embarrassment of riches

right after posting about the "boot box" - and you have not heard the last of that (or rather its contents) - i was on restructures, noticing suddenly all these extra recordings, some of which are appearing back in the mid-seventies. more boots!! well, of course last year had seen me have one of my "moments", flooded with optimism for a while after the relaunch of the TCF site... this spring's bootiful bounty actually arrived around the same time as last year's, but it's been a while (few months i guess - after the october events anyway) - and when i tried to log in, i was booted out. wrong sort of boot, that... and a manual reboot was ineffective, my username and email being dead money around the new-look place apparently :(

- now, there was a happy ending to this: 'cos the guys were very helpful, and explained very promptly indeed what had happened to allow me and others to slip through the net; i rebuilt my account and away we go... now, inspection of the new-and-easier-to-navigate site quickly revealed/confirmed that i really have missed a lot, purely in terms of new releases. the sheer number of variety of braxton house releases now is bewildering, hugely encouraging and (frankly) rather overwhelming. i mean, and here's the crux of it, they all cost money too and even though the foundation has priced things very sensibly on the whole, the unfortunate truth is that most of us cannot simply spend hundreds of pounds/dollars etc on music all the time (well... growing up and into my thirties this was exactly what i did, but i have had to slow down a lot since then... ok, so i found other resources at the same time - !). anyway, for the time being i grabbed one thing which actually leapt out at me as "free", volume one of the sax quintet from 1998, a remarkable affair which i've ben enjoying this very evening. (as for vol two... well yes of course i'm tempted, but we gotta keep a level head here. i still never did become a member, but that's another story... one which is not likely to get aired here any time soon.)

so yeah, i stuck to the free stuff for the time being until i have made up my mind what's what (*). (don't get me wrong, i fully support in principle what the foundation is doing with all this. i also appreciate they can't just give it all away and still survive; i think possibly they have flooded the market a bit, but we will see.) now, as regards this year's "march harvest". there's another fabulous crop of boots, indeed on balance it probably outweighs last year's. ok, there is no '93 supermega-quartet, but then just look at what we have got this time around:

  1.  quintet (new york) 1975. no sooner do i mention this in my previous post (section 4.), than it turns up here, to save me the hassle of playing the tape ;-) fascinating chance to hear the core quartet plus teitelbaum.

  2. quartet (wilhelmshaven) 1979 pts 1 and 2. this one actually turned up on inconstant sol several years ago, passed on by tantris presumably from dime, but in any case both sets were already available to me. (i downloaded it anyway of course... always worth it, just to compare...)

  3. quartet (karlsruhe) 1983. tantalising late version of comp. 98 with crispell and anderson from the original tour, paul smoker in for hugh ragin.

  4. duo (zurich) 1984. one in a very long line of duets for the maestro, this time with gunter "baby" sommer alongside...

  5. trio (pisa) 1982. man, i am so glad this one is back in circulation. i blogged about it myself a few years back but those files are dead of course, and besides, now i find out that i never had the entire thing in the first place. unbelievably high-end free improv from three absolute fucking masters.

  6. solo (kent) 1979. one in an even longer line of discipline-enforcing solo alto recitals. what's not to like, etc

  7. duo (belfort) 1985. and speaking of series and continuations, these two maestros have wandered in and out of each other's frequencies pretty regularly over the years and decades...

  8. trio (wuppertal) 1989 pts 1 and 2.  incredible band this, which left behind an amazing album of course, but which also toured europe somewhat during that year. i was recently delighted to discover at least four full concerts from this tour, all waiting for me in the box. and here is yet another! both sets! my cup runneth over.

  9. creative orchestra (portland) 1989 pts 1 and 2. same line-up as eugene. same set-list too. just under a week later, in the big city. what did they all learn from the first time?

 10. quartet (mulhouse) 1983. one full set from everyone's favourite not-quite-the-finished-article line-up.

