Octet (New York) 1995 (Braxton House)
Following the unveiling of B's brave new musical strategy in Istanbul on 14th October 1995, there were at least some more dates around South-Eastern Europe - as we know from the presence in the discography of Solo (Skopje) 1995 (documenting a performance given in (what was then called) Macedonia on October 18th) - but the next set of recordings in the sessionography relate to concerts presented under the aegis of the Tri-Centric (Thanksgiving 1995) Festival, at the good old Knitting Factory in NYC. Though not listed on Restructures as being part of this event, the live date which resulted in the Splasc(h) Records release Six Standards (Quintet) 1996 (featuring B. on piano, with Mark Whitecage taking up the reed mantle in this case) took place at the very same venue on November 22nd, two days before the recording we'll be looking at today; it seems overwhelmingly likely that these concerts were part of the same residency*. In any case, what concerns us here is not the standards date but the next instalments in the great GTM experiment...
... both of which took place on November 24th. I haven't yet been able to establish which of the two performances actually took place first: Restructures listed the octet before the ensemble**, but there is no explanation for this - no details of what time the two performances commenced etc - so the tempting assumption is that they were listed in the order of the catalogue numbers assigned to their eventual releases: BH006 before BH007. (Never mind that following the order of the official releases is bound to be somewhat misleading anyway: the studio sessions which produced the very first GTM recordings comprise an album released with the catalogue number BH005, whilst BH001 presents the live performance given almost two months later. The order in which the actual albums saw the light of day, in other words, cannot be taken as representative of the chronology for the source recording sessions or live performances - as a matter of fact, even the order of the releases themselves is now rather open to question***.)
So, lacking any precise information on the order of these two performances - and on the basis that there are limits to how significant a few hours' difference would be, either way - I will proceed on the assumption that the octet was indeed presented first. It is worth just recapitulating, in order to remind the reader: it is possible now for us to listen to these recordings one after another, in the order in which they were made - but anyone present for one or both of the concerts given in NYC on 24/11/1995# would very probably have been witnessing completely new music, as far as they were concerned. There may have been a few people present at the Knitting Factory who were also fortunate enough to attend the previous month's concert in Istanbul, but even if there were, none of them would surely have been aware yet of the studio recordings made in August. I am of course taking advantage of the passage of time - among other things - in order to track the development of this music now##. It's an artificial reconstruction, inasmuch as it would not have been possible for even the most dedicated fan to undertake the same journey of discovery at the time; but it's also an accurate study, with hindsight, reflecting the progress which was made by the musicians, and also therefore the growth of the actual music.
The other reason why it makes sense to consider the octet first is because that group represents a natural extension of the previous sextet (which itself was an expanded version of the quartet which recorded the first four pieces): Dahinden, Hwang, Reichman, Fonda and Norton all return, and the group is supplemented by the addition of two more reedmen: Brandon Evans and Andre Vida, both of whom would become significant collaborators and senior students###. So, what this recital represented was an expanded version of a musical experiment which was already underway, both in terms of the music itself and of the group which was chosen to play it. This is not straightforwardly the case with the larger ensemble, presented the same day; that will be examined separately, in due course.
When I came to listen closely to this recording recently for the purposes of the present analysis, I struggled to locate the two extra horns in the stereo image, or rather I struggled to tell them apart. As usual, it was no problem at all to pick out the leader, a little to the right of centre: this was obvious early on, confirmed for definite by his wailing away on sopranino around 06:45. However, although it was quickly apparent that one of the students is on the far left and the other near centre-right, confusingly close to the leader (which doesn't help matters much), I really wasn't able to differentiate them with any confidence until the forty-seventh minute (in a fifty-eight minute piece), at which point I was finally able to identify Vida as standing next to B., by his pulling out the baritone sax: this is one of his regular horns to this day, and is confirmed in the liner notes - assuming those can be trusted^. (Prior to this I had tentatively put Vida on the left and Evans next to B. - but that was at least partly down to misreading the notes^^.)
***
Naturally, Comp. 188 is a first species theme, so it consists of evenly spaced eighth notes, but alternating staccato with legato attacks. This will be so familiar to anyone reading now that it's worth adding once again: those hearing this performed will have been experiencing something entirely new. Dahinden is the first to break out and essay some solo flights, before the four-minute mark, but quickly enough his playing melds back into the group theme; again, this is completely normal practice (as we now know). Norton, meanwhile, sounds so perfectly adapted to the demands of this music that I am prompted all over again to consider him a natural fit for it: he effortlessly finds numerous ways to fragment the rhythmic pulse, without drawing undue attention to himself. By 06:45, as noted above, B. has peeled away on sopranino, with Norton on hand percussion, Evans and Reichman picking up the pulse. This is also round about the time when Dahinden's fluency on trombone strikes me so forcefully - not for the first time - that it occurs to his command of the instrument is basically as good as any of B's previous collaborators^^^. After a near-pause, the tempo is increased by a few beats and with eleven minutes on the clock we are refreshed and off again.
