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Bruce Ackley + Andrea Centazzo + Tania Chen + Danielle Degruttola + Henry Kaiser + Michael Manring
Two Views of Steve Lacy’s The Wire
DG DG-296
Repertory projects can be tricky propositions if the core materials are little known. Standards by Ellington and Monk can be stretched almost beyond recognition and still be easily appreciated in relation to the originals. It’s a significantly heavier lift when it comes to Steve Lacy’s The Wire. A rare 1975 Denon LP featuring a sextet of Japanese musicians including pianist Masahiko Satoh and percussionist Masahiko Togashi, it is valued by the cognoscenti and moneyed collectors – a used copy costs several hundred dollars. Unless listeners seek out the original online, they will not know how the material is commented upon, toasted, or set upon a plinth. The only viable option is to make a version that stands on its own.
Certainly, Bruce Ackley and Andrea Centazzo are very well positioned to shape such a statement. A founding member of ROVA, whose 1984 Favorite Street was the first Lacy repertoire album – followed almost 30 years later with a recasting of Saxophone Special – Ackley was long one of the very few soprano saxophonists who thoroughly absorbed Lacy’s sound and distilled his vocabulary. Centazzo’s 1976-7 recordings with Lacy issued on the percussionist’s Ictus label – Clangs, a duo disc, and Trio Live, which adds Kent Carter to the mix (both of which Centazzo has just reissued) – are overlooked gems.
To comport with Lacy’s original ensemble configuration, Henry Kaiser – who played guitar on ROVA’s Saxophone Special – was enlisted to play bass in tandem with Michael Manring, while Tania Chen and Danielle DeGruttola are respectively heard on piano and cello. Lacy’s writing in the mid-70s was blunter than during his stint with RCA and after; the combination of cello and bass was integral to the sound he was then after, so doubling the basses worked on the original and again here. Lacy’s bluntness was rigorous and tenacious, which the Japanese sextet understood, as does Ackley, Centazzo, and company.
While there is a wealth of comparisons between Lacy’s original and the two versions presented here – and between the two new takes, as well – the listener is better served if the work is heard untethered from its history. Instead of giving credit or subtracting points for an adherence to the original here and a derivation there, the individuality of the musicians is really the most pertinent metric for assessing the work. Ackley remains a captivating voice on the straight horn; Centazzo continues to be an engaging, supple percussionist; and the rest of the ensemble steps up to deliver engaging performances. That’s enough to clear a very high bar.
Lacy talked about the necessity of curing work, letting time not simply to preserve it, but enhance it. A half-century has passed since he recorded The Wire, and two decades since his passing. While there was a spate of ensembles playing his music in the late 2000s, a drought has set in. Whether or not this recording precipitates others remains to be seen; but it is a welcomed reminder of a rare treasure and of Steve Lacy himself.
–Bill Shoemaker
Derek Bailey + Sabu Toyozumi
Breath Awareness
NoBusiness NBCD 166
Peter Brötzmann + Toshinori Kondo + Sabu Toyozumi
Complete Link
NoBusiness NBCD 165
Japanese percussionist Yoshisaburo "Sabu" Toyozumi was an integral part of the first generation of free improvisers in Japan in the late 1960s along with Masayuki JoJo Takayanagi and Karou Abe, expanding his musical circle by travels to Chicago and Europe in the early 1970s as the only non-American member of the AACM. The musical bonds he formed helped him continue to foster a fertile scene in Japan including increasingly frequent visits by international musicians. Toyozumi has been particularly well served by the Lithuanian label NoBusiness records and their Chap Chap Series imprint. Over the course of the last decade, they’ve released a string of duos with musicians like Paul Rutherford, Abe, Wadada Leo Smith, Masahiko Satoh, Mats Gustafsson, and Peter Brötzmann along with an exhilarating trio with Takayanagi and Nobuyoshi Ino. Their recent batch of releases adds to that catalog with a trio by Brötzmann and Toshinori Kondo from 2016 along with a duo with Derek Bailey from 1987, in both cases bringing noteworthy live sessions from the vaults to light.
