Is this actually happening?

 

McClintic Sphere brought this to my attention recently - isn't it just as well one of us is up-to-date with such things? - and I initially just registered it as an upcoming Braxton event, right here in the UK indeed, without fully comprehending just how weird and unlikely an event it is.

For those who may not know, the BBC Proms are/is a long-running annual music festival in which - hell, what am I talking about... I daresay everybody has probably heard of the Proms and has at least some idea what they are - which is, after all, about as much idea as I have myself, not being overly interested in classical music*. As a child I would end up sat in the living room while the Last Night of the Proms was on, but this now seems like one of those tragic imperial hangovers which refuse to go away (in which the orchestra plays things like "Land of Hope and Glory", and everyone waves little union flags and pretends that Britain is still a global superpower). It's been a very long time since I would dream of sitting through anything like that, and as for the concerts themselves... I just wouldn't know. Apparently (sez Wikipedia) 'Czech conductor Jiří Bělohlávek described the Proms as "the world's largest and most democratic musical festival"**' - and clearly I have no opinion on that, but you would have to excuse my cynicism preventing me from believing in the idea of much cutting-edge contemporary music taking place at such a festival, even if it does last eight weeks. The Brits in general conflate art and entertainment to the extent that any attempt to explain the difference sees their eyes glaze over within seconds. People with money treat this stuff as "fun" because they know they are supposed to like it, as with opera and ballet, but really for most of them it's just about getting tanked up and being seen in expensive evening clothes***. 

An-y-waaaay... blow me down if they haven't somehow allowed a programme to slip through the net which contains some actual cutting-edge contemporary music, albeit only in the second half. It would appear that this was achieved with the utterance of the magic words "Duke Ellington", since even the British middle classes have heard of him, and would know that they are supposed to pretend to admire him, even if they have no very solid idea of who he was. But yes, I pretty much have to assume that this was how the event was pitched to the organisers, since very few of their target audience can be expected to know anything at all about Mary Lou Williams (to be fair, I know relatively little myself) - and if any of them have heard of B. at all, this is more or less guaranteed to be along the lines of "that weird American jazz musician who makes music nobody understands". The set has been carefully contrived to open with the Ellington stuff, followed by Williams' Zodiac Suite, followed by the interval... and it will be quite interesting to see how many people make it back from the bar after that. 

But enough of my cycnicism (for the time being). I say that it "will" be interesting, not "would", because however I might feel about attending something like this, I really have to do so - the logistical details will just have to work themselves out nearer the time. As you can see from the event's webpage, the whole concert will be conducted by Ilan Volkov, who has been brought to my attention on at least one occasion recently#, and will mainly feature the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; but there are also guests and soloists, and B. himself is due to play, together with James Fei and Katherine Young. The post-interval set, projected to last around thirty minutes, is due to comprise a very rare public performance## of Comp. 27, with additional material from Comps. 46 & 151 as well as language musics - which sounds like ( = is) a lot to squeeze into one half-hour set, so who knows exactly how this will be achieved; all three of these pieces were composed for creative orchestra, or rather 27 and 151 were, whilst technically 46 was originally written for ten players, but has "previous" as an orchestral piece. Comp. 27 itself has never been officially recorded, and looks - in the catalog(ue) of works - like a close relative of Comp. 25 (which of course was recorded) - but B's notes say that it is more useful to view it as "the second part of Comp. 24" (which itself had to wait well over three decades to be recorded). [46 has been recorded a few times: besides its 1980 orchestral outing as noted above, it crops up on BH009, where it opens the album; it is also featured on NBH048 - and has doubtless been collaged in as a tertiary before now. 151 has turned up on multiple occasions, and Volkov has prior experience of conducting it.]

Alexander Hawkins evidently knows Ilan Volkov, and describes him as "a great conductor", adding that he is sure they will do a brilliant job of interpreting all this music, so even if there may not be very many of us who can truly even try to appreciate it, I can buy my ticket with faith in the musicians' intention to try their best to do the material justice. Now, how do I let the maestro know that I am planning to be there this time..?

