This may count as progress...

 

... or then again, it may not.

It probably doesn't. Buuuuuut... it still feels pretty significant for me that for the first time since my daughter was a toddler*, I have all my Braxton CDs in one place, for easy and immediate access. (I can't work out now whether they look like a lot, or surprisingly few... but that's not important: this is not about fetishising a collection.)

We weren't short of space in the house we moved out of last year, but for various reasons we didn't make the best use of it - and as one consequence of that, most of my possessions were stuffed away in places where I couldn't easily get at them. I certainly couldn't readily access, say, an individual book I might feel like perusing - or a CD that I felt like playing. 

We took care of some of that when we moved, although it's still a work in (very slow) progress; the music collection, especially, is not all sorted out yet. But I do now have all my Zappa in one place and, more to the point, all my Braxton. 

I am sitting here right now listening to Beyond Quantum while I type. I haven't heard that album for years. 

I have been going through some very troubled times just lately, and this is just what my ears needed...

* That is to say, more than a decade ago. The collection was quite a lot smaller then, too...

Obvious hiatus

 

Heard the one about..? Sigh... OK... it's not even worth making a joke out of it at this point. Thing is, I started the "main" Thumbscrew post several weeks ago, didn't finish it (obviously) - and that in turn sort of prevented me from writing anything else. Part of the problem stems from my suspicion that I shan't have anything very interesting to say about it - that all I seem to be able to do is analyse the aspects of it which are "weighed in the balance and found wanting". I very much don't want to be that guy - or to continue being him, if that's indeed who I have been previously - but it may well turn out to be the case that the most pungent comments I can provide on it are those I've already posted. That would be perverse, since the more I have listened to the album, the more I've enjoyed it; but hey, who's counting? No half-serious fan of B's music is holding off from buying the album until they've heard what I have to say about it.

So - I will still finish and post that, but since self-imposed deadlines are not helpful or effective for me, I will free myself up at this point to write about other things first. What else is going on?

Atanase has recorded some more music (following the stuff I mentioned briefly in December): this is promised to be "somewhat heavier", with a different guitarist this time - who is "not afraid to play messy"; A. himself stuck exclusively to his main axe, tenor saxophone, for this outing. All of which sounds just fine with me, but I haven't yet found time to hear this new recording, and I'd intended to wait until I had, before plugging it... but fuck it, whatever else might turn out to be true of the music, I can basically guarantee I will dig the sax playing. 

I recently read a famous book on modern jazz which I only bought quite recently, A.B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business. This very readable book is well written and has a distinctly socio-political angle, examining the music scene as it does through the perspectives of three musicians who were either entirely marginalised (Herbie Nichols) or whose opportunities were severely curtailed owing to a perceived lack of commercial appeal in their musical approach (Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman), plus one (Jackie McLean) who had plenty of success, but who found himself on the wrong end of the NYC music scene's outdated regulations anyway; it makes no mention of B. at all, anywhere in the text, but - naturally enough - I was reminded at numerous points of the difficulties faced by the maestro, in trying to get his music accepted and validated by (what has been for the most part) a strongly resistant establishment. If I can actually get my shit together I will probably look at these connections in a bit more detail, but... not right now.

Other than that? Not much... twice recently I was involved in auctions for multiple Braxton CDs on eBay, but I lost them both, and in truth I wasn't trying all that hard to win them (since in both cases they included releases which I already have, as well as some I'm still looking for). That won't make any sense to a lot of people, who would just see the acquisition of duplicates as an opportunity to sell, but... I never have been any good at that side of things. So it remains the case that the last purchase directly relevant to what I do here - when I do it at all - was the RogueArt Duo (DCWM) 2013... anyway. More soon, honest... 

What it is to duet

 

It's fair to say that the gestation of this post dates back at least a decade; it involves confronting some things I was initially unwilling to confront at all, hence if certain ideas even started to come to mind I tended at first just to shut them down again. On and off over the years I have found myself thinking along similar lines... it's only very recently I have allowed myself to wrestle properly with the issues I'm going to lay out below. What really prompted this was, first, listening to the duo concert B. played with Fred Frith - and then, soon afterwards, to the duo recordings he made with Miya Masaoka...