Breath Awareness documents a duo by Bailey and Toyozumi at IMAI-Tei, Fukuoka City, Japan from November 1987. Bailey had visited and played in Japan in 1978 though any encounters with Toyozumi on that trip remain unreleased. Returning in 1987, he toured the country performing with collaborators including reed player Mototeru Takagi (documented on the NoBusiness release Live At FarOut, Atsugi 1987), dancer Min Tanaka, a few duos with Toyozumi as well as a trio date with Toyozumi and Peter Brötzmann (released as a limited-edition CD on the Improvised Company label.) Bailey’s duo collaborations with percussionists were particularly effective over the course of his career, whether with regular partners Han Bennink and Tony Oxley or with less frequent partners like Cyro Baptista, Andrea Centazzo, Steve Noble, and Susie Ibarra. From the first moments of this recording, his duo with Toyozumi clicks.
The guitarist’s brittle shards meld with the drummer’s lithe, open attack. The two quickly foster a mode of parallel interaction, Bailey methodically hammering out a repeated skewed chord while Toyozumi tosses off spattered tom patterns and cymbal splashes. Over the course of the first 25-minute improvisation, the two parry and weave their way along simultaneous circuitous trajectories. The drummer favors clattering phrasing that charges along, ebbing into areas of uncluttered activity, then veers off into oblique densities. Bailey is at top form, parsing out ringing chords and scrabbled runs, shrewdly probing and prodding his partner. Bailey follows with a 13-minute guitar solo which is a study in flinty elegance and considered brilliance. The guitarist proceeds with resolute deliberation, letting overtones ring against each other countered by assiduously-phrased, sharply articulated mid-register motifs. Bailey was a master at spontaneously structured improvisation and this solo is a dazzling example of the guitarist at top form.
The solo is followed by a compact, musing 4-minute duo improvisation which leads into a 27-minute finale. Here, the playing is spikier and there is a more dynamic sense of interchange between the two. Toyozumi’s playing is more jazz-inflected, injecting a free momentum which Bailey responds to with razor-sharp, whorled torrents. The improvisation moves back and forth between sections of boisterous density and velocity, circumspect volleys, and fiery give-and-take. This is an invaluable discovery and a laudable addition to both Bailey and Toyozumi’s catalog.
It's surprising that the trio of Peter Brötzmann, Toshinori Kondo, and Toyozumi took so long to come together. Kondo and Toyozumi had collaborated over many years with visiting Europeans like Tristian Honsinger and Peter Kowald and as part of Kondo’s Tibetan Blue Air Liquid Band. Kondo and Brötzmann worked together frequently starting in the early 1980s as part of the reed player’s Alarm session, a Japanese tour by ICP Orchestra, the Die Like a Dog quartet with William Parker and Hamid Drake, and in a variety of other projects. Brötzmann and Toyozumi played together when the ICP toured in 1982, again in 1987 with Derek Bailey and as a duo documented on the NoBusiness Triangle – Live at Ohm release. While the trio played together in 2014, Complete Link is their first recording, documenting a live set they performed at Roppongi Super Deluxe, Tokyo in 2016.
The three are incendiary across the entire 70-minute duration. Things kick off with Brötzmann’s immediately-identifiable baying roar and the drummer’s loose freely gamboling drums as the two build a simmering energy. When Kondo enters on shredded amplified trumpet four minutes in, the intensity is amped as tenor and trumpet trade phrases across Toyozumi’s coursing thunder. The trio sound is markedly different here from Die Like a Dog which was always anchored in the free-pulse undercurrent of Parker and Drake. Bereft of that underlying pulse, the music soars with an exuberant vigor with each of the members clearly reveling in the collective dynamism. The set consists of an opening 16-minute piece, a caterwauling 48-minute piece, and a five and a half minute closer.
Over the course of the first piece, one can sense the three probing the collective sound, pushing at the edges and measuring the way their playing coalesces. Settling into the longer “First Monorail,” they expand the arcs of the improvisation, riding squalling waves, opening up for extended solos, then diving back in with bellowing force. This works to particularly strong effect 15-minutes in, as tarogato, electronics-drenched trumpet, and surging drums converge into an eddying mass, setting the stage for a searing extended solo by Kondo, his clarion trumpet splintered into resonant shards across Toyozumi’s slashing cymbals then settling into shadings for an extended central section for keening reeds and buffeting drums. When Kondo comes back in, the massing of sound is orchestral in power and timbral depth. The shifting ebb and flow between brawny collective trio sections and reed/drums or trumpet/drums duos changes focus in the group while never flagging in commanding potency. The closing “Memories Of Wuppertal” provides a compact, pensive finale to the set, with flurried phrases by Brötzmann and Kondo whirring over the drummer’s fluid salvos. The set is a fitting tribute to the memories of Brötzmann and Kondo while providing another vital view of the musical depth and power of Toyozumi.