* I was brought up on it, among other things, but I so long ago turned away from the values of the British middle class that any real interest in this stuff went with it. Baby, bathwater..? Yes, quite possibly, but although I sometimes feel a twinge of guilt for not bringing up my daughter to be at least familiar with it, I never really miss it and I don't think it matters much. (She found her way to her own taste with very little help from me.) In principle I am up for exploring contemporary notated music, but in practice I would probably need a guide through it at this juncture. [As for the term "classical music", I trust that anyone reading this understands that term for the misnomer that it usually is, classical denoting a period in Western art music, not the entirety of it.]

** Noted on the Wikipedia page for the Proms, indexed with a link from here - a quick glance at which tells me that the Czech was chief conductor of the BBC SO in 2007, when he said that (... so it's not as if he had no skin in the game at the time). 

*** Grotesque hyperbole aside, I am writing from some personal experience here. But I don't particularly want to talk about it :-S

# I had remembered it as being at least two occasions, but it looks as if it was one occasion, approached from two different angles in fairly quick succession. The point is, Volkov has worked with B's music before, and has worked on at least some of this material before, so his would seem to be a safe and sympathetic pair of hands (so to speak).

## It's not strictly speaking a premiere, though it may very well be the first performance of the "third revision" alluded to in the Composition Notes. Composed in 1971 (Book B) or possibly in '72 (catalogue of works), the piece was first performed at San Jose State University in 1975; that premiere was itself of the second revision, apparently. One thing's for sure: it has very seldom been played at all, anywhere, and this does add some extra spice... 

All sax, all of the time (more new releases, pt 2)

 

Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022

From a solo saxophone album, we move on to a saxophone quartet, for another new release - another box set, actually - which I could easily have missed altogether, if McC had not brought it to my attention: Discogs does list it, but it's one of those outlier releases peculiar to that site, filed (in this case) under Anthony Braxton Saxophone Quartet, but not under the main entry for B. himself. (This really makes no sense, but... ah, fuck it.)

A much more useful place to look for this, then, is under the entry for the release itself on Bandcamp. Here we have full details and excerpts from the performances, as well as a video, just under thirty-two minutes long, of B. talking to camera in a sort of Q&A sessions (where the questions mainly happen offscreen, and what we are left with is the lengthy answers). I watched, this and listened to the audio clips, before posting.

The album is put out by the Bolognese label i dischi di angelica, which (in the style of Moers Music, and others) is attached to a local music Festival: in this case, naturally enough, the AngelicA Festival, under which auspices the second disc from this four-CD box was recorded, on 3rd June 2022; the Q&A session was recorded in the same city the previous day. But the live performance in question was in fact one of four on a short European festival tour that summer, and all four concerts are presented in this box. For these dates, B. was joined by longtime senior student/ major collaborator James Fei and by another Wesleyan alumnus making a return, Chris Jonas; for the first show, in Vilnius, the quartet was rounded out by yet another former student, Andre Vida, who played on just this date; for the remainder of the tour, the fourth voice was supplied by Ingrid Laubrock. Bologna was the second stop, followed by Antwerp and Rome in due course*. 

The label makes a bit of a fuss about the instrumentation: rather surprisingly, they describe the format as an "almost unprecedented lineup for the composer", citing as the only strict precedent the version of Comp. 37 which appears on side two of New York, Fall 1974**; more perversely, they then mention the 2001 album Composition N. 169 + (186 + 206 + 214), which does star four saxophones, it is true - three of which were played by B. plus Fei and Jonas, again - but which also features an orchestra. (Some mention of this album was made on the blog last year.) The point being, if multiple saxophones plus other instruments are to be included in this, there is absolutely no shortage of such recordings - from the mid-1990s onwards***; and if we are only considering multiple saxophones without other instruments, well, there is precedent for that too, isn't there? It just happens that B. has not regularly employed a saxophone quartet, per se; but with that format being used by every Tom, Dick and Harry since the 1970s#... why would we expect the maestro to do the obvious? (We'll allow for a bit of label hype here, but will also assume that they may be unaware of the saxophone quintet recordings.)

