Thumbscrew, The Anthony Braxton Project (Cuneiform, 2020)
(Stop me, as they say, if you've heard this one before...)
Anyone actually keeping an eye on the blog recently will have started to wonder if this post would ever appear... so just in case: this post continues from the original pt 1, and from its follow-up; and I can tell you right now that there will eventually be at least two further posts trailing along behind this one, like cans tied to the back of a car: I need to do yet a further follow-up on the whole bamboozling business of Comp. 61 aka Comp. 29a, in the light of the official written material on the TCF site (link provided by commenter Jeff Schwartz, q.v.); and at some point I will essay a comparative study of the three different solo interpretations of Comp. 14 which are included on this here album, with reference to B's composition notes - but don't hold your breath for that one (as if anyone reading this needed to be told that...).
The first thing that needs to be said regarding the content of this post, then: it won't contain any more than passing consideration of those same three versions of Comp. 14, because they really deserve a post all of their own.
The second thing, cutting to the chase: taken purely out of context, as a listening experience (with the proviso that the listener be already somewhat familiar with creative music in general, and preferably with B's music particularly), this album is very enjoyable and does repay repeat visits. It seems important to state that clearly at (or near) the outset, given that I have previously led up to this point by airing all manner of gripes and grumbles and grievances: over the last year, the more I have listened to the album, the more enjoyable I have found it. It's also worth saying right now that the album has made me see (hear) Tomas Fujiwara in a whole new light (= audio equivalent thereof). It's not that I didn't rate him as a drummer, but until recently I had never considered him to be an ideal interpreter of B's music; I absolutely think of him that way now, as a result of repeated listens to this recording.
[- 'Cos apparently repeated listens is what it took. The first two or three plays, whenever they took place (sometime in 2020... 2021) almost might as well not have happened at all, because however much I may have "enjoyed" them - and what does one call it, when a certain amount of pleasure seems to have been obtained from listening to something of which nothing much is nevertheless retained? - I failed to carry forward some rather significant details about it. The album begins with Comp. 52, an old favourite of mine*, and yet somehow when I returned to the CD last autumn, I was surprised to see title that staring back at me from the track listing on the back cover: I had completely forgotten it was on here**. When writing the introductory post for this album, I was reduced (in the first footnote) to saying that Comp. 274 "must presumably be GTM", simply because at that point, I couldn't remember that either (and didn't want to have to interrupt my train of thought in order to check***). The one thing which I had never forgotten about the album was that it contained a renumbered piece which I already knew as Comp. 29a... but various other details, some of which are pretty salient, had disappeared from my memory altogether. #]
So much for the top-level "pros"; as regards the "cons", well, it remains the case that what I said previously (that "it is just not possible to conclude that this project turned out exactly the way the musicians had hoped, or anywhere near it") may have sounded terribly harsh, but I'm going to stick with that. At least two of the interpretations here border on the perfunctory; and since there can't possibly have been anything lacking in terms of will or good intention, I'll presume that it was ultimately down to there being less rehearsal time available than originally hoped, necessitating some corners being cut with the material. As it turns out, the ideal way to listen to this album is with your ears turned on, for sure; but perhaps not all the way on, since the more closely one listens, the harder it is to avoid hearing where those gaps are.
Now that I am finally at the point of dealing with the album as a whole, I have decided to free myself from the tyranny of writing about it track-by-track; this was something I found myself unable to avoid doing, back in the "old days", largely because there was simply so much to say about every piece; but I often felt like a terrible hypocrite, since I have extremely limited patience for that kind of review as a reader ##. As I've already said, I will basically skate over (the three different interpretations of) Comp. 14 here anyway - that cuts down to just eight the number of pieces under consideration. Those eight will get covered, one way or another; but it won't necessarily be one-second-to-the-next, as in the days of the Braxtothon.
