A question... of sorts

 Much to my surprise, it seems that a small handful of people still read anything I post on here - what little that currently is, in other words. This despite a) my continuing overwhelming inactivity, b) my failure to respond to comments as I used to (there is a reason for that - see below*), and c) the difficulty in locating Blogger material via a web-search these days.

To anyone who is still checking in: thank you for your (seemingly-infinite) patience ;-)

Now...

... as any Braxtonhead must know by now, an unofficial bootleg CD emerged a few years back on the Cypriot label Hi Hat. This is credited solely to AB and bears the title Live At The Rainbow Gallery '79; it claims to be taken from a radio broadcast from "the end of the decade", implying - sort of - that the 1979 date refers to the year of the broadcast, not necessarily the date of the actual performance. It gives the personnel as being Lewis, Holland and Altschul plus Muhal Richard Abrams, which makes it massively unlikely that it was recorded any later than 1976; but of course, that's assuming the personnel are credited correctly, which perhaps we had better not assume at all (hence my caveat "sort of" in the previous sentence: given the inherently-dubious nature of the release, it's probably best not to assume anything which we can't actually verify).

So, let's posit for the sake of argument that at least the venue is correct, and that the broadcast presents a performance at the Rainbow Gallery (in Minneapolis, apparently; even more confusingly, the entry for this item on Discogs adds the note "...in September 1987.(?)" - which would of course indicate that the performance was broadcast at least seven years before it actually took place! - where this unhelpful note originates (i.e. on the CD liners or with Discogs' members) is unclear). A pretty recent comment (from user "fetidwheeze") reads: "I had a painting exhibition during Braxton's residency at Rainbow Gallery and can assure you that the date was 1976... The group was there for several nights."

-This, in turn, appears to be at least partly in response to an earlier (and much longer) comment by user "senorton", which provides some quite detailed info, but which suggests that the "date" (?/?/79) is correct and the personnel wrong, rather than the other way around, as most people had previously assumed. The commentator supposes then that the line-up actually comprises John Lindberg and Thurman Barker, as per the 1979 working quartet, but with Lewis in for Ray Anderson - senorton reckons this sounds more like Lewis (but is confident it's not Altschul on drums) - and "Muhal Richard Abrams is definitely the likely choice for the pianist."

I have no intention of buying this illegal release myself - never did - and haven't yet heard it. What I'm interested to know, therefore, is whether anyone who might be reading this has listened to the performance, and if so what conclusions were drawn, if any? (My curiosity is however sufficiently piqued at this point that one way or another, I will probably go looking for an online audio rip and see what I can deduce about it... so if anyone does want to beat me to the punch and share their thoughts on this little mystery, they are encouraged to do so in the next few days..!)

[senorton provides a tracklist, too, having stated in passing that "the titles are ludicrous for a Braxton date"; that is not actually strictly true  - the release lists the four pieces just as "Free Jazz Improv. 1-4", which is not completely implausible, though highly unlikely to be accurate for either the '76 working group or its '79 counterpart - but in any case he reckons that he can name all four pieces: the last three are given by him as Comps. 23d, 23e and 40f, while he lists the first as being "Cherokee" (but incorrectly gives Charlie Parker a co-credit for it, and in turn uses that as evidence of this being Lewis playing, since the two duo sets from 1976 with Lewis both include (brief) Parker covers... "Cherokee" was published in 1938, at which time Parker would have been around 18 years old; he is credited with the contrafact "KoKo", based on the "Cherokee" changes, and did play the earlier song, but he most certainly didn't co-write it. Does this undermine our commentator's credentials..?). For what it's worth, a later comment by user "SSRI_Guy" says instead that the first number is "Marshmallow" by Warne Marsh. - Regardless of which number it actually was that opened the broadcast, it was evidently a standard; but the rest of the set, if senorton is right about it, would be a very strange tracklist indeed for 1979. I'm already angling towards 1976, myself...]

***

If anyone doesn't yet have the reissued (remastered) Willisau (1991) Studio 2xCD on hatOLOGY... now is an excellent time to snap it up, since - unlike most commodities - its price seems to have fallen dramatically. A year or so ago you would have been lucky to find this for sale for less than twenty pounds (GBP; I can't vouch for what it would have cost in euros or dollars), but I just picked it up for five-and-a-half quid, brand new and still factory-sealed. Nobody reading this will need to be told what an essential release this was/is. The question is... where is the Live equivalent? Liner notes say it was slated for release in 2019, but we know that never materialised...