... the (double) CD of which I acquired just before Christmas. Now, unlike the Victoriaville meeting with Frith - which I only heard for the very first time just recently - I had a rip of the Masaoka duo several years ago (it having been posted online shortly after it was released) and listened to it a few times back then. Probably I treated it as background music at that time, but for whatever reason, I didn't hear it with any great clarity - until I actually played the CD. At that point, I suddenly found myself utterly fascinated by Masaoka's approach to the koto: she uses a very wide variety of techniques and attacks to elicit a huge range of sounds from the instrument, many of which I really wouldn't associate with the koto at all. As the album's title indicates, these were Diamond Curtain Wall performances, but the interactive software proved far less interesting on this occasion than B's human duet partner.

The problem was: on this same occasion, I didn't find B's own playing that interesting. Everything I heard him play... just sounded like things I had heard him play (many times) before. (To some extent at least * this was also a problem for me back in November, listening to the Victoriaville duo. To some extent - as implied above - it's been a potential problem for me on numerous listenings over the years, had I but let myself admit that.)

Of course, part of the problem is precisely the fact that I have heard B. play many times before: I have spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours listening to him in all sorts of different contexts. I have heard way more of his saxophone playing than anybody else's, over the years. Naturally then it will tend to be the case that a new (to me) recording reminds me of previous ones. Still, though... this does not seem to encompass the whole of the problem.

In his liner notes to the Firehouse 12 Quartet (New Haven) 2014 4-CD set, THB says something to the effect that in an ideal world, B. would record a duo album with every interesting musician he meets - would have recorded an album with every interesting musician he has ever met. This wasn't exactly news to me, either, and I don't suppose it's news to anyone who is reading this; anybody who keeps even half an eye on B's constantly-expanding discography can infer that he relishes playing in duet with different musicians, especially if he has not had the chance to play with them before. In turn, I have always been keen to listen to these recordings whenever I can (although some of the larger recent boxes make this particularly challenging). But as my familiarity increases and my ears grow more educated, I am finding it harder and harder to deny that with a lot of these recordings, the pleasure for me lies chiefly in discovering what B's playing partners are inspired to come up with, in his presence. That's great, of course... but is it really too much to ask that the maestro might also surprise me, from time to time?

Before I go any further I must clarify something. Even at duo level, there are recordings and recordings. In some cases, a programme is chosen for the date which comprises existing music; that might be a programme of B's own pieces exclusively (such as the Leipzig concert with Ted Reichman), or a mixture of B's pieces and those written by his partner, and/or standards, and/or improvised pieces. (Tons of examples of this format - the duos with Mario Pavone and with Gino Robair spring readily to mind, since I've written about those recently.) Where this is the case, at least in the composed numbers it's fully understood that there will be a variety of playing styles and/or techniques on display, according to the particular requirements of the written music; in the same way, B's solo performances always tend to feature a wide variety of playing approaches since the solo books themselves comprise pieces written to illustrate particular language types, and so on. - The other type of duo (more rarely, trio or quartet) encounter is completely improvised, and really, it's this type of recording I'm concerned with here. (Again, there's really no shortage of examples of this; I've mentioned three of them already. The album with Miya Masaoka is apparently rather unusual, in that DCW performances generally consist(ed) of B's compositions, albeit with a pretty large degree of latitude given to the musicians to set their own stamp on the eventual music; in this case, the performances are explicitly stated to be DCW, but the music purports to be completely improvised - unless the label simply failed to do its homework in this case, which seems unlikely.)

So, having got that all that out of the way, what I appear to be saying here is that when Braxton freely improvises, he sounds like himself, over and over again. Is that really true? - and if it is... is it really a problem?

"The case for the prosecution" (as it were)

One player I've been listening to quite a bit lately is Larry Ochs. This master first came to prominence, of course, as the "O" component of ROVA; another prominent early slot for him was as the second sax player in Glenn Spearman's double trio (a "chair" which would have required some technique for sure**, but which above all needed someone who could play with power, in that company). He's someone who could rest fairly comfortably on his laurels - such as they are - these days, but who has chosen not to do so: in recent years he's sought out some challenging new gigs to get his teeth into. There was a one-off trio on Clean Feed with Nels Cline (who keeps cropping up in contexts where I end up digging him, just lately - not least that same Firehouse 12 box I mentioned earlier) and Gerald Cleaver (who himself, if he's not literally ubiquitous, at least must surely have mastered the siddhi of being in two places at once). There is a cooperative quintet (The Fictive Five) with trumpet monster Nate Wooley, plus two bassists and a drummer. Most interestingly for me, at least, is a super-high-end free improv trio which goes by the infuriatingly search-engine-proof moniker of Jones Jones: Ochs plus Mark Dresser and Vladimir Tarasov, a ludicrously-skilled group which convenes occasionally for festival performances (and went into the studio for the first time just last year, recording for ESP Disk (a label which, if I'm honest, I didn't realise still existed until very recently)). The latter group, in particular, is one I've played and replayed - and one of the things which keep me coming back to them is the sheer variety of sounds, the timbral and tonal multiplicity of what emerges when these three guys get together. 