The packaging
I do just want to address the question of the cover(s), the design etc at this point because I'm not sure this is an issue which generally gets its due share of attention. In an era where digital music is not widely available but is really the norm (at least as far as listeners under a certain age are concerned), it falls to labels to give potential buyers a good enough incentive to want to own something in physical form to begin with. Yes, the sound quality is better, that's true - but this is not something that people in general are really aware of ###, and even if they are, they may not care all that much. Most people can now play on their phone something that at least sounds good enough for them - and they get to carry that around wherever they go. Who needs clunky hard media?
Even fans of creative music - who are (arguably) more likely to be concerned about audio fidelity and hence potentially less likely to make do with listening to a recording via a streaming service - might still require persuasion, to part with their money for this product as opposed to that one. Of course the labels have problems of their own (or so I understand it), with rising overheads versus diminished profit margins, and labels specialising in niche markets such as this one are never likely to see much in the way of profit at the best of times; how do they make their product attractive to the consumer, without bankrupting themselves? Different labels come up with different solutions to that problem: older, more established ones like Leo or Emanem still use old-style jewel cases, with the associated "J-cards" and all the rest of it, but keep their design as basic and spartan as possible, spending no more on this than they have to (nothing at all, in some cases - by the looks of it); newer labels such as Clean Feed or RareNoise always take care over the cover design, but use more slimline packaging and don't always include much - if anything at all - by way of liner notes. (Those labels - such as Hat or ECM - which have both elevated aesthetics and detailed liners are presumably privately funded in some way that the others are not. As for Tzadik... I have no idea how Zorn does what he does, and I never did. ^)
Cuneiform takes the latter route, as evidenced by this album. It's a slimline CD, with a transparent tray glued to the rear cover, and no insert. But I have to say, the design of the cover and packaging, basic though it is, has actually been achieved quite carefully and tastefully; and although the cover concept itself is a pretty obvious one, with elements of B's graphic titles etc scattered around piecemeal, it works pretty well^^. Lack of liner notes is always a bit of a disappointment (and in the case of this particular project, I felt I could have done with some proper explanation as to how it was realised and what limitations were faced), but I didn't feel ripped off^^^ by this purchase, and the CD - with its mainly black and white packaging and bright blue disc - is quite a nice item to have.
The band
Though the group is a cooperative trio, it is likely that Mary Halvorson would have had to take the lead here. That is simply because she had so much more experience at studying and playing B's music than did her bandmates; Tomas Fujiwara himself has such long experience of working closely with THB in particular that he may have felt by this point as if he was immersed in Braxtoniana by association, but he had far fewer actual music-miles on the clock than the guitarist did, whilst Michael Formanek, the oldest player here by quite a way, had nonetheless no previous direct links to B's music at all that I am aware of, and thus (I will presume) less experience with material which moves this fast.
The primary materials
As previously established, the programme begins with (an unfamiliar arrangement of) a well-known and much-recorded piece, Comp. 52. Anybody reading this also presumably knows by now that although track seven purports to be the first recorded interpretation of Comp. 61, the actual music it comprises has in fact previously been recorded, under another opus number. Otherwise, the programme consists largely of premiere recordings (as confirmed by Carl Testa; but see the next para below). Track five is a GTM territory, Comp. 274 (as mentioned above); I did think - when I went and looked at it properly - that the graphic title looked somewhat familiar, but a quick bit of research here shows that these little clips (if that is indeed what they are) crop up frequently in the titles of many other GTM compositions in the 200 range: examples can be found here and here, among other places. As for the opus number itself, the closest I can find to this one numerically is here, on discs three and four (of a 4-CD set which I first wrote excitedly about in the very first month of the blog's existence), where Comps. 277 & 278 can be found; I am not aware of any previous recording of this particular work. As previously discussed, it is dealt with in just six minutes and eleven seconds, which is to say that it's turned into a cameo, a "miniature".