- like i say, that's plenty to be getting on with, right there.

now the way it turned out, it was pretty late in the end before i even got started. so i prioritised a bit, grabbed what i could with both hands and immediately started to organise a super-playlist to get me on the go. that turned to be just over five hours long, but hey... in this mood, i've learned to go with it and just absorb as much as i can. (these intensive, music-packed phases don't tend to last all that long historically; they are also counterbalanced by periods of drought.) in the event, though, i was thoroughly exhausted on sunday night (after the traumatic saturday i'd had... never mind that now) and managed only to hear the first two parts of this monster playlist, to wit:

list one

a) as 1. above, the "loft quintet" with teitelbaum sitting in. this is not as mad as you might think, at least not at first. the synth does not really nose its way in until the first piece is pretty well explored, this being the tension-inducing, usually non-cathartic comp. 23g. where i found this date particularly satisfying and interesting was the second piece, comp. 40n (which is far less common in live performances of the time than its schizoid twin, comp. 23e). holland defies belief in this one with his iron self-control when wielding that bow - the actual production of the attack becomes completely transparent, leaving just this endless sound which dominates the space with only minimal (need for) variation; and the synths end up working the most wonderful magic/k - towards the end of the piece i had long since given up doing anything other than standing very still, giving all my attention to the music in my ears. no more detail, that's for another time ;-)

"four winds" is the last piece, just to prove [to me] that it was in the band's repertoire before 1976. i mean, it's only the brass player who would need to learn it and then probably only once or twice; for all its tricky pauses and shifts in time, this is not a difficult piece of music; i don't remember much about this rendition of it though. i was already flagging by this point (as see above). [i am no longer paranoid enough nor egotistical enough to conclude that someone deliberately put this out there to slap my wrist, or whatever, for any of the times i might have implied (or indeed stated) that this piece is too vanilla to belong in the book - and that it was just being played at graz as a nice favour. (don't forget one thing - i didn't start out thinking this way, it came upon me once i had embarked upon the work. my memory told me that the graz rendition of "winds" was, y'know, red-hot... until such time as braxtothon ears told me a little different.) even if there was nothing conscious about it - and of course it's far more likely that the concert was selected for the inclusion of teitelbaum, simple as that - indeed especially if no direct human agency was at work, then it is still what the universe is reminding me with this discovery. it's all part of the self-dissection, the public learning process i seem to be committed to continuing..!]

b) comp. 98 sounds great with smoker on board (no disrespect to hugh ragin; smoker is one trumpet player i liked more or less on first hearing - the small brass is not something i hear clearly in free music, or rather it wasn't until recently... over the last year or two that has actually changed a lot, mainly thanks to thb, peter evans et al). and i did manage to stay awake for almost all of it, but not quite the last few minutes, when i had one of those "suddenly roused by applause" moments. i was far too tired and distracted to draw any useful conclusions about the nature of the piece itself - which i have never studied, and which of course remains some way in the future as far as the core work is concerned - or indeed about this interpretation, but i do remember enjoying it, and particularly the pleasure of "channel-switching" in my head between the three horns at times, consciously trying to hear the whole at others. i will be coming back to all this stuff, anyway.

- and  meanwhile, the playlist (which as you can see includes the first revisit to bremen, just to mix things up a bit) continued on  the monday morning, just like in the old days :)

***

few more things while i remember... at some point i need to write a bit about the incredible comp. 173, an outrageous vocal/orchestral masterwork which defies description, as they say... oh does it, i reply... but anyway, i've been listening to that recently, three or four times spaced out over weeks or months, however long it's been (for a start, time-before-new-job seems to have moved at a totally different pace - and indeed it did in many ways)... it may have warped my fragile little mind as one might say ;-)   erm, and i have actually been repeat-playing a standard for a change (really does make a change in my case, as the reader may know), notably "little melonae" from the bergamo '03 jf date. ok, ok... it smokes... i have to admit. hey, i do listen to actual jazz from time to time i'll have you know, nor do i have anything (much) against it, it's just not where the meat is at, for me... but every so often like i say... now, it is true that of all the musics b.s plays, i tend to enjoy his standards dates the least but when the piece is really challenging - as in mr maclean's wicked, monkish, spiked sweetmeat - and the band is cooking (as if it would be likely to do anything else, with this guy in the room), i gotta admit the mood is pretty irresistible.

i still couldn't sit through a whole set of it without taking a break...