Ochs in general comes readily to mind in this context, because something I keep noticing about him is how much variety he seems to bring to his playing, even if he's just playing tenor. Now, I have heard a hell of a lot less of Larry Ochs than I have of Braxton. The short list above illustrates (I trust) how Mr O. is not content to take it easy in his later years; but if it also seemingly implies that I could easily keep listing other contexts in which he's played recently, that would be false. He's certainly done other things (***); I may even have heard some other recent work of his, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. The point is that if I listened to lots more of his playing, I daresay it wouldn't be long before I heard him repeating himself...

... but the other point still stands: the recordings which I have listened to demonstrate the extent to which an improviser - especially a player with compendious technique - can keep surprising the listener, by playing in different ways.

To say that B. has compendious technique is so blindingly obvious as to be completely fatuous; so why do I not always find myself thinking the same when I listen to him, in freely improvised contexts?

"The case (so to speak) for the defence"

Of course, the easiest rebuttal to the above is simply what some people may already be shouting at the screen by now: most improvisers repeat themselves over and over again. This (as I understand it) is why John Cage was down on improvisers: he felt he couldn't rely on them to improvise at all, rather believed that they would inevitably fall back on their own peculiar phrases and patterns. (That doesn't even mean necessarily that he expected improvisers to commit the cardinal jazz sin of playing licks, since that implies a step further into playing on auto-pilot, a pretty serious accusation to level against a serious improviser.)

The first improvising soloist that I listened to extensively would have been Frank Zappa: he definitely repeated himself, however much he may have tried to avoid that. These days, I am pretty thoroughly familiar with John Zorn: again, he definitely falls back on the same strategies much of the time when he's playing in free contexts #. Roscoe Mitchell? Again, precisely what makes him identifiable and distinctive is his tendency to repeat himself. (This is especially true of his extended solos on soprano sax, an instrument Mitchell tends to reserve for his formidable demonstrations of circular breathing; formidable every time, but every time much the same in my experience.) Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann? Two of the giants of European Free Improvisation, in other words... Parker repeats himself endlessly (and nobody has ever accused him of lacking technique), while Brötzmann has been accused (wrongly, I think) of lacking technique, because of his reliance on an approach once described to me as "one straight line, every time" ##. Derek Bailey, the most militant proponent imaginable of non-idiomatic music, is always identifiable within a handful of notes because he always sounds like himself. 

Nica de Koenigswarter was known to say that every time she watched Monk play live - something she must have done hundreds of times - he did something she had never heard him do before. I doubt anybody ever challenged her to back up this assertion, so who knows whether she could have done so; in any case, she was only claiming that in each performance Monk would unveil one new idea, so we may reasonably infer from that that the rest of each performance was... familiar ground being covered. The more you listen to any player, the harder it will be for them to surprise you. My own route into jazz, really, came via a fascination with Eric Dolphy: as I collected his recordings, it became increasingly obvious that those "surprising" solo phrases of his were on almost permanent loop. (Of course, in Dolphy's case I quickly realised that there were extenuating circumstances: he was really only active on the scene for a very short period, 1960-64 (and really only from 1961), having waited a very long time to get himself out there; and when he did get out there, he doubtless often found himself in situations where he had to assume that (much of) his audience would be hearing him for the first time.) Ornette... Coltrane... Miles... we could go on almost endlessly here. 

- I'm also cheating now, because I started out by limiting myself to B's recordings in a context of free improvisation, and have now drifted into consideration of players who take improvised solos within a structured context. Most of the players named above didn't play in freely improvised contexts much if at all... Still, that doesn't really undermine the defence's basic argument, here; most improvising musicians tend to repeat themselves a lot regardless of the context within which they are improvising. Some of the guys with a foot in both camps (Zorn, Parker) tend to sound much the same whether in a completely free context, or when improvising within a structured piece. This actually isn't the case with B: certainly he's identifiable within a couple of notes (at least he is to me, after all this time), but when he's taking a solo within a structured context he has always been able to draw on a fabulously rich vocabulary, and although certain phrases will inevitably crop up sooner or later, there may well be plenty of surprises along the way. So as I said above, it's only really when listening to him playing in completely free situations that I start to get (anything close to) that "comfortable old shoe" feeling.

Now that I've allowed myself to confront this nagging feeling head on, then... how do I feel about this whole business?