Tracks two and ten are the other choices which are most obviously problematic for me, representing as they do rather skeletal attempts to interpret compositions in the 150 range: these compositions all had similar graphic titles, featuring sketch-style drawings of townscapes or activities, and although they did not necessarily have hugely lengthy scores, they have tended to generate recordings which last at least six minutes. I have not been able to find a previous recording of Comp. 150 itself (track ten - duration 2.57), but Comp. 157 (track two - duration 2.21) has previously been recorded, not once but twice: B's album of duets with the late Peter Niklas Wilson features two takes of this piece~, the shorter of which clocks in at just over seven minutes. (I'm just sayin'.) No attempt will be made at this time to compare the version here with either of the earlier duo recordings.
Otherwise, we know there are three individual interpretations of the purely graphic score retrospectively designated as Comp. 14, previously unrecorded; Comp. 79 - which closes the album - was apparently~~ written specifically for a concert in NYC in which Douglas Ewart sat in with B's working trio (comprising Muhal Richard Abrams and George Lewis), but has not previously been recorded either; Comp. 68 (track four) is another one with a familiar-looking graphic title, but although other compositions in the 60 range have been much used for duets especially, I can't think of any recordings of this piece; and finally we have Comp. 35 (track eight). Opus numbers around this range tend to crop up mainly in the context of solo piano performances, but that could be a complete red herring; if the number sounds vaguely familiar to me now, it's probably only because I'm thinking of piano pieces with close numbers (come to think of it, the "locomotive" piece first recorded in October 1981 is Comp. 34, so there is no reason to think that 35 would be a solo piano work). Again, I'm not aware of any prior recordings. These last two numbers - tracks four and eight - are coincidentally the longest pieces on the album, the only two which break the seven-minute mark.
Finally on this: I say "primary" materials in the spirit of proper Braxton-related analysis, but in fact there are no secondary materials on this album. As brief as most of the performances are, there is no time for collaging.
The music
Hands up who thought I might never get round to this..? (You can't see, but I have my hand up.)
Much as I maintain that really close listening to this album reveals it as being (overall, and especially in certain specific parts) too short, the approach to the material adopted by the trio nevertheless comes really close to working perfectly. Whether or not Mary Halvorson was the de facto leader on this project, as pondered above, it's generally Tomas Fujiwara who drives changes in mood and/or intensity. Whether through study/practice or instinctively, the percussionist seems to have arrived here at an ideal understanding of how to engage with B's work: he pursues the music restlessly from the word go, never settling into one single approach for more than a few seconds at a time but continuously varying and modifying his attacks - and doing so in a way which nevertheless does not clamour for the listener's attention in some vulgar way, but rather seeks to explore and open up different facets and possibilities of the music, always in a most thoughtful manner. He also uses cymbals in a way that borders on the hypnotic, drawing out the attacks on these surfaces to help create an atmosphere which at times is almost other-worldly.
These two aspects of Fujiwara's playing, then, seem to me now to encapsulate beautifully how the musicians chose to go about the task of interpreting such inherently interesting and demanding music with (what must surely have been) quite limited time in which to prepare it. Treat the album as background music and (assuming one's taste is amenable to this sort of sound in the first place) you will pass a pleasant enough forty minutes or so, without anything much really remaining in the memory. Focus in more closely and you will find dozens of separable experiences and environments~~~, which usually flow seamlessly one into the next; and this, again, is led above all by Fujiwara - although all three players are very much "reading from the same sheet".
The microscopic attention to detail, in the percussionist's playing in particular, in turn highlights another real plus point, which is simply how good the album sounds: open your ears and pay attention, and you really will be rewarded with a marvellously rich soundscape, which sometimes fosters the illusion of being the work of more than just three players; obviously we will credit the players themselves for much of this, but kudos is definitely also due to engineer Nate Campisi.
