One question answered

 

Actually, now that I come to think of it, there may be some progress here after all... (This is not the answer to the question, by the way...)

Following on from the previous post, then, it took me a few days to get on it, but I did then take advantage of my improved access to CDs by, y'know, actually playing some. I said that I'd started things off by spinning Beyond Quantum, an album which was more or less guaranteed to do my adrenaline-shattered nervous system some good, owing to the presence of Milford "20th-Century Shaman" Graves, a man who had been (among many other things) an actual music therapist at one point - besides of course being one of the great legends of free jazz. The following night, I chose an album I had acquired five or six years ago, played once and filed away (somewhere): Four Compositions (GTM) 2000, on Delmark. It's not a hugely well-known album, a state of affairs possibly not helped much by that rather odd choice of cover shot, in which the maestro's glasses almost look as if they are falling off his face*; naturally enough, much was made in the liner notes of B's triumphant return to the label which released the ground-breaking For Alto - indeed, the same label had previously launched B's career as a leader - but I don't know if this recording was received with a great deal of fanfare. In the years since, it has pretty much vanished into the vast Braxton discography; if anyone at this point is on the hunt for representative GTM recordings, they are probably more likely to plump for some of the multi-disc sets, assuming they can get them, or at any rate for some of the albums featuring B's better known students and/or collaborators.

In my case, of course, I was some years away from taking a really serious interest in the maestro's music** at the time of this album's release, and I didn't pick up a copy until at least fifteen years after it came out. Even for me, it was hard in principle to distinguish the CD from many other GTM recordings, and I acquired it at a very trying time for me personally - during the blog's "wilderness years" - so if anything stood out when I played it, I have long since forgotten what that was. The main differences between this album and most others showcasing Ghost Trance Music are: it features sidemen who are pretty obscure*** even by creative music's standards, and its programme comprises four GTM compositions on a single disc.

This, then, is the question which nobody besides me has been bothered to ask: what is the shortest officially-sanctioned performance of a GTM composition? - and the answer, it turns out, can be found here. # 

The question is not as utterly trivial as it may sound: as we all know, it is pretty normal for a GTM performance to last about an hour. OK, so those will typically involve some collaging - incorporation of themes or secondary materials derived from elsewhere amongst B's voluminous canon of compositions - and if we assume that a performance entirely devoid of collaging will necessarily be shorter, that will probably cut down the average duration by anything up to a third. Still, performances much under twenty minutes risk feeling positively perfunctory when the scores themselves are clearly pretty weighty. The question of how long is long enough has been one I've pondered quite a bit since I resumed blogging, mainly thanks to rather desultory "interpretations" such as that by Ensemble dal Niente, as previously mentioned; if all you do is run through the written theme and allow a couple of minutes of freedom, I'm really far from convinced that you can be said to have interpreted the piece at all, in any meaningful sense. Oh, and with the right blend of skill and experience it's possible to cram a lot of elements into a very narrow time-frame indeed, creating the illusion of having reproduced the piece in miniature; but - ahem - whether that is truly valid as an interpretation is something on which I still haven't officially expressed my opinion. (I promise, that really is imminent now...)

So, anyway: this CD includes four consecutive GTM compositions - Comps. 242, 243, 244 & 245 - and (clearly, given that the maximum running time of a compact disc is 79:59) the average duration is less than 20 minutes. One piece just about makes it over that threshold; but the other three are all done and dusted within less than 19 minutes, and Comp. 243 clocks in at a mere 13:40. I haven't got (or even heard) every studio GTM recording under B's leadership or direct supervision, but I'd be amazed if there's one anywhere which is shorter than this.

What is the music like?? - well you know what, given that the brief renditions and (almost) unknown personnel might lead one to suspect a completely non-essential recording, this one really did turn out to be full of pleasant surprises. Keyboardist Kevin Uehlinger## explains in the liner notes that the group was not given the written music until the actual recording date, and had only seen one of the compositions prior to that; very possibly, this freshness and lack of prior familiarity helps to explain why the resulting music is so vibrant (if some bandleaders pulled a trick like this, it might cause the musicians to be paralyzed with terror, but we know this bandleader has a well-earned reputation for faith, trust, support and encouragement). Whatever the reason, there really isn't a dull moment to be found on this CD - the music is fully alive. (It also includes something I have yet to encounter anywhere else within the discography: Uehlinger plays piano, but also melodica. That is to say, he doesn't just tootle on it through some of the written themes, he actually plays it, exclusively throughout the first ten minutes or so of the third piece. Extraordinary.)

So there you go. Oh, and it's not actually even the case here that no collaging was involved: Uehlinger confirms that in his case at least, materials from the 130 opus range were factored in. Evidently, none of the entire scores could possibly have been used for the sessions; but still, just as evidently, the resulting performances had the Braxton seal of approval. Thirteen minutes and forty seconds it is, then, until anyone tells me otherwise... and boy, am I glad I pulled this one out for a long-overdue airing. 

* It really is a pretty bizarre photo, which almost gives the impression that the maestro is so into his playing that his glasses are actually about to fly off; that seems unlikely. I would hazard a guess that the idea was to play on B's "eccentric professor" image - look everybody, this cat is so crazy that he can't even keep his spectacles straight. I dunno, I could easily get indignant on B's behalf, but I'd like to think he will have had some say in the matter and I don't suppose he was overly irritated by it...

** B's name was already flagged up for further investigation, by 2003; I even had more than one of his CDs by then. But it wasn't until 2007 that I really began my endless fall down this particular rabbit-hole

*** Kevin Uehlinger, Keith Witty and Noam Schatz had all studied with B. at Wesleyan - but I don't think any of them played on any other recordings besides this one. Really not sure why not. (Schatz, by the way, also plays on the recording from which I gleaned the correct full name of percussionist A. Kobena Adzenyah, better known (ish) to browsers of the Braxton discog as Abraham Adzinyah, under which name he performed in duo with B., a 1994 concert which was released in full and which I wrote about briefly last September. (Incidentally, after we moved house I discovered that the reason I didn't recognise his name from Marion Brown's Geechee Recollections was because when I wrote out the credits for the CD-R which I burned, I resorted to the cop-out "various percussionists"...))

# Obviously I'm not claiming that this is the final, definitive answer - though as I say above, I'd be surprised if it turns out not be.

## If the keyboardist's name seems naggingly familiar, that is probably because he happens to share a surname with the Swiss producer/ founder of the "Hat family" of record labels...