What it is to duet

 

It's fair to say that the gestation of this post dates back at least a decade; it involves confronting some things I was initially unwilling to confront at all, hence if certain ideas even started to come to mind I tended at first just to shut them down again. On and off over the years I have found myself thinking along similar lines... it's only very recently I have allowed myself to wrestle properly with the issues I'm going to lay out below. What really prompted this was, first, listening to the duo concert B. played with Fred Frith - and then, soon afterwards, to the duo recordings he made with Miya Masaoka...

... the (double) CD of which I acquired just before Christmas. Now, unlike the Victoriaville meeting with Frith - which I only heard for the very first time just recently - I had a rip of the Masaoka duo several years ago (it having been posted online shortly after it was released) and listened to it a few times back then. Probably I treated it as background music at that time, but for whatever reason, I didn't hear it with any great clarity - until I actually played the CD. At that point, I suddenly found myself utterly fascinated by Masaoka's approach to the koto: she uses a very wide variety of techniques and attacks to elicit a huge range of sounds from the instrument, many of which I really wouldn't associate with the koto at all. As the album's title indicates, these were Diamond Curtain Wall performances, but the interactive software proved far less interesting on this occasion than B's human duet partner.

The problem was: on this same occasion, I didn't find B's own playing that interesting. Everything I heard him play... just sounded like things I had heard him play (many times) before. (To some extent at least * this was also a problem for me back in November, listening to the Victoriaville duo. To some extent - as implied above - it's been a potential problem for me on numerous listenings over the years, had I but let myself admit that.)

Of course, part of the problem is precisely the fact that I have heard B. play many times before: I have spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours listening to him in all sorts of different contexts. I have heard way more of his saxophone playing than anybody else's, over the years. Naturally then it will tend to be the case that a new (to me) recording reminds me of previous ones. Still, though... this does not seem to encompass the whole of the problem.

In his liner notes to the Firehouse 12 Quartet (New Haven) 2014 4-CD set, THB says something to the effect that in an ideal world, B. would record a duo album with every interesting musician he meets - would have recorded an album with every interesting musician he has ever met. This wasn't exactly news to me, either, and I don't suppose it's news to anyone who is reading this; anybody who keeps even half an eye on B's constantly-expanding discography can infer that he relishes playing in duet with different musicians, especially if he has not had the chance to play with them before. In turn, I have always been keen to listen to these recordings whenever I can (although some of the larger recent boxes make this particularly challenging). But as my familiarity increases and my ears grow more educated, I am finding it harder and harder to deny that with a lot of these recordings, the pleasure for me lies chiefly in discovering what B's playing partners are inspired to come up with, in his presence. That's great, of course... but is it really too much to ask that the maestro might also surprise me, from time to time?

Before I go any further I must clarify something. Even at duo level, there are recordings and recordings. In some cases, a programme is chosen for the date which comprises existing music; that might be a programme of B's own pieces exclusively (such as the Leipzig concert with Ted Reichman), or a mixture of B's pieces and those written by his partner, and/or standards, and/or improvised pieces. (Tons of examples of this format - the duos with Mario Pavone and with Gino Robair spring readily to mind, since I've written about those recently.) Where this is the case, at least in the composed numbers it's fully understood that there will be a variety of playing styles and/or techniques on display, according to the particular requirements of the written music; in the same way, B's solo performances always tend to feature a wide variety of playing approaches since the solo books themselves comprise pieces written to illustrate particular language types, and so on. - The other type of duo (more rarely, trio or quartet) encounter is completely improvised, and really, it's this type of recording I'm concerned with here. (Again, there's really no shortage of examples of this; I've mentioned three of them already. The album with Miya Masaoka is apparently rather unusual, in that DCW performances generally consist(ed) of B's compositions, albeit with a pretty large degree of latitude given to the musicians to set their own stamp on the eventual music; in this case, the performances are explicitly stated to be DCW, but the music purports to be completely improvised - unless the label simply failed to do its homework in this case, which seems unlikely.)

So, having got that all that out of the way, what I appear to be saying here is that when Braxton freely improvises, he sounds like himself, over and over again. Is that really true? - and if it is... is it really a problem?

