacted over the weekend by the renowned and acclaimed vibraphonist - and sometime braxton collaborator - bobby naughton, advertising the new (online) release of a trio recording of b's comp. 23j. the piece, which dates from 1985, features randy kaye on drums and another important braxton sideman, joe fonda, on bass. (naughton played with the creative orchestra in 1978 and afterwards, and continued his involvement with b's music at least until 1988; fonda's own association with b. was almost a decade in the future at this point, but he would eventually become bassist of choice for five years during the 90s, playing in a wide variety of contexts including duets, a quartet playing standards, and the first recorded gtm compositions.)

naughton's interpretation of the piece is rather more sedate in pace and mood than the dortmund version, and seems to be concerned with exploring the ways in which b's tonalities open up complex dissonances when voiced by the vibes. the recording can be downloaded from naughton's website (as linked above). support active musicians!

***

don't forget: in case anyone missed them, august's posts include a couple of articles which contain links to concert recordings. regular readers will know that i don't post music files very often... get 'em while they're hot :)

state of the braxtothon address

2010-09-20T03:32:00.000-07:00

so... here i am again.

believe me, there were times last year when i began to think i would never get here, when the thread seemed irretrievably lost... but with a change of focus at the beginning of this year and some patient work, i managed to squeeze out the four remaining phase 4 entries without too much procrastination. (a quick glance at the list of posts for 2010 will show that i didn't get a lot else done, at least in terms of writing... but hey, you can't have everything. the main thing is that i got the core work back on track..!)

in the event, the close of phase four overlapped with the opening of phase five. with the quartet autopsy nearly finished, i found myself with enough free time to do the listening session for the roscoe mitchell album duets with anthony braxton (long since earmarked as the beginning of phase five), and for the follow-up duet which appears on mitchell's nonaah. (these astounding recordings will take some time to write up.) with this done, i still had to complete the article i was working on, and - miracle of miracles - i got that done the following evening. hence, braxtothon volume two is now officially underway.

as i've mentioned before, this next phase will be characterised by more research into the composition notes. i don't plan to consult many other sources, however, and this is not just a matter of arrogance (though there is probably an element of that): the whole point of this undertaking is to document my responses to the music, my journey through b's career, and i don't want to get distracted by reading too many other opinions. another reason is that i remain (alas) a piss-poor scholar and have only so much time and attention to devote to what has long since become a pretty demanding project; it would take me too long to work through lots of reviews and articles, and that would take time away from the writing. and besides... again, it's not the first time i've said this: i am firmly of the opinion that many (most) professional critics have never seriously attempted to understand b's music on its own terms, so i have pretty limited faith/interest in what they have to say about it. [of course there are exceptions to this gross generalisation, and i'm not just thinking of graham lock and mike heffley - both of whom b. himself considers to possess genuine insight into his music; art lange and stuart broomer both seem to me to have made the necessary effort to get inside the music, and anything they have to say is therefore worth reading. i am doubtless leaving some names out here, and no disrespect is intended: i don't read widely and have probably missed some very good stuff. on the other hand, there are a few well-regarded critics (and i'm not about to name names) who don't get the music at all as far as i'm concerned, who seem content to treat b. as a "jazz eccentric" and write about him accordingly, making much use of platitudes and preconceptions... well, if one is a professional reviewer there can only be so much time one can spend on any given recording, i suppose - but that isn't actually an excuse for turning out summaries which sound good (to the uninitiated) but don't stand up to close scrutiny.]

- but the composition notes are another matter. since i began this project almost three years ago, i have followed the development of b's groups and (to an extent) his own playing, as well as that of his collaborators; but although my familiarity with some of the material has increased, i'm not convinced that my understanding of b's composing has really grown much. partly this is due to my own lack of formal tuition; and partly it's because i haven't yet found the time to take advantage of the composer's own thoughts on the subject. having been sent b's complete writings back in 2008, i panicked a bit when i received them, balking at the idea of getting to grips with such a detailed (and lengthy!) body of work. at the time, remember, i was fast approaching parenthood and knew that i could not really afford to devote myself completely to something which would necessarily dominate my time and attention. so, i put the notes pretty much to one side, to be dealt with as and when. (an attempt, the following year, to get stuck into the tri-axium writings proved sadly abortive: again, i just didn't have the time to engage properly with the material, which is extremely dense and by no means easy to read - that's not a criticism: philosophy is not supposed to be easy to read.) anyway, i feel now that the time has come: if i am to get any further with learning about the composer's ideas, aims and methods, i have to go right to the source. what i am able to learn from this deeper research, you will soon enough be able to judge for yourselves.

***

something else i am trying to do now is relisten to some of the material i've already covered in the braxtothon. when i first started, i was very reluctant to do this, for two reasons. first, i wanted to use the time available to move forward, as quickly as i could (just as wood must move rapidly in one direction and not look back, lest it revert to water); second, i was afraid that in relistening, i might end up completely overturning my original impressions and have to start all over again. to an extent, this tunnel-vision approach was discontinued after the end of phase two, when i began assembling playlists (and indeed these jumped forwards as well as back, since in some cases i was using tracks from albums which i had not yet covered). but i didn't relisten to whole albums, and i missed out some pieces which were too long to use; so some compositions just got forgotten, and i wasn't able to recognise these when they cropped up again. when i hear live recordings, it's very rare for me to be able to identify all the pieces played; in the case of solo concerts, this is extraordinarily difficult anyway, but performances by the working group(s) are far less problematic since they mainly tend to incorporate pieces from the four creative ensemble books. (true of the 70s groups, fairly true also during the 80s - from the mid-90s onwards, the focus is mainly on gtm of course.) several times i have found myself hearing something naggingly familiar which i couldn't place... in relistening now to some of the earlier recordings, i am hoping to be able to fill in more gaps in live track-listings. (i have already realised that comp. 6n crops up once or twice, post-1972; the town hall concert version has a five-minute buildup to the main theme, which i did not remember afterwards... i'll know it next time i hear it!)

so... that's where i'm at. please bear with me for the next instalment of the core work: more research has to be done before i even start writing it. but in the meantime, i shall continue trying to post more often than once or twice a month, and occasionally i will even be writing about other composers... next up, all being well, is an update to my john carter article from november 2008.

thanks for listening :)

* braxtothon master-list, part two *

2010-09-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

with braxtothon phase four now finally complete, it seems a good time to provide a second index*, detailing all the phase three/four articles. newer readers may not be aware that certain recordings have been covered, and even older readers may have difficulty finding them (this being a drawback of the blog format, and doubtless not helped by my own approach to naming the posts - shit, even i have trouble sometimes in finding a particular article..!)

now, just to clarify one little thing: the second wave of braxtothon posts began in march 2008, and these were (naturally enough) listed as braxtothon '08, to distinguish them from the original clutch of sessions (all of which took place in october 2007, though some of the articles were posted rather later). as the 2008 summer wore on, an awful paralysis seemed to overtake me, preventing me from writing up some of the later sessions; i was also expecting the birth of my daughter, and although that could have spurred me on (to make use of my time while i still had it), in practice it just didn't work out that way. and then, in october of that year, my daughter was actually born and of course that was that, as far as free time went - ! heading into 2009, it didn't bother me that i was still posting articles billed as braxtothon '08 (as evidenced by a post from march of that year, talking about phase 3a and 3b - this is not linked below since i didn't follow through on it anyway); but then something else happened midway through last year, and the core work got put completely on hold (indeed my attention got pushed away from music altogether for the most part). hence, i didn't get back to the project until earlier this year, and at that point it finally seemed ludicrous to be talking about 2008 when it was actually 2010. (in some ways i still feel as if i'm stuck in that summer two years ago, watching my precious time elapse day by day, yet powerless to make proper use of it; but then my daughter's imminent second birthday reminds me that time has in fact moved on!) hence, the posts from this year were listed as braxtothon phase four. in retrospect, it is easy enough to determine where phase three ended... anyway, below are links to the articles which make up the second half of (what i recently decided was) braxtothon volume one. confused? nah... :)

braxtothon phase three:

introduction

session 001 preamble

session 001, take one: new york, fall 1974

session 001, take two

session 001, take three

session 002: comp. 23e (news from the 70s)

session 003: five pieces 1975

conclusions so far

how week one happened
(- an experiment that was not repeated)

