Room for squares

 

John Shiurba: 5x5 1.2=A

A fairly obscure one, this: almost three years after West Coast guitarist Shiurba took part in the sessions which generated the 4-CD set Six Compositions (GTM) 2001 (which itself is waaaay overdue for another listen... note to self), he led this date, for which he secured B's participation as a special guest. (The album itself didn't emerge until 2006.)

We need to back up here to give this some context. Those 2001 happenings - about which I first posted rather excitedly, but very briefly, back in the first month of the blog - involved eight musicians, some of whom are (relatively) better known than others, coming to Wesleyan to record with B. (and Taylor Ho Bynum*) over two days in December; reed-player Scott Rosenberg had recorded with the maestro the previous year, but I don't believe any of the others had - with the obvious exception of Gino Robair. (The detailed liner notes for this well-presented set are by B. himself, and mainly focus on the principles and genesis of GTM as such, rather than explaining how these recordings came about.) I believe I'm right in saying that most - if not all - of the players were from the San Francisco Bay Area scene (and therefore had to travel all the way across the country to Connecticut in order to take part in this project).

It seems likely, then, that this was Shiurba's first encounter with B., at least in person. He was not just involved as a player; he's listed, along with Rosenberg and Robair, as co-producer for the album, a reflection of the conditions under which the release came about: the 4-CD set which I own is on Rastascan (Robair's label), but this version followed a strictly limited, hand-numbered edition of 43 copies (! **) jointly put out by Barely Auditable (Rosenberg)  and Limited Sedition (Shiurba). 

Going back a few years again, Shiurba knew at least some of these players from when he was first establishing himself. The first Limited Sedition release (in 1998) was a trio improv date with Rosenberg and Robair; this was followed the next year by a quartet, augmented by bassist Morgan Guberman. In 2004, Shiurba put out the first of what was intended to be a quintet of quintets, five successive quintet recordings featuring a mixture of written music and free improvisation by a rotating cast of players; this first volume was recorded in 2002, about nine months after the Wesleyan sessions. Robair was present, as was Matthew Sperry, who is the "M" in the album's title (by the time the recording was released, Sperry was already dead, killed in a hit and run as he cycled to work in 2003). Shiurba went on to work with significant West Coast players like Jack Wright and Matt (Ma++) Ingalls, as well as with other notable musicians as varied as Carla Kihlstedt and Andrew Raffo Dewar*** - and he was very much involved in the return engagement of 2003, which saw many of the December 2001 brigade convene at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco to record more than six hours of music#.  Unfortunately, however, it doesn't look as if he ever completed his quintet of quintets; in fact there were originally intended to be twenty-five such albums, as far as I can make out, but Shiurba managed to realise only three, and the second of these is the one I'm dealing with here##. 

Again, it's a co-production: the catalogue number suggests it's basically on Rastascan, but the notes inside explain that it's a co-release with UN-Limited Sedition... which "is like the permanent collection wing of Limited Sedition... releases will feature music which is written ahead of time (at least in part) as opposed to being entirely improvised". Shiurba, Robair and B. are joined by Guberman### - and by trumpeter Greg Kelley, another fairly major figure from this scene^ (who was of course also very much involved in the 2001 bash). The participation of Myles Boisen and Steve Norton, both of whom were central to Jump or Die (which itself set a pretty high bar for Braxton-repertoire albums - and which is another one in my to-revisit-very-soon pile), turns out to be a red herring: Shiurba was never a member of either Splatter Trio (Boisen and Robair plus Dave Barrett) or Debris (Norton - and numerous others over the years^^), and the two men's presence here is in non-musical capacities... Boisen both recorded it and mastered it, whilst Norton is credited with design & layout (although frankly if I'd designed something as hideous-looking as this I might well hesitate to put my name to it; the album cover does actually specify "with Anthony Braxton", which one would have thought was - relatively speaking - a selling point, but with brownish-red letters stuck on a murky-green background, it's absolutely possible to look at the CD under most interior lighting and not notice those words are even there). 

Yes yes yes. Is the music any good? 

Frankly, it's not worth going into this in any serious detail: the music could be incredible and I would still be right up against it, writing about an album which only the most hardcore of Brax-completists are going to bother to track down. (I'm assuming that anyone with a special interest in the West Coast improv scene - that's a pretty niche market, but I'm sure such people do exist - is probably aware of the album already.) I acquired it years ago when I was trawling through the listings on a well-known online retailer, and until recently, kept forgetting I'd got it; I doubt it is especially expensive to buy now if you look hard enough, but you'd have to go out of your way. Still, at least some of it is available on Youtube at time of writing so it's certainly worth a few observations; it's not essential, but it does feature very good players and is actually pretty decent. 