* see comments

the opinion upgrade from uranus

ok, so... the other night i was awoken by a strange greenish flash and a whirring noise, seemingly emanating from just outside the house yet apparently inaudible to the rest of the family. y'know, just ordinary stuff so i turned over and went right on back to sleep. imagine my surprise when the next morning i let the whippets out to relieve themselves and saw in the corner of the back garden a large, sturdy box... wisps of smoke still uncoiling therefrom into the chilly post-dawn air.

- and upon closer inspection, what should turn out to be in this box but a shitload of anthony braxton bootlegs. no, really (*1). a handful of cd-rs and a BUNCH of tapes. yeah, tapes. audio cassettes... obsolete format etc etc - the task will fall to me at some point to digitise some of this stuff, assuming there remains an internet onto which to upload it by the time i get round to it, because let's be clear, this is me we're talking about and i don't do anything today which i could do some other time, and so on and so forth... well, even allowing for forward motion (and since the new year/new job situation i can definitely affirm that i am in forward motion, ridiculously so compared to the last few years) i can but try to set realistic goals for deprocrastinating, but then i'm not kidding about one thing at least: there were a lot of tapes in that box and a frighteningly high percentage of it represents stuff that's totally new to me. (needless to say i have collected every single scrap (*2) i could find by this guy ever since late 2006... i have a lot of braxton boots already.) in other words there's no rush to get it all up since it will need to be assimilated a little at a time.

besides, the joke is that i don't have a damn cassette player in the house any more, or rather i do, but not a functional one. i have to make it a priority to sort that out - ! because there really really is some fucking primo shit in there. as i catalogued it - the mysterious "source" had kindly chronologised it already - i started to get very excited. i mean, for a start there is a great run of concerts from c.1982-5, documenting the working group's metamorphosis from manic hypercarnival vehicle to dimension-shifting superstragegic visionaries - around the pivot of john lindberg, the "fallen from grace", well documented in this remarkable collection up until literally the very moment of his eventual departure mid-tour in '85: that is to say, the amsterdam show from 16th june apparently saw a trio plus a bass onstage, while the bassist sat at the bar. (i say mid-tour; i don't have any idea yet of the actual itinerary: what i have so far is a june which kicks off with three solo gigs before that fateful "final concert", and prior to that the nearest quartet tape in the list is salzburg, 19th may.) the night of the 17th, in eindhoven, ernst reijseger sat in; when they reached east berlin, jens saleh was on duty; but of course the name on gerry hemingway's lips early on had been mark dresser (*3) - and by the 22nd, there he is, already in place for the legendary events of later-that-year - though from this one, in ljubljana (yugoslavia, as it was then) i am promised as yet only 25 tantalising minutes. (*4)

***

now, barely having started on the music (see final para below) yet, just listing this little lot gave me many pauses for thought. i have been trying to lead by example in drawing open and close attention to my mistakes, especially when this involves various parts of the hypothetical braxto-continuum i have been fabricating ever since the inception of the 'thon. i mean, y'know, piecing it all together from a fragmentary series of recordings in chronological order - that does not and cannot give the full picture; i wasn't there, so it can't be complete or completely accurate. but, hahaha, it can be easy at times to run away with a clear idea and declare it probably so (or whatever i'm doing on such occasions). the eternal problem with such a "spontaneous hypothesis": it may explain everything neatly, take into account all available evidence and answer many possible questions but it can also be wrong. like i say, i am committed to bringing this to my own attention when i catch myself out, and then to sharing it with whoever actually reads this stuff ;-)

(... *5)

sometimes it's not even a question of correcting myself or setting the record straight, simply new information which helps build a fuller picture. anyway, with all that in mind... some points of interest from the first part of the collection:

1. in may 1972 there was a performance at studio rivBea, effectively circle with sam rivers himself in for corea. or rather (since circle was already brown bread by this point) the earliest actual anthony braxton quartet with rivers in for wheeler. i don't know yet what music they played but i'm guessing it wasn't the same set list as was rolled out on the first of december that year, at the same venue, the day after conference was recorded. the may date is news to me. (and exhilarating news too, since i otherwise only knew of the famous '78 san francisco gig with b. guesting in rivers' band.)