* One of the frustrations which has kept me away from here lately is the fact that I currently rely on a device - I can't really call it a laptop - which my wife originally bought, hence it "thinks" by default that I am her. Even when signed into my own email, if I load Blogger it tries to log me in as my wife - and the last time I tried to reply to a comment, I gave up because even though I had (eventually) succeeded in logging into the site / the blog as myself, when I went to the comments it reverted back to my wife's account. - To the gracious person who told me recently about the need to celebrate living musicians - my thoughts exactly - and who recommended one of Roscoe Mitchell's recent groups, I had tried to respond as follows: Yes indeed, we absolutely do... I haven't heard this particular small group of Mitchell's (love Tomeka Reid) and will try to hunt down some recordings. Thanks for the tip :-D   (NB: I didn't yet manage to find any recordings by that group. I do really like Tomeka Reid - especially her first album as a leader. I love Roscoe Mitchell)

(Much belated) birthday card, and other stories

 

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday Mr Braxton

More-than-a-week-ago

Ahem. So, what's going on, then? Maybe somebody can fill me in - evidently, while I was not paying proper attention and getting on with other stuff, Google/Blogger did something weird and now it's all-but impossible to locate Blogger pages via a Google search. (I only discovered this accidentally, a few months ago, when I wanted to remind a friend of mine about a particular post I had written, back in the days when I actually wrote posts... for reasons I can't be bothered to go into, I had no easy/direct route into the blog and it always used to be very easy to get in via a web search... this time I had a few "sinking" moments during which I thought the blog had actually been taken down without me even realising it. This was not helped by a slew of search results in which various ex-bloggers lamented whatever it is that got done, to cause all this.)

As previously (teasingly) advised, my intentions to write about the Thumbscrew album were in worse-than-usual disarray anyway, first because it's a very difficult project to write about (read on), and then because something happened between B. and (at least some of) his inner circle - I say that, I myself am so out of touch with these things now that I have no idea who is or isn't "in the loop" at present; but discovering that Jason Guthartz had severed ties with B. so suddenly and peremptorily was a shock... and realising that Restructures had been taken down altogether was horrible. (It still feels like such a loss as to be almost an act of vandalism, even if it was perpetrated by the architect himself; and I still haven't been able to bring myself to talk to Jason about it.)

So there's that... and then there's this... and then we go and arrange to go away for the weekend, to somewhere (just about) remote enough to have no wifi or mobile phone coverage, in a (semi-successful) attempt to escape the enforced jollity (and, here in Wales, the hypocrisy) of the jubilee celebrations... so that I wasn't even "here" on the one day of the year when I still do make an effort to post. Dear oh dear.

Thumbscrew... this really is a difficult one to write about. The balancing act it will require breaks down like this: the actual finished article leaves me feeling that it could have been SO much more than it is, and yet I don't want to be the guy who moans about it, given that we are lucky it even exists in the first place. (I spent enough time being "that guy" in the past, right? I did, yes.) Besides, it really is quite a delightful listen. It just happens to be problematic for several reasons, but... ugh, later. I will write about this album if it kills me, even if hardly anybody at this point will ever see it...

Why the birthday card will be late this year

 ... we are going away for the weekend and I shan't have access to the internet. (The U.K. is currently embroiled in a four-day celebration for the Queen's platinum jubilee... we are trying to take ourselves out into the middle of nowhere to avoid the fuss as much as we can!)

Hence I shan't be able to post anything on June 4th as such. Happy Birthday in advance, sir! I will be posting some stuff on my return (though it's increasingly doubtful whether anyone will see it, even if they wanted to... I had trouble locating my own blog the last time I went looking for it)

What was THAT about..?

 There I was, finally (finally!) about to start writing on here again - just very gently - and something came along almost immediately to derail my train of thought.

How long has it been? This quasi-edifice I constructed - it disintegrated so long ago now that my regular involvement in it almost feels like another life. I have never lost interest in B's music, though my listening has waxed and waned over time, and I never entirely lost the intention to resume writing about it; but as one year bled into another, and my life seemed to be falling apart around my ears... then rebuilt itself (or allowed me to rebuild it)..., I just never got round to doing anything about it. The online "scene" around free jazz and creative music - which had subsisted for a few years in the mid-to-late '00s - had dissipated little by little anyway. For whom would I now be writing, other than for myself? etc, etc, round and round ad nauseam...

... and then I found I had a few things I wanted to set down after all, so with the annual occasion of the Birthday Card to prompt me, I planned to cobble together a couple of posts. 

Within a couple of days of stating my intention to do that, I went online to recheck a detail on Restructures, and - got a bizarre error message. The site, purportedly, had been taken offline. I thought at first this had to be some sort of mistake, or perhaps a hack. Quite apart from anything else, I had only just been using it a few days earlier (the Braxton discog itself had not been updated for some time, but of course it was still a goldmine of useful info, and every so often I would find myself clicking through it again). It was - right there. It couldn't now suddenly be gone... I had not been in touch with Jason G. for years, but I still had a contact email for him, so dropped him a very quick line, not knowing if he would ever see it. Within a couple of days, I had a response: there was no mistake. He actually had taken the site down.