The five pieces in this set - numbered "1.2.1" - "1.2.5" - are tracks 2-6, with a fully-improvised six-and-a-half-minute "Intro" preceding them. This sounds as if it leads directly into the written theme of the second track (i.e. the first "proper" piece), but I'm inclined to think that's just very good editing: the album as a whole plays (almost) seamlessly, but it seems rather unlikely that it was literally played straight through in one take. The written theme, not very surprisingly, sounds almost as if B. could have written it: an acrobatic line, with wide interval jumps and rhythmic trickery, which the quintet has to negotiate before they settle back into what was surely most familiar for these guys (at least when playing together), i.e. improvising freely. I can't offer an opinion as to whether this sort of composition is typical of Shiurba, or whether he consciously wrote Braxtonesque themes specially for his star guest, perhaps thinking that would make him more likely to accept an invitation (... this would have been unnecessary, of course, but then again Shiurba might not have known that); either way, the remaining written pieces - and the four tracks in the middle all begin with through-composed material, before deliquescing into non-idiomatic free improv (only the very short last track is an exception to this formula) - do have a distinctly "Braxy" feel to them. 

The fourth track is the longest, and to my mind also the pick of the bunch - at least that's the impression I got on this relisten, based to a large extent on the fact that it was the only cut which forced me to stop what I was doing completely and give the music my undivided attention. After the unison written theme, Kelley and B. both make much use of breathy attacks, the trumpeter forcing air through the instrument in a way which has become strongly associated with Nate Wooley, but which sounds equally effective and captivating here - whilst B. unleashes his multiphonics, growling into the bore of his sax while simultaneously playing it, a trick I have caught numerous times before but which I never tire of hearing. The sound demands attention at this point. - And when the two of them lay out, this overlaps with the other three weaving an entirely different, equally fascinating mesh of sound, Shiurba using his guitar in such a way as to disguise where the sound is coming from, and Robair skittering his way across many different surfaces in rapid succession (a playing approach somewhat similar to Tony Oxley's, but sounding quite different from him). As the minutes ticked by, this section of the music continued to hold my attention; interestingly, though, this is also the part which compels me to say (in the para above) that the album "plays (almost) seamlessly", since it eventually reaches a complete (natural) pause, but resumes and lasts for several more minutes before the start of track five. 

Themes apart, the obvious inference is that most of the written scores must include a lot of space for complete freedom, because you can clearly hear that's where these guys feel most secure. Overall, it plays more like a free improv recording with some written interpolations, rather than the other way around. There is nothing wrong with that, though, and of course we know that B. would be happy either way. It's superfluous to state that he plays beautifully, simply because he always does; he may have an "A +" game to complement his normal "A game", but he doesn't really have a "B game" (pun not intended) - nor do I think this is unique to him, so much as it's basically an absolute core value of the AACM and was completely drilled into those older members in particular (all of whom kept each other honest). This is only ever going to be a very minor recording, and will inevitably appeal mainly to Braxmaniacs like me - but these guys did certainly know how to make music together, and it is worth checking out.

* THB actually played on only one track, but this is by far the longest piece, and occupies the first two discs; for that matter, Greg Kelley only played on that monster as well.

** That information came from Restructures, though small print on the (not limited) Rastascan CD box confirms the two other labels' involvement. The original hand-numbered issue is so obscure that Discogs does not even have an entry for it.

*** Carla K. is originally from Pennsylvania, although I, like a lot of others I suspect, was first aware of her as a member of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the experimental rock/metal band which grew out of Idiot Flesh (and yet another Oakland act). Only later did I discover her work with (e.g.) Satoko Fujii... Mr Dewar is of course best known to anyone reading this as a member of the 12+1tet.

# I'm very glad I picked this audio-only DVD up a few years ago, for an extremely reasonable price: I wasn't writing at all at the time (and wasn't listening much either), but I happened to find a copy and figured I'd better get it while I could. Good choice: it seems a lot less readily available these days.

## The liner notes refer to this album as "the second of five sets in the first of five groups of five short pieces written for five players... the A is for Anthony". Only the last part of that is easy to parse. However, the album featuring (and dedicated to) Sperry is 1.1, and this is 1.2; the only other one which got released, as far as I can see, was designated 2.5 - that numbering alone does imply that there were supposed to be twenty-five recordings in all. (Perhaps some others did indeed come out as limited CD-Rs, and Discogs just doesn't know about them yet...)

### Tempting though it is to assume that Sperry would have been first-call bassist if he had still been among the living, this may be unfair to Guberman, who had of course played on Shiurba's projects before (as detailed in the fourth para of this post).

^ I had remembered (correctly, as it turned out) reading an article by Dave Douglas in which he praised a number of trumpeters, including Kelley. I was pretty sure this was a guest post on Destination: Out - and indeed it was, though you can no longer find that site in the usual way. There is a reference to the post here, filling in the part which I had forgotten: DD was not talking about trumpeters generally, but solo trumpet recordings in particular. (Doesn't look as if Peter Evans was included in that list, despite recording whole albums of that stuff.)

^^ The members of Debris at the time of Jump or Die were all as (largely) obscure as Steve Norton himself, but over the years the band has included much-better-known figures on a (presumably-temporary) basis, such as Ken Vandermark, Cuong Vu and Andrew D'Angelo.