I don't normally bring personal or domestic matters into my posts so much these days, and I'm not about to change that here, but my daughter's sixteenth birthday earlier this week did bring irresistibly to mind my having announced her birth, here in these pages. At least I can say truthfully that it does all feel like a long time ago...
... and speaking of history, a slice of it was delivered rather randomly into my YT feed over the last few days, two years after the video itself was apparently first posted: a rare interview from 1971, offering the friendly experiencer the chance to hear the maestro talking as well as playing (and answering questions in a way one would surely not have expected). I was probably aware of this recording already, as it turns out, though I had forgotten all about its existence; it is, as I discovered, listed clearly enough online, but I had allowed myself to become unfamiliar with corners of B's multifaceted career during my years of drifting inactivity, and when I first came across the video, I struggled at first even to figure out which 1971 solo concert was being referenced here.
The concert in question is not one which appears in the discography, nor is it to be confused with the French solo boot* (BL001, no longer readily available) - I say this because that's precisely the mistake which I made at first**. The next thing which has to be explicated is the contradiction in the video description itself, which is given at (so to speak) headline level as "Anthony Braxton interviewed in 1971 before his concert at the Palace of the Legion of Honor" - note here the word before - but then described underneath as having taken place afterwards: "Anthony Braxton, as interviewed by Roland Young, Glen Howell, and Sandy Silver, with music from Anthony Braxton's concert the night before at the Palace of the Legion of Honor on October 10, 1971." Clearly, the person who uploaded this to YT doesn't really know what happened when; but then, there's no real reason why we would expect them to know, since presumably they just have this recording from who-knows-where, and simply uploaded it onto this platform.
It seems pretty well established that the concert performance took place on 4th October 1971, and since it was obviously quite well publicised in the area, there's every reason to think that's a reliable date. As for the interview which we have here... that's a lot less clear. It took me a bit of time to track down the recording of (B's segment from) the concert, which I don't have in the form of digital files, but for whatever reason I have the tracks themselves on two different CD-Rs; having located one of these, I noted to my surprise that the musical portion of the event is followed by sixteen minutes of "KPFA radio blather", as I wrote at the time the CD-R was burned, and I assumed at first that it must be (part of) the same interview, or perhaps just the talking parts with the solo sax interludes removed. It isn't: it really was just air-filling, as the concert itself was being broadcast live on the radio, and the announcers needed to fill a few minutes after B's solo set finished, while the crew for the Mike Nock Underground set up their gear***. Mildly intriguing though this is from a historical point of view, it really is just the station's staff talking amongst themselves while waiting for something else to happen, although they do mention how well B's set was received by the audience; it's not something I am likely to need to hear again any time soon, but it does shed a little light on one other detail pertinent to the interview itself, or rather to the recording of it which I'm looking at today.
As mentioned above, you see, the video purports to have B. being interviewed by three different people, which is not reflected in what we actually hear. Most of the talking is by B. himself, interspersed with occasional "yeahs" and what have you, rather than much in the way of questions; and there does seem to be only one interlocutor. But in the between-set blather I found on my old CD-R, there are indeed three different people heard at times, and they do seem to be called Roland, Glen and Sandy - and by the way, Sandy is female, and we definitely do not hear her voice during the interview. So I think this all got a bit garbled, over time: the names provided in the YT description relate to the live presentation of the actual concert, and one of the two men (I think Roland) talked to B. in the studio around this time, said interview then being edited for broadcast the following Sunday, 10th October 1971. Or to put it another way: fifty-three years ago, today. (Let's just take stock of that for a minute.)
It's pretty clearly not a live interview anyway, because it consists of snippets of conversation, interspersed with music heard in the concert, and has fairly obviously been prepared for subsequent broadcast. The music, by the way, comprises numerous excerpts from (what we would now call) Comp. 26b, dedicated to (Kalaparusha) Maurice McIntyre, and although it sounds rather like the studio version, this is impossible, since the recording session which gave rise to the album Saxophone Improvisations Series F. did not take place until 25th February 1972. Annoyingly, my version of the 1971 concert to hand is incomplete, with the beginning of the first piece missing, and of course 26b - or, as it was probably known at the time, "JMK-80 CFN-7"# - was the opening number##; but what I do have confirms that the maestro's playing was absolutely precise on all four numbers played, so I'm confident that those gorgeous pointillisms which we hear at the opening of the YT audio - the beginning of the "interview", if we can even call it that - were pulled off live in concert just as perfectly as they sound here. (In any case, like I say, any recording of 26b being broadcast in 1971 could only have been sourced from a live performance - unless the piece was revisited in the studio especially for the broadcast, and if that were the case, I think we would know about it.) It would have been true, naturally - still is, really - that some unsympathetic ears would have heard many of the sounds being produced and concluded that they were random screeches and squawks, but to this listener (and, unschooled though I am, I have clocked up thousands of hours listening closely to free jazz saxophone at this point), it seems undeniably the case that every sound we hear is exactly what the player intended. His level of control by this stage### - over pitch, timbre, dynamics, you name it - was just uncanny; and, it must be said (as usually turns out to have been the case, when we listen to such performances), the audience really did appreciate it. It was only ever the snotty critics who refused to get with the programme. To hell with 'em.
