The whole messy business of trying to gather up and list every Braxton recording in my possession, across all different formats, is still not quite over: the lack of information surrounding some of my random digital files makes it hard to know exactly when (or whether) I will be able to say that the process is over. (Some of these files were acquired years ago, from who knows where, very probably in a haze of smoke - in some cases it is nevertheless surprisingly easy to identify the music contained in them, but in others... well, you can imagine.) However, I am pretty sure I've at least now accounted for all the albums in my possession, howsoever represented (and by albums I mean anything which is now considered to be one, which of course includes both official downloads and "official bootlegs", however brief*, and regardless of whether the latter happen to overlap with other recordings acquired separately and listed elsewhere).
That being the case, I'm happy to proceed with this second instalment of a "conclusion round-up" which I
started just recently.
I just want to interject something at this point. One of the unexpected benefits of getting myself diagnosed on the autism spectrum in 2013** has been a gradual release from the grip of what were previously unshakeable compulsions; in the case of this work, or anything like it, those compulsions affected both me and anybody around me, since while I was in their grip I could not tolerate any interruption or distraction, but rather felt that my very sanity was dependent upon being able to "finish" (temporarily) whatever task I had taken on. (I have since learned to manage this tendency to such an extent that it feels almost like another life when I remember what it used to be like.) The way this manifested with regard to what I do here was not limited to writing a post, once I'd started; if I go back eleven or twelve years, I "believed my own hype" to the extent that I felt I had to know about every single Braxton-related file or activity before anyone else. Discovering new recordings was great, of course, but the unspoken assumption would always be that I would be discovering these no later than the rest of the music-sharing community, and preferably among the very first; as time went on, and that was often no longer the case, it became a source of (wholly unnecessary) stress to trip over recordings online which others already knew about. And when I say stress, I don't mean purely mental or emotional stress either: I would have an actual physical reaction to such circumstances, a hot flush and a sick feeling which I would have to try and relieve, not just by grabbing the recording itself, but by then scouring the internet frantically for anything else I might have missed, so that there could be no more "nasty surprises". Only once I was back up to speed could I relax a bit.
I no longer have to worry about this sort of thing (which is just as well, since the number of things I have missed in the last decade or so must be pretty extensive). It's a clear benefit of gradually being able to challenge some of my own "innate" tendencies - gradually learning to understand these not as inalienable truths about me, but rather as characteristics typical of a certain neurodiverse profile and not specific to me at all. Does make my life a lot easier of course - and as regards the sort of task I've been undertaking just lately, I probably couldn't have faced it at all in days gone by.
Anyway, the fact that there are still plenty of recordings out there which I don't (yet) have is fine. I have even been listening, over the last couple of days, to the Kevin Norton album*** For Guy Debord (in nine events), which I don't own in any shape or form - and which I therefore would have had to avoid altogether in the past, since the fact that I didn't have it would have made listening to it too much of an "anxiety-risk". This may sound ridiculous (and no doubt is) - but it's also basically true.
There you go: a different sort of update, but who knows, some people may find it helpful to hear about my experiences in this regard. In the meantime, back to our regular programming, as they used to say; in the interests of consistency, the numbering for individual observations will continue from where I left off.
***
8. I had
wondered recently whether the
GTM Comp. 206 - one of the pieces collaged into the '00 Ljubljana JF performance released as a double CD on Leo - might not have been officially recorded prior to that; and it may well not have been, but it did nevertheless get played in public. When I was going through my old CD-Rs, I came across all the recordings from the
1996 Tri-Centric Festival, a residency at the Knitting Factory in June of that year (and thus presumably arranged for B's birthday, though in that case the timing seems a little odd as if the year is correct, the occasion was his 51st, not his 50th). I can still remember real excitement when (former blogger/music contact) Volkan Terzioğlu shared with me the links for these recordings, which he had been safeguarding on cassette and had only just ripped into digital format; I was then promptly a bit deflated when I told Jason Guthartz about them, and he simply responded that he made no effort to collect live bootlegs and never had. (For that matter, I imagine Volkan was disappointed himself if he thought I might be the one to put the music up online for all to hear; that seemed like a pretty big project at the time and not really one for me. Now, of course, I no longer even have the core digital files, only the CDs which I burned from them, which are fine for my purposes but useless for sharing unless I was planning to break the habit of a lifetime and rip them as .flac or something similar... and besides...
#)
The recordings from this residency included: two "bebop" quintets with different instrumentation;
Comp. 102 (for creative orchestra and puppet theatre, a work which was
released on Braxton House that same year, though that recording was made in March, not June, and at Wesleyan);
Comp. 151;
Comp. 169;
Comps. 100 &
163; a recital of solo piano music; two solo alto sets by the maestro; and (finally we get there) two
GTM concerts, premiering
Comps. 205 and
206. I have next to no information about these concerts (which seems odd now, considering how detailed some of Volkan's data was for the recordings), but really they do deserve to be available somewhere, one of these days...
