Repertoire: The Locals

 

The Locals Play the Music of Anthony Braxton (Discus, 2021)

I never saw these guys live, but I eventually talked to several people who did; everyone remembered their (sporadic) performances very fondly - and rumour had it that B. himself was a big fan. A project of the maverick British keyboardist Pat Thomas*, The Locals had a unique shtick: they played exclusively Braxton's compositions, but played them as if they were jazz-funk numbers. Or something like that, anyway: I don't know exactly what the band's original self-imposed remit was, but it evidently did involve electric instrumentation, and repetitive and groove-based rhythmic vamps.

When I first heard about this, I had to admit it did sound pretty cool. The idea that anyone would use this outrageous formula as the foundation for a live band is, after all, utterly and irresistibly charming. Unfortunately I discovered that in practice, the approach can be somewhat problematic, even (arguably) self-defeating: the very nature of the material's recontextualisation leads to an inevitable smoothing-off of (most if not all of) the music's jagged edges. As soon as I listened to the band for the first time**, this presented a major problem for me; indeed at the time it seemed to be an insuperable problem, and in my own mind at least - and therefore in the half-(in)formed opinions which I spouted on the old BBC R3 messagebored - I wrote off the band completely as an experiment doomed to failure. 

This was still the case when I first exchanged emails with Alexander Hawkins (yep, him again***), back in... whenever it was exactly#: Alex mentioned how much he enjoyed the band and that he had some great recordings of them; I responded that (... as detailed above). He obviously had quite a personal connection to the band, being very close to bassist Dom Lash in particular - and given that Lash seemed to me to exemplify the problem (in practice) with the band's approach, that didn't precisely win me over, but it did at least give me some real pause for thought, since it was so obvious that AH knew his stuff and also was genuinely interested in B's music. But then, I never got to hear these recordings that he was so fond of, and months and years passed, and...

... and eventually this album came out##, and by the time it did, I had warmed to the idea enough to stick it on a "wants list", though I still didn't buy it straight away. It didn't take me too long, though. 

***

The album was recorded live in Austria, at the Nickelsdorf Konfrontationen Festival in 2006. (No more precise date than that is provided with the CD, but the festival website confirms that this concert took place on the Friday night, i.e. 14th July.) The following pieces were played:

Comp. 40b

Comp. 6c

Comp. 115

Comp. 23b

Comp. 6i

Comp. 23g

- although there is some doubt as to whether this was, in fact, the entire set###. Besides Thomas and Lash, the band comprised clarinet wizard Alex Ward, guitarist Evan Thomas (who may or may not be related - anyone?) and drummer Darren Hasson-Davis.

The CD itself is pretty nicely put together, to be fair (whatever one might think of the Kandinsky-cum-Klee-cum-Miró cover art courtesy of Mark Browne): some actual thought has gone into it, and some effort at making a product which somebody might actually want to buy. There are no photos of the band as such, only a smallish one of Thomas - which is fair enough: it was his brainchild, after all - and three larger ones of the maestro: one (recent) full-panel shot in colour, with our man looking intensely off into a distance nobody else can see, as is his wont; and two half-panel b&w shots. These are presented as "then" and "now" portraits of B. taming the seamonster, a nice idea which gives some real character to the physical product. (The earlier shot is probably from the '70s or early '80s; the later one is of much more recent vintage. Full photo credits are given, as well as the basic recording and mastering info.)

The band's logo - shown inside, and on the disc - is a cool creation (even if it does slightly resemble some sort of '80s clothing emporium...), riffing on B's own diagrams and schematics. (We're not told who came up with this.) The track listing may seem unnecessarily spaced, occupying as it does an entire inside panel; but this in fact allows the label to do what some others don't, i.e. present the titular diagrams large enough to be worth showing. The actual disc is tucked away inside one of those panels, and another nice touch is that it comes inside a protective plastic envelope^. All in all, it's quite a pleasing album to own and I certainly don't regret buying it.

***

Did the music win me over, after all this time? Basically, yes - though I still have some reservations about it. I certainly shan't undertake a track-by-track analysis here, mainly because most of the pieces follow a very similar pattern: often beginning with a brief (completely free) intro featuring just some of the band, the music quickly settles into a groove laid down by the (electric) bass and drums, giving no clue which number is about to be unveiled; Ward will then start to reveal this, while the leader provides an accompaniment entirely devoid of conventional harmony, and the guitar fits in where it can. (In some of its noisier moments, the guitar actually threatens to drown out the clarinet; the live engineer is not credited, and you can make of that what you will^^.) As the pieces progress, the bass and drums remain completely locked-in, while the other three players provide the actual movement. Lash's role in particular is fairly thankless, though I imagine he still had some fun playing in this band.

Ward - as anyone familiar with him will not need to be told - is a brilliant player, one of the most creative clarinet specialists since the late John Carter; and Thomas manages to furnish support which cleaves closely to the rhythm of whatever theme is being played, while smashing the harmonic structure to smithereens; but as anarchic as this sounds, he does it in a manner which always sounds completely controlled and deliberate. These two players between them are responsible for almost all of the actual music being played, on a bar-by-bar basis; Evan Thomas contributes to the overall sound without necessarily playing anything very memorable. Of course, the band's ethos being as it is, all five of the players are essential to the formula; and as limited as the roles are which are assigned to the bass and the drums, this could not be done without them.