–Michael Rosenstein
BassDrumBone
Afternoon
Auricle AUR-24
Back in the day, Bill Smith had a column in Coda called “Letters from Friends,” dedicated to records made by improvisers he knew. Then, the title seemed a bit precious: these recordings were documents of a different nature, manifestos of uncompromising principles made in environments inimical to creativity, made by artists who walked the walk and therefore were consigned to a hard-scrabble, gig-to-gig subsistence. With the ripeness of time, as the scene has changed and so many have left it, Bill’s phrase has gained resonance. Records are like letters in that they can take on new meaning over the years, their youthful audacity now seen as prescience.
“Letters from Friends” sprung to mind with the arrival of BassDrumBone’s Afternoon, prompted by a handwritten “letter” on the envelope, presumably an alert to mail handlers. Having known Ray Anderson, Mark Helias, and Gerry Hemingway for decades, their recordings do take on an epistolary aspect, a periodic updating of their activities, interests, et al. The three comprise what anthropologists call an age set, persons who pass together through age-related statuses: 20-something DIY upstarts; long-haul road warriors; greying eminent artists. Particularly for their contemporaries, they have individually and collectively been a reflection of creative music’s long, detour-riddled road, and the right stuff required to traverse it.
With their 50th anniversary in 2027 on the horizon, Afternoon is a subtle title, alluding both to the real-time afternoon when the album was made, and to the stage of life the trio has entered. The cover image sends a related message: though the stump has cracked and discolored over time, its rings are evidence of decades of growth and maturation. The dynamism between the moment and the history that is its backdrop has always driven BassDrumBone’s music. Granted: the scope of that history has expanded enormously since 1977, and their relationship to it has evolved from being beneficiaries to contributors.
Great modern jazz groups have a complement of composer/soloists who cover much, if not all of the relevant waterfront. Think 1960 Jazz Messengers with Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, and Bobby Timmons, who created a textured picture of hard bop and where it was then going. BassDrumBone did something similar in regards to loft jazz at their inception, cohering inside and outside approaches with strong individual voices.
Of the three composers, Anderson leans a bit more heavily into grooves and old school jazz lyricism; Helias favors knottier themes that he deftly unties; and Hemingway puts a little more shoulder into pushing the envelope, but without dissipating the trio’s jazz core. Their complementary sensibilities are abundantly evident not only on the pieces they each contribute, but also to the album’s three collective pieces. Despite increasingly long hiatuses over the decades, BassDrumBone has retained the spirited bantering interplay that distinguished them from the outset.
Afternoon is a welcomed letter. If only they would write a little more frequently.
–Bill Shoemaker
Matthew Bourne + Glen Leach + Nika Ticciati + Nightports
Harpsichords
Discus 175 CD
Pianist and composer Matthew Bourne describes himself as “a passionate explorer of sound, possessed of a burning desire to make music on anything old, broken, or infirm.” So, when three harpsichords in various states of disrepair were offered to him by Leeds Conservatoire, under the condition that he make some music from them, he jumped on the opportunity. In the liner notes to the set, he explains, “There seemed to be an auspiciousness surrounding these harpsichords, the stories they might reveal, and more importantly, the promise of setting them alight in some sort of sacrificial bonfire after their usefulness had expired.” The resulting 2-CD set is comprised of two projects. The first CD, titled “All Three, At Once,” is a collection of improvisations by the harpsichord trio of Bourne, Glen Leach, and Nika Ticciati while on the second CD, titled “Each One, Separately,” Bourne improvises on each of the instruments with electronic processing by the Nightports duo, Mark Slater and Adam Martin.