1976 introduction

session 005: creative orchestra music 1976

session 006: comp. 6f (wildflowers)/elements of surprise

extra session: the '76 "special quintet"

session 007: duets 1976 (w/abrams)

interludes: time zones/company 2

recap

session 008: donaueschingen (duo) 1976

session 009: graz '76 (bootleg - NB music files are long dead)

braxtothon phase four:

fill-in: bremen, 1975 (bootleg)

session 004: montreux (out-of-sequence)

session 010, context: dortmund

session 010, details (1): quartet (dortmund) 1976

session 010, details (2): more dortmund

session 011a: berlin (quartets)

session 011b: berlin (creative orch.)

final conclusions on volume one

there was also this:

gap filling, part two: (first byg album)
(- fills a hole in phase one, but was written rather later)

***

the next post will (probably!) be the introduction to volume two, the first session of phase five having already taken place... stay tuned...

* the first index can be found here, not that it's needed so much since the same list is now in the blog sidebar... the phase three and four links will appear there in due course (thanks again to mcclintic sphere, in advance!)

braxtothon phase 4: quartet autopsy

2010-08-31T12:05:00.000-07:00

november, 1976... and what began in london almost six years earlier has finally come to an end. those feb 1971 recording sessions probably didn't witness the actual conception of the anthony braxton quartet (although maybe they did..?), but as far as the discography is concerned, that's ground zero (*1). of course, it would be easy to forget a couple of significant points as well: the working quartet didn't always feature dave holland and barry altschul, and even when it did, sometimes they weren't both available. just to restate what any half-serious braxtophile "should" know by now: new york, fall 1974 is only partly a quartet album, and jerome cooper played drums on it anyway. (worth repeating that, since i know the tendency - out there in "jazz discussion land" - is to consider that album as a highpoint for the classic 70s quartet.) getting back to the first significant point, b's working band during 1973, unfortunately unrecorded and therefore unknown to most people, featured kenny wheeler with the unfamiliar - but superb - rhythm section of j-f jenny-clark and charles "bobo" shaw. b. mentions to graham lock (in forces in motion) how good this band was and regrets that he never got the chance to take it into the studio and capture it for posterity; the only recording i have of them is from châteauvallon in august 1973 and as far as i know it's (alas) long gone from the blogosphere. the point is, holland and altschul were not continuously involved with this project throughout those years; but for the most part, they were, and in some (esp. older) listeners' minds their names are perpetually linked with braxton's during this time. in any case they gave loyal service during a crucial period in b's development, and what i want to do here is look back over their tenure in the band; specifically, i've long promised to give a fuller account of my frequently-stated opinion that they stayed just a little bit too long. presumably, there have been plenty of people out there who don't like this idea at all, and it's worth giving a proper explanation. (even more specifically, this is the time to examine and unpack what some may think by now is a personal grudge against dave holland... that really isn't the case, but... well, read on.)

let's just remind ourselves of how we got here. the young dave holland's career was kick-started by miles davis, who head-hunted him after seeing him at ronnie scott's and whisked him off to new york - where he met, among many others, chick corea. the two of them would participate in several large ensembles (most notably for the epochal bitches brew); and they stuck around after others had gone their own way, working closely together in miles' "lost" quintet (with wayne shorter and jack dejohnette - "lost" because miles never got them into the studio, though there are now so many live recordings of this band in circulation that it would be more appropriate to call them the "found" quintet..!). corea then formed his own trio, with holland and barry altschul; when b. got involved, the resulting quartet became known as circle, a group still fetishised in some quarters (by people who in some cases seem to regard the group's inevitable dissolution as the beginning of the end for b.). at some point around this time, all four members of the band were inducted into scientology, and corea stayed with it; the other three lasted about a year before deciding to leave. corea goes on from here to make lots of money (a basic requirement for scientologists, since ascension through the ranks necessitates large investment) by playing dodgy fusion (*2) for most of the next decade... the others, no doubt bonded further by their shared doubts about scientology, proceed to take the path of creativity over commercialism, condemning themselves to relative poverty in the process.

- but even before circle was disbanded, our man was already hard at work constructing his own main working group for the next decade (and beyond). circle was - like air - a democratic co-operative group, with no leader (*3). though it shared personnel with the other group, the anthony braxton quartet was very much b's baby and firmly under his leadership. wheeler, introduced to free music by the spontaneous music ensemble (where he met holland), comes in to help voice those lovely ballad structures which are taking shape... of course, the complete 1971 album is not credited to the quartet, since only three of the tracks are performed by it; there are also two duets with corea, at least one of which made its way into circle's repertoire (*4), as did the original repetition structure, now known as comp. 6f but first listed on record(s) as "73 kelvin" or similar. all of these pieces (including the three quartet numbers waxed in london) are significant, since they were retrospectively included in the 6 series, the first book of pieces for creative ensemble. this first book (of four) also includes the two braxton compositions from his first album as a leader, 3 compositions of new jazz, as well as pieces cut for the french byg label and issued on b's two albums for them. one key aspect of b's work at this time was to establish separate "strands" for his composing; solo pieces went together, of course (*5), and there were to be many other types of composition also, which would later be numbered individually when b. and francesco martinelli drew up the system which is in use today. but the creative ensemble pieces are special in their own way, since they were to make up the bulk of the repertoire for the main working group over the next couple of decades (*6).

that group, having begun while circle was still a going concern, took a while to bear any more fruit. over the next few years, my picture of the band's evolution is very far from complete; i don't (yet!) have many live recordings from 1971-3. but the discography, at least, does not contain many quartet recordings during this period, and those which were released do not always feature the "classic" line-up. february 1972 sees michael smith, peter warren and oliver johnson in the group, cutting two standards and a pair of book two (23 series) pieces for what was released mistakenly as dona lee (just a careless typo; this is not the "correct" name of the album as some insist!). may of the same year sees holland back on board, and altschul too, for the new york town hall concert; but even then, only holland played on all the pieces. january 1973 finds b. in tokyo, working with three top-flight japanese players on four book two compositions (*7). as previously stated, the (american) working group during that year did not include holland and altschul, though kenny wheeler was back in. only in 1974 does the "classic" line-up begin to assert itself as such. from here until 1976, holland and altschul are the first-call rhythm section, and only the brass chair changes - wheeler to lewis. during this three-year period, of course, several much-loved albums were recorded (although some of those only saw release a while later), and this above all is why the line-up of braxton, wheeler/lewis, holland and altschul is so enshrined in the "jazz memory" (*8).

in any case, that brings me up to date with braxtothon time: at the tail end of 1976, after a very full year of activity for the composer - and for free jazz and creative music generally - holland and altschul finally leave the band, and a major chapter has closed. i can now try and get to grips with exactly what was lacking in these two players, for me... and for starters, it's time to look at the whole "dave holland question".

