pisa trio 1980

this very interesting recording was brought to my attention the other day, and just in case anyone has any thoughts about it (or knows any more info), i thought it worth a post all of its own... (i did actually try and leave a comment on ubu-roi's blog, but apparently it didn't accept it..?)

crediting this to the "anthony braxton trio" is, i presume, a gloss added later. to an extent braxton does indeed take the lead, but these are surely not his pieces being played - the music has the feel of three-way group improv throughout, at least once the full trio is in action; the first short piece, on which rzewski isn't heard until near the end, seems to have been a simple idea worked out by b. and lewis beforehand, a drone-with-depth effect on which lewis' multiphonics summon the dead across vast freezing marshes, even as he continues playing the drone. as the second file begins it appears that all plans and blueprints have been scrapped, and the three-way construction which follows sounds at times a little hesitant. (piano is maybe not the most obvious voice for this sort of music..?) the audience, too, are maddeningly distracted as is obvious during the quieter passages. this, in turn, can only be somewhat off-putting for the performers, though they are all seasoned players and must be used to it. still, one does wonder what this audience was expecting, exactly. when the longest piece finishes, the eventual applause sounds rather perfunctory as if the crowd don't really know what they're applauding.

braxton seizes control with the next piece, opening with a prolonged squeal (a device which john zorn particularly likes also) and setting in the process a furious "pace" for the group territory which is very much taken up by the other two. effectively the piece becomes a triple solo statement, the three players snaking around and under each other at high speed until the burning intensity is spent and the music gently winds down. again, rather confused applause precedes the last piece here, what sounds like an improvised ballad structure. i wasn't totally convinced by this one, and again, the audience seems to be elsewhere entirely for much of it. typically enough, only when the performers take their bows do the penguins suddenly remember what their role is supposed to be. a few even cry for more, though there is not much suggestion that many were really troubling to listen the first time round.

pisa was the venue for another improv trio two years later, of course: i dealt with that one here (my upload, alas, is no longer live). bailey is a more natural partner for this sort of stuff, having been in on the ground floor so to speak. still, this earlier trio is fascinating for all braxton (and lewis) fans and well worth hearing... check it out and let us know what you think!

* * *

that last reference to "us" was not delusional, by the way... the post dated the 9th feb really was by mcclintic sphere, as some readers may perhaps not have realised. after a long absence, the founder of this blog has returned to it, a cause for (dignified!) celebration i would think. some of you reading will probably not even remember who he is, others will suspect that i made him up - but older hands will recall him from the comments pages in c#9 and may well have downloaded some of his rips. i hope regular readers will join me in welcoming him back. the blog still has it in itself to evolve :)

critical massage 3: student studies

AT LAST at fucking last and only after much hesitation/procrastination, and with easy justification for same deriving from the radical change(s) in my immediate environment during the last year; hold page 13, i have started to read the tri-axium writings. this is really the first time i've tried in depth to follow a really detailed system of philosophy since i read ouspensky in my late twenties... and even that was essentially quite different, since much of the core text is not written by him as such but transcribed from q&a sessions (ideal stress- and ego-free way of doing it, in principle). braxton's writing takes me right back to my last year of uni, heidegger's being and time as my english edition is called; in order to crack that (very difficult) linguistic code i had to get all the forensic tools out and really dismantle the stuff sentence by dragging sentence, constantly annotating with abbreviations to ensure that every fragment was grasped before inching onto the next... four or five hours of this, during which time i covered a surprisingly large chunk of the first half of the book, all that i really needed to know once the massive implications had had time to settle, following the series of earth-splitting reverberations detonated inside my head, on the occasion of that one late-night total immersion...

... this time is somewhat similar in that the beginning is very, very dense and requires painstaking and meticulous reading, the writer going to great lengths to present the eye (and impatient questing mind) with structures both seen and unseen, entirely personal and therefore new and fresh models for arranging communicative or discourse-related information for purposes of dissemination. or something like that (ahem). actually, once the main body text is underway, the ideas and words flow very smoothly and efficiently with no wastage, only such repetition as is necessary (and already stated at the outset as a core principle) in order to keep presenting and re-presenting the new ideas and models from as many different angles as practicable within a written text. (heidegger never reached that stage for me; maybe one individual sentence might be brief and/or simple, but never an entire block of text actually "readable"...)