The eight improvisations on the trio CD were recorded in an afternoon and Bourne, Leach, and Ticciati clearly revel in the opportunity to collectively explore the timbral possibilities of the instruments. With pieces ranging from two and a half to ten minutes long, the three exercise a keen ear toward the balance of velocity and densities of the overlapping lines. The inherent sonic nature of the harpsichord, with the sharp attack of plucked strings and short sustain are maximized, though the three take freedoms with the ramshackle instruments, hammering on the keys, scraping the strings, knocking the frames, and thrashing out blizzards of notes. The set starts out with the relatively spare sonorities of chiming chords, stuttering lines, and scuffed textures as the three musicians patiently let the sounds coalesce and then gradually mount into whorls of superimposed activity. From there, pieces zero in on collective strategies, constructing interwoven concentrations of notes threaded through with rhythmic motifs, shuddering onslaughts, and cracked angularities. “Handkerchief” plumbs the lower registers of the instruments while it is next to impossible to identify the instrumental sources of the raucous scree of the following “The Helmet Of Disaster.” Remnants of Baroque phrasings are deconstructed with ebbs and flows of bracing intensity on “Charles” which jolts and crackles with bristling focus. Bourne sums up the session effectively, noting “The instruments never seemed to tire of us, and, although they revealed much of themselves, it felt as if we had only scratched at the surface (sometimes literally) of their reach.”
Bourne deployed distinctly different strategies for the second CD. Here, he improvised on each of the instruments, with simultaneous electronic processing by Slater. The recordings were then heavily edited as Martin layered in additional effects and processing. The nine short pieces, all running between two and five minutes, sound a bit more like studies than the trio excursions. Bourne (on piano) and Nightports have collaborated before so their working strategies, while informed by the shift from piano to harpsichord, have a sense of familiarity. With a single harpsichord, the instrumental elements are sparer, colored by the added layers of electronic textures. The trajectories of the improvisations are more measured in contrast to the torrents of the trio. Pulsing rhythms, abraded electronics, harmonic manipulations, and shades of reverb and delay meld with the keyboard reverberations, sometimes subsuming them into variegated soundscapes. The opening “Burn All Three” begins with cascading, melodic harpsichord which is gradually colored by electronic shadings. As the piece proceeds, the lyricism is frayed, and the electronics increasingly distress the attack of the acoustic instrument. On other pieces, it sounds as if Bourne prepares or plucks the strings, eliciting the sound of an extended zither. That ear toward timbre is in evidence throughout. “Red Handed” begins with chiming resonances of short motifs and builds intensity as shimmering skeins of electronics wrap around Bourne’s angular phrasing, concluding with welling atmospherics, while on “Keep Both,” the mounting electronics are in the foreground with the percussive attack of the harpsichord peeking through.
Bourne concludes the liner notes to set with an astute summation. “In making this music, no one could have anticipated just how generously these instruments would surrender, or the extent to which they were capable of generating music of such singularity and belligerence.” That notion the spontaneous grappling with the “belligerence” of the “old, broken or infirm” instruments comes through in both of the complementary discs of this set.
–Michael Rosenstein
Anthony Braxton
Solo Bern 1984: First Visit
ezz-thetics 103
In a 1971 Blindfold Test, Leonard Feather asked Phil Woods to comment on Anthony Braxton’s “To Artist Murray De Pillars” from his album For Alto. Woods didn’t hold back: “That was terrible. I can’t imagine the ego of a person thinking they can sustain a whole performance by themselves, when they can’t really play the saxophone well ... If you’re going to try and play ... you should have the training to carry it off ... this is such an ego trip, that you think you’re that much of a bitch that you can do a solo album. No stars.” Braxton, who Feather often used as a whipping boy for what he felt were the shortcomings of the avant-garde, felt a direct impact from Woods’s comments, telling Graham Lock in Forces in Motion that “Phil Woods damned me to hell.”
On the other hand, whereas Woods felt that Braxton did not have the proper training and technique to accomplish what he was striving for, in his book The Universal Machine philosopher and poet Fred Moten speaks of Braxton’s “movement out into extensions of the alto horn that remake it or, at least, reconstruct what had been given as its capacity.” He emphasizes Braxton’s “study and the forging of language” and of For Alto’s “law-breaking and law-giving grammar.” In For Alto, Moten sees Braxton offering a “methodological assertion of flight in and from a given order.” Braxton’s music “comes from deep outside, the open, the surround, which resists being enclosed or buried as much as it does being excluded.”
