Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday Mr Braxton
More-than-a-week-ago
Ahem. So, what's going on, then? Maybe somebody can fill me in - evidently, while I was not paying proper attention and getting on with other stuff, Google/Blogger did something weird and now it's all-but impossible to locate Blogger pages via a Google search. (I only discovered this accidentally, a few months ago, when I wanted to remind a friend of mine about a particular post I had written, back in the days when I actually wrote posts... for reasons I can't be bothered to go into, I had no easy/direct route into the blog and it always used to be very easy to get in via a web search... this time I had a few "sinking" moments during which I thought the blog had actually been taken down without me even realising it. This was not helped by a slew of search results in which various ex-bloggers lamented whatever it is that got done, to cause all this.)
As previously (teasingly) advised, my intentions to write about the Thumbscrew album were in worse-than-usual disarray anyway, first because it's a very difficult project to write about (read on), and then because something happened between B. and (at least some of) his inner circle - I say that, I myself am so out of touch with these things now that I have no idea who is or isn't "in the loop" at present; but discovering that Jason Guthartz had severed ties with B. so suddenly and peremptorily was a shock... and realising that Restructures had been taken down altogether was horrible. (It still feels like such a loss as to be almost an act of vandalism, even if it was perpetrated by the architect himself; and I still haven't been able to bring myself to talk to Jason about it.)
So there's that... and then there's this... and then we go and arrange to go away for the weekend, to somewhere (just about) remote enough to have no wifi or mobile phone coverage, in a (semi-successful) attempt to escape the enforced jollity (and, here in Wales, the hypocrisy) of the jubilee celebrations... so that I wasn't even "here" on the one day of the year when I still do make an effort to post. Dear oh dear.
Thumbscrew... this really is a difficult one to write about. The balancing act it will require breaks down like this: the actual finished article leaves me feeling that it could have been SO much more than it is, and yet I don't want to be the guy who moans about it, given that we are lucky it even exists in the first place. (I spent enough time being "that guy" in the past, right? I did, yes.) Besides, it really is quite a delightful listen. It just happens to be problematic for several reasons, but... ugh, later. I will write about this album if it kills me, even if hardly anybody at this point will ever see it...
1 comment:
Last week I happened to catch a concert of Braxton's AACM companion Roscoe Mitchell in Prague. The first half of the program was a large orchestra composition, conducted by Roland Dahinden, the second half Mitchell's quintet with Tomeka Reid on cello. We do need to cherish this generation of creators while they're still around.
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