Also inducing a steeply raised eyebrow here was the suggestion that the "distinctive feature of this new project is the addition of electronics", with the blurb going on to explain about SuperCollider, as if this were being unveiled for the very first time. Obviously, we all know that that is absolutely not the case, and indeed the question which McC and I have had ever since the first Lorraine document was released is: what is it about this new system which really sets it apart from Diamond Curtain Wall Music? That question was not answered by the Other Minds album, nor was it really cleared up with the release of the recent megabox - and in all likelihood it won't be fully answered by this new set either, at least as regards the distinction between the two systems for the listener. What is becoming more and more clear is that for the composer himself, there is a massive difference.

Much of the content of the video (which is freely available on the Bandcamp page - go check it out) concerns background theory of B's musical systems in general, and won't be looked at here at all (not least because there is a great deal of overlap with the content of an online article which I was already going to post about, hopefully later this month); this was obviously considered necessary as part of the explanation of what the Lorraine system is. This, you see, is part of a "new system of poetics", according to the maestro himself, as removed from the origin systems as clouds are from the ground; all that has gone before is part of the "ground floor" layout of B's Tricentric musical model; centred around winds and breath, the new music is the first of the systems which will make up an "ethereal world", designed to "fly above" the ground floor systems. (In the future, we are told, there will be a corresponding "underworld" layer, too, but this has not yet been formulated.) At the time of speaking in Bologna, B. still did not know how many new systems would make up this "ethereal layer" - he speaks of needing to do more research, which might take as long as another ten years##. In the meantime, he had already composed nine pieces for the Lorraine system, and envisaged "fifteen to twenty" in total before he would be able to declare the system complete and move onto the next constituent element###. 

At the time of writing today, then, there are already fifteen compositions that I know of within this new system; some rearranging of numbers must have taken place somewhere along the line, since the four works unveiled in 2022, and released in this box set, bear the opus numbers 436-39 inclusive, and all the others released thus far have lower numbers than that. (If only nine had been finished by June 2022, clearly they were not all composed in - what is now - strict numerical order.) For the sake of completeness: the recent NBH box collects Comps. 423-28 (all recorded live in 2021) and Comps. 432-35 (recorded in the studio the following year, less than two weeks before the tour documented in this latest box was undertaken), whilst the Other Minds album in duet with Fei presents Comp. 429 (also recorded live in the autumn of 2021). Missing from this list are Comps. 430-31, not yet accounted for; but in any case, and not for the first time, something doesn't quite add up here... leaving aside the whole business of exactly when the opus numbers were assigned to the works themselves, the chronology would seem to confirm that on June 2nd 2022, at the time of the Q&A session in Bologna, twelve new pieces had already been performed live or recorded in the studio; even if we assume that those last three were being finished during the tour - which seems unlikely but is not impossible, given the way this man operates (and allowing for the calibre of his collaborators here, all of whom were very thoroughly versed in B's methodologies by this point) - this still indicates something awry with the maestro's arithmetic... but if I'm honest, that doesn't feel like a new problem and as usual, I'm prepared to overlook it ;-)

