An album which I have never heard - or come across, except in passing - has suddenly become available (well, at least one copy of it has turned up for sale): Four Compositions (Duets) 2000, with Alex Horwitz.
B's duo partner in this instance is a vocalist, which is already not a great start from my point of view (some readers of longer acquaintance will recall my fussiness with vocals, especially those of the jazz variety). For every Anne Rhodes or Lauren Newton* there are many more that I just can't listen to; yep, it's a problem of mine, but not one I have ever been in a desperate hurry to fix. And male jazz singers, just don't get me started. However, in this case, the problem is a bit more complicated than that: Discogs lists the album, confusingly, as Jazz, Non-Music - and subcategorises it thus:
Free Jazz, Contemporary Jazz, Free Improvisation, Spoken Word
- Let's assume here that the "Jazz" bit refers to B's contribution (hardly accurate, in most cases, but hardly surprising either - since most sites don't recognise Creative Music as a genre, and if we were looking for B's stuff in a music shop, we would have to go to the Jazz section... assuming there is one) and that "Non-Music" relates to Mr Horwitz. (Rightly or wrongly, I am presuming that Alex Horwitz is/was male. Discogs is no help, providing zero information about this person - who has no other recording credits of any description. Google nudges me only towards a guy involved with film, connected in some way to the musical Hamilton - he doesn't look old enough to have done an album with B. in 2000.)
Spoken word..?
There is one "review" of this album on Discogs, evidently by a friendly experiencer, granting one solitary star to the album. Horwitz is characterised as a "woefully unfunny comedian". The overall impression is that the album is "just painful".
So, not a ringing endorsement then...
If that's what is going on here, it explains the rather weird Genre/ Style tags, and I'm inclined to explore no further. But: before I give up on this idea completely... has anyone actually heard this album, or part of it?
***
UPDATE - see comments
* Lauren Newton is, I trust, too well-known for me to have to explain who she is. Anne Rhodes is possibly unknown except to serious fans of B's music, having been intrinsically involved with the Syntactical Ghost Trance Choir, and represented on official recordings here (with her name unfortunately misspelled) and here; way back in Feb 2012 I wrote a bit about the Leo release, and the chanteuse was gracious enough to pop in and say hello. [She was also Mrs Carl Testa at the time, though I have no idea whether this "Braxblessed" union is still intact. Relationships are complicated, and one never likes to presume.]
1 comment:
Shortly after I posted this, McClintic Sphere emailed me a clip of one of the pieces from the album, probably downloaded (years ago) from CIMP's website. As he tactfully put it, he was "not inspired to investigate further" - and now that I've heard it, I can see why not.
The clip in question is an excerpt (lasting two minutes) from Comp. 281 - the mp3 file itself is entitled only by the album's catalogue number, but the tags reveal the details. The content - well it's not even comedy, although some of the album may have been; it's just a dry male voice reading out pre-written material from various sources. B. is of course playing in the background, or the foreground as the case may be. And because of that - well, you'd really have to be a completist I think. Of course, I pretty much am that completist... even so, this would be pretty far down my wish list by the sound of it...
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