In conclusion (and this will amaze precisely nobody)

Even if it's true... I don't think it matters very much.

- and of course it may not be entirely true, anyway. Only on my very best days do I get close to the sort of monomaniac focus with which Pannonica followed Monk; if it seems to me when listening to the (improvised) duets in particular that B. is playing the same stuff each time, it could easily be the case that I am just hearing the bits which sound most familiar, and allowing my attention to wander at other times, perhaps missing things which I will only gradually pick up little by little, with enough repeated listening. (I'm not totally convinced by that, actually: at this point, anything totally new to my ears is likely to stick out a mile; but it remains true that I could be missing a lot of actual movement during the moments when my attention is at least partly elsewhere.)

But let's say for the sake of argument that I'm not missing anything, or anything much, and that in at least some of the duo recordings B. just ends up repeating himself. Does that render the meetings pointless, the recordings of them redundant? No. Even if the only element of surprise lies in discovering what B's playing partner brings to the date, that's still worth hearing; and it may also very well be the case that it was the maestro's presence (and company, and example) which facilitated the other party's creativity in the first place. Knowing that you are about to get the chance to play with a modern grandmaster must sharpen you right up and put you on full alert, whoever you are. And I think for B., that is the real pleasure of these meetings anyway: it's not so much that he is looking to create music hitherto entirely unknown by alchemising two known quantities into a brand-new substance, more a matter of this is how I play, and I want to know how you sound when you play with me. He himself quite clearly never gets bored of this game and (of course) that is the trick of it.

As for me, well, if I go back and start re-listening to lots of these recordings with renewed focus, who knows what I may end up finding in them?

* To some extent, yeah. Reading back what I wrote at the time, apparently there were at least some points where I felt that Frith was inspiring B., not just the other way round... or was I not yet being completely honest with myself? (I still don't own the CD of this recording and don't feel inclined to listen to it again until I do have it.)

** Spearman is sometimes remembered as being "just" a wild energy player, a "disciple of Ayler", but he held down a place in CTU for some time and during his tenure there, some of the other players (apparently) looked to him for guidance on how to play Taylor's music. He may have been self-taught but I don't think it's fair to regard him as any sort of "primitive" (any more than it would be fair to regard Ayler that way).

*** By an odd coincidence, Ochs once recorded a trio set with the first two players I mentioned in this very post: the alliterative Fred Frith and Miya Masaoka. Small world, huh? This was back in 1999 - and I haven't heard the album. (The three players were actually in a band together, but Maybe Monday was more often a quartet.)

# I'm quite sure there are (still) those who distrust Zorn for various reasons, and who therefore must dismiss out of hand his credentials for participating in free improvisation. But an experienced musician of my acquaintance who saw him play more than once in such contexts confirmed that there was nothing detached or ironic about Zorn's commitment on these occasions, rather he was all the way into it when he played.

## I can't now remember for certain who it was that told me this; it was one of two people, both improvising musicians - if it wasn't the same musician mentioned in the previous footnote, it was the other guy, but in any case they were quoting someone else, a very experienced improviser of their acquaintance who had played with Brötzmann on more than one occasion. 

Only five footnotes, this time? I'm slipping...

Cent's 2023 manifesto

 

Well now... hello 2023. When was the last time I posted one of these, eh? But of course there's no great mystery about that: the answer is, nine years ago (minus one day). Hmmm, and if you haven't read that one already, maybe don't bother with it now, as it will in all probability prove completely unreadable*; given how the rest of the year ended up, at least from the blog's point of view, it can at best be regarded as something of a false dawn anyway... better examples are available, from previous years. That was, however, the last time I did one - until now. 

It always felt, during the blog's long slumber, as if it would probably awaken eventually, but as the years rolled by that had begun to seem less and less likely. So it rather took me by surprise when it actually happened. Now: what am I really looking to achieve at this point?

What I would like to achieve is to demonstrate that it is possible to draw meaningful and worthwhile conclusions about complex music without formal training (... and without psychoactive assistance, ahem). 

I genuinely am not sure to what extent that is possible, however - or at least, whether it is possible for me. So I suppose what I am really looking to establish is, precisely, whether it is possible - or not.