"The case for the prosecution" (as it were)

One player I've been listening to quite a bit lately is Larry Ochs. This master first came to prominence, of course, as the "O" component of ROVA; another prominent early slot for him was as the second sax player in Glenn Spearman's double trio (a "chair" which would have required some technique for sure**, but which above all needed someone who could play with power, in that company). He's someone who could rest fairly comfortably on his laurels - such as they are - these days, but who has chosen not to do so: in recent years he's sought out some challenging new gigs to get his teeth into. There was a one-off trio on Clean Feed with Nels Cline (who keeps cropping up in contexts where I end up digging him, just lately - not least that same Firehouse 12 box I mentioned earlier) and Gerald Cleaver (who himself, if he's not literally ubiquitous, at least must surely have mastered the siddhi of being in two places at once). There is a cooperative quintet (The Fictive Five) with trumpet monster Nate Wooley, plus two bassists and a drummer. Most interestingly for me, at least, is a super-high-end free improv trio which goes by the infuriatingly search-engine-proof moniker of Jones Jones: Ochs plus Mark Dresser and Vladimir Tarasov, a ludicrously-skilled group which convenes occasionally for festival performances (and went into the studio for the first time just last year, recording for ESP Disk (a label which, if I'm honest, I didn't realise still existed until very recently)). The latter group, in particular, is one I've played and replayed - and one of the things which keep me coming back to them is the sheer variety of sounds, the timbral and tonal multiplicity of what emerges when these three guys get together. 

Ochs in general comes readily to mind in this context, because something I keep noticing about him is how much variety he seems to bring to his playing, even if he's just playing tenor. Now, I have heard a hell of a lot less of Larry Ochs than I have of Braxton. The short list above illustrates (I trust) how Mr O. is not content to take it easy in his later years; but if it also seemingly implies that I could easily keep listing other contexts in which he's played recently, that would be false. He's certainly done other things (***); I may even have heard some other recent work of his, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. The point is that if I listened to lots more of his playing, I daresay it wouldn't be long before I heard him repeating himself...

... but the other point still stands: the recordings which I have listened to demonstrate the extent to which an improviser - especially a player with compendious technique - can keep surprising the listener, by playing in different ways.

To say that B. has compendious technique is so blindingly obvious as to be completely fatuous; so why do I not always find myself thinking the same when I listen to him, in freely improvised contexts?

"The case (so to speak) for the defence"

Of course, the easiest rebuttal to the above is simply what some people may already be shouting at the screen by now: most improvisers repeat themselves over and over again. This (as I understand it) is why John Cage was down on improvisers: he felt he couldn't rely on them to improvise at all, rather believed that they would inevitably fall back on their own peculiar phrases and patterns. (That doesn't even mean necessarily that he expected improvisers to commit the cardinal jazz sin of playing licks, since that implies a step further into playing on auto-pilot, a pretty serious accusation to level against a serious improviser.)

The first improvising soloist that I listened to extensively would have been Frank Zappa: he definitely repeated himself, however much he may have tried to avoid that. These days, I am pretty thoroughly familiar with John Zorn: again, he definitely falls back on the same strategies much of the time when he's playing in free contexts #. Roscoe Mitchell? Again, precisely what makes him identifiable and distinctive is his tendency to repeat himself. (This is especially true of his extended solos on soprano sax, an instrument Mitchell tends to reserve for his formidable demonstrations of circular breathing; formidable every time, but every time much the same in my experience.) Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann? Two of the giants of European Free Improvisation, in other words... Parker repeats himself endlessly (and nobody has ever accused him of lacking technique), while Brötzmann has been accused (wrongly, I think) of lacking technique, because of his reliance on an approach once described to me as "one straight line, every time" ##. Derek Bailey, the most militant proponent imaginable of non-idiomatic music, is always identifiable within a handful of notes because he always sounds like himself. 

Nica de Koenigswarter was known to say that every time she watched Monk play live - something she must have done hundreds of times - he did something she had never heard him do before. I doubt anybody ever challenged her to back up this assertion, so who knows whether she could have done so; in any case, she was only claiming that in each performance Monk would unveil one new idea, so we may reasonably infer from that that the rest of each performance was... familiar ground being covered. The more you listen to any player, the harder it will be for them to surprise you. My own route into jazz, really, came via a fascination with Eric Dolphy: as I collected his recordings, it became increasingly obvious that those "surprising" solo phrases of his were on almost permanent loop. (Of course, in Dolphy's case I quickly realised that there were extenuating circumstances: he was really only active on the scene for a very short period, 1960-64 (and really only from 1961), having waited a very long time to get himself out there; and when he did get out there, he doubtless often found himself in situations where he had to assume that (much of) his audience would be hearing him for the first time.) Ornette... Coltrane... Miles... we could go on almost endlessly here. 