already, after just a few pages there are so many details i could go into that i have to rein myself in almost completely, not allow any digression into details of the text (yet) but simply point out the most poignant aspect of the work at this time, when so few of the writer's hopeful hopes have been realised on any significant scale; yet; but a new phase is, indeed underway - and although there are never any guarantees (except the obvious one or two) and it's best not to get too carried away with ones hopes for the human race, there is still time for major and radical change to occur, with the sort of shake-up which could (indeed) destroy empires, but would by no means extinguish human life in so doing, merely perhaps draw the line under an obsessive, unhealthy and ultimately futile and self-defeating (ask alexander the great) target-driven approach to life. that is what it might take, at this point... the potential to end up as another failed experiment (this particular life form called the human race at this time) is still not only there and considerable but in terms of betting, it's where the money was... till very recently, since of course now "they" aren't sure whether any of them are gonna be left with any money once the buildings have stopped shaking...

i never did read radano last year beyond the first couple of pages, can't remember why really, never even read more than a chapter or two of george e. lewis (yet - neither of these books is going anywhere) - and had enough reasons for that anyway, as i did for leaving the braxton books in their box for a while, daunted by vast mountain-ranges of detail - at a time when i couldn't even keep the braxtothon going, and pre-parenthood time was ticking away week by week - but now that i have made the effort to engage with this major work of profound social value (as it seems to me - feeling always confident that i know the ring of truth when i hear it being spoken or channelled) i shall keep up with it, for sure, as time and circ's permit. as the warmer weather approaches, light advances / dark recedes, new undertakings are timely and apposite... as usual, watch this space... long, slow, deep breaths ;-)

* * *

ask me some other time to tell you about the music i've been listening to during the last 72 fairly hectic hours... and maybe just maybe i'll have time to tell you about it :)

cent x

Last night a DJ saved my life

A review of the Complete Arista Recordings, broadcast in the US last week on NPR.

I actually like the review pretty well, except for the bit about Sousa's band marching into a wall.  To me, the creative orchestra track in question is the sound of a joyful march into freedom... not at all a destructive image.

But overall, pretty solid.  And great publicity for our man.

These records were my first introduction to Braxton, about 15 years ago.  I have a lot of them on vinyl already, and they're some of my favorite recordings.  It's great to have them in print... I would say "again," but have they ever all been in print at the same time?  And wasn't "For Four Orchestras" in print for about a week?

McC. S.

300 duets

as we know, the years after the breakup of the "great quartet" (1993) were largely dominated by the massive meta-project known as ghost trance music (routinely rendered on this blog, and indeed elsewhere, as gtm). it's easy at times to assume that any opus number upwards of about 180 will refer to a gtm map/layout - but this is by no means always the case. the 323 series, for example, is a short book of diamond curtain wall blueprints for trios or quartets to use with the supercollider software.

- and another tradition continued in this era, that of b's writing pieces specifically to fuel his never-ending fascination with playing duets (which itself runs parallel to his core discipline of playing solo, a one-off requirement for aacm acolytes which became a lifelong gong fu practice for our man). as the opus numbers ticked into their fourth century, another clutch of duo territories sprang forth to provide fodder for another series of duets. frequently these pieces feature those half-mocking, interval-spanning birdcalls - messages fed to your ears by intelligent birds, seemingly offering the secret passwords to your dreams. (this hallmark, in turn, can be traced back into the early seventies and probably beyond... by 1976 the duo pieces b. was examining with george lewis seem to throw up eerily-familiar melodic fragments.) an example is comp. 304, evidently written with thb in mind, for the master's full album of duets with his new "disciple"...

... and two more are comps. 310 and 311, which if conceived in a different mood or another day might perhaps have begun life as 310 a&b... this time the duet date was with master percussionist andrew cyrille, the resulting material spread over two paired releases. far from being the full-on free jazz blowout some might have expected (?*), this meeting saw information shared and exchanged at a very subtle level, forceful dynamics rarely the chief concern. as well as the birdcall motifs which link these two braxton originals with comp. 304 (and with their common ancestors), all three recent pieces seem to include a basic stipulation that very precise modulations and inflections of tone and timbre will be employed at times. this is certainly the case for the leader, but to an extent it is mirrored in what bynum and cyrille bring forth in return. bynum is a very expressive player anyway, who prefers cornet to trumpet for that reason (expressiveness/tonal versatility) and who still probably has a special place in his heart for arch-trickster lester bowie; cyrille, all drummers to all people, becomes here a micro-explorer of the oceans of sound which lie scattered around his drum set. i'm guessing that those colourful signs and symbols we glimpse tantalisingly in partial reproductions of recent braxton charts were used quite liberally on these scores; that is, liberally but precisely, that word once more.

