Another quick round-up

 Up to my eyeballs in a messy and complicated house-move here, as I said before, so I'm taking advantage of a brief few hours of respite to check in and bring a couple of things up to date...

Something I had become aware of recently - but hadn't heard at all - is the limited edition set of eight improvisations featuring B. in duet with Eugene Chadbourne. In all honesty, Chadbourne is not a musician I've really paid any attention to, although I have been peripherally aware of him as this cult, fringe figure for years; so I hadn't made it a priority to track any recordings down. Nevertheless I was pretty curious: presumably this would be something very different from the usual duo experience, in which B. interacts with a highly-trained technical virtuoso (with a seemingly never-ending succession of them). And eight full-length performances! Clearly it was thought that the two players had a lot to say which was worth hearing.

Yesterday I finally found the first of the recordings - just stumbled across it really (I don't think I was even looking for music at the time). It was a very busy day and I only managed to get through the first 35 minutes, finsishing off this morning (when I got up early to plunge back into the "moving maelstrom"), but it did, indeed, prove to be an unusual listening experience and definitely worth hearing.

Chadbourne is, I believe, an entirely self-taught player (although he has of course been at it for decades now). I couldn't give the music enough focussed attention to make any real observations here, but it was a most refreshing and pleasing listen and there were frequent moments which made me think "Wow, that's unusual" - I kept being drawn away from whatever else I was doing. Among the chordophones which Chadbourne used for these dates is the dobro, which he plays rather like a koto - this of course made me think of other duo meetings with Brett Larner and (more recently) with Miya Masaoka (again, both of those players are formally trained on that instrument). It made here for a really intriguing and unpredictable sound and there definitely seemed to be times when B. himself was jolted into playing things one would not usually expect to hear from him. I don't know if I will ever own the 8-CD set, but I shall be looking for more of the recordings online for sure.

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I'd mentioned recently my first listen to the hard-to-find duo concert with (the percussionist here credited as) Abraham Adzinyah; to be precise, I had posted about it after listening just to the first half of it. It was only as I listened to the second part, a few days ago now, that I really figured out what I was - and wasn't - hearing. Generally these (numerous) meetings at Wesleyan were recordings B. made with his students. I had never recognised the name of his collaborator here, so had assumed the same applied in this case. It absolutely didn't: the African percussionist was already considered an experienced master in his own right, and the concert was a special live performance, billed at the time as a highly unusual opportunity (and received as such, to judge from the reaction of the audience). Like I say, I had not recognised the name at all, but at some point around fifteen years ago I would have seen it, because Mr Adzenyah - as he is usually known - played on Geechee Recollections (1973) by Marion Brown; and, a couple of years later, on The Gardens Of Harlem by Clifford Thornton & The Jazz Composer's Orchestra. I really can't remember whether I heard the latter back in the "heyday of the free jazz blogosphere", but I definitely heard and enjoyed the former and at some point, therefore, I have hand-written the master percussionist's name along with the other details of the recording... many names, and a fair few years later, and I had forgotten it altogether... but this is indeed the same player.

The second half features something quite weird, or at least that is how it struck me at the time: for several minutes, B. plays his saxophone in such a way that it sounds more as if he is talking through it. This is not one of his usual subvocalisations (all of which I am highly familiar with, having heard him use these extended techniques many times). I was rapt and fascinated when I first realised what I was hearing, but is hard to put into words (other than in the simple way I did above). I need to listen to this recording again soon I think.

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Finally, just to touch base very briefly with the recording which started this whole thing off, back in 2007, before I even got involved with it: (the reissue now known as) Performance (Quartet) 1979. I listened to this suoerb album for the first time in a good few years the other night, and dug the fuck out of it; but why, I wonder, is it always listed that track one comprises the first four pieces, and track 2 the remaining three? Comp. 40f quite clearly comes at the beginning of Track 2, and it is indeed the fourth primary territory explored here. Hence the split is three pieces, then four, not the other way round. Given that the timings for the original double vinyl don't seem to make sense at all when compared with the CD reissue(s), this does raise the question of why a label like Hat (insert variant of choice here) would get so confused about something relatively simple. But there we are...

Hi again to McC! Great to see you in these parts again, my friend :-D