OK, maybe not quite swiftly enough, but I don't want that dissatisfied bit of venting to sit at the top of the blog any longer than it has to, however much it may have felt necessary...
Some other brief observations, then. One of the things I listened to over the last week is Duo (Heidelberg Loppem) 2007, B's improvised duet(s) with Joëlle Léandre; this is a delightful recording and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it, but besides that, given my recent musings on the subject of B's approach(es) to duets in general, I had half an ear out for anything which sounded unusual, in whatever way. And there were some unusual moments, for sure: trouble is, I didn't make any notes at the time so I can only be very vague about what those might have been. It is probably still the case (as previously mentioned) that most of the unexpected stuff came from JL rather than from B. - and even then, "unexpected" would have to be glossed as "unexpected in the context of duets with B." since JL does quite a lot of this stuff and although I do have several other recordings of her playing in fully improvised settings with other partners - Steve Lacy, Lauren Newton, William Parker - it's been quite a while since I listened to any of them (as indeed it has since I played this, fairly obviously). Of course, JL is a bit of an outlier for this kind of music anyway, because she has no involvement with the jazz scene at all, free or otherwise: she plays new (classical) music, and she plays free improv, but nothing "in between" as I understand it. (We know that as a conservatory student in Paris, she attended jazz clubs regularly and was particularly enthused by frequent doses of J-F Jenny-Clark; but she seems to have decided very early on that active participation in that scene was not for her, and for that matter I've never heard her cite "Jif" as a direct influence, however much she may have admired him as a player.)
Whatever the reason, then, it was probably JL's utterances rather than B's which struck me as being "unusual sounds for this sort of meeting". I am also pretty sure that some of the sounds which came from the horn(s) did give me pause for thought too; one of the difficulties here is that the CD player I'm using currently doesn't have a time counter on it, so unless I set a stopwatch at the start of the CD, I am going to be unable to reference anything very precisely (until further notice). Accordingly, I generally don't even try at the moment. The upshot of all this vagueness, however, is that the (double) CD did strike me several times as being a useful counter-example to my half-arsed hypothesis - and contrary to what one might expect, I am very much looking to be proved wrong here, not right - and (to repeat and sum up) very enjoyable indeed. [I have the feeling that I may have mentioned the CD before, years ago, though I can't remember when; but I know I didn't get that far in my unfinished look at B's "contrabass duet series", because I was doing them in chronological order and this one was earmarked for Pt 2, which never got published as such.]
The fact that the presence of a collaborator from outside the "usual circles" might have led to an especially fruitful meeting leads me to the next recording, which really is something I haven't listened to in years: 2 Compositions (Järvenpää) 1988, a recording which captivated me immediately when I first heard it* and which - not necessarily unusually for me, it must be admitted - I promptly shelved to "return to one of these days". (I genuinely don't think I have played it since, until the other day. Of course, as recently mentioned, for most of the last decade a large proportion of my collection has been out of easy reach.)
The recording is credited to the "Ensemble Braxtonia", which - one would infer from the very brief liner notes - is how the group (which included B. himself) was billed for a seven-date tour of Finland; the CD itself is credited to B., but of course that is in his capacity as the composer of the music which comprised the programme: in other words, there is no indication that the ensemble existed before this tour, nor (unfortunately) that it survived the tour's completion. All seven of the Finnish musicians who accompanied B. in this venture would appear to (have) be(en) quite well-established in their domestic scene(s - some of these guys also played classical music), but I doubt if any of their names are familiar to creative music listeners generally, unless those listeners are intimately familiar with Edward Vesala's various projects; presumably all of them had reason to be up for this particular challenge, but it doesn't look as if they had much (if any) prior familiarity with B's oeuvre. That, however, is all to the better: the "unknown" quality of this collaboration gives it a freshness which grabbed me back when I first heard it, and grabbed me in very much the same way (even without the magic of marijuana...) this time. It's not the easiest CD to listen to, partly because it's mastered in such a way as to require the volume to be turned up very high in order to hear it properly, and partly because there is no indexing on it at all, the entire set being presented as one 70-minute track, with no indication even of where Comp. 144 ends and Comp. 145 begins (assuming that they are played in sequence, rather than merged together in some way - who knows). Nevertheless, once it's underway, it demands the ear's attention and I didn't really struggle at all with the playing time. (In any case, it's really much the same as listening to a full GTM or DCW set, most of which are similarly unindexed on CD.) It appears that back in 2012, I was interrupted just over halfway through; this time, I played the whole thing end to end, and not only did that not feel like hard work, I kept having to stop whatever else I was doing in order to give my full attention to the music. It really would be an exceptionally difficult album to write about in detail, I think, but the continual freshness and originality of its sound(s) is a wonder to behold. Definitely won't leave it another ten years before listening to that one again.
I have also this week revisited another album which blew me away on first listen**, 11 Compositions (Duo) 1995 with Brett Larner. Besides my having acquired these last two albums more or less simultaneously, one of the things they have in common is that I included both of them on my 2013 "best-of list" (so tempted to use strikethrough for that phrase...), having been utterly charmed by them upon first acquaintance. The Larner duets didn't have quite the same impact this time around, but I played those over two sessions and the second definitely went down better than the first, so maybe it was really just down to mood and concentration. In any case, this one has some very unusual features and really deserves a post all of its own, if I can get one together sometime... for now let's just say that it's (yet) another very interesting release and well worth chasing down if you don't already have it.
Finally, for the time being, a quick visual update:
- The only major addition*** there is on the fifth shelf down, where Circle's Paris Concert has now taken up residence. This one is not a new acquisition - I've had that CD almost twenty years now (scary as that sounds to me), but it was formerly housed under "C" with my jazz CDs (not pictured). Those guys having recently required a spot of reorganisation (and a good spring clean), it seemed a good time to acknowledge that, realistically, the only reason I still own this one is because of B's involvement. A small number of CDs on which B. appeared as a sideman or special guest are still in with the jazz CDs, but this cooperative group, unjustly claimed by the reissue market as a Chick Corea solo project, has come "back home" where (I've now decided) it belongs. About time too :-D
* I apologise in advance to anyone who tries to read that earlier post, because I didn't have the patience to get through it. Listening to the recordings whilst high usually worked marvellously well for me (as B. himself was able to attest). Writing whilst in the same state... didn't always work out that well. After a while, it seemed only to result in completely unreadable posts. What I gained in enthusiasm was well and truly lost in terms of coherence, alas...
** As above, for the apologies... this last post for 2012 very much picked up where the previous one had left off, both in terms of starting out by discussing (ish) the Finnish album before moving on to the 11 koto duets, and in terms of its general tone and (un)readability.
*** The other unit was not previously there, of course. Visible below some John Zorn CDs are the vast majority of the CD-Rs which I burned back in the "golden age of music blogging", most of which got completely neglected in the last house (2014-22) and are only now being "revived". As you can see, this is not an ideal way of storing such things... but I'm working on it..!
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