2. from the "empty years", 1972-3, there is still half-of-fuck-all unfortunately, but there is one snippet of interest, a twenty-minute extract from a film soundtrack recorded in paris for la coupe a dix francs. (hmm, just looked that up on imdb and you can forget any notions of chic parisian crime movies or whatever...). probably recorded 1972 but there's not much info on it.

3. right, so here's a mistake of sorts for starters and guess what, it concerns my old mate dave holland. i finally had to 'fess up last year to feeling a bit guilty about mr holland, or rather what i've said about him at times on this blog. (but then again... etc.) more to the point, though, i have (still) thus far allowed myself to get away with drawing a very firm line under berlin 1976, marking the end of the holland years, regardless of what friendship may have persisted between the two men thereafter; and prior to that even, my journey through (bits of) 1975-6 has been characterised by an increasing and ineluctable feeling that holland was fundamentally unsuited to music on b's scale. which may or may not have some validity (*6), but there was not so much of a firm line anyway as it turns out: duo concerts with holland continue through 1975 (april, philadelphia) and 1976 (well... no date or venue on that one but still) and crucially, this is the deal breaker, into early '77 if 19th feb, buffalo is to be believed, a full 90 minutes' worth from that one. back in '76, 18th august sees an impromptu presentation of solos, duos and trios with steve potts and kent carter, holland having been taken ill at the last minute; the point here is that according to braxtothon lore, once duets had been undertaken with lewis in particular, there was no way holland could measure up (supposedly). so much for that idea. (yep, back to *6 again)

4. 12th june 1975, another rivBea appearance, this time the working group with wheeler. 28th june, back at the same loftspace again but this time with richard teitelbaum. (hmmm...!)

5. 26th july 1975, the day after the antibes quartet, our man is back onstage again but this time with evan parker and derek bailey. man..! (the 27th, b. is in viareggio, north of pisa, playing a solo show. that's a pretty gruelling journey, chances are. this man spent far too many hours and days travelling steerage or the equivalent - true of him and of anyone else on the creative music circuit, but b. played a lot of solo concerts. again, i was basically wrong(ish) in my core assumption about that but this is not the place to detail it.)

6. 14th sept '75, somewhere or other in NYC - details on tape but not on my master list (yet!) - the art ensemble of chicago played with b. and frank lowe both sitting in. omfg, etc :))   (*7)

7. jan '76, a detroit show with phillip wilson in for altschul. yet more evidence (as frequently-ish discussed on these pages) that there was never anything set-in-stone about any version of the early quartet - regardless of how fondly some may look back upon it.

8. march '76, one from san francisco with wilson again (the latter a dab hand of course, having played with b way back when, captured on a recording with him as early as 1972), but this time in an intriguing double-brass group comprising leo smith, baikida carroll and a guitarist called - j. leary? maybe, maybe not... and i'm really not sure whether b. appears as leader or sideman. anyway, there's at least one other (small-group) appearance by carroll in that box but i'm struggling to find it in the list. it'll turn up :)

9. 25th july 1976, washington d.c. - a quintet featuring lewis, muhal, holland and steve mccall...

