Thumbscrew pt 1: background and context

 

Thumbscrew, The Anthony Braxton Project (Cuneiform, 2020)

Not for the first time, I've had to approach an album sideways, so to speak - or perhaps it would be better to say I've had to take an unusually long run-up at it... anyway, let's hope it doesn't turn out to be another one of those false starts (ahem). 

There are several different reasons why I have found this a difficult album to write about - or, more accurately, a difficult album to think about (since I haven't precisely tried and failed to write about it... I just haven't got round to it until now). Some of these reasons overlap a bit. Some of them I have touched on before. All of them will be laid out and examined here:

1. Insofar as I ever gained any reputation at all, I'm sure it would be fair to say that I gained one back in the day as a pedantic and difficult bastard who had to have every detail just perfect (and who got decidedly short-tempered and impatient, at times even downright unpleasant, with anybody who I perceived to have fallen short in this regard). This in turn can't have been especially helpful to the original cause of the blog: spreading the word about B's music and (ha!) providing a place for people to talk about it. Obviously that's long (loooong) gone, but still, I have it in mind when approaching things like this album, the release of which "should", it seems, have been greeted with joy. Just having such things in existence is basically a blessing, after all. To have such a project undertaken/overseen by an experienced former Braxton student/collaborator such as Mary Halvorson is more or less the kind of thing which might appear on an imaginary wish-list. So to have such an album in the hand - as I first did back in January 2021 - and have such mixed feelings about it as I did... that is, as they say, kind of a bummer. It left me feeling really quite conflicted, and I hated having to feel that way, being all too aware of what a rare treat the album's release - the project's being brought to fruition, if not necessarily the actual finished product - was in the first place. Hence, any time I played the damn thing I tried quite consciously just to switch off my critical faculties and allow myself to enjoy it as a collection of music, played by a very good band. The fact that I was fairly successful in the attempt also, then, helps to explain why I never seemed to get any closer to the point of being able to write about it. 

2. It's annoyingly short. Not so much the running time: I mean, OK, that too actually because in the CD era, although there is absolutely no reason in principle for an album to run any longer than albums used to back in the vinyl/cassette days - forty minutes is fine, generally - there is very much a compelling argument for shoehorning in as much material as the format will tolerate (eighty minutes, as it happens) in a case such as this, where rare items from B's back catalogue are being given an outing, in many cases for the first time ever. (For more on this last point see 3., below...)

- The album clocks in at well under fifty minutes, and comprises eleven tracks - but only nine different compositions. (Three different versions of Comp. 14 are included, each a solo interpretation by one member of the band.) However, as stated above, my main gripe here is not so much even with the overall running time - or with the glaring fact that they could have utilised and included more material, under the circumstances - but rather with the brevity of the readings themselves. Two of the eleven tracks run between seven and eight minutes; one further track lasts just over six minutes. The remaining eight pieces are all under four and a half minutes. Indeed, six of them last less than four minutes, and four of them last less than three minutes - in creative music terms, over when they have barely begun*. (The truism that is the "three minute pop song" most definitely has no currency in this context - as if that needed to be pointed out.) It is just impossible for me to suppose that the band finished working on this with the collective sense of having done the best they could do. There HAS to have been some inevitable sense of artistic compromise,  whether this was in the preparation, the researching/acquisition of scores, the recording itself - who knows - but it is just not possible to conclude that this project turned out exactly the way the musicians had hoped, or anywhere near it, really. The text on the CD tray makes a point of saying that the music was "developed, recorded and premiered during an artist residency at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh" - before explaining what the latter consists in. One is rather given the impression from this that favourable conditions prevailed throughout. The recordings were done over four (consecutive) days in the studio. So, what happened? Why was a tribute to this famously detail-rich composer brought off in such a brief and inchoate fashion? 

Just to hammer (or screw) the point home: compare the tracklists for Thumbscrew's other albums. I mean, the ones which feature the band members' own compositions. You won't find a lot of pieces under five minutes on those. Seriously, what the actual fuck?!

3. I can't remember where exactly I read it now, and nowhere does it say this on the actual album, but I swear the whole point of this project was to bring to light pieces from B's vast canon which had not yet been recorded. OK, so quite clearly that wasn't exclusively the case: the album kicks off with Comp. 52, which most definitely has been recorded before, and several times (by various players). Nevertheless, a lot of these opus numbers are ones which the even most diligent friendly experiencer - with access to the full online discography (before it was taken down, or in a genie-granted parallel universe where it never was) - would seek in vain amongst the recorded catalogue. Looking through the tracklist before I played the CD for the first time, I saw practically nothing which looked familiar.