The album is neatly bookended by the opening and closing tracks, which are somewhat of a piece, both relatively "jazzy" numbers handled at quite high intensity. Comp. 52 does not begin in that vein, however: where the "classic" studio quartet version bristles with tension right from the off, this arrangement gives each note of the written theme equal, measured weight, counting off each segment of the overall "head" - for once we could actually talk in terms of a "head" for this piece - in the manner of a ticking clock, to such an extent that unless one goes into the album expecting to hear this number up first, it would be entirely possible not to recognise it at all (and indeed I am pretty sure that's exactly what happened with me, not just the first time I played the album, but potentially the second time too). The regular spacing of the notes recalls Comp. 23m more than it does any previous rendition of Comp. 52 that I am aware of. But any serious attention paid to the piece reveals it to be filled with life and activity, the three players soon making enough sound for a quartet or quintet, varying their attacks busily to remind us very early on that B's music is, as Carl Testa says in his essay, above all a system of possibilities. - And when we eventually reach Comp. 79 at the album's close, Halvorson's opening attack there, an unanticipated bottleneck slide up the fretboard, brings with it a real rush of excitement which is pretty well sustained throughout the whole number, in which a typical Braxtonian theme, superbly played by all three, is preceded by an opening section in which Formanek's walking bass (replicating here the role originally played by Abrams on piano, as explained by Testa) counterbalances the written material played by the other two; the track as a whole ends up covering a lot of ground in the course of just three and a half minutes. It's also almost (but not quite) impossible for the attentive listener to emerge from the album feeling anything other than pleasure and satisfaction. @
The reason it's not ultimately impossible to do that has already been indicated both here, above, and in my earlier post. In terms of a sequential play through the album, we hit a snag as early as track two.
Comp. 157 is very much driven and controlled by Fujiwara, as outlined above. He not only does most of the heavy lifting during the theme, but once a shift is enjoined, it is he who drives up the intensity, something which is quickly picked up by the other two players, so that all of them build towards... wait. What happened? We were just starting to go somewhere really promising, and it's already over. All of the individual components of the track are beyond reproach, but in the end, it doesn't seem to go anywhere. Here, alas - and, alas, not just here - is where the end result doesn't reward the listener who really pays attention.
In a continued spirit of symmetry, the penultimate track ten is Comp. 150, the other most obvious example of - I presume - the band's running out of studio time. Here the piece doesn't feel quite so brutally cut short, comprising three identifiable sections, each with its own type of attacks (staccato at first then legato in the second, etc); but still, the problem is much the same: at the end of the track, the attentive ear is just starting to get really into the journey - only to be told: it's over, we hope you enjoyed your trip.
On the assumption, then, that fairly radical decisions had to be made quite early on in the recording process, concerning how much was really going to be possible under the real-world constraints (and I presume that these decisions are basically always necessary, to some extent, at least in any creative project not underwritten by unlimited patronage - which is to say, pretty much all of them), it must have been accepted that fewer pieces could even be attempted than the band might have wished, and that most of the ones they were going to undertake would still have to be interpreted pretty briefly. It's much to their credit that the band did manage to find an answer to this, one which enabled them to make of the project the best they could under the circumstances, even while the end product inevitably hints at what more might have been done. The solution, of course, was to embrace the idea of possibilities, creating little holograms in which each tiny fragment contains and reflects the spirit of the whole - but also implies manifold other fragments. Flawed as the end result is - and I can't see it as anything other than flawed, ultimately - it will always now be an album which I can return to and enjoy: what is good about still it outweighs what is missing.
