State of the blog address

 

OK... where's my head at?

First things first: last year (before I had any inkling that I was almost ready to start blogging again) I had to post on June 3rd to say that a certain traditional greeting would inevitably be delayed: some British functionaries had rather thoughtlessly timed the queen's jubilee celebrations to coincide with Anthony Braxton's birthday - and my family and I had taken the decision to distance ourselves from the fuss associated with the former by getting away from it all, which meant missing the latter (since "getting away" entailed staying in a place with no TV, no internet access - not even a phone signal). 

Fast forward eleven months, and the queen is no more, which makes her eldest son king after all these years... and apparently that in turn means another gigantic three-day bun-fight which, once again, we have deemed it prudent to miss by as large a margin as possible. Back we will go to the "field of no internet". Before we do... I just wanted to seize the chance for a bit of a catch-up.

Having recovered from my latest bout of writer's block - or whatever the equivalent would be in my case - I find myself in a slightly odd position, but probably not in a bad one. Throughout April (when I was still posting pretty regularly), nobody was reading. And then at the end of the month, at least a few people suddenly were - but I have no idea who they might have been, since no comments have been left just lately (which is perhaps hardly surprising - I'm not the quickest at responding to those, these days). So I have no idea either of whether this new formula I'm trying to settle into - interspersing detail-light musings and observations with more detail-heavy posts on very specific subjects - is actually working for anybody besides me. As always, though... that's OK. 

Of course, the beauty of picking as the main focus of my attention an artist as prolific as the maestro is that the more I get back into it, the more there will always be for me to write about - I could never really run out of material. There are all sorts of posts which are getting fairly close to being written; it's basically just a question of trying to organise them in my head so as to handle them in an order which makes the most sense. For example, I wrote recently about buying a copy of Ensemble Montaigne (Bau 4) 2013, then wrote again about the issues which are making it challenging to write about that album - and about others which similarly cover a number of different compositions; part of the difficulty with that album in particular is that the main territory (or at least the first one listed) is purportedly Comp. 174, a piece which I have never heard and which, on the face of it, is entirely unsuited to adaptation for this sort of ensemble, being specifically a work for percussion... Now, in principle, "any" Braxton composition can be adapted to any instrumentation, but there are definitely some exceptions to that rule (for example any of the solo pieces) and, without being able to make any assessment as to whether Comp. 174 is one of those exceptions, how can I say anything useful about the album at all? So I really need to hear the official recording of that piece before I can look at writing about the later album, as good as it is in its own right. (Copies are not so much difficult to acquire, as... well look, I don't have anything like an unlimited budget and I'm not going to buy any album at a price which leaves me feeling ripped off. I came very close to buying it recently, but just missed out on it...)

What else...? Let's see...  I had almost finished the previous post before I stopped to wonder why am I doing this? nobody is going to seek out this album - and by that point, I gone so far that I was not about to abandon it; and besides, by then I had already had to dig out both Six Compositions (GTM) 2001 and Jump or Die, so I shall now be revisiting both of those in the very near future... which could very well lead to further etc etc. In the case of Jump or Die, this can then serve as a useful springboard for a dive into the continued study of repertoire, since I still have at least three separate recordings I fully intend to cover along those lines, albeit not at the same granular level of detail as I ended up bringing to my analysis of "that" Thumbscrew album... still, there is a lot more I intend to write about this kind of stuff - and what better way to get started on that than by revisiting the original gold standard? (so to speak..!)

All this in turn continues to push me to work through the corners of my collection which have become neglected, and then to carry on sifting through the other recordings which I don't technically own but which I have in some form or other, and that... well, that will eventually lead me to the notorious collection of tapes which I inherited (-ish) more than a decade ago and never did find the time to tackle in any way, shape or form... they are still there, waiting for my attention... and at some point (assuming I don't keel over first) I will finally be ready to begin dealing with that. We're not quite there yet, no, but - I have at least dug out the chronological index which I made of the recordings, way back when; and I did notice that, indeed, there is a listing there for a quintet gig in 1976... in September, if memory serves... in Minneapolis... featuring M.R. Abrams, George Lewis, Holland and Altschul. - none of which, naturally, proves anything at all, but it does indicate that the recording was in circulation among collectors as a '76 date, and with that line-up... as always, nobody is really bothered about any of this except me, but that's OK, I am taking it upon myself to be bothered about it for everybody... XD

So there you go. Plenty more on the way, once I can figure out where to begin, exactly... but first, a weekend away from everything..!