- Imagine my surprise, then, at hearing something entirely familiar, assigned an entirely unfamiliar opus number. Track 7 purports to be Comp. 61; which is 'passing strange, to be sure, because the (many) previous times I had heard this piece it was known as Comp. 29a**. I recognised it instantly because it was something of a favourite of mine, in the early days of this blog; I even wrote (rather briefly) about the album on which it appears. It's not a hugely well-known album - and I daresay some of those who have heard it still wouldn't recognise the piece from this version, which has completely different voicings (B. originally laid it down as a duet for contrabass clarinet and Mario Pavone's (string) bass); it just happens to have been something I listened to a lot and thus know very well. OK, so... now what?! which is it to be? I know B. is regarded in some quarters as an "eccentric professor" type (and has arguably even played up to this image himself), but not even he can have written the same piece twice.

The band must have had access to a decent variety of scores for this project, but the (very brief) notes don't go into any detail about this at all. Yes, City of Asylum provided the time, among other things, but it seems unlikely that a full range of Braxton scores happens to be permanently available in Pittsburgh, a city which (as far as I know) bears no direct connection to B. at all. No, these had to have been sourced via TCF, in which capacity one presumes Carl Testa helped out: he is thanked along with the TCF and this would not otherwise have been necessary. (Halvorson and Testa played together many times and must know each other pretty well.) Of course, I am in no position to comment on how professional the archiving is or isn't at TCF; we know that B. used to have a lot of trouble with record labels messing up the graphic titles on track lists, that sort of thing, and the maestro himself may sometimes have allowed things to get a little confused after the fact, or so he has suggested in the past to this writer at least***. Nevertheless, one rather presumes that he has arrived at the point some time ago where he can get other people to take care of that kind of thing for him, allowing him to get on with the more crucial stuff like playing and composing new material (always, always pressing deeper into new mines). I've seen - we've all seen - title pages of scores with the opus numbers written at the top. What happened here, to allow two unrelated pieces to become conflated like this? Whatever this is, it's not a case of a simple typo: the graphic title assigned to track 7 here is completely different from the one included on the album with Mario Pavone. The band this time genuinely believed that they were reading and playing Comp. 61, even while B. himself had already recorded it under a completely different premise. (If the band were aware of the earlier attribution and wanted to release the piece under its correct title and opus number, to make a point, then surely there would be a note to that effect on the CD. The absence of any such note suggests very strongly that they are unaware of the problem.)

Mary H. has extensive experience with B's music, obviously. Michael Formanek, to the best of my knowledge, has no direct experience with it at all; Tomas Fujiwara is a bit of an in-between case, having what you might call extensive indirect experience (by osmosis, as it were, via his long-standing musical partnership with THB, and various more recent connections#), and some direct experience, albeit in a very specific context##. Obviously, I don't know if any of them have heard the duo album with Mario Pavone###. Also obviously, it doesn't matter how much I ramble or rant about this here, we're not going to figure out how/when/where the mistake got made just by speculating about it. What I will do between now and "pt 2" is look at the composition notes for Comps. 29 and 61, just to see if that clarifies things at all. But the point is, the irritation I felt about this is not limited to not knowing the correct opus number for this one piece. Rather, it's the implication raised by such an anomaly coming to light in a project of this nature: that we can't actually be sure of any of the titles given for the previously-unrecorded pieces (i.e. most of them). In theory, one should not need to worry about this kind of thing at all: the band were doing this with B's blessing for sure, and presumably with his knowledge as well, and one would think they would have had full access to officially certified, accurate scores in making their selections of what material to perform. In practice, that's all up in the air now. In theory, there is considerable value for the Braxton community (for want of a better term) in having this type of project undertaken: I don't mean just an album full of his pieces generally, although there are few enough of those in existence (as recently discussed) and that alone gives this some weight, makes it desirable; I mean specifically an album of premieres, pieces which have never previously been officially recorded (in some cases, perhaps not even publicly performed). In practice... well even I would stop well short of declaring this to be of no value; that would be absurd, ridiculous. But unfortunately to have it in this form, with these doubts hanging over it, lends an ambivalence to its reception that I really wish I didn't have.

OK, breathe... that's most if not all of the venting out of the way...

4. ... and what remains has nothing really to do with the recording, as such, but more to do with my own essential (unavoidable) shortcomings as an analyst. This has been nagging away at me for years, on and off; a long time ago now, I wrote about my own (lack of) musical education, explaining why I come to have such knowledge as I have, while also making it clear why it doesn't go any further... more recently I have found myself banging my head against my own ceiling, so to speak, in trying to delve into the innermost workings of music which normally presupposes a pretty fair degree of formal training without, in my case, actually having any.