***

as i've tried to make clear before, i really don't have a grudge against dave holland, nor am i on a mission to undermine his reputation - the aim of this blog is to listen closely and report back on my findings; that's it. however, my changing opinions on holland as a bandleader and composer in particular seem in some way emblematic of the drastic change in my hearing and taste which took place in the last few months of 2006. (my opinion of holland as a player has changed less, but anyone who has read the braxtothon entries at all over the last couple of years will know that i no longer consider him to have been ideally suited to b's music... this is all about to be explained.)

after a brief flirtation with jazz in my university days, i didn't seriously attempt to get into it until i was approaching thirty (which seemed like a good age for it!). having initially been drawn to dolphy, coleman, coltrane, ayler etc, i nevertheless tried to read up on the history of the music and learn as much as i could about (what i perceived to be) the key figures. at this time i had no friends who were particularly interested in jazz and had to collect as best i could on a limited budget, making use of the libraries wherever possible. (i managed to borrow a fair number of recordings since i was living in north london at the time; since i've been based in swansea the opportunities for such things are rather less, but then i've found other ways to do my research..!) i established fairly quickly that "premodern" jazz just didn't work for me, and concentrated on the modern players. while pursuing my original interest in free/avant-garde jazz, albeit rather slowly, i tried also to familiarise myself with parker, monk, mingus, miles davis, and with the blue note stable (these were always freely available, either as library borrowings or as cheap purchases). at this point i found myself listening mainly to recordings from the 50s and 60s, with only fairly occasional forays into more recent developments. names like braxton, mitchell, cecil taylor went down on a list somewhere to be explored further at a later date; i knew back then that these were beyond my understanding at that time, though i felt sure they would be of great interest later.

during this period (roughly 2000-05) i became familiar with lots of facts and figures, knew the basic details of some key discographies pretty well... and found that my understanding of the music remained more or less static. reviews by professional critics often left me scratching my head, wondering how they could hear the music with such clarity and hoping that i might one day come close to doing the same.

sometime around 2004-5, i began listening to the bbc radio programme jazz on 3 on a weekly basis, eagerly drinking in more contemporary sounds and trying to bring my knowledge of the scene up to date. the broadcasts would frequently include tracks from current cd issues, and my "to buy one day" lists got bigger and bigger... but, to my frustration, my understanding of the music still didn't increase much. part of the problem, i knew, was that i was usually doing other things while the music was playing, but... this didn't seem to be a complete explanation for it. i often couldn't really tell whether i liked something or not; if it didn't speak to me, i usually concluded that the fault was in me (*9) and that i just needed repeated exposure, better concentration, etc. my collection of cds grew steadily, as did my knowledge of names and facts, without any great shift in my hearing taking place. meanwhile, having time on my hands, i had become active on the bbc's jazz messageboard; i was aware that a hardcore contingent of posters were loudly opposed to jazz on 3 and to its presenter, jez nelson, in particular; i always thought they were being rather unfair (and indeed ungrateful) and sometimes told them so.

dave holland was one of my "certainties" at this time, someone whose albums i collected whenever the opportunity came up. conference of the birds, widely regarded as a timeless classic (*10), had been on one of my early "must-buy" lists; i got it as soon as i could, and was happy to agree with the general consensus (though i always found the themes a bit twee and dated). i also picked up the later albums as i came across them, and although some of the dhq offerings struck me as rather dull and samey, i put this impression to the back of my mind (assuming as always that i just needed to hear them more). holland's contemporary projects, both the quintet and big band, were very much still of interest to me at this time.

heading into the autumn and winter of 2006, i began to discover the emerging music blogging scene, just in time to get in on the action at church number nine (*11). now i had found my music, as i quickly realised. night after night found me in front of the computer, feverishly downloading rare albums and live sets, listening to them straight away (this "honeymoon period" was all too brief - soon enough i found myself overwhelmed), discussing my impressions excitedly with other listeners. i learned that i had been badly mistaken in one of my assumptions: that this was an ideal time to get into the music, since "everything" had been (re)issued on cd and was in print. nope! as it turned out, lots of crucial recordings had been lost to time, buried by general indifference. but the other important lesson was absorbed gradually, so that it took me a while to notice: my hearing changed. constant exposure to the sounds i'd been looking for all along meant that after a while, i heard everything differently. ironically, daily exposure to free jazz had achieved what countless hours playing hard bop cds couldn't: even mainstream recordings now appeared much more transparent to me. eventually, i found myself understanding precisely what the "jez nelson naysayers" meant - many of the broadcasts now sounded superficial and/or derivative to my ears, and the presenter struck me as shallow and uninformed. very often i could now assess within a few seconds whether or not a given piece of music was what i was looking for. i was soon able to go back through my "wants" lists and cut them in half...

... but this took a little while. there was an overlap period, during which i hadn't yet had the opportunity to update a lot of my opinions (and i'm tempted to put that word in inverted commas). approaching the end of 2006, i was still looking forward to jazz on 3's scheduled live performance by dhq, and indeed i'd asked a relative to buy me the latest album by the group, critical mass (i would later find this a staggeringly inappropriate name for an album in which nothing much happens, or nothing new at any rate..!). it was only when the cd arrived, and i first played it, that the penny really dropped. for a start, the opening track just sounded far too familiar: essentially, i now realised, holland had been turning out versions of the same piece for more than two decades now. this caused an uneasy feeling in me, which the rest of the album only increased: over the course of the next hour (i don't think i made it all the way through on this occasion), i developed an unshakeable impression of tired, formulaic, lifeless, sterile music. the scales had fallen from my ears, and nothing ever sounded quite the same to me again.

***

so that's how it goes with me and dave holland the composer-bandleader. i'm not suggesting that his music was always tired and sterile; and as regards his later output, it's not actually all that heretical of me to label it formulaic: even the two jeffs, not necessarily known for their heterodox opinions on active musicians, have been happy to go on record saying it, and rather more scathingly than i just did (*12). i can't remember now when exactly i first came across the notorious misha mengelberg blindfold test, in which the pianist (who is unable to identify the artist on a lateish holland excursion) declares the music he's hearing to be "anti-fun" and - on being told who it is - says with typical dutch bluntness that holland should never be allowed to lead an ensemble (*13). but in any case, the "updated" opinion i carried forward into 2007, and on into the braxtothon some months later, was (still) that dave holland the sideman possessed impeccable credentials. so when did my thinking start to change, and why?

as intimated in one of the notes above, the first time i can remember having reason to doubt holland's abilities as a player - at least in this context - was very near the end of braxtothon phase two, at the tail end of october 2007; it came as quite a shock. to be totally fair and accurate, it wasn't actually specific to holland, on that first occasion: listening to the quartet play comp. 23b at moers in 1974, within a few minutes i became aware of the bass and drums half asleep on the job, just cruising. i could hardly believe the conclusion i'd just reached - my original notes for the session find me wondering whether i was now just setting my standards ridiculously high..? was i just spoilt by insane musicianship and impossible expectations? but of course i had only just recently heard the same number played by the '73 band and was acutely aware of a difference in intensity (this one's probably thought of as a "fast" tune because it begins with fast horn lines, but it's a mid-tempo number and - i would rediscover on several occasions - that's precisely when this r-section is most likely to doze off for a spell)... is it too much, to ask of creative musicians that they play always and only from the centre - ? but no, it isn't too much; indeed it's a basic unspoken requirement, common to all the new approaches to serious music which grew up in free jazz soil.