What really matters here, after all, is the music itself, which is pretty sublime, as far as can be judged from the available samples. The four performances are subdivided into parts on the Bandcamp page, and presumably on the CDs themselves; of these, one part from each concert can be streamed from the webpage, between seven and eleven minutes in duration, and this is more than enough to glean the overall "flavour" of the music. With the players involved, it is no news at all that a very considerable level of virtuosity is on display, and I will definitely buy a copy of this box in the near future to hear the whole thing for myself. It's worth stating that the excerpts published do make it clear that there are frequent passages with no electronic backing, and some unison written parts which do, after all, sound completely different from anything we might associate with DCWM. It goes without saying that we can hear breath, given the instrumentation; if the listener focuses on the idea of floating or flying, there are passages too which appear emblematic of that. At the same time, when the electronics are present, there are passages which even a diligent listener probably could not distinguish from DCWM in a blindfold test (... I am sure I couldn't). But it does seem apparent that the interactive software is less essential here than it was in that previous context, and there are often is quite a sense of "air and space" about these proceedings. It does sound pretty new and fresh, I must admit; and it is quite beautiful. The conceptual distinctions might only be fully clear to the composer and his players, or to anyone who has access to the scores and understands how to read them; the beauty of the music is completely exoteric and will be obvious to anyone who pays attention.

***

Yet another piece of news concerns an upcoming live event, right here in the UK this time; but that, too, will require a further post all of its own..!

* The itinerary here was nothing like as wearying as the "bad old days" of the 1970s and '80s, when groups had to travel around obscure parts of Europe in no great comfort, and were sometimes booked to play twice in one day - in two different places; but still, it seems bizarre that June 2nd found B. in northern Italy, where he played the following day, but that he thence had to fly up to Belgium for the 5th, only to return to Italy for the 7th... still, I suppose that in this case the scheduling was governed by which slots were available at the various different festivals. Tiring stuff, nevertheless...

** Famously, this utilised (what would later be) three quarters of the World Saxophone Quartet - minus David Murray, still in California at this point. In other words, B. himself actually got there before they did, though who knows whether Hemphill had already conceived of such a thing...

*** This is only to be expected, since the first musicians who sought B. out at Wesleyan were predominantly reed players, and the recordings from that point on overwhelmingly feature his students. 

# Slight exaggeration here, but the format has been used quite a lot since the mid-70s, and the impression I have is that for every ROVA there are about ten far more safe and traditional outfits. 

## One hopes it will take rather less than that, since the same interview sees B. acknowledge that he may not have that much time left to him, and that his main focus is to complete the 36-act Trillium cycle and to realise some more Sonic Genome projects. If any more detail has become available in the last two years regarding the precise nature and structure of the "ethereal world" systems, I am not yet aware of it...

### ... but whilst I immediately though "Thunder Music" when he mentioned moving on to the next system, this same thought clearly occurred to somebody off to B's right at the same time, and the maestro said no, Thunder  Music is part of the origin / ground-floor systems. (Rather confusingly, the account he then gives of Thunder Music makes it sound exactly like SGTM, though surely there has to be a difference... all will become clear, maybe? But let's not count on it..!)

All sax, all of the time (more new releases, pt 1)

 

Since I returned to posting here - indeed, since before then really - it has seemed as if the steady stream of new album releases from B's corner had dried up; of course, one possible explanation for that is that people behind the scenes are busy preparing monster box sets, but still... 

However, that does seem to be changing just lately! Having only just written about one new release - and whilst still waiting to see how easy it might be to get hold of another (albeit from last year) - I was nudged by McClintic Sphere about not one, but two further new arrivals... and I was planning to deal with both of them in one post, but as it turns out there are just too many digressions too many observations to make on the first one, so that the second one will have to follow along in a day or two. The blog can wait ;-)

This first one, then, is another in the long line of solo alto recordings, with the slight difference being that it's not a new recording: titled Solo Bern 1984, First Visit, it comprises a performance recorded live at Altes Schlachthaus, Bern on July 7th 1984, and is released now as part of a special new imprint (itself called First Visit) on the Hat subsidiary ezz-thetics. 