10. ... and in september of that year, the same line-up with altschul in minneapolis. you see, i didn't know that lewis-abrams line-up from before 1977 really but the r-section dates it pretty firmly i think. even in the case of the gig with mccall, holland's presence makes it that much more likely that it really is 1976... and yes, i am mindful of what i wrote in point 3 above... courting the possibility therefore of falling on my arse again :)

11. october 1976, and i was very pleased about this, the one-off quartet of b. and teitelbaum, roscoe mitchell - and allan strange, whoever he is or was, but he played a synthesiser too. double duo, then... a fragment of this was posted by "the rare music curator" (as mentioned here - though as you can see the original link is long since deceased) who never answered my emails. well, hey... it was a good idea he had anyway, but it's reassuring to know that several of the treasures he excerpted for that podcast are now available to me in full. (just, i can't actually hear them yet... ) there's another, even better example of the same thing in the next batch of observations... coming up (some time)

12. i wondered a few times here whether or not lewis plus mark helias and charles "bobo" shaw was the line-up of the working group during 1977. it never seemed consistent that muhal would have agreed to join someone else's band as a regular member. but we know he played plenty of gigs with b. around this time, however that worked out; and these always featured b's music (afaik) - of course, b. appeared as a sideman with abrams also... anyway, one more to add to the list (of mra's braxton quintet gigs) in june of that year and then a quartet the following week in hamburg, no piano. this quartet always seemed plausible as a working concern but i read elsewhere a while ago (*8) that the line-up for that year was supposed to be something totally different..?

that's about it for now... being human i am never totally satisfied with anything (much... it's no longer quite true of me actually, but not far off) and there was one thing i sort of expected to see, namely a (near-)complete set of the '85 uk tour tapes which didn't materialise at all - and one thing i really hoped to see, a long duo with buell neidlinger recorded (iirc) in a guitar shop in santa monica, which slipped through my fingers once, before i could grasp it and was gone: that wasn't in the box either. but man, what there IS in there, it's truly extraordinary. now, what am i gonna do about that damn k7 player...


* see comments

ps  i did listen to two of the cd-rs already, both very good, one in distinctly lo-fi sound (even for me - though as always i found it perfectly listenable once it was underway, especially solos), one rather butchered in terms of actual content, but "that's boots for you" - i am considering uploading part of the butchered one, watch this space#

i forgot my point(s)

(- title of my damn autobiography, that could be...)

it's true, in the end it took so long to write that last post out that i forgot one of the basic points i wanted to make in the first place. what i meant to say was... - and once again i'm repeating myself here! - that b's music is all about possibility, not necessarily actuality and certainly (*1) not about finality. rather than bring to us a new set of (ego-based) statements, he comes to the meeting-table with new sets of questions, or rather the latest exotic variations on the same basic (that word again) sets if questions which he has been asking over and over, all this long (short) time. he is far less concerned with control than many other composers have been (*2), much motivated by the perpetually-curious mindset which wonders, each time, "what will happen when we ask these questions in a live environment?"

- hence the endless joy of collaging one's own compositions, and also of composing in such a way as to leave vast areas of personal and interpersonal freedom, guaranteeing that no two "results" (crystallised-realised time-limited potentialities... oh boy *3) are even remotely close, never mind the same. terms like "mileage" (which apply usefully to high-end free jazz, for example) become pathetically small-minded in this context. parsecs perhaps, rather than miles.

or perhaps such distances of musical-conceptual space could be termed braxtons ;-)

anyway, that's about it - except no it's not, i need to add a second, very important, point which i omitted from the previous post (!): i have mentioned zappa on so many prior occasions that i'm not even going to bother linking to any of them, they are all over the place whenever b's orchestral music is under discussion; but one crucial difference between the two men (n.b. not just "two composers") is precisely the willing lack of control in braxton's philosophy. fz was famously an exacting taskmaster who demanded almost slavish obedience from his players (and is roundly disliked by many as a result). b. is pretty much known to be the opposite, yet his music requires an even higher degree of virtuosity in order to engage with it fully (it's possible to engage with it less than fully at considerably lower levels of musicanship - arguably another difference, although... etc *4). it is no coincidence that fz famously had terrible experiences* getting orchestras to play his stuff properly... whereas those who work with our man have driven themselves to exceed his and their expectations, time and time again, and have done so (i believe and understand) freely and joyfully. there's a message there for all of us, right?


* see comments (inevitably)
* see second comment!