In the meantime, what I shall be doing here is continuing the recent trend: some observations on specific recordings (which will hopefully become more detailed over time), some musings on non-specific aspects of B's work, or of creative music in general; some commentaries on pieces of video footage, some comments on new releases or whatever else might come up... that kind of thing. In the massively unlikely event that anyone out there is still waiting for the Braxtothon itself to continue, I can't see how that would ever happen now. (There are several reasons for this, and/but I'm not about to enumerate them here.) On the other hand, I would like to think that I am capable of rising to the double challenge of engaging with the composition notes more (at last...), and of trying to get to grips with the substantial collection of bootleg tapes which was passed on to me more than a decade ago now (FFS), and which I never did find the time to deal with. I may or may not be able to wrangle the Tri-Axium Writings (being, as I am, a piss-poor excuse for a scholar**); that remains to be seen...  but one way or another, I have amassed rather a large collection of B's recordings over the years, and I'm still adding to it, and it seems only fitting to keep on writing about them. Above all, I find that I want to keep writing about B's music. So I will. Who knows, (some of) it may even turn out to be readable...

Onwards!

* It may literally be unreadable, given that it's barely comprehensible even to me... written as it was not only under the influence of cannabis, but in the bewildering intensity of - what was at the time - my first smoke in six months. I had not greatly enjoyed being "straight" for all that time, and seized the first chance I got to fall off the wagon - but, as fate would have it, that turned out to be a most inopportune time for it (not that that stopped me, of course, once my mind was made up). We never did find out what caused dog #2/whippet #1 to suffer his phantom back injury - subsequent investigation by an expert found absolutely nothing wrong - but... well, anyway. On this occasion, more than ever before, I found myself on the horns of a dilemma, to wit: getting high allowed me to hear music with extraordinary clarity, but greatly reduced my ability to communicate effectively, whether by speech or in writing. Instead I would convince myself that what I was coming out with made sense, since although (by now) it never came out the way I wanted it to, I could always adjust my thinking to the point where it made sense to me, and therefore a patient enough reader would be able to follow my cognitive twists and turns and end up seeing what I - god knows why I ever thought that anybody would bother even to try, but there we are. I can only apologise for the state of some of the posts in the "middle years"...

** Just in case anyone thinks this is British false modesty: it really, really isn't. A number of people observed about me when I was younger that I was too clever for my own good. I used to wonder what the hell they were talking about - and I never stopped to wonder for long. But I presume what they meant was that I was clever enough not to have to try properly, or learn properly. For a long time I was able to finesse my (undoubted) potential into a temporary, somewhat illusory state of over-achievement, but eventually it reached the point when I was actually expected to make good on that potential, and of course at that point I discovered that I couldn't - I had never learned how, and I wasn't about to find out (at a time when all I generally wanted to do was get high, listen to music and chase girls, more or less in that order). So the basic tools of the scholar - which include being able to read complex texts quickly and with a high degree of retention, for example - are pretty much a mystery to me. I can read complex texts, but it is harder work for me than it "should" be... in the end I escaped from university with a decent degree, but that was more down to luck than anything else, and the stress involved in getting to that point resolved me never to put myself in that situation again. I did, eventually, flirt with (some form of) scholarship on this blog - something which B. himself was gracious enough to recognise. But, again, when it came down to seeing it through... 

A reed player other than Anthony Braxton, for a change

 

I mentioned briefly last time out that I had been back in touch with Atanase (whose Church Number Nine blog really kick-started my own journey of exploration into free jazz and improvised music, around fifteen years ago*), but at the time it didn't feel appropriate to say much more than that - although I did say that he plays reeds now. This is not a new development as such: even before he left London, he was playing tenor sax (latterly having lessons with Rachel Musson, somewhat known these days for her own association with clarinet wizard Alex Ward). Since Atanase moved back to Georgia, he has also been playing bass clarinet and, most recently, shehnai (although he is most dismissive of his playing on the latter instrument). 

A. sent me a link to an album which he has recorded with two friends. He was at pains to point out that it's not the kind of music he expected me to like, or that he himself would usually be involved in; the two other musicians - a guitarist and a synth player - are both professionals, but both come from backgrounds in pop and dance music, not the sort of bandmates A. would immediately have chosen if he could. I do know that he has struggled to find people back home that come even close to sharing his taste in music; in the end, he embarked on a project which was a sort of middle ground for all three (even then, it didn't end up exactly the sort of drone music which they started out intending to play). And he's right enough: it's not my usual cup of tea, or any of my usual teas for that matter**... but I did quite enjoy listening to it, mainly because I really dug the reeds on this. You can hear where all those hours of practice have gone... I certainly hope he carries on recording, and is maybe able to find some more sympathetic playing-partners as time goes on! He has given me his blessing now to mention the album on here, so if anyone's interested... go check it out :)