There are some specifics which are worth highlighting. In all cases, the themes are eventually spelled out by Ward in some way utterly unlike any previous recordings of the pieces being played; in the case of 6c, one of B's "circus marches", the spacing of the written line both tessellates neatly with the wacka-wacka rhythmic groove, and captures somehow the intrinsic spirit of the original theme. 23b, meanwhile, is slowed right down and rendered almost unrecognisable, in a way which really has to be heard to be believed; here, the original spirit of the theme is transmuted into something else altogether, but it is nonetheless pretty clever and creative. Anyone who knows the material reasonably well will find plenty to hold their attention while listening to these readings. (Anyone who is not paying close attention might struggle to recognise 23b even once the theme is fully underway.)

6i, an old favourite of mine from way back, is given a reggae-flavoured lilt to complement the '70s-porno-movie guitar, and although as always it's Ward who picks out the written theme, (Pat) Thomas himself provides much of the actual movement on this number, even though (Evan) Thomas and Ward do get stuck in during the second half. The leader here, playfully joins in with the theme, even though all he is really joining in with is the rhythmic figure, "playing the theme" in such a radically reharmonised manner that it almost makes Misha Mengelberg's approach to the Parker Project seem conventional by comparison. It is, however, very exciting to listen to and - as noted above - never sounds remotely haphazard. 

The piece which I was most curious to hear when I first bought the album is Comp. 115: this, for those who don't recognise the opus number, is B's "accordion-time" piece, originally rendered in such a way that the tempo continually accelerates and decelerates as the theme progresses. The problem here is surely obvious: given the essential nature of the source material, the approach taken by this band does not so much constitute a reimagining of the piece as just a simplification of it, removing from the work precisely the element which made it unusual in the first place. However, when I came to listen to it with open ears, I realised that this element has not actually been stripped away at all; it's just that only Ward gives voice to it, while the rest of the band remain locked into their unchanging groove. As the theme develops, the clarinet does indeed begin to introduce the accelerandi and rallentandi which characterise the original composition, and the fact that he is able to do this while all around him remains fixed in time is a testament to how much care and thought actually went into this project. The leader, again, is so thoroughly out that he provides the perfect contrast to the enforced stability of the backing players. This piece, along with the closing 23g - the prototype pulse-track, much collaged later on - seems a risky choice for this approach; but in both cases the overall rendition is so thoroughly and delightfully messed up that the band succeeds in making it work.

The blueprint, then, to sum up: the bass and drums provide the anchor, the clarinet fills in the melodic content as well as providing a great deal of the fire, and the piano and guitar counterbalance the rooted rhythms by demolishing the harmony. Thus, one could argue, whilst not playing B's music the way he would play it at all, they do end up covering its various bases - having a great deal of fun doing so, and treating the very appreciative audience to a generous dose of the same. I do still think that the formula has (quite obvious) limitations, and this was always going to be an occasional "festival band", but it has more going for it than I originally considered, for sure. When the time came, I did really enjoy listening to it, and it's an album I will be happy to play again from time to time. 

* I did actually see Thomas live once, though I had no idea who he was at the time, and it wasn't until years later that I figured it out... When I saw John Zorn play at the Barbican (with Fred Frith, Bill Laswell and Dave Lombardo - a band retroactively dubbed Bladerunner, though they were never billed as such at the time), the opening act was a trio led by Derek Bailey, plus two musicians whose names immediately disappeared from my memory: I only remembered that one played a keyboard, and the other turntables. Eventually I pieced together that it was none other than Thomas on the keys - and presumably Steve Noble on the decks (though I'm not quite so sure about that)...

** The only time I heard them, back in the day, was courtesy of three tracks broadcast by Jez Nelson (Jazz on 3). Even at the time I felt a bit ungrateful to be criticising an actual Braxton-rep band of all things, but it seemed to me on first acquaintance that the sacrifices entailed by the formula were too great to be worth making. I like to think I have mellowed out a bit since those days ;-)  As for the broadcast itself, see also ### below.

*** Hawkins was most recently mentioned here, of course.

# For some reason I don't seem to be able to find them right now, but there were two posts which date from this time: one in which I discussed a recording of Hawkins' group, which I had heard for the first time, making various erroneous conclusions about it; and a follow-up in which I detailed all the manifold ways in which I'd been wrong (the pianist having contacted me in the meantime - people sometimes did back then, the blogging scene being a lot more active in those days). I did look for them, but I'm not going to take all night over it. Dammit.

## The blurb went like this: Discus asked Pat Thomas which project or recording of his would he most like to see released - and naturally he said this one. That seemed like a pretty good vote of confidence, if true...

### Jazz on 3 played three tracks - which purported to come from this very same performance. Two of them are on this album: one, a reading of Comp. 23e, is not. The editing on the CD is quite close to being seamless, but if you pay very close attention, you can hear how, for example, track two and track three might be concealing something which was originally between them. (Why the full set was not released, one can only imagine; it's nothing to do with running time, but could of course be a familiar sad story of corrupted tape, etc.) Much to my irritation, not only can I not find those two posts mentioned in # above, I can't even put my hands on the CD-r which includes those three radio recordings - despite all the work I put in earlier this year. They can't have gone far, but... again, I'm not spending too long on this. In the meantime, I can't currently even confirm what the other two pieces broadcast actually were. {tt}

^ One problem with CD digipaks of this type is that, with the disc itself tucked away tightly inside a fold-out panel, sometimes it can be a right pain to get the fucking thing out without damaging it (or at the very least covering the laminate with fingerprints). Adding the plastic sleeve must jack up the cost a fraction - but it is a great boon to the consumer.

^^ Chances are, this signifies nothing at all beyond the fact that the information was not forthcoming at the time of eventual release. Given that the label didn't even nail down the precise date of the performance, we can't seriously expect them to have identified the sound man...