This too was new

 

Anthony Braxton: Accelerator Ghost Trance Septet

Jazzaldia Festival

San Sebastian, Spain, 25th July 2008

Composition 348

Video here

After about three weeks of daily Braxton, I very nearly had a "dry" day yesterday. That wasn't so bad really: on some days recently I gorged myself on four or five different full-length recordings, so it averaged out pretty well. Anyway, in the end I was able to administer a small homoeopathic dose before I crashed out: I started watching this video, although I only got a few minutes in before I was too tired to continue. (We are in the process of moving house, and the place is utter chaos. Plus of course the microcosmic change local to this family is reflected in a macrocosmic change affecting the whole of Britain and parts beyond: I write this on the day of the Queen's funeral. We live on a busy main road here, but it's been very quiet today.)

I remember this recording, by which I mean that I remember its first appearing in the blogosphere, back in the day - remember the sheer excitement of having a good-quality live recording from a concert which had only just taken place. What I didn't know, however, is that there was a film made of the performance, never mind that said film has been available for viewing on Youtube for (evidently) some time. I only found that out yesterday: and having watched just a few minutes last night, I finished it off this morning (to set myself up for another day of boxing and sorting).

The band for this festival performance included three of the same musicians (four including the leader) who played the London Jazz Festival in 2004: THB, Mary Halvorson, Chris Dahlgren - meaning that four of the players in the video are musicians I've seen live onstage. [The 2004 LJF performance at the Royal Festival Hall was recorded by the BBC and broadcast on Radio 3, back when I used to listen to (some of) their jazz programming. That same recording was later licensed to Leo Records. I have also written about this recording*.] They were younger when I saw them, and none of them were yet firmly established in the creative music scene: most people would have thought of them, if at all, as "just Braxton's students"**. By 2008 all three of these players mentioned above were fairly well known (in relative terms) and very well thought of. Aaron Siegel is now handling drums and percussion, a role he would play for a number of years; Jessica Pavone plays violin and viola, Jay Rozen tuba - again, both musicians would be intimately involved with B's music for some time. 

As well as the live 2004 performance (and part of me will always be sat on the edge of my seat at the (old) RFH, literally trying not to blink, so I still remember parts of it vividly), I have seen video recordings of these musicians before: the Iridium box includes a DVD, after all; and other decent recordings are available online. But it's been a good number of years since I watched any of those, so we may as well pretend that this was new to me, 'cos it sort of was. Several things stirke the viewer early on. For one thing, how hard the players are worked physically! Dahlgren in particular plays his ass off here, gets a real workout just in the opening ten minutes. (This observation is included to counter the argument, still sometimes advanced, that this sort of music is dry and academic and purely cerebral.) Also, which will be of interest to anybody who was under the impression that the players in this sort of thing "make it up as they go along"***, the players spend a great deal of time rivetted to the written score. They also pay very close attention to the leader - and to each other. Sub-groupings arise both spontaneously and (apparently) by prior arrangement. It's really interesting to see these aspects of the music as it's being performed. Multiple cameras (and quite creative visual editing, at times) allow us to get a pretty good close-up look at numerous different aspects of the performance which would not necessarily be obvious from the seats of a concert hall. 

As the piece unfolds, all sorts of secondary materials get folded in (as always) - my understanding, from memory, is that by this stage all the musicians would be trusted enough to interpolate pretty much any earlier piece they felt like playing, at least at certain intervals: parts of the scores are through-composed, but many other parts leave plenty of room for improvisation and invention, and in practice we get a mixture of both, most of the time. Starting at 19.48, some of the group sketch out a rubato Comp. 23d; THB creates high winds, over the top. Around 24.30, one camera zooms in over Rozen's shoulder to examine page one of the the score for Comp. 168, with its list of Language Types and associated symbols (but I can't say at this point that I'm familiar enough with that piece to know if Rozen - or anyone else - is actually playing it at that precise moment). Starting just before the 31-minute mark, the strings (later joined by Siegel on mallet percussion) sound as if they are playing Comp. 23m, or something very like it, while the horns do something completely different. At about 36.20, Dahlgren begins bowing out the distinctive bassline from Comp. 6n, which appears to be a signal to the leader to get out the oil-refinery equipment: as always, it is a pure pleasure to hear B. mangling the contrabass clarinet, and it's a real a privilege to have him captured on camera using it for both subvocalised growling and ultra-high-pitched squeaks and squeals - both extended techniques are frequently employed by the maestro, but we would not often get the chance to watch him do in real time #. 