***

There's still pretty much a week of December left, and it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that I will post again before 2022 evaporates, but if I don't... well, it's been good to get going again on this, finally, even if the world has moved on in my absence - even if hardly anybody is reading - even if I still managed to find time to get myself "stuck", as I mentioned just recently: well, that's not gonna last, and I have every intention of continuing to post into the new year and beyond. This already ended up being the most productive single year the blog has enjoyed since 2011; indeed there have only been three years which saw more activity than this one did, in the end. It feels good to be back. If anyone is reading this "live" - happy festive season, however you and yours might be celebrating it. Back soon! C x

* I've somewhat lost track, but I am pretty sure C#9 actually started late in 2006 and was active into 2007 - well, it must definitely have been active in 2007 because its eventual demise was swiftly followed by McClintic Sphere starting this one (little knowing that I was about to run away with it... I didn't know that either, until I got going on it). As for my listening tastes and all that - I was already listening to jazz before C#9 came along, and my tastes were far more geared towards the freer end of things, but I had not really "found my ears" yet. If anyone really wants more information on this, they can find it here - a post which also happens to sum up my conclusions regarding the state of the Braxton quartet up to and including 1976. 

** My own music taste is still sort of oddly-unbalanced: wide in terms of the variety of sounds (etc) I will tolerate, quite narrow in terms of what I actually listen to. Besides (mainly free) jazz and creative music, I do still listen to (some of the more extreme subgenres of) metal, but these days I'm more into hardcore punk - especially the more intense and brutal strains thereof (fastcore, grindcore, powerviolence etc). I also listen to some less outlandish rock-based stuff, but not that much. And that's kind of it, because I seem to get enough sustenance out of that lot to keep me going... 

Once again, I lost sight of what's important

 

This is - apparently - so easily done: I slip back into an all-too-familiar pattern of treating the blog, and any music associated with it, as "work" and hence putting it off. Evidently it's not just habitual dope-smokers who suffer with habitual procrastination.

In entirely predictable fashion, it was the long-deferred Thumbscrew album which really brought this to the fore, but in truth it's been building and it just feels like a good time to admit that, get it out in the open. (Part of the blog's function for me has long been to delineate my own process, such as it is.) I wrote in early November about acquiring several releases featuring Braxwerks, and not only have I not managed to write about any of them yet, I haven't even been listening to them over the last few weeks. The Locals CD I bought, played once (and enjoyed it way more than I thought I would, when I first saw it had been released) - and then promptly shelved, because it's "work"... and therefore is mentally filed away in some sort of in-tray rather than in the enjoyment and recreation pile (where it properly belongs).

The actual underlying reasons for this are all far too obvious to be worth analysing here; it only feels worth confessing at all because it shows how quickly, how easily, I can slip back into an old and self-limiting habit.

Of course, there was also a complicating factor where Thumbscrew is concerned: having laid out my conclusions (such as they were for the time being) regarding the vexed question of the album's seventh track, I was almost immediately "set straight" by being pointed to a piece by Carl Testa on the TCF site - although it's not that simple*, and will stand further consideration at some point (not now... I'm already fed up of talking about it for a while at least). What this did do, though, was prompt me to think about my own activity, back when I was a far more active music blogger (during the 2000s especially). At the time, I regarded part of my own contribution as being to help clear up little details wherever I could, so that if someone posted, say, a live recording with incomplete or inaccurate information, and I was able to supply missing details or make some corrections, I would do this with the minimum fuss and as quickly as I could. There was never any element of criticism intended: rather, as I saw it, we were all part of the same community, which wanted basically the same things, and since I didn't tend to post much in the way of actual music, if I could help sort out some of the information surrounding it then so much the better. And I don't think most people took it as criticism, but I know ( = eventually found out) that some people did**. Anyway, I hadn't really though about this for quite some time, but I did find myself revisiting it recently... it's all useful material...

- Not that this has really got anything to do with why I'm stalling (again) over posting some observations on the actual music. No, that's just the sort of thing I do - still do, obviously. I'm not going to keep indulging myself in this, however. I only have to go back as far as September this year for a time when I was listening to B's music every day, and making my own daily life better as a result (as well as finding plenty to write about): before this newly-reacquired habit (of avoiding listening to music on the supposed grounds that I can't listen to it recreationally, but must always approach it with full focus and taking of notes) becomes completely crystallised, I am going to break it. So that's that.

***

Some people will remember my old friend Atanase, formerly the editor of the semi-legendary free jazz blog Church Number Nine. At the time C#9 was active, and for a good while thereafter, he lived in London - but he has long since moved back to his native Georgia (the country, not the US state). He does, however, play reeds these days. I'm not saying any more about that just yet..!