all three pieces have helped me enjoy the day, now it's evening and in writing just the vaguest outline about them i'm resisting the temptation to listen again with full focus to any of 'em, never mind all of 'em... we could be here for a long time if i did! the well never runs dry... i know from the half-listening which took place earlier that full concentration would see me engulfed, swallowed whole as if by a huge, friendly but hungry monster. one thing i can tell you for sure is that the fineness of those reed calibrations is getting ridiculous... by the time the millennium came and went, countless hours of informed practice were reflected by a supernatural degree of control over all the potential variables governing b's next individual utterance. for a duet partner this must be thrilling, intimidating and inspiring all at once... or so i like to imagine :)

* * *

just to get really nerdy for a minute, a quick word regarding a list... my list-making/fetishising proclivity has been reasonably well reined in for some time now, i try not to make them at all unless they are actually gonna be functional... and as regards my number one obsession, i can honestly say that i don't know how many braxton albums i have (in whatever form), because i don't need to know but i *do* maintain a master-list of all his recordings i have, arranged chronologically for obvious reasons. that list, at the time of the original braxtothon week, numbered exactly 100 entries; at present time of writing it runs to a manageable 183. (an entry might be a full-length album or live show, a box set, or a live fragment; news from the 70s comprises five different entries, the iridium box just one, as befits a monolith.) just to get really nerdy for a sec... right now all the post-millennium entries occupy one full page on my screen, something which has the added pleaser that there are no entries for 1999 anyway, this being one very few "dry" years i have left... may even be the only one. see, i'm not going to check -

- and in any case, what i actually wanted to pass on was the more relevant synchronicity which came as the answer to one of my own queries. 1985 or 1993, my finish-line for the braxtothon? well, again at time of writing the last entry for 1985 (coventry) occurs at line 113, which of course has a special significance in braxtonian numerology... so that's that, 1985 it is - whenever the damn behemoth rolls back over and onto its wheelbase, and however long it takes to get there it will terminate at the end of the 1985 u.k. tour. who knows, if i live long enough to see it, i may even embark on a separate series of voyages to the later realms explored by that same "quartet's quartet"...

* see comments

muddling through...

actual free time all to myself is a pretty rare commodity these days, and i have to fill it accordingly... when i last did get the chance to play some music in a suitably receptive state, i had other things to do as well, so that only so much of my attention was available for listening. yes, it's a shame, but... well, look, i can at least admit it. (there are some out there who insist that just being present within half a mile of a recording being played means that they took in every last grace note and rimshot, with full comprehension, regardless of whatever else they were doing at the time... but this is just not possible.)

anyway... as the picture suggests, my listening on this last occasion was the leo double two compositions (trio) 1998. that is, two consecutive first species gtm works, explored by two different all-reed trios (braxton himself being the only one who played in both groupings) for the enjoyment and edification of a lucky audience at wesleyan u...

... and during the first piece (featuring chris jonas and david novak, neither of them a familiar name to me) i had also to write a long-overdue email, so that although i stopped several times just to listen, i found later on that my memory of the piece had been wiped pretty much clean. all i remember clearly is how it ends abruptly in mid-stream, as though the piece itself were an endless loop... well, i did enjoy it at the time! but part of the reason for this amnesia (aside from my not making any notes) was the more vivid impression left by the second piece.

comp. 228 features a lot of low-end. the master is credited here with just bass and contrabass sax, and contrabass clarinet; seth misterka and jackson moore (the latter a section-leader in b's larger groups by this time) both play baritone sax as well as higher-pitched reeds. the written theme sticks to the low stuff, and irresistibly recalls for me comp. 40p (which got me quite excited a few months ago) with its rumbustious, down-and-dirty flavour. during the "breakout" sections of this piece, all sorts of remarkable things happen - the leader (just for a change) has me gasping at some of his more exotic expostulations, and of course with the low horns in play, there is ample potential for drones too, an effect which is very well deployed at times. however, the real moments of beauty for me came from outside the recording itself.

see, what i like about doing two or more things at once, where listening to music is one of those things - it doesn't always happen, but i have noticed it on many occasions - is that coincidence so often intervenes. what's happening in the music reflects what is going on elsewhere, and vice versa, creating a multimedia effect which adds something to both parts of the experience, a gestalt effect in which the whole really is more than just the sum of its parts. on this occasion i had downloaded a few old recordings by wolf eyes (see comments), and was preparing the files to burn to cd; with the volume low so as not to spoil the reed trio, i kicked off the first track on dead hills on the computer, and then temporarily forgot about it, back with the low reeds; and then the two sound sources just sort of conjoined. right at the time that the wolf eyes track stopped being a menacing throb and broke out into something more active, the three reedmen on the stereo began doing something truly spellbinding, and the overall effect made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

with this synchronicity established, it didn't surprise me at all that my next task (both more mundane and more private, so i shan't go into any detail for a change) was similarly "commentated" by the music - and that effect seemed to last right up to the end of the cd. well, it works for me... anyone else ever noticed this? (i think of it as being similar to some of the better work in comics, those by alan moore for example - text which comments on image, to build up a layered effect. and yes, of course it's the case that the more one looks for these coincidences, the more frequently they seem to turn up - but that doesn't mean the patterns are not really there, does it?)