(- three textual emendations, last para, 19/4/12)

back to "basics"

... and here i am again, drawing the same conclusion i've reached before: at times when it seems too daunting to engage with b's music - if, for example, my head is generally filled with other things, such as it has been recently - all i actually have to do is put some on and open up to it, and the music takes care of the rest.

i've been hanging out at the 2005 ulrichsberg festival over the last couple of days: that's plenty of music... a fortnight after his sixtieth birthday, the maestro celebrated with two days of powerful new public rituals, programmed carefully to open up new territories to the maximum extent; for myself, having acquired this box set just recently, i had hitherto not tackled the two tri-centric orchestra pieces, for several reasons - but mainly, i found myself putting these off for the lame reason outlined above, namely that i was probably a bit daunted by them. (why does this still happen, from time to time..?) - i had played the solo piano piece (comp. 301, then being premiered by genevieve foccroulle - who has since reprised*1 it, along with all the other piano works, for that other box set on leo), establishing in the process only what was already obvious, that it does not serve as background music at all; - and i'd spent a bit of quality time behind the diamond curtain wall, the performance here of comp. 323a being (i believe) another premiere, and compelling throughout. (this is the part where b. himself gets to play, of course, and inevitably it was the right-hand man who was in at the birth, thb on cornet; the third on this occasion was the young percussionist aaron siegel, already working with b. in the "small" (but incredibly versatile) groups which played most of the concerts during the mid-2000s *2). not until two days ago did i essay discs 2 & 4, which feature much of the more concentrated magic/k.

***

the large ensemble performance from the 18th, then, is a tri-centric reading of that braxton staple comp. 96. (never mind the wider/deeper significance of tri-centricity as it might pertain to b's system/s, in this precise context it refers to the fact that there are three conductors: the maestro plus bynum plus siegel... needless to say, the details of how this works are rather more complex and will not be entered into here..!) but, it is not just 96 either: this version is specified as 96+134. it just goes to show how hard it can be to attach opus numbers to musical strategies in the remembering mind - comp. 134 is one of the three (hugely memorable and energy-efficient) "tense rhythm" pieces featured on eugene, as raved over by me in the past; i hadn't recognised the number and thus was not expecting the music when it eventually showed up. it... really... works  :)

anyway - above all when i played this disc, i really did get back to basics 'cos this was the latest welcome return of my continually-reaffirmed discovery that life-feels-better-when-my-house-is-filled-with-anthony-braxton. treating this very much as background or ambient music (in the strict sense of the word ambient!), i nevertheless very quickly began to absorb its positive vibrations as i walked around through the spaces inhabited by the music. the spirit of the musicians was evident from the outset (i did start off, at least, by listening: i was seeking comparison/contrast with another reading of 96 i'd heard more than once recently), and any time i patched right in, i found myself seeing at once into the architecture of what was happening at the time. being around this music left me feeling cleaner, more refreshed, healthier. this is not the first time i've said it, again, but it's worth repeating that neither is it at all exaggerated.

i'm sure i'm not the only listener who's had the experience of not really paying attention to something, at least not on a second-by-second basis, then phasing back in and finding it still open and clear; on the contrary, i imagine this must happen regularly to experienced listeners - some of whom perhaps at times confuse the event with evidence of constant listening; the two things must not be conflated though, for the simple and excellently cogent reason that they are entirely different things, as i discovered when i came back to the memory of the music 60 hrs later: i have nothing of substance to say about it, except indirectly (as above). the strong sense of wellbeing was genuine and profound. i didn't actually follow most of the music, though.

- tell you what, though, it wasn't half a nice surprise when comp. 134 did kick in, cos like i say i wasn't looking out for it. another fantastic hit from the maestro, and a great number for the vibes player, here as in eugene.