'cos the point is that this was the first of numerous such "doldrums" which i began to pick up in the quartet's intensity levels from now on - and even then, for a while i came to associate these with wheeler, so rarely sure of what he wants to say when he's flung right out into free space, precisely where true free-spirited musicians instantly thrive; so that for a while i was partially blinded to the truth each time i hit on something true... but in any case, even in that first rather deflating session, i was quickly enough reminded of what holland's and altschul's strengths are: the moers set proceeds with the magickal, magisterial conception that is comp. 23e, far from the finished article at this stage (and not at all properly understood by me in that entry), yet still fizzing with massive energies, held under tight control by the r-section at the top of its game. quickly enough i was prepared to let the earlier lapse go as a one-off...

... because like everyone else i'd put a lot of personal faith in the idea of this rhythm section, had got so used to lapping up anything they got involved with during this period... i can remember first reading about "braxton's great quartet" of the 80s and thinking that surely no quartet could be better or greater than the line-up with lewis, holland, altschul... well, we all know i no longer think that, but i wasn't there yet. still, it took little or no time for the doubts to begin creeping back, and regularly from now on: and at first i laid this at the door of mr kenny wheeler. so often a boiling rhythm would simmer down to flatline levels when the trumpet came out, and this seemed to become more and more frequent as 1974 became 1975 - it may have been a vicious circle, because lack of intensity in the backing then left wheeler without much heat to build a fire with; but no-one ever hung back like that when lewis took a solo. ok, so during this next clutch of sessions i saw wheeler edging towards the door in my hindsight-influenced eye, knowing that gnu high was on the cards (and through it and out the other side, a modest but very well-regarded career as a composer of wistful ballad tunes), knowing that lewis took over soon enough... being so recent a convert to this sort of music, i was rather ignorant of the (smallish) extent to which wheeler did remain involved with free music after 1975; but then the weak spot in the group seemed so obviously to be him at this point that i got ahead of myself a bit. (i took some of it back rather when the "special quintet" gig from '76 turned up... reading that line-up gave me a bit of a shock i can tell you..!) yes, there were also times when holland's solos would put me half to sleep, or when he would seem to think slowest or react last in a group free-for-all... i still felt (assumed, really) that with wheeler gone, all this would change.

after all, 1975 saw what i still consider to the be the apotheosis of this particular band: not the album as such but the piece which occasioned the use of that picture, comp. 23e in all its glory, fully worked-up on the road and ready to crack open the earth, raise ayler's spirit from the grave. i said before that holland's studio work on this incredible piece may well represent his finest moment with braxton; who knows, it may well be the very best moment he's had on record, it would be no shame. the sonic alchemy being worked in that space laboratory is entirely dependent on holland's rock-steady arco technique (*14) and his magnificent control of the dynamics. and don't let's forget the non-schizoid twin, comp. 40n, if anything an even stiffer test of arco technique since it requires continuous stability and only fractional dynamic variance; but really, that powerhouse performance of 23e is (i realise now) the top of the curve as far as the loyal bassist was concerned. it actually was all downhill from there... not that the journey down wasn't still pretty enjoyable.

the rest has been harped on about in so many of my posts over the last two years that it's worth only a very brief recap, to wit: because the first crop of lewis sessions don't feature the quartet, i was fully (delightedly) aware of what those two could do together - and it was another system shock to find (as i could really have guessed by now) that holland and altschul just can't quite cut it in this company. it's really about holland, though: he's just not a thinker on that level and this has a terribly grounding effect on any far-flung flights of fancy. altschul... to an extent these two are joined at the hip, and so one can drag down the other at times (or inspire him at others), but in theory the band could lose holland, keep altschul and still move forward. a bit. basically... it's at an end now.

***

familiarity breeds contempt? i've said more than once that the "comfy old shoe" sensation of settling into a holland-altschul groove is one of the things i found hardest to overlook in the last few sessions... am i just now far too demanding, unfair? would a new listener come to any of these recordings and think simply, "what a completely great band"? some of them might... i did, once... but then i hadn't heard the duet sessions at that point in my life. anyway, be serious: i've heard a great many more solos by anthony braxton than i have by dave holland, and... (no need to finish that sentence)

- and the thing is, pick up the thread with holland after the end of '76, it's not as if he settles at once into something easy and undemanding, even if that's arguably what he settled for later on; no, he goes right back into playing (among other things) white-hot free jazz with sam rivers (and, usually, the other half of that pelvis, b. altschul, esq.). as late as 1980, at least, holland was still playing with rivers (*15) and sounded great. rivers' music at this time (at least for trio or quartet) played right up to holland's estimable strengths - let's just remind ourselves of what they are, of what miles davis saw just before he went "yeeeaaahhhh... that cat's a motherfucker" (*16): tireless forward momentum; extraordinary technical facility, built on hard graft and natural self-confidence; lovely sound (this alone might have got him the davis gig)... from the point of view of (fully) free jazz, holland has been one of those who picked up the thread from charlie haden and buell neidlinger, both in on the ground floor when the bass first cast off the shackles of "the changes" - combine this with his stamina, you can play at full throttle for a whole set and dave'll never flag, nor ever paint the soloists into a corner. ideal for the sam rivers school of modern creative music, where holland isn't called upon to think on his feet as such, just play well within himself (*17). paradoxically (as some greater minds would see it), this frees holland up to play his very best. again, it startled me when i heard the 1975 bremen recording: this was the latest full set of holland that i've enjoyed unequivocally with this band, on a set full of book two "standards" that consistently fails to inspire the leader by this stage. this is the demarcation line that separates the true visionaries: the fresh and new inspires them, pushes them beyond their current limits. our bassist falls into holding patterns whenever confronted by these same qualities.

how early could they have known? the august 1975 jazz hot carries a laurent goddet interview in which b. says (*18) "dave holland is indeed one of my closest friends and i often feel the need to play with him." these two (and these three, including altschul) had shared a lot, mostly in hard times. the holland family even put braxton up at one point, i believe (somewhat earlier). they both had every reason to put off the inevitable, to screen off from their own conscious minds the signals which would foreshadow it. but eventually, after joyous weeks scrying the cosmos with the 'bone wonder, b. the magus would have to get that sinking feeling: it can't go on like this, the music is being dragged backwards, or at best stretched in two directions at once. new blood will be needed, a complete rethink from the ground up. in the meantime, two paths diverge and head off into separate futures, it is to be hoped with no hard feelings on either side. much important work has been undertaken with these loyal assistants, and some great moments have been bequeathed to the library of free jazz.

lewis, of course, will return to b's music on several occasions... and continues to collaborate with him in other contexts too.

* see comments

- FINIS -

end of braxtothon volume one (as i've just decided!)

- volume two will commence with phase five, coming next month... the ball is rolling again!