I didn't really think (much) about this aspect of the problem when I first mooted the idea of writing about this album. (It was there in the background, for sure; but given that I knew I was going to do this writing "at some point", rather than imminently, in the background it remained.) It really came sharply into focus when I made the first steps towards a comparison between two different versions of B's Comp. 305, as discussed briefly here; I have also been watching some of Chanan Hanspal's video analyses of Frank Zappa recently, and it's not been at all lost on me that he is able to use detailed analysis of the actual scores to unlock layers of the music which have in many cases remained pretty obscure to me until now (I have been listening to Zappa a lot longer than I have been listening to Braxton, and I wouldn't even pretend to understand some of the more advanced pieces). I never learned to read music, and even if I did, I doubt it would be of much use to me in analysing work of this degree of complexity. Plus I don't even have access to the scores... so why am I even bothering? One acquaintance did more or less ask me this way back in the early Braxtothon days... but back then, the answer seemed obvious enough because even without formal training, or being able to use transcriptions in my write-ups, I was assured by a number of people that I had helped them hear B's music a lot more clearly than before. However it worked, for a while back there I really felt as if I'd been somehow "looking over the composer's shoulder". (B. himself was kind enough to confirm a little later that I wasn't simply imagining this.) That didn't last forever though; and while it lasted it was greatly aided, undeniably, by the use of cannabis while listening. I haven't smoked in well over five years now - and although my appreciation of music definitely continues to grow, not diminish, with time and age and experience, there is no doubt that I did for a while have access to a dimension in it which is now closed to me. (Don't ask me how any of this works - it just does. Or doesn't, as the case may be...) Without it, is there really any point in my trying at all?

So that's yet another thing which presents difficulties in writing about this album - and indeed other recordings, but this is the article I've been promising to write. Hence, this acute awareness of my own ignorance now appears to block the road for me, just as I'm trying to move forwards.

***

That's it: that's all of it, I think. I needed to get points 1-3 off my chest before I could even think about tackling this, because until I'd got all this properly laid out and acknowledged, I didn't feel able to listen to the music with any sort of critical ear at all. 

How much the problem outlined in point 4 will prevent me from doing that anyway is, of course, something which remains to be seen...

* What seems really galling about this is that the graphic titles for two of the pieces - listed on the CD as being Comps. 274 & 150 (although I can't, alas, take that for granted - see point 3. above) very much suggest that these are longish compositions. Comp. 274 must presumably be GTM, although I don't recognise the graphic at all (and maybe this is one of those pieces which has not previously been recorded); Comp. 150, too, has the type of graphic which B. usually reserves for the sort of pieces which take up an entire CD in the reading. The latter is disposed of in less than three minutes, and even though the former is one of the longer pieces here, that's only a relative thing: it's still only just over six minutes. I have pondered before why B's own GTM performances tend to last so much longer than the same pieces when interpreted by other musicians; this album really takes that principle to an extreme.

** The original Music & Arts CD lists it simply as Comp. 29, a mistake corrected by Jason Guthartz in his much-missed online discography.

*** Shortly before B. contacted me for the first time, I had wondered aloud whether recreational substances might not have interfered with the matching up of the pieces on For Alto with their intended dedicatees (leading to the much-repeated, nonsensical dedication to John Cage of the piece intended for Cecil Taylor, for example). He didn't exactly confirm it, but he certainly didn't try very hard to deny it...

# I'm thinking specifically of The Thirteenth Assembly, a grouping of THB + Fujiwara with another long-standing musical partnership, Mary Halvorson + Jessica Pavone. The group Illegal Crowns (with Benoît Delbecq) is another example. 

## Tomas F. may well have worked with B. in another context around that time; there was a lot of stuff being released by NBH back then, much of it on a digital-only basis, and I only heard a fraction of it. I was at least aware of some releases which I didn't actually hear - including the four-CD set in a trio with Tom Rainey, as referenced in the post. I don't delude myself that I didn't miss some things altogether.

### It's a curious coincidence if they haven't: the Pavone duo set concludes with a cover of "Stablemates" by Benny Golson, and the exact same standard kicks off the Thumbscrew album Theirs, an album of cover versions which the band released (in conjunction with an album of new music, naturally entitled Ours) in 2018, two years before their Braxton album. This could, of course, be precisely a curious coincidence: Golson is not exactly underrepresented in the world of jazz standards, and many musicians have covered tunes of his. It's just another twist... (Yet a further one is abstruse enough that I didn't even allude to it in the main post: it's tempting to assume that Mario Pavone was related in some way to Jessica Pavone, although I have not been able to confirm that. Even if he was, that doesn't of course mean that Mary H. would necessarily have heard everything he recorded, just because she was a close friend of his daughter/niece/etc. Coincidences are everywhere.)