There is a beautifully-unguarded moment picked up by one camera just before the 45-minute mark, B. watching on with loving delight as THB freaks out with the mute; this moment is all the more precious for its brevity, since within seconds it's all business again: B. catches Siegel's eye and holds up nine fingers, the drummer commencing a brisk and busy cymbal pattern (presumably in 9/8, I couldn't be sure) which sets up yet another movement in the piece, while Bynum continues in his own world, mute clasped to bell, eyes closed, lost in the music. 

As (almost) always with later GTM, we get everything from delicate sighs to raging storms, and more or less everything in between. The mood around 56 minutes and counting is pretty much as intense and furious as anything by anybody; it's quite awesome and thrilling to behold. But though we are approaching the end of the sand in the hourglass, this is not the "climax" of the performance; gradually, over the next couple of minutes, the volume and intensity is ratcheted down... by 59.25 Rozen and Siegel (the latter with the softest of marimba accompaniment) are setting up the real endgame, in which Dahlgren joins in with a tiny Casio synth, THB with a toy horn so small that even the close-up camera can only pick up his hands, not the instrument itself; chops from the guitar, squeaks from the leader, increasingly staccato attacks all round really, interspersed with some long held tones from Pavone in particular, and many quick glances (and several hand signals) between the players as they know they are coming to the very end. The sand elapsed, the band finishes - and B. doesn't manage to get all the way through his habitual namechecks before the rapturous applause breaks out as he pauses for breath. The outpouring of sheer joy and amazement from the audience## is worth cherishing on its own...

... because this sort of experience genuinely can change almost everything, for a careful listener: one's understanding of music, of art in general, of the limitless possibilities which are opened up by human cooperation, rather than competition. It is not too late, surely... and in the meantime, this great video serves as a timely reminder of what I said last time out: yes, the ZIM pieces were new; but the new is precisely what this man and his cohorts deal in, time after time after time. If anyone who reads this hasn't seen the video, don't hesitate - just plunge on in.

***

I'd originally thought that this might be a very brief post just saying "I've just realised there's a video, check it out", but it became obvious it would grow in the telling as I sat and watched it myself. I had thought to add some unrelated further observations on the duo performance I mentioned at the end of my previous post; but those can wait for a bit. (If McClintic Sphere is reading - no, I haven't forgotten about Thumbscrew!! we will get there... promise!)

***

Kai Weber: glad to be of service ;-)  - and how, may I ask, did you get on? 

* The relevant bit is entry 4 in the linked post. (That was more precisely the first time I wrote about that 2004 performance; I am sure I returned to it later, but I can't remember when, off the top of my head. It's there, somewhere...)

** I was active on the Radio 3 jazz messageboard at the time, and I seem to recall some people were a bit sniffy about Braxton not using a "proper" band, but just dragging his students onstage with him. Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh were still students of Lennie Tristano's, when they cut some quite famous recordings with him: I don't remember anyone pissing and moaning about that...

*** There is a pervasive general misunderstanding about "free" music that it always means "everyone just makes it up", and very often it really, really doesn't mean that at all. As regards B's music specifically, it STILL seems to be the case that some lazy writers talk about the graphic titles as "scores", as if they actually think that the music arises from free association of the musicians after they look at the picture..! FFS. These people cannot ever have listened closely to the music at all.

 - In this performance, as was usual at this time, all the players had music stands which contained not only the written score for Comp. 348, but also lead-sheets (at least) for numerous entries in B's "book": by this point, it was explicitly the case that any piece could work with any other, and any individual performance would hence be unique not only in its ex tempore interpretation of the primary territory, but in its judicious selection of secondary materials.

# My only (slight) disappointment back in 2004 was that the sea monster - as I would later come to think of it - did not make an appearance. I have seen B. play it live, during that historic meeting with Cecil Taylor in 2007... before this blog was even "born".

## Again, this takes me right back to 2004. I had gone with a friend from university, someone I hadn't seen in a number of years, but who was a musician himself and had an active interest in jazz. He was not, at the time, hip to this sort of thing... as the applause rang out after the set finished, he was vocally astonished; "Wow. Wow! I mean... I have never seen anything like that. Wow" - I know he did get into B's music after that. (Funnily enough he is now a radio producer for the BBC... not exclusively in music broadcasting, though)