The most successful interpretations, probably - and this is hardly a surprise - are the longest pieces, those which don't feel "sawn off". The spacey, far-out feel of Comp. 68 pervades the whole piece, which nonetheless progresses through distinct sections; a gorgeous, shimmering opening - in which the three players (Fujiwara using brushes, Formanek the bow) subtly mirror each other's delicate attacks - gives way to a middle section which sounds almost computerised, as the effect-laden guitar is accompanied by isolated dots of vibraphone and strings, the overall impression briefly being that we are hearing the fluttering of a CD stuck in one place. At one point (no timestamp on this I'm afraid), Fujiwara throws in what sounds like a deliberate quote from "Hat and Beard"/Out To Lunch - Bobby Hutcherson's "dead" vibes clunk (used to such terrific effect in Dolphy's 1964 classic that the percussionist just had to do it again). Throughout this ethereal piece you can really hear the three players' concentration, and the result is extremely effective. Comp. 35, which opens with rapid bursts from Halvorson and Fujiwara (again on mallets) that co-create such a busy soundscape that one scarcely misses Formanek at all, again encompasses several entirely different phases over its seven minutes, the bass and percussion enjoying a duo encounter of their own in the middle of the piece; Fujiwara plays with such wonderful variety that one could get quite lost in here, just listening to him. (His solo interpretation of Comp. 14 has much the same effect, but that's another story.) It could be argued, though, that the piece ends up feeling a little unbalanced: when all three players do play together at the end - spelling out a written line in slow, ponderous synchrony - it sounds terrific, but as by far the longest section of the piece, it can't help but flag up how brief some of the earlier parts were. This really is nit-picking, though.
As for Comp. 274, this ingeniously brief GTM-in-miniature neatly sums up both the strengths of the album and its inevitable weakness. Crammed into six minutes are four distinct phases, the first of which is of course the opening theme (which sounds absolutely replete with just the three players, again mainly thanks to the incessantly industrious Fujiwara); this time, it's Formanek who ratchets up the intensity, leaning hard on the gas in a riveting second section... which is then almost-invisibly succeeded by a much slower and quieter third section containing some startlingly beautiful instants; another more brisk phase follows that, some very busy playing by everyone leading us quickly back to the theme again to take us out. As a solution to what might otherwise appear an intractable problem - how to engage with such material at all, in so short a time - it really is very clever, and the many different tone colours and moods which are conjured up in rapid succession succeed in hinting at a far greater variety of other options, implicit if absent; at the same time, the alert listener is left wondering just how many pages of the score have actually been used here, and how many more must have been left untouched. How incredible might it be to have a full-length reading of this work, from this band? This is the essential problem: as premiere recordings, these performances simply cannot help flagging up how much material is left uninterpreted.
The same, finally, is true of track seven; leaving aside any question of what this piece actually represents - since as far as the band was concerned they were giving a premiere of Comp. 61 - the reading given by the trio is exciting and filled with possibility, opening from a march (Fujiwara playing initially just on the snare, to underline the effect) and unfurling into a short microcosm of the whole album, the band using the whole range of their shared skill and experience to imply a rather greater length and depth than is actually present. Again, though: it's there, full of life - and it's gone. Sic transit...
System of possibilities
In some parallel universe - where humans routinely collaborate instead of competing, and resources are divided up equitably - this project resulted in a two-disc set, as follows: disc one contains over an hour of diverse pieces, including three short solo interpretations of Comp. 14 and at least ten other selections, each of which is fully developed and explored; disc two is entirely given over to a full-length reading of Comp. 274, lasting more than fifty minutes.
Here in this poor shadow world, where a tiny minority controls almost all the resources and where the rest of us have to consider themselves lucky that (uncommercial) projects like this can be brought to life at all, this single disc is about as good as anybody could realistically have expected. Most certainly, it's good enough for me to want to return to it, and being able to "turn off the ears" to an extent will probably prove beneficial in this case...
* I know for a fact that I once wrote in a bit more detail about this exact same number, but I'll be buggered if I can remember when that was. (The Braxtothon itself never got even remotely close to 1981, so clearly the answer to this question does not lie along those lines...)
** As is (eventually) explained, the version on the album doesn't really sound like a typical rendition of the piece.
*** This sounds ludicrous: GTM is always identifiable as GTM within two or three seconds, so all I had to do was throw on the CD and check; but I hadn't yet sorted a lot of stuff out after the house move, and it wasn't completely straightforward to locate what I needed. (Not all of the pieces were available on Youtube.)