***

the morning (late shifts at work this week) on which i hungrily consumed the above saw also the first of two airings for disc four, which is another tri-centric reading of a large ensemble work, in this case comp. 169 which also has a supplementary territory appended, in this case comp. 147. (this opus number meant nothing to me either, but a check on restructures reveals it to be a popular piece for small and large-ensemble collaging, and so forth.) i had to go back and give it a second go, because the first morning, after such a positive start, went suddenly and rapidly downhill just before i left for work, as i realised that i had miscalculated the start of my shift and was (about to be) late: that made for a pretty stressful experience, and the weird (yet obvious) thing was that for an hour or two previously, i'd been getting a nagging anxiety in my belly, which i had attended carefully but had been unable to quell. ok, so i now knew why, and why i couldn't, but i could also track the anxiety back to the start of disc four. that one didn't extend the golden vibe at all as it turned out.

so back i went, the next day. and once again, though for different reasons i was on edge and in need of solace. i went back to disc four because i needed to know, and to give it a fair chance, and it quickly emerged that with a little more attention paid, classifying the musical experience was possible at least in the basic degree, and although feelings of tension and anxiety can be understood in relation to comp. 169 this is only the case if it's just absorbed osmotically without any attention paid towards actually understanding it. the core strategy seems to be that players "hustle" each other's attacks, not elbowing each other out of the way (far from it, actually) but hurrying each other up, joining a queue and then immediately hastening the speed of it with pressure from the rear. as one would expect, the strategy is not just about straightforward repetition and the core idea is explored any number if different ways; but yes, the overwhelming impression is one of haste. there is obviously a good reason for this, most probably it would seem to be a statement about the western mentality as it drives/is driven by western society, but in any case: in terms of vibrational dynamics the piece is potentially a complicated influence, and it is therefore entirely proper that the maestro matches it up with the smooth, calming legato sounds of 147 so as not to send everyone away jittery and on edge. (*3)

so that was that. afterwards, without checking how much time i had left, i put disc one back on for the first time in a few weeks, the solo piano piece which had just been impenetrable to my lazy ears before. now, with a head lit up with greater understanding again, i heard the music very clearly indeed and with no apparent effort. the incredibly complex multiple strategies are so artfully deployed both by the composer and by the interpreter that they don't sound forced at all, but high-level pianists like ms foccroulle must flip when they given this stuff: one must work on three or four different horizontal strategies at once, each requiring a different variety of attack; and then there must be factored in the vertical, since although conventional harmony has no place here whasoever, the complex resonance of timbres is very much key to the music, which makes great use of the piano's ability to apply sustain to some tones while others can be layered in on top, as staccato as you please; again, different strategies here have different rates of decay so that the "cross-section" of the vertical stack at any given second really is a very complex beast indeed.

- i was able to keep that up for a few (enrapt) minutes. eventually i wandered off and lost the thread, but i was running out of time anyw


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mystical (ludic) syntax

one of my recent purchases (absolute bargain in leo's year end sale!) was the confusingly-mistitled gtm (syntax) 2003, which actually dates from 2007. if i'm going to be picky about this (and when am i not? let's face it), the vocalist's name is also repeatedly spelt wrongly (as well as correctly!) on the cd - ann rhodes for anne rhodes, director of the syntactical ghost trance choir, and also mrs carl testa apparently... i knew nothing about this, not being that far into the loop, but it seems that b's longtime bassist (taking over from chris dahlgren, pretty much) is also half of what-may-or-may-not-be the first proper braxtonian couple, as it were, which is in any case a tremendously welcome development, wedding as it does the love of music with that other kind of love; herein we begin to glimpse the possibilities of the virtuous circle or ascending spiral, seldom considered (its evil twin so much the more common in our imperfect lives).

- and it would have been silly to buy the one without the other: gtm (outpost) 2003, which actually does date from that year; though even here there remains some doubt about the actual date of the performance. (no, this one was not recorded at wesleyan for a change!) the first half of this one is actually a duet between b. and chris jonas, one of a distinguished line of dedicated reed scientists drawn to the maestro in his teaching capacity. (mr jonas has played a lot of gtm. he was gone by the time of the 12+1tet, but was the returning guest when that band was reconvened to mark the occasion of b's 65th birthday.) the second half features the adaptable vocals of molly sturges, in addition to the two reeds (and i would say that two reeds is the minimum it takes to give a proper gtm reading - solo recordings exist, but there has to be something missing, when one voice alone can enter the playing space...). and that, not in short at all, is why i am linking these two together. (they were non-identical twins anyway, released in the same week!)