* gtm concert here *

2010-08-27T15:20:00.000-07:00

ok, so here's one which was prepared earlier... i found it here, just recently (and a long time after it was originally posted - i've very much lost touch with most of the music blogs which are still active, especially those which came into being during the last two or three years).

the reason i've prepared my own version - of the 2000 concert, not the 2006 sextet (which i posted myself back on c#9 - probably a different rip, but it's long gone anyway, so those of you who didn't get it, download it now!) - is because, as the poster says, his file includes a number of "gaps". these dropouts are pretty numerous: i've removed at least thirty of them, and i don't know about anyone else, but i find these very irritating when listening to a performance. it's easy enough to overlook one or two, but after a while it becomes a sort of mental torture - you know that there will be another one along sometime soon, you just don't know when... hence, i edited them all out; and in all but one case, have restored seamless playback in so doing. (that one exception is detailed below, at the bottom.)

here is the file, ~~split~~ into ~~two~~ parts. (again, this is a personal thing, but i sometimes find it slightly easier to deal with these long performances if they're broken up a bit. it also makes life a bit easier when downloading.)

this is a superb concert, an example of gtm, second (i think) species. the original poster lists the piece as comp. 224, which seems unlikely to me. this concert did indeed take place in august 2000, and by that time b. was further through the opus numbers than that; needing always to keep moving forwards at the time, he would probably not have gone back to an earlier piece. the opus numbers within the 220-range were being laid down in 1998; in may 2000, the composer was already working through the 240s. by august of that year... well, i don't know which piece was played in lisbon, and i could be wrong in my assumptions... but if it is indeed a premiere (as listed), then i find it hard to believe that it's #224. doesn't really matter that much, though.

the instrumentation is an augmented version of the ninetet which played a short residency at yoshi's, oakland, in 1997. that group featured six reedmen, plus guitar, bass, drums; this one is stacked even more heavily in favour of the saxes with seven. seven! naturally, the leader makes his presence felt throughout the piece. as for the others: james fei and jackson moore are still there (here i am reliant on the original poster's info, of course, but there's no particular reason to doubt it); steve lehman is in the group by this point - he would become very important to b's expanded ensembles later, of course - and seth misterka and scott rosenberg can both be found on other recordings from round about this time. brian glick is unfamiliar to me, as is the bassist, seth dellinger (though a quick internet search reveals that there is indeed a bassist of that name). kevins o'neil and norton were both in the ninetet as well, and feature prominently in b's work of this period. the guitar and percussion add crucial tonal variety at many points throughout the set, but of course it's those stacked reeds which really dominate proceedings. i recommend headphones for this one, since it's otherwise quite hard to distinguish them all.

as the original poster suggests, the ending itself is truncated, although by the end of the recording we are clearly very close to the finish; it's not at all unusual for a gtm performance to end "in midair" as it were, giving an illusion of an endless piece - but experience suggests that the leader would immediately name the band members and offer his thanks on behalf of the ensemble; this is the bit which is most obviously missing, but we must have 99% of the performance here.

thanks to the original poster for making this excellent recording available. [i would have left a comment on his blog, however belatedly - but his is one of those which only accept comments after moderation, and i don't like to waste time and effort on comments which may never appear..!]

NB - the one exception mentioned above occurs at 9.25 in the second file. this was the only instance where removing the dropout did not result in seamless playback: a tiny fragment is actually lost, so that taking out the gap made for jarring listening. hence, i reinserted a small silence (0.2 secs to be precise!), this being my best compromise.

stay tuned, spread the word, keep the faith... etc etc :)

* music files here *

2010-08-14T08:11:00.000-07:00

[NEW - unedited version of rip now available (see bottom), in case anyone would prefer to index their own versions differently from me, etc... c x]

here are those same, celebratory recordings alluded to in the previous post, converted to handy mp3s by mcclintic sphere (thanks again!) - i've since split the second and third sets into separate tracks. link is at the bottom of this post.

over the last couple of days i've read up a bit more about these 65th birthday concerts, specifically the first of the two nights (as far as i can tell, b. himself didn't play at all on the second night). actually, i was mainly looking for the name of the person who replaced reut regev in the gtm 'tet - and i was unsuccessful in that, but i did find out a few interesting things. for some reason, the website i linked to last time places the sets in reverse order: on the night, the duo was first, then the trio/quartet and finally the expanded ensemble. there was other music on the programme too, but only these three sets featured the leader.

in point of fact, only the gtm piece was supposed to feature b. at all. richard teitelbaum was ready to play solo, and had prepared for the occasion some samples of b's playing from the duo's previous encounters; to his and everyone else's surprise, up jumped the honoree with alto in hand. the music, as i said last time, is extremely good: indeed the impromptu duet worked so well that many in attendance apparently assumed that teitelbaum was sampling b. live, rather than using prepared material.

again, the second set was billed as a trio of crispell, dresser and hemingway, not as the quartet. what they were intending to play after the second repetition structure may never be known, because of course what happened was another "stage invasion": as the trio began to navigate away from comp. 23c, b. joined them (to audible cheers) and it wasn't long before his first quote from "impressions" was picked up by the other three players and turned into a full rendition of the famous modern standard. since my last post i've identified the first piece played by the trio: it was comp. 69b. as previously stated, this was followed by comps. 40(o) and 23c, thus giving us a brief selection of materials from the second, third and fourth books for the creative ensemble. "impressions" of course closed the set.

finally, the evening was brought to a close by the one set intended to feature the composer: the gtm piece interpreted by the 12+2tet. this, in turn, is simply an augmented version of the famous 12+1tet which gave us the glorious iridium box, and another official recording since - as i mentioned above, the only member of that group who didn't make it back for this reunion was trombonist reut regev (anyone know why?): thb was there of course, as were james fei, steve lehman, andrew raffo dewar, jay rozen, sara schoenbeck, nicole mitchell, mary halvorson, jessica pavone and aaron siegel; carl testa was on bass, rather than chris dahlgren (both have played in this group); the extra player was another returning reedman, chris jonas. again, as i said above, i haven't been able to identify the player who replaces regev here and i can't say for sure that it's even a trombonist (perhaps if i listened to the whole set just for that i might be a bit more confident! not even i am that obsessive about such details). b's thanks at the end of the set take in all the players, as always, and the missing name sounds to me like "makiko reid". anyone familiar with a japanese-american of that name?*

here is the music

(i am using the latest version of audacity now, and i haven't yet had much of a chance to get my head round it... i am sure i could have done a much better job of tagging the files when i split them. the resulting mp3s may be numbered rather confusingly; accordingly, i have included a text file with full track details including the running order and timings.)

here also (rather belatedly!) is the original stream rip, in ~~three unedited sets~~ c/o mcclintic sphere

* see second comment for the answer...

update/65th birthday celebrations

2010-08-05T13:47:00.000-07:00

well, let's start with the 65th birthday bash... i've been so out of touch lately that i didn't know about this beforehand - knew nothing about it until a month later, in fact - and i'm actually kinda glad that i didn't, since i couldn't have afforded to go anyway... but reading about it after the fact still makes me wish i had been there. don't the good vibes just leap off the page?

- i have to thank mcclintic sphere (again) for tipping me off about this (the event generally and that webpage in particular)... by now, with my posting having slowed down as much as it has, i have to assume that even fewer people are checking in here than they were before, and that most of those who have peeped in here over the last month won't have seen mcc's comment on this year's birthday post: hence my saying a word or two about the music now. if you haven't already done so, be sure to check out those streams!

what we've got there: out of the various performances which (apparently) took place over two nights of richly-deserved celebration, the site has made available for streaming the three which feature the maestro himself. these, in turn, rather neatly sum up some of b's most important, most rewarding projects - at least, out of those on which he himself has played. (i would not want to suggest that, say, the piano music or the opera cycle are not important or rewarding.) that said, there's nothing here with george lewis... but still, one gtm piece, one mini-set from the great quartet (although, see below for what that actually entailed), and one short duet with arguably b's longest-standing collaborator; these between them comprise a powerful "brief history". (only those who crave standards, or who perversely insist on the superiority of the 70s recordings, will be disappointed here.)