# Part of this is probably just down to getting older: I have noticed in the last few years that I no longer automatically convert short-term to long-term memory, so that if I have to look something up, then don't make a particular effort to remember what I read, within a month it's as if I never read it at all. That never used to be the case!! However in this instance it's probably also down to the "work syndrome" which continues to make my writing of this blog harder than it really needs to be; it's an unfortunate paradox which has long prevented me from reaching anything like my full potential, and which (obviously) made writing this post borderline torture. The music under consideration gives me more pleasure than pretty much any other art, but I am prevented from simply enjoying it by the self-inflicted "need" to analyse it, etc etc ad nauseam. As for writing about it: sometimes it flows, but most of the time, it's more of a trickle (and even that has to be coaxed continuously to get it to emerge at all). - The photo used for this post relates back to 2021's "birthday card" - as soon as I wrote that, I knew at once which picture would accompany this when I eventually wrote it. (Did I really think it would only take me a few weeks?! Of course, back then I was trying to take pressure off myself by intending to write something very superficial - and it still didn't work.)
## Of course, I'm a bit of a hypocrite generally, being someone who - when he writes at all - writes at great length, but has limited patience for reading what other people have to say. (Some of this is down to my never having learned how to study properly when I was younger, not having needed to do so at the time.)
### This really isn't the place to enter into the whole "audiophile question", although I will say that I have long been suspicious of people who describe themselves thus; leaving all that aside, I have known many people over the last ten years or so who have offloaded all their CDs and so on, as "you just don't need that stuff any more, it's all online these days" - they can't understand why I still buy CDs at all. (I don't bother arguing with them, obviously.)
^ Some of these labels also deal in (so-called) classical music; of course, whether that actually helps pay the bills these days, I'm not sure. There has to be something I'm missing here, since I can't imagine that even independently-wealthy label-owners would want to keep sinking their own money into releases which won't make anything back. (Zorn is working some sort of magic/k, and is apparently very good at it.)
^^ This approach rather cleverly hints at collaging, even though there isn't any of that to be found on this album...
^^^ I have had that feeling more than once when purchasing items on RareNoise, unfortunately: no liners, no nothing. Obviously I understand the need to keep expenses down, but... you have to give buyers a reason to want to buy in the first place. As regards Clean Feed in particular, there is quite a gulf at times between their design (usually excellent) and their actual packaging. The Braxton/Joe Morris box was such a disappointment when I bought it - four CDs in clear plastic wallets, no notes, no insert at all - that I actually contacted them wondering if my copy had something missing. I did eventually get a reply saying that I couldn't even imagine how much it had cost to produce... and I do have some sympathy with that, of course. But... - As for Emanem and (especially) Leo, it's almost the opposite problem. There are (nearly) always liner notes, but so little effort seems to go into the design that it's almost as if they don't WANT people to buy their stuff... admittedly this is not usually the case with Leo's Braxton releases - where the graphic titles themselves make for simple but effective cover art, if all else fails; but some of the other releases on that label, my goodness... anyway.
~ Almost of the album with Wilson consists of compositions in the 150 number-range, and all of them are around six minutes or longer. You see where I'm going with this.
~~ It's taken so long to get this written that I have deliberately avoided getting the Compositions Notes out, but there is an excerpt from them in Testa's essay, which also fills in the other details I've relied on here. It is, of course, possible that I have at least one recording from the Storyville residency in amongst that collection of tapes which I never got round to exploring (huge sigh...) - one day sooner rather than later, I really do intend to get stuck into those...
~~~ It's an exaggeration to say "dozens", but one which I decided to leave in. It sort of feels as if there are dozens. (Partly that is because other sounds are implied if not heard, as is discussed above...)
@ This sort of work - or delving into work of this nature - tends to lead to its own little coincidences and synchronicities. It is not lost on this amateur philologist that I have twice mentioned Carl Testa in the same paragraph in which I noted how unusual it is to refer to a head in this context :-D
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