ok, so... delight is my usual response to the sound(s) of anne rhodes' voice; and not so long ago (just last year indeed) i had never heard her. yet now it feels as if that voice has been in my ears forever, so perfect a vehicle is it for the music of my main man... back in the day, i almost made a slogan of my distaste for vocal jazz, and i remain very picky about singers in general, but that has been wavering over the last year and this lady is one key reason why. when singing without inflection, her simple attacks have the most marvellous timbral purity; it just makes my heart smile. and of course her range (in all senses) is well suited to the demands of the music. (she's not lauren newton; but then there is only one of those!) we know she's actively involved in teaching b's work as well of course, mainly through the choir as mentioned above, so we can all hope for exciting further developments from her... back to gtm (syntax), obviously a choir offers all kinds of wonderful possibilities which one voice alone can never hope to replicate, but a) we know from before the simple formula b+voc = magic/k, so that's fine and b) in this case, unheralded as it may be, there is heavy use of electronics right from the word go. i don't know anything about this at all: there is no mention of it on the cd, and therefore none at restructures; i have asked b. via email, but not really holding my breath for a response, and for that matter i have also asked mr feigin, but didn't get a response to that one either (and bearing in mind how hard i had to press in the end for an answer on that other matter, i didn't want to make much of a big song and dance about it; possibly he hasn't even noticed that my last mail to him contained a question..!). whatever we are dealing with here - and it comes across really as a sort of hitherto-unknown, hybridised gdtmcw construct - the effect of it is quite otherworldly, and entirely and wholeheartedly to be recommended {{{@*@@@**@}}}

thus for the syntax... as regards gtm (outpost), i confess i still haven't heard the duo disc but then we are dealing here with singers, and ms sturges - whoever she may be - contributes significantly to this music as well. if it must be admitted that her voice lacks *for me* the same magnetic quality that i find in anne rhodes, that is not to criticise, and besides, molly s. offers certain extended techniques which the later collaborator has never (yet) demonstrated. specifically, she has mastered a variety of throat-singing and uses it, and other unexpected inflections, to great effect in the concert... here, offering us still another subtle variation, the twin reeds entwine around each other and the voice also, the latter at times enmeshed, at times piercing through or soaring above. again, the effect is such that a diligent listener could lose him*self entirely within the sound-idea-space... and i trust that the audience was indeed held spellbound.

... and that brings me to another (slightly tedious) unresolved question, because the notes for disc 2 read as follows: "although comp. 265 is naturally divided into eleven sections by the applause from the audience one should remember that it was written as one piece of music." ah, tracks 2-11 on the cd actually are one piece of music, with (arguably helpful, but unnecessary) indexations breaking the piece up into smaller sections; track one is the end of something else, beginning in media res and soon proceeding to a rousing rendition of comp. 40i, then wrapping itself up to enthusiastic applause; i will just add again at this point that we don't hear any more of that, not even at the end of the disc, which is clipped off in midstream and may, or may not, dovetail with the beginning of track one (possibly, but i am not convinced). so, yes, it is safe to say that a pattern is emerging... one of missing details here and wrong info there, all of which could very probably drive me mad if i let it become a mission to sort it out. i'm not proposing to do that: firstly, and let's just be clear about this, leo records has supported b. as a featured artist for a long time now and has released more recordings of his than any other label, (excluding the revived, rapidly-mushrooming braxton house); many different facets of the man as both musician and composer have been explored, just within this one label's discography, and that is continuing into the future even now; if that legacy brings with it the odd mistake here and there, i can live with that. secondly - let this not be overlooked either - the production credit on outpost is shared equally between leo feigin and b. himself, hence the "absent-minded professor" must assume his share of the blame for any misinformation regarding the product. whatever, the music is great and i'm grateful for it. friendly experiencer, dive on in...

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braxbites: birth and rebirth

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!


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the trillium (comp. 126) mystery: update

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?)


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