Anyway, as regards the actual interview... this is a real curiosity too, but not really for the reasons that one might think. Doubtless all too conscious of being in San Francisco of all places - the global epicentre of all that was most hip - B. presumably knows that he is expected to rock up and profess his love for everything and everybody, and how his music is here to heal the world. He therefore does pretty much the exact opposite, declaring that he couldn't care less about music, or people, or even the world itself for that matter ("Destroy the planet!... what's a planet between friends?") - and all the while, the interviewer does his best to act as if none of this is remotely surprising, that he is totally cool with all of it, you dig... it is really quite odd to listen to, although given that his contrariness is pretty evidently a contrived stance, for reasons which he must have felt made sense at the time, I don't know if B. would necessarily find it embarrassing to be reminded of it now.
Besides, it's not all purely contrary for the sake of being contrary; some of this strategy even seems, in retrospect, to have contained the germ of the professor's later insistence that he had no answers, only good questions: for example, he won't declare what it is that he believes in partly for defensive reasons - revealing his purpose would give people a way to destroy him - but also because in order to do so he would have to understand it himself, and he isn't claiming that he does. Around nine minutes in, he makes the point that he doesn't want to tell people how to do anything because if people are honest with themselves, they all know what's going on anyway - "which is why I spend so much time trying to learn how to talk but not say anything..." (on the face of it, an extraordinary statement, making him sound almost like a politician - but I was reminded at once of my own observation, earlier this year). It's telling that when asked about how his work relates to the social struggle - one of the few direct questions we hear put to him - he refuses to answer, then talks around the subject in very vague terms and finally admits that he is not answering (though he already said up front that he wouldn't). Later on, he describes the impulse to try and save people as a "diversion"; to hear poverty described as "beautiful" sounds odd, until you contrast it with the idea of refusing to play the music out of an idea to get rich - "the intention is coming from someplace else". (Was this a dig at Chick Corea, I wonder? It wouldn't be long before Circle unravelled completely, and by now it must have been clear to the other three members of that group that Corea was fully sold on Scientology, to an extent that they themselves were not; then as now, it was not possible to advance through the grades without heavy financial investment.)
It does all feel, ultimately, like a deliberate ploy, to avoid presenting himself as someone who has come along with easy answers or popular slogans. If some of the actual delivery, in his inimitably garrulous way, comes across as a bit extreme... well, who am I to judge at this point? I would just recommend that interested readers check it out for themselves. Where else would you hear the maestro say "I'm not interested in music at all... nor am I interested in spiritualism"? He certainly would not say anything like that later, but I feel as if I can make sense of why he wanted to adopt such a posture at that time, in that place, if only to make it quite clear that he wasn't like everyone else. (Now that is definitely something I can understand^.)
Finally, it's also fascinating to hear hints of B's speaking voice before it became completely "academicised" (which wouldn't take long). There is still a slight regional twang to his accent, here, and I don't think I have ever heard it before. Very interesting - albeit, probably only interesting to people like me. But if you're not at all like me... what are you doing even reading at this point? ;-)
* This recording, in turn, is not to be confused with the album Recital Paris 71, first released by Futura Records in 1971, and which features a long solo alto version of the Ellington standard "Come Sunday" on one side, and a multi-tracked piano piece (Comp. 16) on the other. - Reissued numerous times, this album is itself the subject of much confusion as regards track lengths, identities, and recording dates, but this is absolutely not the time to go into any of that (quite apart from anything else, the Wayback Machine's archive version of the Restructures discog is down at time of writing, which is not making my life any easier). The French solo boot is quite confusing enough to begin with, including two tracks which were originally released on the compilation News From the 70s, where they were misidentified; even the description "France, 1971" apparently represented Hugo De Craen's best guess, given that the source tape was found in a box of B's labelled "Ghent" (and on the understanding that the only record they could find of a solo concert in Ghent was from 1973, and was not this one).
** Any mention of the words "Legion of Honor" - even rendered in English, and even with the US spelling - automatically makes me think of France. As I observed to McC the other day in an email, I don't really tend to associate palaces - traditionally the dwelling-places of monarchs - with the United States, either. I needed to dig around in my lists and records for a while, before I located the details of the '71 San Francisco affair...
*** B's set filled a gap between two sets by ex-colleagues and now rival (?) bandleaders: keyboardist Mike Nock had previously played in the Bay Area fusion group The Fourth Way with violinist Michael White, whose own new group had opened proceedings. (This is all explained in the "blather", otherwise I would never have known.... I can't say I was aware of a band called The Fourth Way at all, although presumably they were named after the book by P.D. Ouspensky, itself expounding upon philosophical ideas set out by G.I. Gurdjieff.)
# Apart from the fact that we no longer need to refer to the pieces in this way, I have always disliked the habit of "naming" them thus: simply listing the alphanumeric characters in the correct order still does not give their titles, unless one takes into account the spatial relation between them, a crucial element of the graphic design.
## It's just possible that my other CD-R which contains this recording includes the whole of the music... for tedious reasons not worth going into here and now, I am presently unable to check. Postscript: v. comments
### I don't seem to have got round to writing this down yet, but the last time I listened to For Alto I was taken aback to realise how imperfect it is, in many respects. (Sacrilege!! Yeah, but... since when have I ever held anything sacred? It wasn't for nothing that I fell in love with punk rock.) The point is that the instrumental reach exceeded the grasp, at that very early stage, purely in terms of technique - not by much, but it's noticeable when you have listened to the maestro's playing as much as I have. By 1971, if not before, there are basically no imperfections left.
^ This is after all the meaning of the nom de plume Centrifuge: from Latin, "that which flees the centre". [It never particularly mattered to me whether readers understood that, though, which is why I have not explained it before.]