*All the article proves is that the band were justified in believing that they were indeed interpreting Comp. 61 - something which I didn't doubt in the end. This doesn't, however, mean that the handwritten score which the band had access to for purposes of recording their album actually represents the piece that was originally intended to be Comp. 61 - there are a number of features specified clearly in the composition notes which appear to be directly contradicted, or at best disregarded by that score... and that's not even mentioning the fact that the same tune had already been recorded under a different opus number. No, we're some way off having a proper answer to that question...

** One person in particular - not someone I'd ever dealt with directly - took the whole thing very personally and eventually made it clear that he thought I was just "finding fault" with him. This had literally never occurred to me - I mean that anyone might take it that way - and it came as a bit of a jolt. (I was still a few years away from being diagnosed on the autistm spectrum at that point..!)

Thumbscrew pt 1a: the mysterious track 7

 

OK, so in that previous post - specifically in the third part of said post - I highlighted one problematic aspect of the Thumbscrew Braxwerks album: one piece listed thereupon as Comp. 61 has been previously recorded (by B. himself, in duo with Mario Pavone) as Comp. 29a (technically, at the time of release it was listed as being just plain Comp. 29; but that, at any rate, I can categorically say was a mistake - see below). 

I said I would refer to the Composition Notes for guidance on this, and I have done so. Did this clear the matter up, once and for all? Weeeeeell... not exactly :-S

First things first, # 29 is in fact a short series, comprising Comps. 29a-29e - so, clearly whatever this piece is, it's not "Comp. 29" since that doesn't actually exist. (Probably. Let's not forget that B. and Martinelli were putting numbers to many of these pieces retrospectively, in some cases years after they were written, and if the odd detail got confused along the way... that wouldn't be the first time, now would it..?)

Secondly, there is at least some (internal) consistency to be found in the two conflicting recordings: the Pavone duo CD gives a diagram for track 2 which matches the graphic title for Comp. 29a in Composition Notes Book B, and the Thumbscrew CD gives a diagram for track 7 which (nearly) matches the graphic title for Comp. 61 in Composition Notes Book C (very nearly, but not quite: the three numbers which appear in the graphic title on the Thumbscrew CD are 67, 3 & 23 whereas the middle one should properly be 32). So we at least know for sure that the respective artists were clear about which piece they thought they were interpreting.

Thirdly... look, this is all bewilderingly vague and one can see (ish) how such confusion might arise. The notes say that Comp. 29a was composed "in the early seventies", and Comp. 61 dates from "circa 1976"; Composition Notes Books B and C are both copyrighted 1988 (although B's introductions to both books are dated August 2nd, 1984); the Pavone duets were recorded in January 1993... you can see how there is plenty of scope for things going awry here. Just in case it's not already fairly obvious where we're going with this: both pieces have very brief notes, and neither one of them includes any actual formal notation, so it may not be definitively possible to establish from the written notes exactly which recording was correctly attributed. (For all I know, neither of them is correct!) Who knows what the scores look like, or how/when they were produced? The Thumbscrew album (and I may have had a teeny whinge about this already) contains no information whatsoever about how the scores were sourced or where from, even if it seems an obvious inference (from the thanks list) that they were sourced from an official TCF archive with the assistance of Carl Testa. To be honest, I am tempted to say in principle that the Thumbscrew attribution is more likely to have been correct, simply because they will almost certainly have been working from a written score, whereas B. - in leading his own session with a close musical cohort  - might not necessarily have felt the need to do so; it's a simple enough theme, which he could easily have taught Pavone by ear (and then titled from memory after the fact). Unfortunately, it's not that straightforward. (I mean, why would it be?!)

One thing we can say for sure is that Thumbscrew tried to match the music to the written notes, if that is what they were doing: their version of the piece is clearly presented as a march, with Fujiwara rattling out a smart 2/4 line on the snare, and the notes for Comp. 61 do describe the piece precisely as a "march structure". Then again, the notes go on to say "... for extended improvisation", and Thumbscrew's three-minute sprint dispenses with that idea, at least. The rest of the notes are typically opaque, or rather typically Braxtonesque: that is, I'm quite sure they made perfect sense to him (and they probably do to students if he is explaining it all to them, or if they are already thoroughly immersed in B's system of thought), but for the rest of us, with the best will in the world, what are we to make of glosses such as this: "Composition No. 61 is a solidified structural moment that can be utilized as a germ factor for creative interpretation..."? Well, OK, with a bit of squinting we can actually glimpse the idea of what might be meant by that - but the crucial point is that such descriptions tell us only about what the piece might be or could be in the performance, rather than anything concrete about what it is. Still, we are told that it "was probably written in ten seconds (or something)"... so we can't perhaps expect too much in the way of hard detail.