The precise reasons for that are not something I feel I can go into here, because it's JG's decision and his business. But what he told me came as a nasty jolt, and shook me up a bit. I did some digging, and I think I found what it was that had led him to do as he did. I would have to say: I would not draw the same conclusions from it as he apparently did. But, again, it's his decision and I have to respect that.

What it leaves me wondering is about a sort of "anti-synchronicity" surrounding this blog, and the intentions it represents (or more specifically, "this blog, and the intentions my involvement with it represents", since it was not actually my blog to begin with). I go all that time without posting on it more than once a year, rendering the blog little more than a sort of dusty memorial to itself; and then, I decide at length to resume posting on it, and almost simultaneously, this happens. What the actual fuck? But then, when I really started to think that through, I began to realise that this was just the latest reiteration of something which first cropped up years ago.

Several times, blockages appeared which made it hard to work on this. Most notably, I found myself inheriting another collector's carefully-amassed treasure-trove of live recordings... at a time when I could not possibly hope to give them even a fraction of the attention they deserved (and at a time, for that matter, when I no longer even owned a cassette-player). Previously, I had been gifted a complete set of B's Tri-Axium writings and his Composititon Notes - and had not had time or space for those either. There were several other obstacles of similar stripe, at several points along the way. With my own attention having moved away from such matters, I had forgotten about them. This latest cosmic irony with the Restructures site, and the consequent loss (to everyone) of the Braxton discography,  got me remembering all over again.

There are schools of thought which make much of coincidence, and there are those who say that when one discovers one's true vocation or life-path, it's as if all obstacles just melt away. What, then, am I to make of this? Have I created all such energetic blockages myself? Cos if not... it seems I am being told -have repeatedly been told - to steer well clear.

That feels wrong, though. I suspect that the "lack of cosmic path-clearing" can be traced directly back to B's contacting me for the first time, saying that he hoped his doing so would not interfere with what I was doing. It wasn't his fault... but it did. That's all down to me, though, and my long-established inability to see things through.

I may never see this through properly either, and I certainly have long since missed the opportunity to make it into what I originally hoped it would become. But... does that really matter?

I still intend to post, pretty soon. I just needed to have this little argument with myself, before doing so...

Birthday card... with a difference

 

Another year, anoth- ah now, hang on there. 

Naturally, as always on this day, I want to take the opportunity to wish Maestro Braxton a very happy birthday. I mean, of course I do! But while I'm at it, I want to make - well, I'm not even going to call it an announcement, because unless McC pops his head in, chances are nobody will see this anyway; but after vaguely threatening a few times over the last few years to resume posting, I'm actually about to start doing precisely that. Within the next couple of weeks I shall be writing a bit about the Thumbscrew album (what do you mean, "which one?" - take a wild guess), and a bit about the New Haven box on Firehouse 12. I shan't be going into rabbit-hole detail on either one - quite apart from any other considerations, I have still only heard half of the box - but I do have a few things I wanted to say about them and, dammit, I'm gonna do it. 

The fact that nobody is likely to read such posts isn't really a problem, indeed it may positively be an advantage at this point. And even if it isn't, I'm going to write them anyway. Non-spoiler alert: the New Haven set is absolutely astonishing. 

That's it, for now. Except to wish the main man:

*"@"*Many happy returns of the day*"@"*

C x

75th Birthday!

On the one hand... Maestro B. probably won't thank me for pointing that out. On the other... he can hardly get away from it! I imagine there will be plenty of well-wishers, only too eager to help him celebrate reaching such a milestone. (In some parallel universe... I'm involved in whatever celebrations end up taking place. In this one... yes, well...)

So, just in case you happen to be casting an eye in this direction, sir...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

 - Glib though it may sound, I genuinely hope you enjoy your day - and any special arrangements which have been made for you. With very best wishes for now and the future, from an absent friend... c x

Another year... another birthday card

Every year - well, for the last few years anyway - I find myself posting one of these and thinking (among other things) that another birthday has come around very quickly, and that surely this time I have more to say: to explain what happened to the blog and why; to detail how I lost touch with Maestro B, how I felt I had let him down; and so on and so on. Whether it was - ultimately - self-preservation which stopped me from rambling on, or just plain old inertia, is unclear even to me, and no longer even remotely important.

What is important is to say, once more: Many happy returns of the day, Maestro! Your continued existence is a reason to have hope, in these dark-and-rapidly-ever-more-darkening times... I trust that you are enjoying your (academic) retirement and that the well of inspiration will never run dry. (As if...)

***Happy Birthday!***

****

(In case anyone is wondering ... whenever they see this... I am quite well in myself, much more stable and contented than I was a few years ago... and one day it really is likely that I will resume writing. When I do, it goes without saying that I will resume writing about Anthony Braxton's music, since that remains a subject close to my heart. For the time being, I read a lot and write pretty much nothing... but that too is a phase, and will not last forever...)