* * *

no, there's not as much detail as i like to provide here, but until such time as i can get back to "real" work, this sort of half-arsed post is probably the best i can do... hopefully it isn't a complete waste of space. something's better than nothing, right..?

cent's 2009 manifesto

right then. here i still am, but where is here, exactly?

one of my main intentions when i first got involved in all this was to try and create a meeting-place for anyone interested in anthony braxton's work. ok, a blog probably wasn't the ideal format but still, pretty clearly, i've failed in this! any number of people over the months have told me, publicly or privately, that they felt too intimidated to contribute (which most certainly was not the desired effect); i lost my "partner" early on, and never got him back - even though the site was actually his idea to begin with; i lost the energy needed to continue my own work, during the last summer (or what passed for a summer over here); and of course, over the last few months i have also fallen out with several sections of the online musical community in which i had formerly been involved. whatever else i have done here, i haven't really "made friends and influenced people". quite the reverse, apparently.

then again... as a few recent comments have confirmed, and despite the blog's almost total lack of activity lately, people with an interest in braxton's music do still check in here. this is of course reassuring, and it reminds me about something else i've been trying to do with this: contribute towards a greater understanding of the man's music. others are engaged in the same work, but probably not that many; certainly i've long since come to the conclusion that most of the critics (and many others) who claim to be fans of braxton's music don't actually listen to it very closely at all, and rarely have anything much to say about it - beyond paraphrasing someone else's liner notes or repeating discographical details. one thing i can guarantee is that i've put some serious thought into any analytical writing you read here. if you are really interested in braxton and his music, i hope that you will find this site to be worth a visit.

- and besides: as one reader pointed out a while ago, one on level what i do here is entirely for me. that's reason enough to keep going, and that's what i plan to do; how often i am able to post, and how much actual braxtothon work i can produce as a new parent, remains to be seen! the braxtothon is not the blog... the braxtothon was a specific project and by no means all of the articles on here are a part of it. at the outset, really what i had in mind was to try and continue that project as far as 1985, perhaps even 1993: one of my (undeclared) aims was to gain a better personal understanding of the "forces in motion" quartet and its formidably complex music. of course, back then i had no idea how slow my own progress would turn out to be, but still... i'm planning on going at least as far as 1985, if i can. what form the braxtothon will take by then, i'm not even going to guess at; right now, i still have to finish up with the last few entries from 2008, which is to say dortmund, montreux/berlin, and some general conclusions about the two versions of the quartet showcased on the latter double album. fingers crossed that i can get all that done within the next few months... check in from time to time and see how i'm doing ;-)

finally, to all those who are still reading and providing encouragement: thank you.

cent x

looking back and beyond

annus mirabilis, annus horribilis - this has been both and will always be remembered with (very) mixed emotions: a year which saw my work here recognised and respected by the subject who inspired it, yet which also saw me increasingly alienated from sections of the online musical community/-ies... which saw me evolve my work and then fail to carry on with it, beyond a certain point (for the time being) - a year, above all, which began with unexpected news and in many ways culminated with the birth of our daughter, yet which right at the end saw us put to sleep our beloved first dog. there has been more (di)stress crammed into this one year than i thought possible and i'm very glad to see the back of it.

so i want to look forward and beyond really, rather than back (though there has been plenty of that over the last 24 traumatic hours, and i'm sure there's more soul-searching in the post... as if there is anything else, with me around)... the blog will continue, albeit it might well take a while to get going again in the new year - next post will be my continued statement of intent explaining a bit more about what form i expect the blog to take, and where i am still going with the braxtothon, such as it is(n't). meanwhile i have had precious little time to listen to anything meaningful lately, but did fill my ears with the 1978 solo köln concert within the last few days - or the first part of it; the first four pieces contain so much music in themselves that it felt like an entire concert's worth of material just there. once again, i know there is work for me to do concerning this man's music and i'll be heeding the call in the year(s) to come.