9. One of the few things I did have time to listen to while I was ploughing through all this stuff and updating my records was the Cygnus Ensemble's
rendition of
Comp. 186 (which follows on rather neatly from the previous observation, it being a piece originally recorded in late 1995 and released
on Braxton House in 1996, again); it struck me as an example of
how to do it, "it" being in this case a shortish performance of a GTM work with a smallish group - of course, the Istanbul performance was itself only a sextet - and contrasted with, say, the rather cursory "interpretation" of such works done by Ensemble Dal Niente (as
mentioned last autumn). I don't have much else to say about this, only that it did strike me as a (short but) satisfying reading of one of the very earliest first species GTM works, by a group that was really trying to get to grips with the spirit of the music.
10. I also listened to another random "single", a solo rendition of
Comp. 362 by B's former student Kyle Brenders, taken from a self-released 2008 album of his entitled
Flows and Intensities; the same year saw the release of
Toronto (Duets) 2007, one of these extraordinary releases which see B. duetting with another reed player on full-length GTM pieces (I have never heard this one, but I do have a similar album from around the same period
with Ben Opie - as far as I know the very first such undertaking was
with Brandon Evans in 2000
##). Coming to this one-off track, I did wonder whether it might not be the very first solo GTM performance, something I had always regarded as inherently impossible (but
which was undertaken by Kobe Van Cauwenberghe a few years back); however,
Comp. 362 didn't sound like GTM and it may very well not be, given that other works in the
360 numerical range are either
Diamond Curtain Wall or
Falling River Music... in any case, my mind was really elsewhere for this one and if I'm honest I don't remember anything about it...
11. One of the (numerous) things I'd completely forgotten was that at a certain point in proceedings, before I gave up burning CD-R "master" copies altogether, I burned a few things to disc without having sleeves for them - and if I ever had accompanying .txt files with the details on, I have no fucking clue where those might be. (Like the music files for the TCF '96 extravaganza as discussed in 8. above, all of this stuff could be on one of my "dead" hard drives, in which case it may yet one day be recovered, or then again... etc). There were not loads of these, but the few there were had been left together on a spindle just like when the discs themselves were blanks, held down with one of those little styrofoam rings to keep the discs from moving around and damaging each other... and
one such recording purports to be something I wasn't sure actually ever existed, or whether I had just dreamed it up: a quartet with B. and John Zorn on reeds, plus Bill Laswell and Milford Graves. Needless to say (given Laswell's involvement) this was Zorn's idea, and a bit of digging suggests it
took place in Warsaw on July 3rd 2009. Was this the only time the two reedmen shared a stage? I don't think I'm aware of any other occasions... Why did I not have any details for the performance other than the disc itself? - no fucking idea :( But I'm happy to know that I didn't in fact just dream it up... I genuinely had started to wonder - on the rare occasions when I thought of it at all - whether I might have done.
12. Another one of these random CD-Rs-on-a-stick, which in this case I had completely forgotten that I ever had, turned out to be Naima, by the Roland Dahinden Trios (four tracks on which the trombonist is accompanied by drummer Art Fuller###, plus either B. himself - on two long cuts credited to Dahinden - or Joe Fonda, on (yet) a(nother) reading of Comp. 136, plus of course Coltrane's title track)... with this, and for that matter the other CD-Rs without sleeves, I can only assume that I burned them at a time when either I didn't have any paper cases, or just lacked the impetus to write out track listings; like I say, there weren't many of them and I had really forgotten all about them at this point.
This one I did, however, listen to in its entirety and I have to say it sounded pretty terrific, the playing really top-notch throughout and the music consistently interesting (also well-recorded). I even belatedly sorted it out with a sleeve and a track listing... but with Dahinden never being too far from my thoughts these days owing to my continued intention to examine
his 2013 project in due course, I'm not going to say anything else about him here.
From this point on, we're into digital-only territory (at least as far as my collection is concerned)...
13. Mike Heffley - another trombonist with a storied and distinguished connection to the maestro - recorded
a solo album,
Meditations on Early Braxton, over three months in 1996. Because of Heffley's personal connection to B. - he even wrote
a book about him, and I know for a fact that B. considered Heffley and Lock to be the only published authors who really "got" his music - I have never regarded this as an especially obscure release (though it's been a long time since I listened to it), but apparently the actual physical CD is rare enough that Discogs doesn't even have a listing for it...
14. The mp3-only New Braxton House
sampler (NBH010) released in Sept 2011 didn't seem to have a text file with it explaining what was what - although the tracks themselves were at least titled. (The Discogs entry does have pretty detailed credits as personnel and recording dates/venues, so presumably this information was available on TCF at the time of release.)
15. One of the official bootlegs -
BL017 to be precise - purports to be a rendition of
Comp. 98 from 1983 in Karlsruhe, Germany - with Paul Smoker replacing Hugh Ragin on trumpet. There's nothing inherently implausible about the substitution of one player for another, even if in this case the music is unusually demanding: Smoker was capable of handling it, with the right support and rehearsal time. No, but I am struggling to get my head round the idea of
this piece of music being performed in 1983
at all, when B's musical thoughts had moved on a full two years from the time when this "special quartet" was doing the rounds in Europe. Marilyn Crispell was on the verge in 1983 of becoming a key collaborator, of course, so the idea of her coming back is not incongruous; but are there any other performances of that vintage featuring Ray Anderson, rather than George Lewis? In other words: are we really sure that 1983 is not just a misprint for 1981?! (The list of tapes is no help here - I don't appear to have any quartets from Karlsruhe dated either '81 or '83.) Bit of a weird one, that.