Where the idea of Thumbscrew's track 7 being Comp. 61 starts to break down, though, is in the second paragraph of the written notes. Here we actually do get some specific detail, just no actual musical notation; the piece is declared* to be "in its most basic sense... a two-part phrase statement", which description does actually fit the tune well enough; but "the first part... is a fifteen-beat phrase grouping construction (actually thirteen and a half beats with one and a half beats rest)", a piece of rubric which really doesn't match the recorded music at all well. You can sort of jam it in sideways, and say that it fits: in march time, the first phrase of the recorded piece does indeed last fifteen beats; only no, it doesn't, because the written phrase includes a rest - which quite clearly occupies a sixteenth beat. In any case, the first written phrase occupies no fewer than fifteen beats, whichever way you look at it - not thirteen and a half. This section repeats, and the second written phrase which follows (played once in Thumbscrew's version, more than once in the original) really does not match the description in the notes at all. This "consists of two sections of pulse (notated) phrase groupings..." and that is where the written rubric definitively deviates from the audio recording. (At least I think it does... sigh...) 

Comp. 29a is another short piece, "written to meet the dictates of whatever project was happening at the time"; we are told it is "simply constructed and easily executed - so as not to be the focus of too much talking or rehearsing", although it, too, is a "material platform for extended improvisation" (...**). Again, we have brief notes which tend to focus on what the piece might be used for in performance - indeed, this piece "was written to express its own form": "the concept form has been superimposed... only as a means to have a criterion to comment on the work... the music came first, then the form".  However, once we get down to the technicalities, these seem a far closer match for the recorded music than do the specifics of Comp. 61. 

Composition No. 29a is a monophonic line* whose form is divided into four basic parts...

*There is one harmonization in the work (on one pitch)

- This neatly matches the music that we hear on the Pavone duo album, at least, down to the single harmonisation in what is otherwise a monophonic line.

Form in this context constitutes phrases, rather than time parameters. This is so because (it) is a short work only consisting of 56 notes in two phrases.

- Again, if I am counting correctly, this a dead match for what we hear in the Pavone duet, at least. Given that there isn't much to go on - and notwithstanding the temptation to suppose, as I did above, that B's acolytes might have taken more trouble to get their primary materials straight than the maestro himself would have done - it's beginning to look as if somehow, whatever their copy of the score might say, Thumbscrew were not playing the piece they thought they were playing. The final nail in that coffin would appear to come in the last paragraph of the notes: 

The work also contains several different levels of operating materials (i.e. short phrases, or fixed long sound beams)...

- In both recordings, the second phrase begins with a long, held note. OK, so that doesn't add up to any conclusive proof, but cumulatively, on balance, I would say that Thumbscrew just got this one wrong. Absent-minded he may occasionally be, but the (future) professor knew what he was taking into the studio. Track 2 on the Pavone duo album and track 7 on the Thumbscrew album are, 100% definitely, the same composition; and that composition is (not 100% definitely) Comp. 29a. There, I'm calling it.

Of course, as I already complained last time out, this means that we can't be overly confident about the attributions of any of the hitherto unrecorded pieces with which Thumbscrew have blessed us, but that's just an annoyance I'm going to have to live with. (Spoiler alert: taken purely as a musical recording, the Thumbscrew album really is a blessing.) - I will, at some point, have a good look at the notes for Comp. 14 as well... but that ain't happening tonight.

It's worth adding one delightful little detail here: the notes for Comp. 29a conclude "(it) is a short delicacy to be served quickly and consumed to whatever depth is possible". (**)

Next time I post about this album, I promise I'll be writing about the actual recorded music...

* I say "declared" advisedly: these parts of the text are presented with every individual word underlined.

** This seems to imply a contradiction, in that the piece is both "short... to be served quickly" and a "platform for extended improvisation". It's not necessarily a contradiction, though: I think B. means that the written, crystallised form of the piece is short - but that it may easily prolong itself in the performance. Whatever we are dealing with here, assuming the recordings represent either Comp. 29a or Comp. 61 and not some other piece entirely (...), they are intended to support extended improvisation. Thumbscrew apparently just didn't have enough time to develop the music as fully as one supposes they must have wished; that observation is certainly not limited to track 7, either.