The GTM compositions are like miniature universes, and represent a new level of complexity and ambition compared with much of the work B. had conceived up until then. Much of it, not all of it - it's all too easy for even serious listeners to fall into the trap of thinking of the four books for the creative ensemble as somehow representing the totality of the composer's work~ - but this new strategy allows for a single composition to contain as much potential for growth and movement as any of the collage sets, and the overall complexity of the musical ideas is such that before the first twenty minutes are up, it's already too hard to trace all of the threads. For anyone present who was really paying close attention, the music must have been almost intolerably exciting, limitlessly full of creative energy and fulfilled possibility, any individual cross-section uniquely complex and varied despite the continuous basic pulse...
... the flow of which increasingly comes to resemble one of B's beloved trains, and although the regular appearance of locomotives themselves in the graphic titles for the GTM pieces is some way in the future at this point~~, the idea of fast vehicular motion has already very much been introduced: indeed, the graphic title for 188 itself includes a racing car. But - I'm not quite sure why this had not really occurred to me before - in listening to this particular recording, I suddenly found myself thinking of a moving train. (Previously I have tended to think in terms of a giant clock, ticking away - an image I mentioned way back when, albeit in the context of the (second part of the) 40f theme, which itself looks forward to GTM, first species - although I have had all sorts of exotic visions presented to me when listening to this stuff, especially in its later forms.) Extending this metaphor to its logical conclusion, the compositional territory becomes a sort of dreamscape which is traversed by the train, carrying the listener along from one gorgeous scene to the next, retaining its familiar identity even while the world outside is essentially unpredictable. With Norton on brushes around 13:30, I found the image of a steam train puffing away to be irresistible; much later on, somewhere around the 39-minute mark, he varies his cymbal attacks to change the character of the music utterly, in a way which instantly recalls the work of Ed Blackwell on the 1981 reading of Comp. 34a - yet another piece which can't help evoking the image of a moving train. Note how these impressions keep referring back to themselves, the recorded canon endlessly reminding the attentive listener of its other constituent parts...
Another rather inevitable feature of this sort of work is that different players will phase in and out of focus over time: Hwang, for example, plays electric violin here, but this not as obvious as one might suppose, though it leaps out on occasion (e.g. 14:15); Fonda also becomes most salient when playing arco (e.g. from 16:00), without which his sound can easily vanish into the mix. This effect is also true of the leader, whose presence is not continuously evident; and indeed with two other versatile woodwind players in the ensemble, this both adds to the sonic possibilities and reduces some of the pressure on B., who no longer has to do it all himself - though, naturally, he still very much makes his presence felt from time to time with some typically expressive bursts at regular intervals.
Like any moving vehicle, this train requires some refuelling stops, and the shifting tempo evident throughout this reading is another key feature, not of this piece so much as of GTM itself, it seems (a similar effect was noted in Istanbul). Here, at 24:45 (with B. on contrabass clarinet), the pulse has stopped entirely, but there is actually still plenty happening; as the theme kicks in again and the journey proceeds, this feels so natural and familiar that one could easily not even notice that we have begun travelling again. From around 29 minutes, the pulse slooooows right down, then gradually speeds up again. This playing around with the sense of time already looks to be an essential element of what the composer wanted to do with this new music - again, to refer back to the canon we can highlight the way in which Comp. 115, the "accordion sound space context"~~~, foreshadows this. Finally, this is not one of the pieces which ends "up in the air" to create an illusion of unceasing motion; it does actually end definitively, although any applause which may have followed that has been edited out on this occasion.
***
As usual with this sort of thing, I had no desire to break the whole thing down, minute by minute - rather I just wanted to comment on some details which struck me, and to give a sense of the development of what was still very much new music at the time of its performance. Over the course of three albums, the composer has shown us a whole new world of music possibilities, and has already very much set about exploring them. Again, this was one of two such performances on the day - the other will be covered separately.
As much as I enjoyed listening to this, I found writing about it to be a form of slow torture, and for whatever reason this post felt as if it was dragged out of me, one sentence at a time. If reading it proves boring - as it well may - please don't let that put you off listening to the music, which is of course available on Bandcamp: that should prove a great deal more entertaining than my tedious ramblings.