- I'm also cheating now, because I started out by limiting myself to B's recordings in a context of free improvisation, and have now drifted into consideration of players who take improvised solos within a structured context. Most of the players named above didn't play in freely improvised contexts much if at all... Still, that doesn't really undermine the defence's basic argument, here; most improvising musicians tend to repeat themselves a lot regardless of the context within which they are improvising. Some of the guys with a foot in both camps (Zorn, Parker) tend to sound much the same whether in a completely free context, or when improvising within a structured piece. This actually isn't the case with B: certainly he's identifiable within a couple of notes (at least he is to me, after all this time), but when he's taking a solo within a structured context he has always been able to draw on a fabulously rich vocabulary, and although certain phrases will inevitably crop up sooner or later, there may well be plenty of surprises along the way. So as I said above, it's only really when listening to him playing in completely free situations that I start to get (anything close to) that "comfortable old shoe" feeling.

Now that I've allowed myself to confront this nagging feeling head on, then... how do I feel about this whole business?

In conclusion (and this will amaze precisely nobody)

Even if it's true... I don't think it matters very much.

- and of course it may not be entirely true, anyway. Only on my very best days do I get close to the sort of monomaniac focus with which Pannonica followed Monk; if it seems to me when listening to the (improvised) duets in particular that B. is playing the same stuff each time, it could easily be the case that I am just hearing the bits which sound most familiar, and allowing my attention to wander at other times, perhaps missing things which I will only gradually pick up little by little, with enough repeated listening. (I'm not totally convinced by that, actually: at this point, anything totally new to my ears is likely to stick out a mile; but it remains true that I could be missing a lot of actual movement during the moments when my attention is at least partly elsewhere.)

But let's say for the sake of argument that I'm not missing anything, or anything much, and that in at least some of the duo recordings B. just ends up repeating himself. Does that render the meetings pointless, the recordings of them redundant? No. Even if the only element of surprise lies in discovering what B's playing partner brings to the date, that's still worth hearing; and it may also very well be the case that it was the maestro's presence (and company, and example) which facilitated the other party's creativity in the first place. Knowing that you are about to get the chance to play with a modern grandmaster must sharpen you right up and put you on full alert, whoever you are. And I think for B., that is the real pleasure of these meetings anyway: it's not so much that he is looking to create music hitherto entirely unknown by alchemising two known quantities into a brand-new substance, more a matter of this is how I play, and I want to know how you sound when you play with me. He himself quite clearly never gets bored of this game and (of course) that is the trick of it.

As for me, well, if I go back and start re-listening to lots of these recordings with renewed focus, who knows what I may end up finding in them?

* To some extent, yeah. Reading back what I wrote at the time, apparently there were at least some points where I felt that Frith was inspiring B., not just the other way round... or was I not yet being completely honest with myself? (I still don't own the CD of this recording and don't feel inclined to listen to it again until I do have it.)

** Spearman is sometimes remembered as being "just" a wild energy player, a "disciple of Ayler", but he held down a place in CTU for some time and during his tenure there, some of the other players (apparently) looked to him for guidance on how to play Taylor's music. He may have been self-taught but I don't think it's fair to regard him as any sort of "primitive" (any more than it would be fair to regard Ayler that way).

*** By an odd coincidence, Ochs once recorded a trio set with the first two players I mentioned in this very post: the alliterative Fred Frith and Miya Masaoka. Small world, huh? This was back in 1999 - and I haven't heard the album. (The three players were actually in a band together, but Maybe Monday was more often a quartet.)

# I'm quite sure there are (still) those who distrust Zorn for various reasons, and who therefore must dismiss out of hand his credentials for participating in free improvisation. But an experienced musician of my acquaintance who saw him play more than once in such contexts confirmed that there was nothing detached or ironic about Zorn's commitment on these occasions, rather he was all the way into it when he played.

## I can't now remember for certain who it was that told me this; it was one of two people, both improvising musicians - if it wasn't the same musician mentioned in the previous footnote, it was the other guy, but in any case they were quoting someone else, a very experienced improviser of their acquaintance who had played with Brötzmann on more than one occasion. 

Only five footnotes, this time? I'm slipping...