16. I did (vaguely) know that TCF continued issuing official bootlegs after I stopped actively following (never mind downloading) them, but I'd never really looked at this in any detail before last night. There look to be some really interesting things there, not least
two dates from
2016, several years after the latest live recording I've got, at time of writing... one of the missing ones
is BL031, which promises to fill in the gaps of the 4th November, 1976 Berlin concert (
portions of which made it to a
famous double-album on Arista, of course). Not having heard it, I can't vouch for it - but it always seemed a bit unlikely that the last-ever show by that version of the quartet was only half an hour long... I don't have the Berlin '76 show as a full bootleg in any format (unlike the
show in Graz, which the world and his wife have got - it turns up everywhere and if anything seems to be one of the most commonly-traded of B's live recordings). The official bootleg appears to be the first part of the show, given that the first track is an announcer - but the published track listing ("Composition No. 40") is just deliberately unhelpful. [Rightly or wrongly, I always rather got the impression with these official boots that someone at TCF was not entirely happy to be putting them out, and was determined to do it with minimal effort if they had to do it at all.]
17. Later official boots which I don't (yet) have include
two Florence trios from
1979 - at least one of these will be another
Comp. 94 prototype, as
already described in observation 5...
18. One which I
do have - but can't remember listening to - is entitled
Orchestra (Pisa) 1980 and consists solely of a 17-minute (rounded up) reading of
Comp. 46, a piece which was given a
much more recent treatment in 2014. (That one, I don't have.)
... and that is about that. What did I learn, above all - besides gaining the peace of mind which comes from knowing (almost) exactly what I've got..? Mainly I reminded myself of three things: one, that I have a hell of a lot of music to listen to, before I even get near the infamous box of tapes; two, that (being an inveterate collector) I am now also more aware than ever of how many recordings of B's I haven't got, some of which I would really, really like to obtain^; and three, that before too long I really need to bury the hatchet^^ with TCF and go see what is actually available from them, these days (if anything...). I can't stay pissed off at them forever; and even if I did, who is actually affected by that, besides me? If it's worth my continuing with this stuff at all - and it is! - then this would be a good time to put all that nonsense behind me... though maybe not quite just yet, since I have so much going on already...
* The fashion these days seems to be to consider almost anything which contains more than one track/lasts longer than five minutes an "album". (Although my daughter tells me that the term E.P does still exist, even if the distinction between those and albums is hopelessly blurred these days... remember mini-albums? That is a term which long since fell under Occam's razor...)
** I got myself diagnosed purely to make my life easier at work (at the time working for an employer which was very big on "enforced fun"), and did not expect it to make any real difference to my personal life; after all, my wife and I both understood by now that I was on the spectrum somewhere. It took a few years for all the benefits to show themselves; but they did...
*** Norton has made this available for streaming on his bandcamp - from whence it can also be purchased, though only as a digital download.
# I'm further away than ever from understanding how I would even go about doing something like that, now... up until a few years ago, music was still being very actively shared online, however frowned upon this may have been in some quarters (and especially by the larger record labels, of course). Sometime around lockdown, 2020 or -21, my last proper laptop died, and ever since then I have had to make do with something with hardly any disk space... so I stopped downloading music and started (mainly) listening to it on (e.g.) Youtube. At some point since then, by coincidence, either people stopped being able to share links in the familiar (to me) way, or search engines stopped revealing the pages where such things could be found. Maybe it's just the latter... in any case, I am marginalised enough here as it is and I have no wish to drive myself even still further "underground". I can't see - in principle - why I shouldn't eventually share live recordings in my possession... but where, and how? hmmmm...
## This is yet another recording which I'd forgotten I ever had, and I have no idea where I got it... but there it is, among the CD-Rs, just waiting to be played again (- again? I can't say for sure that I ever played it in the first place..!)
### Doesn't sound like a real name, does it? But he had already played with B. on one of the standards projects (which by now were steadily multiplying), credited then as "Arthur" Fuller - which at least sounds like less of a Dickens joke...
^ As I mentioned recently, I will do a separate post soon just laying out some of my "wants list"... McClintic Sphere has already been able to sort me out with a couple of things, bless him :-D
^^ This kind of makes it sound far more dramatic than it ever was, but: the "old" version of the TCF website was reluctant to include this blog in their links, until B. himself forced them to do so - I know that because he personally telephoned me to explain what had happened - and when the site was redesigned, they took the opportunity to cut us out altogether. By this point the blog was already more or less dormant anyway and I could hardly complain, but I just removed the website from my mental map of the internet at that point. - Not really something I need to keep up, I don't think... we're all here to spread the word about the music, aren't we?