the first stream features an expanded 12+2tet tackling a third species gtm territory (*1); it's short, around twenty minutes, but very successful and (almost inevitably) filled with activity and excitement. less than half the usual length for such an undertaking, it does miss some of what we've come to expect - not much time for impromptu readings of pieces from the (now vast) songbook(s), and no particular fireworks from the leader, but it's still well worth a listen. actually, the collective's ability to distil its potentials into small spaces is even better exemplified by the fabulous four-minute encore.

the second is - well, it is talked up on the webpage as a reunion for b's classic eighties quartet, and indeed it was, just about: but the version of "impressions" highlighted on that page is actually the only part of the 33-minute set to feature the hornman. the first three quarters of it were played by only three quarters of the band... this is hardly much of an objection, though, since those three players are of such stratospherically high calibre. the set - which for me was rather dominated by mark dresser's massive bass sound and presence - was not (of course) an improvisation, as the webpage gives it; when did this band ever play fully improvised sets..? no, it's rather a semi-collage set: "semi-" because there doesn't seem to be a lot of mix-and-match going on, though in terms of their interaction and group identity, the trio sounds as if it never disbanded. i can't currently put an opus number to the first piece played, though it's very distinctive and must presumably have been part of the book for the '85 tour (doubtless in a year or so i'll be able to name it right away...); this is followed by the first of two repetition structures, comp. 40(o) - which crispell especially seems to enjoy playing (*2); then a short drum solo; a second repetition structure, this time the additive series comp. 23c, and finally of course the cover, the aforementioned coltrane standard "impressions" which our man obviously loves, since he has played it many times over the years (though usually solo; it's actually highly unusual for a set like this to feature another composer's piece, but hey, this was a special occasion).

finally, there is a rivetting, highly-charged improvisation between b. and richard teitelbaum, which for me is probably the pick of the three - just fantastic, and here, at last, the maestro unleashes some of his very best extended techniques and most ferocious playing.

basically, you can't go far wrong with these short sets - really (for me) the only thing missing is an actual solo performance as such... and it might have been nice to hear the quartet play an entire set... but our man was the guest and honoree on this occasion, and perhaps he didn't want to play too long at his own party. in any case, the music presented is more than good enough. enjoy :)

***

now, the update... with the last braxtothon phase four session finally done and dusted (goddamn), there is only one article left to post before i move on to the next phase, and a new methodology with it (making more use of the composition notes, for a start... not that i will ever be a "proper" musicologist of course... until further notice you will not find any notation or "correct" musical analysis here). that one remaining article is of course the "quartet autopsy" as promised, and it's getting ready to be birthed as i write... no, really... this one should be up within the next couple of weeks, barring any unforeseen disasters; let's face it, it's long overdue. anyone who's still reading... stick around, there is more on the way!

* see comments

braxtothon phase 4: session 011b

2010-07-30T16:56:00.000-07:00

- this (at long last) is the final part of the final session, terminus for braxtothon phase 4 as such. naturally there is still to come the "autopsy" on the quartet - and speaking of which, don't forget, the curtain has already rung down on that band before this evening's curtain rises; lewis is still very much in evidence here (just a bit)... holland and altschul are notable by their absence.

session 011b: the berlin concerts (creative orchestra*1)
date: 6th november 1976

restructures link

(- see also here and here for the rest of the original double album)

so... exactly who else plays on this has never been established and therefore probably never will be - doesn't really matter, it not being that sort of deal: the support players are there for (carefully-contrived) tonal variety in ensemble sections, brought here for scored parts, not improvising. when i first heard this piece (actually heard it, in a session) i enjoyed it a lot, made a couple of pages of notes, and... retained nothing from it at all as it turned out (and of course it was rather more than a year before i got close to writing it up). listening again last month under far looser conditions, i heard it clearly(ish) as a sort of dual concerto, a showcase for lewis and the leader to do what they haven't had a chance to do much in the quartet dates: soar right out into the depths and explore. and, er, most of other guys are just reading the score and watching the conductor... which is fine... the harpist does get a brief (and rather unexpected) opportunity to shine, finishing the performance off with an interesting tail-piece, unaccompanied, sounding at times (to my ears) more like a phantom duet for harp and spanish guitar.

otherwise - yep, lots and lots of solo work by the two horns; so obviously if you're reading this, you will be interested in that (yes?); but what will there be for us to say about it, that being the case? again, i had a peek at the compostion notes (this time didn't even need to get the books out - restructures has them online for this piece, now known as comp. 63) and sure enough, it is a piece for two single-line instruments and large-scale backup, organised in six sections, open-ended as regards the passages of improvisation - so that a given interpretation, says the composer, may last from ten minutes to ten days. it's pretty much comp. 59 again - but with certain subtle yet important differences: instead of picking as partner a full contemporary/peer in roscoe mitchell (*2), we have the golden boy, the number one student already long since turned collaborator; instead of an all-star chorus chirping in every few bars we have a reticent, respectful backdrop of prearranged sound. of course, "listening" under relaxed conditions i did not pick up the sixfold structure of the piece, but here and now at the end of one (gruelling) stage of the journey and before embarking on the next, i'm not even going to attempt to go into that sort of detail anyway (*3). what, if anything, did i pick up from the actual session and the later follow-up(s)?

***

a clarinet leads us very quickly into a well-populated space: within seconds, lots of different instruments are on display, announcing themselves briefly in quick succession so that an extremely broad sound palette is established straight away. (there is a terrific clarity to the recording, in no way compromised by the compressed files i'm using for this. may as well keep on saying it.) just after the one minute mark, a tinkling bell, shortly silenced, leads to a pause of several seconds which may indicate the end of the first section.

following this pause, both lewis and the leader are much in evidence, identifying themselves in short order but without being ostentatious about it. (the trombonist's powerful tone gives him away pretty quickly; b., on sopranino sax, is also easy enough to spot but just in case, a little flurry at 1.41 makes it quite clear.) by 2.00 it already sounds like a "double solo", the two horns improvising over a fairly sparse but tense backing, sustained notes gradually rising in pitch from (some of) the ensemble creating a sense of growing urgency, which is then communicated back to the soloists as their exchanging of paired notes (around 3.00) leads to faster and faster and playing from both. this continues for another minute, both horns playing very briskly for the most part, though only the percussion attempts to match them for pace: otherwise the sustained notes remain in place, the pitches still rising steadily, jacking up the tension still further; this cannot continue indefinitely, and b's first tiny timbral distortion at 4.05 signals a miniature climax reached. by 4.20, all the backing drops away and with no actual pause, the leader is left on his own.

as is so often the case, the solo which follows fully showcases the leader's virtuosity, displaying one by one almost his entire box of tricks: ultra-fast trills, fierce tonal distortions, rapid runs both fluid and staccato, subtle yet emotive pitch bends... all so familiar by now, yet each time it's as if i'm hearing them all for the first time: his playing still has the capacity to astonish me after all these hours of listening. a lovely tremolo brings this performance-within-a-performance to a close as the ensemble returns at 6.00. (amazing how precise some of these timings really are..! given that they surely weren't playing to a clock.) again, it's b. and lewis who dominate proceedings, the backing initially picking up more or less where it left off; and although this does change soon enough, other players elbowing their way briefly into the foreground, by 7.00 it's back to business as usual, with the two principals reciting a set of written lines and the group merely supporting them. (the lines themselves are archetypal braxton, at times almost mimicking the "battlement" configurations of the repetition structures, comps. 6f/40(o); here as there, we are unquestionably far beyond "jazz" - whatever that is.) suddenly, the trombone is the only voice we hear (7.18) and lewis embarks on his own demonstration of virtuosity.