All of the solo albums are well worth hearing - by anyone with a serious interest in saxophone playing, never mind any friendly experiencers as such - and it would be fatuous to do the jazz-journo thing of making out that this is particularly or unusually excellent, but then again not all of the solo albums I've heard (which is most but not all of them) have grabbed me the way this one did. The set consists of twelve originals, plus two Coltrane numbers ("Giant Steps" and "Naima", both also interpreted elsewhere) and two of B's beloved "old chestnuts" from the songbook (in this case "Alone Together" and "I Remember You", both of which must be real favourites of the maestro's: they crop up again and again in various contexts). The originals are (of course) chosen for their variety as much as anything else, so that the programme takes in everything from soaring ballad structures to brutal exercises in multiphonics, overblowing and the like - and a bit of almost everything in between. With no desire to try to unpick each piece individually - anyone interested must simply set about getting hold of this and listening to it - I will just dwell on a few of the marvels on offer here, before turning to those pesky digressions I mentioned earlier. 

Track 6 is Comp. 118f, primarily an exercise in buzz logics - though Composition Notes Book E does list several other specifics in its instructions for this piece - which sounds like an extremely demanding piece to play, requiring both a great deal of breath (as evidenced by the huge gulps of air B. takes every few seconds) and very close and precise timbral control. Even if he was already versed in circular breathing at this stage*, I am not sure that it would have been the appropriate approach to take for this, which naturally seems to want to be broken up into separable attacks as per this performance**.

This is immediately followed by the aforementioned "Giant Steps", played in a rather allusive, indirect manner with only occasional recourse to Coltrane's written theme, interpreted "in spirit" and taken at a suitably brisk pace. B's reading lasts just under four minutes, but given that it follows on from a piece which would surely leave many players dizzy and light-headed, and that he has only had 20-30 seconds of applause in which to recover and get ready, this really showcases his amazing stamina and tests his technical mastery to the full.

Track 8 then is Comp. 26b, rather a storied piece - first recorded in a Paris studio in 1972, it is dedicated to (Kalaparush(a)) Maurice McIntyre, was played live in 1974, and has been regularly revived at intervals since - which runs through an extraordinary sequence of orthodox and extended techniques, including (to great effect) the noisy clacking of keys at one point. 

Track 12 is listed here as Comp. 118q (we'll get to this presently) and is basically "just" a five-note, ascending and descending arpeggio sequence which gradually acquires more and more harsh subvocalisation along the way, switches octaves, gathers speed, acquires more harsh tonal distortions, and - eventually twists itself into something quite different, over the course of three and a half minutes. There is a real release from some of the audience when this one ends, but once again it's a piece which must surely require such controlled power and technical skill that one can imagine it finishing most lesser players off. Come to think of it, this one does seem to be a circular-breathing exercise***, and one of quite extraordinary ambition, varying its pitch, timbre, tempo and dynamics along the way - all to great effect, of course. 

So, this brings us to the digression phase of the post, as we turn our attention to some of the opus numbers given on the official release (and which pass unquestioned by Art Lange in his liner notes#). I just described a piece named here as 118q: but according to both Composition Notes Book E and the Catalog(ue) of Works, the 118 series only runs as high as 118L; track 5 is titled Comp. 99q, where the 99 series (offically) terminates at 99k. Track 10 calls itself Comp. 106r, where the official listings for the 106 series go only up to 106m. And as for track 4... ok, we'll come back to that in just a minute.

There is precedent for this sort of thing, and I'm not about to blame it all on Werner X. Uehlinger (even if we might legitimately ask him where some of these purported titles really came from). The 106 series does indeed only go up to 106m, but that didn't stop Leo Records from giving us "106n" or Intakt from putting out "106p"##; another Leo release gave us "118m", and its sister release offered both "99L" and "99m". Who knows where these titles originate, or whether any of the respective producers bother to check them much when putting these albums out? After all, it's normally only a tiny handful of super-pedants like me who would ever notice, and clearly it's taken me long enough... mind you, Graham Lock famously flagged up one such anomaly years ago, even if he didn't actually solve the puzzle. And let's be clear, some of this confusion might originate with the maestro himself: after all, the Catalogue confirms that there was in fact a Comp. 99a - unrecorded - but there is no listing for it in the Composition Notes, where the 99 series begins with 99b### .