* I can't really take this as being "proof" of anything, since it's not authenticated from another source, but I do have a whole clutch of live bootleg recordings purporting to represent the 1996 iteration of the same "event". The venue is still the same, although the dates are now from June, not November - around B's birthday, in other words - and the concerts ranged from GTM explorations and creative orchestra dates to solo concerts, with a pair of "bebop quintets" somewhere in between. (The recordings were all passed on to me by (Golden-Age blogger) Volkan T., years ago - I can't remember whether any supporting evidence accompanied them to confirm the venue, the occasion or any dates, etc, but I think not.) Come to think of it, the presence in the discography of Tentet (New York) 1996, also recorded at the Knitting Factory in June 1996, but under a different banner (Restructures cites the "What Is Jazz?" Festival), casts some serious doubt on whether there even was a Tri-Centric Festival in June 1996... much as I might like to be, I am very probably not the man to figure all this stuff out. [I'm not sure Volkan is either, since I don't think he ever suggested that he was present in New York at the time these recordings were made... some time I shall have to go through these, and try and work out what we're actually dealing with, even if I am not in a position to date them accurately.]
** Later protocol suggests that this second group would now be classified as a 10+1tet, but B. had not yet started using such terms...
*** Restructures listed both BH006 and BH007 as being released in 1997, which is backed up by listings on Discogs; the individual pages for each album on Bandcamp state the release date for both as being 1st January 1996, which is technically possible - just about - but extremely unlikely. (I've grumbled on before about inaccuracies with this sort of thing, and indeed about the perversity of TCF's apparent fixation on release dates in general; I'm not about to start all that up again here.)
# Yes, yes. I am British, and that's how we write dates over here... deal with it ;-)
## It's only just really occurred to me that exactly the same was true of the original Braxtothon... I'm not quite sure why it feels so important to keep stressing it now, in looking at GTM specifically.
### As far as I can tell, both players first appear in the official sessionography in 1994 - on November 18th, to be precise, as part of (what must have been) a showcase for some of B's most promising students: this was recently discussed - well, part of it was - in my analysis of Comp. 136. (The relevant portion of that rather long post is to be found under point 5.) Evans and Vida, by coincidence or not, appeared on that first occasion in a trio improvisation with B. - just the three horns, no accompaniment. [Fonda was already playing with B. regularly by this point, and Reichman had played with him in a duo setting, also discussed in that same recent post (v. point 4). I don't think any of the others had played with him before - including Norton; or, if they had, we don't have an official record of it. All of these players would of course go on to be significant collaborators, with the exception of pianist Jeanne Chloe and percussionist Eric Rosenthal.]
^ Actually, one is better off never assuming that the instrumentation details on these things are completely accurate... but in the case of Vida and bari sax, we can be fairly sure it's correct.
^^ It wasn't so much misreading the notes as misremembering them: both Vida and Evans play (varieties of) flute, but in my head I had only Evans playing one. (To make matters worse, the section which led me to mislocate the two players occurs from around 16:30, and actually has both of them on flutes, with B. on clarinet; I'd somehow managed to hear the second horn next to the leader as another clarinet, and only realised my mistake when I went back rather later and played that passage again. In the interests of full disclosure, I may as well add that there were presumably opportunities before the 47th minute to identify Evans on bass clarinet, in which case I must have somehow missed that entirely. Something more notable must have been happening elsewhere at that point..!)
^^^ I wasn't consciously aware until afterwards, but the liner notes (by Francis Davis) for this release quote the maestro as having dubbed RD “the first new trombonist I’ve heard who is technically and conceptually on a level with George Lewis.” Davis says that "anyone hearing the Swiss trombonist... for the first time is in for a real treat" - and also singles out Norton, comparing him to both of the percussionists on Dolphy's evergreen Out to Lunch in his feel for colour and texture.
~ Very early on, B. was already conceiving works on a grand scale, something which must not be forgotten in any discussion of the way his composition has developed over the years. (Anyone who is tempted - as some have been - to think of his work in the seventies as being "more traditionally free jazz" than later work must immediately be reminded of the existence of Comp. 82 (For Four Orchestras) before they get carried away...)
~~ Many of the GTM works with opus numbers in the 2xx or 3xx ranges have locomotives - sometimes multiple locomotives - included in their graphic titles - and later on the composer would often refer to the scores themselves in terms of train tracks and junctions, etc.
~~~ - as the work is described by the composer, in the notes on the back cover of Six Compositions (Quartet) 1984.
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