- and this too has the capacity to astonish, again despite previous listening experience... lewis begins with considerable restraint, placing his opening entries sparingly and with great care, taking full advantage of the close recording mics to toy expertly with dynamics; this in addition to all the other manifold tools at his disposal... some very soft, almost intimate attacks are mingled with startlingly powerful ones: he has no trouble generating the echo which is generally absent from this recording! knowing that he's in the homeland of mangelsdorff may give him something extra to prove (*4); in any case, his solo is filled with such extraordinary verve, imagination and technical skill that any brass players in the audience would surely either feel inspired to get playing as soon as they got home, or want to bury their instruments under a dungheap and have done with it. between 8.35 and about 9.00, lewis unleashes cleanly-articulated lines of such ridiculous speed (*5) that the ensemble might be grateful for the fact that they're laying out at the time: otherwise a case of the "charlie parkers" might ensue, everyone losing the plot in amazement at what the soloist is doing.

at 9.45, the group is back in (*6), and this initiates what is possibly the densest section of the piece. at first, we are presented with swaying, uneasy sounds from different instruments in turn (during the session i heard these as creating a "seascape" although repeated listenings have cancelled that somewhat). vague tensions abound; by 10.30 some very forceful attacks by lewis lead to great clashes of cymbals and more noise all round. even when this diminishes, shrill piccolos and scratchy strings keep the atmosphere anything but calm; the volume level drops, but by 12.10 it's building to another crescendo and in due course we're in mid-cacophony again. at 12.40, a biting, spitting attack from the leader indicates a change of tack, and after a brief pause, the next section of the piece commences, this characterised by yearning, balladic playing from both b. (now on alto) and lewis. first it's the leader again, soaring over some hypnotic backing (more sustained notes, without the rising effect this time) with a singing, heart-rending sax solo filled with gorgeous note-bends; one tiny highlight for me occurs between 14.45 and 14.47 as first one note is repeated then a second, each hammered out in a staccato double triplet at great speed (this must surely be extremely difficult, but it's made to sound easy); and at 14.53 lewis dovetails with him - shutting out the applause which the audience can no longer suppress - picking up the thread and continuing in a similar vein, using his own most mellifluous tone to evocative effect. there is another smattering of applause as this section comes to a close...

... and just before 16.30, the seamonster makes its first appearance, sawing its way in beneath the foundations, alternately rumbling and squeaking as is its wont, joined now only by the trombone and by the harp, whose occasional skeletal entries (*7) provide a suitably eerie backdrop to the eldritch dialogue which takes us almost up to the end of the piece - an exchange between the two stars which is so hard to describe in words that even i am reluctant to attempt it (*8), but which is truly fascinating to hear. every so often, they move seamlessly from improvised playing to written lines, the harp joining in; around 18.30ish, they swap "unfinished" attacks, which creates immediate movement in the form of a very intense burst at 18.45; another snippet of written theme, and a minute or so of very fast playing from b's contrabass clarinet and lewis' muted 'bone - playing which occasions another round of applause; and then from 20.00, the pace slows right down, plenty of space around magical, bent attacks from all three players (the harp stays with them and, as mentioned above, is ultimately the last voice heard in the piece). another brief return to the written material, more otherworldly improv - the harp doing its best to match the two masters for craziness but inevitably failing - and we're into the last straight, b. and lewis trading puffs and growls around 22.00 before signing off with one last visit to the score, the harp left to close proceedings out alone, ensuring a low-key and haunting end. warm applause from the rapt audience, and danke schoen from our maestro.

***

- and that is finally it for the montreux/berlin concerts, which just leaves the grading at last... of course, i've known for ages that this was going to be a CCCC recommendation. it's a beautifully balanced double album, the two versions of the quartet nicely equipoised, the two repetition structures and two uptempo jazz numbers mirroring each other; two of the lesser-known 40 series pieces are included, one of which does not appear anywhere else in the official discography (*9); and above all - and i'm consciously comparing with dortmund here - the orchestral piece means that no-one will come away from this album thinking "jazz"... free or otherwise. hence, the album as a whole paints quite a full picture of where b. was at back then, and where he would be going in the future; hence, i would now be nudging new listeners towards this, rather than that other german excursion, good as it (generally) is.

comp.63 itself is intriguing and bears repeated investigations - even if it is essentially a vehicle for extended workouts by the due virtuosi. the complex framework within which these solo flights are presented is knotty, dissonant, beautiful and compelling, and it draws focused and committed performances from everyone... though the astounding improvisations will inevitably be what most lucky witnesses carried home with them.

* see comments

dawn of midi

2010-06-12T08:24:00.000-07:00

i was contacted a little while ago by aakaash israni, contrabassist in (nyc/paris-based free improv trio) dawn of midi. i hadn't previously heard of the band, which is completed by pianist amino belyamani and percussionist qasim naqvi; they had just recently issued their first album and were contacting music bloggers to help promote it. so... having first established a few things - namely, that i'm not any sort of professional critic, don't usually review cds and don't have a large readership! - i agreed to check out the album. i've enjoyed listening to it, and if it's taken me this long to set down some thoughts on it... surely nobody needs to hear about the reasons for that again. pretty much everything seems to take me a long time these days :-S

the album consists entirely of single, fully improvised takes. nowhere to hide, hence a necessity from the outset to be serious - excellent! and the very first thing which greets the listener is a liquid, resonant contrabass*1 - and evidence of precision engineering; skittering percussion enters almost at once, and just like that it's established what the parameters are... that's the setup and the level (at which) we're engaging... now to see what these young tyros can teach us.

piano's first entry is around 0.43 - the piece, titled "phases in blue" has a definite urgency and tension about it, and the piano's muted, crabwise first entries very much reflect this - and end up definitively shaping it, as belyamani more or less takes control once he's in motion. as for that urgency again (those initial piano attacks are short, stabbing runs made one-handed, the other hand damping the strings by the sound of it; especially if considered as the player's first voicings on the album as a whole, they sound somewhat like a less declamatory descendent of cecil taylor; or perhaps (therefore) like marilyn crispell, a name i'm highlighting here both for the name's talismanic qualities as regards this blog {{{*}}} and for the even simpler reason that it came to mind on numerous occasions the first time i played the cd. because of the trio/improv context i found myself thinking back to this particular recording (but note *2) - a comparison which may turn out to be useful, since i am ultimately left on each listening with an impression of DoM playing not so much "classic" free improv as a sort of spontaneous free chamber jazz - that's really the overall vibe i get from the album, which is frequently lyrical as well as exploratory and expressive. *3

- and that leads me back to what may be the crux here, in getting a feel for the nature of the band's musical animus: something i've already mentioned, namely the pianist's taking control, directing the shape and texture of the music though not necessarily the flow. with all three players young, serious and enthusiastic, it's belyamani who comes across to me at this stage as having the most developed or "complete" voice - and his desire to make music which is lyrical or even (almost) melodic of course then governs to a fairly large extent the nature of the territories which the group ends up inhabiting here. ("of course", because it's hard for a piano, where present, not to dominate this sort of open playing context: its inherent suitedness to harmony - of whichever type - gives it control of a much wider space than contrabass and drum set - though those instruments can also control wide spaces in the hands of masters.) the other two players generally seem to slot in around whatever lead the piano sets up: israni is chiefly concerned with rhythmic exploration, at this stage not much concerned with the contrabass as a harmonising instrument at all, more seeing it as a propulsive engine offering a great variety of approaches; qasim naqvi plays in a style fairly reminiscent of classic free improv, with a scattershot, whole-kit-gets-busy attitude which reminded me, at least, of great european masters such as oxley, lytton, lovens... that sort of idea. the point is, the overall effect to which these individual approaches are put: and that, more often than not, seems to be that piano establishes mood, with the bass and drums providing a very open and free mobile backing. it works pretty well, because although israni comes across as a little diffident, reluctant perhaps to venture too far out across the fingerboard at any one time, his frequent low pedal tones never have the quality of harmonic shackles: his utterances are firmly received (by this listener) as rhythmic and timbral attacks rather than notes or pitches. hence, belyamani's brittle lyricism *4 takes the group right to the edge of actual tunefulness, but never right into any explicit tonality, as that's not somewhere the itinerary has in mind. the group's identity remains tied up with the sound of, yeah, i dunno, "chamber improv" (though i wouldn't want them to get stuck with that label..!).