The real enigma on this album, though, and the one which prompted me to do all this checking in the first place, is track 4, listed here as Comp. 170c. In this case, there is no problem with the opus number as such; but there is a major conceptual hurdle to clear with regard to the date of recording. The studio solo albums, at least, tend to focus on the most recent series of original solo works, whichever one that was, often dipping into the earlier canon as well, and/or throwing in the odd "cover" (more common in live settings). The studio album which unveiled the 170 series is this one, which showcased no fewer than seven entries from that series. The recording date was November 14th 1992. How could one of these same pieces have been played more than eight years earlier? This just seems extraordinarily unlikely, not least because in 1984, although the (Martinelli) numbering system was very much in place, the range of numbered pieces was nowhere near that high yet. Works with numbers in the range 15x - 16x very much continue to appear (for the first time) in the early '90s. So I am going to say unequivocally at this point that whatever track 4 was called at the time of performance, it most definitely was not known as 170c. 

The odd thing is... if you compare it with the version on Wesleyan (12 Altosolos) 1992, it really could be the very same piece, allowing for interpretation on the day; as Lange notes in his liners here, few of the solo pieces are actually written-out, but instead comprise short (or in some case long) lists of instructions: this is absolutely borne out by the Composition Notes. So I can well understand how, somewhere along the line^, that title got attached to this piece; I just don't think that decision was properly thought through, and I suspect that what B. actually played in Bern back in '84 was a different piece altogether, which just happens to have several common features with a later work. (Even the maestro revisits his ideas, after all.) 

The only other digression, really, is to note that it's a bit of a disappointing copout to say that "the space on the backcover is not wide enough to show the symbols of Anthony Braxton’s compositions". This is a digital-only release and the solo pieces have very simple, easily-reproduced diagrams assigned to them. Really not sure what happened there - unless of course the process was started, but foundered on the rocks of non-existent opus numbers, as detailed above - but it does come across as uncharacteristically weak of this producer, whose various labels have set such a high standard in the past for their design and packaging.

Gripes and puzzles aside, though: what a brilliant release, and well worth waiting for! Forget all about the mystery titles and just cheer along with the Swiss audience, from all those years ago...

* I remember hearing B. say (in a BBC radio interview) that he was taught circular breathing by Evan Parker, his "last saxophone teacher" - but he didn't say when that was exactly. [If I ever felt I had pinpointed that in the recorded discography, I have forgotten it now... (but see footnote ***)]

** 118f has been revisited a number of times, both live and in the studio - I'm not about to make a comparison at this point. 

*** There are occasional missed notes, but no actual audible inbreaths that I can hear - and indeed if you listen closely enough you can hear him breathe while he is playing, so this has to be done with circular breathing. Pieces which don't use it, therefore, don't call for it.

# Not beating up on Lange, here: he is "one of the good guys" with a definite affection for B's music, and extensive knowledge of it - no question about that. But he's also Uehlinger's in-house essayist for this stuff, and there is only so much effort any writer will bring to that sort of paying gig: painstaking research/fact-checking is not likely to be included. 

## The Intakt release - Willisau Solo, recorded in 2003 (released 2007) - has a pretty weird track list all round, it must be said... probably I should look into that at some point..!

### Composition Notes Book E, p.89. The diagram confirms this is 99b; p.88 contains the last of the notes for Comp. 98. It's as if Comp. 99a doesn't exist - but there it is, in the Catalog(ue) of Works.

^ The back cover confirms that this 2024 digital release is the first edition; but Lange's notes were actually penned in August 2015, "revised 2024"... so clearly this project has been a long time in the pipeline.