the piano doesn't always take the lead, and the group basically sounds unified, even if there are times when the thread seems temporarily lost - but this is free improvisation, it's a process not a product, and precisely what's so fascinating about this sort of recording (especially from a group which is just starting out) is that it enables us to observe this process at very close quarters, understand somewhat how it is that a group mind coalesces and dissipates on such occasions (when everyone is paying close attention). there are also times when individual intention or artifice stands out clearly, an example being during tr. 4, "the floor": before halfway, the bass has settled on a rapid, repetitive rythmic figure which seems at odds with the sparse notes of the piano (belyamani at this point sounding almost like bill evans); and israni sticks resolutely at this, even though for some tense seconds it looks to be going nowhere, but in time he draws the percussion in and eventually the three of them do succeed in making something real out of it, finally creating a curious impression of motion and stillness all at once. this, then, is one aspect of the process at work.

some other things to mention... i particularly like tr. 6, "one", with its heavy use of sustain and plenty of low register, the bass and drums both very fully involved with this one also; tr. 7, "hindu pedagogy", fades in on a group pattern, clear evidence of some selective editing (if not a rare example of something prearranged); here belyamani conspires against himself, setting up tuneful structures with the left hand while maintaining a ruthless series of stabbing dischords with the right; and this continues to the end of the (short) piece. another very short one, "annex", reminds me somewhat of taylor, buell neidlinger and billy higgins playing "cindy's main mood" *5 - though without the straightforward rhythmic drive of the drums on that number: this vignette here is just a brief exercise in summoning up a slightly menacing, paranoid atmosphere.

the final track on the album, "in between", is also by far the longest at around eleven minutes, and is another example of a clear strategy put to use, albeit a very basic one: the piano effectively take a single note for a very long walk, worrying at it ceaselessly throughout the piece (the actual note changes at times and sometime is joined by a second or third, in addition to whatever's happening in the left hand) as we negotiate several different linked territories. at first there is a great deal of movement, bass and drums hammering away in support, israni producing percussive smacks as if knocking at a gate; a change of note brings a palpable sense of buildup, and yet the ambience by about four or five minutes in is hypnotic rather than climactic or cathartic... continuing to vary in intensity thereafter, the piece never resolves into anything straightforwardly melodic yet never sounds devoid of focus, the band managing to sustain the ear's interest right up until the close.

***

this group is not yet the "finished article", nor does it purport to be. i'd like to hear israni pushing himself a little further out of his comfort zone, really allowing himself the freedom to explore his instrument's capacities as a sound-making device: he seems to me to have a good touch on the bass and just maybe seems to lack a little bit of confidence at times. qasim naqvi, too, seems a touch deferential at times - sensitivity and reactivity are indeed essential qualities in a drummer in this field, but it's ok to be forthright and cogent about expressing oneself too. perhaps they are both a trifle overwhelmed at times by belyamani, who has so many ideas at his disposal - that brings me back to the beginning, "phases in blue" again: not (as the title might suggest) a soft, candle-lit ballad structure, not at all, yet the name is well applied since the piano does present us with a series of accents of the blues, albeit in this context they appear rather as specimens under a microscope; - so many influences and moods and strategies in that busy head of his, it'll be interesting to see what else he gets involved with over the years - and i'm assuming that all these players will get involved with other projects, as creative musicians do (film music might be an interesting area to explore...); but they work/play well together, and i hope they will continue to document their growth together as well as separately. i have no intention of grading this album, since i'm not attempting to pass judgement on it, but although the label which issued it (accretions) does not normally put out this sort of stuff, i can safely recommend it to anyone who has a serious interest in free improv... just the musicians' honesty guarantees that.

* see comments

the edifice endures (birthday card)

2010-06-04T14:32:00.000-07:00

today is anthony braxton's 65th birthday.

{{{{***<<%@@@+++@@@#%#>>>**}}}}

many happy returns of the day to you sir!

in some cultures 65 is the age of retirement from working life... i reckon that (at least as regards composition and playing) our man has other ideas ;-)

in any case, already, there is a great body of consistent work which will endure.

know this
and (let's) be grateful... {{{@}}}

c x

emblocages*

2010-05-31T16:27:00.000-07:00

damn, that's may come and gone... and i really did want to put a post up. next up - hopefully now within the next week - is something out of the ordinary, a post dedicated to another musician - or in this case group, dawn of midi. if i am not ready to post that now it's because - well, the usual stuff plus yet more computer hassle - in this case the new household laptop, only bought in jan, already had to "factory-restore" the bugger to eradicate spyware damage {{grrr}} quicker in the end than the alternative at least... and sick toddlers and new dogs, and just the way things worked out - for the most part over the last month i've been occupying my (bone-tired) free evenings with pursuits mostly non-musical, and getting my musical fix at work via a younger guy (19-20), very into good rock music, close listener, drummer, loves his metal, and in short i've been in more of a creative rock vibe just lately... and not fancying the cheap headphones much come the evening. (did enjoy some gerry hemingway recently though... and of course DOM as previously advised...)

there is more on the way. june is a key month for this blog :))

* in french accent

If You Know What I'm Saying

braxbites: birth and rebirth

the trillium (comp. 126) mystery: update

cent's 2012 manifesto

state of play

braxtothon redux: you *can* go back

warmup/gap-filling #3

broadcasting to you live (ish) from the coalface

some omissions...

if it's quarter past october...

braxtothon vol.2/5.01: background "history"

a bit of a mystery...

the experts (1) - thb sextet 2010

tangential intersect with centrispace

slideshow one

london (new york) masters

...and further confessions!

a confession

(yet) another hiatus

braxtothon vol. 2... explanatory preamble

late birthday card (blush)

easter festival (2)

easter festival (1)

broadcast/update

student studies 2 (the return!)

warm weather woodshedding

antibes quartet '75

***music here***/corrigendum

braxbites #3: the '97 ninetet

broadcast from centrispace

hope springs...

london postscript

feet of clay

braxbites #2: solo bagpipes

braxbites #1: jump or die

65th birthday (re-)revisited

cent's 2011 manifesto

seasonal greetings :)

progress report/ comp. 40q

braxtothon phase five: prologue

comp. 23j (re-)revisited

milan quartet '79

moments captured or missed

previous encounter

quick newsflash

state of the braxtothon address

*** braxtothon master-list, part two ***

braxtothon phase 4: quartet autopsy

*** gtm concert here ***

*** music files here ***

update/65th birthday celebrations

braxtothon phase 4: session 011b

dawn of midi

the edifice endures (birthday card)

emblocages*

braxtothon redux: you can go back

music here/corrigendum

* braxtothon master-list, part two *

* gtm concert here *

* music files here *