It is here, in these poles between Woods chafing at Braxton’s inability to follow one version of the rules of jazz and Moten observing an intentional rewriting of black music that is rooted in a blackness that cannot be contained, in which we find the power of Braxton’s solo work: his simultaneous dispensing of that which hinders and an extension and reconfiguration of the essential elements of the tradition to create something wholly new and singular. I.e., embodying the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s slogan, “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.”
Those who are sympathetic to Moten’s reading of Braxton hear this foundation being laid in For Alto. By the time of his 1984 live solo recital in Bern, Switzerland, released now for the first time in ezz-thetics’ new “First Visit” series, Braxton had had thirteen years with which to further codify his solo alto language. In just over one hour, Braxton takes an electrified audience on a journey through twelve originals and four standards. As annotator Art Lange points out, the set’s importance and notability lies in part with its material. Eight pieces, including “Naima” and “I Remember You,” made their first appearance here. Others, such as composition numbers “99Q,” “106R,” and “118Q” were likely never recorded again, while others like “77D,” “77G,” “77H,” and “118F” remained in Braxton’s repertoire.
The recital is a masterclass in programming, with each composition being based on its own set of techniques and approaches. Half of the tracks are less than four minutes, several of them even border on pithiness. This is in great contrast to most of For Alto and Braxton’s other solo live performances such as his 2003 appearance in Wilisau, which go into deeper explorative depths. The relative brevity of the performances set a brisk pace, making the hour breeze by. No two, three, or even four consecutive compositions are alike. The first four tracks demonstrate this most clearly. “99B” opens the performance with a collection of start-stop, jumping, stuttering, and intervallic fragments that Braxton often overblows. Throughout the relatively manic piece, the dynamic levels shift drastically, with some gestures jumping out at the listener as if they were a 3D movie. At times he brutally tears the ends of the phrases from his horn. The tidy “77H” is based around sets of trills that unfold into longer lines that eventually return to their trill of origin. Compared to “99B,” it operates at a much quieter dynamic level and required delicate handling. Braxton’s reading of “Alone Together” is a fairly faithful rendering of the tune. It is less a deconstruction of the standard than it is a showcase of the part of Braxton that admires Bird and Desmond: beboppish and melodic, with hints of relaxed West Coast licks. “170C” is a brief sojourn through Ayleresque squeals, chortles, and multiphonics. Two cuts later, on “118F,” Braxton extends on these techniques in which he hums a countermelody against the multiphonic long tone lines he is playing, in effect playing a duet with himself.
The three other standards illustrate how Braxton filters his language through the established tradition. He absolutely shreds “Giant Steps,” taking Trane’s sheets of sound and translates them into a slightly more jagged Braxtonian dialect. He takes “Naima” at a slightly quicker pace than it is usually heard and departs from it just enough to wonder whether most people in the audience were able to identify it. “I Remember You” closes the set. Like “Alone Together,” it hews as close to a straight-ahead treatment as one might assume Braxton would be willing to give it. It is not too far removed from how Konitz might treat the tune in a solo context.
Throughout the recording, the presence of Braxton’s breath plays an essential role in experiencing the music. While always being able to hear a horn player breathe on every record might be a distraction, here it’s a reminder of the embodied physicality of playing a wind instrument. The audibility of Braxton’s inhalations also accentuates the myriad ways he uses his breath to shape and vary phrase length. As he demonstrates on “77G,” he is a master of circular breathing. On this composition he unfurls a long running set of stepwise and arpeggiated lines that roll and tumble through hills and valleys. It’s an extreme rendering of the solo cadenzas often found in the concert saxophone literature. By contrast, later on “77D,” which is based around an aggressive series of pops, grunts, and squeals, Braxton often breathes after only two or three notes to shape and accentuate the short punchy phrases. He breathes not when it is necessary for his body, but when it is necessary for the music. In this way, he demonstrates a studied and intentional approach to breathing and phrasing, much in the way a classical saxophonist dissects an etude, penciling in breath marks for maximum musicality whether she needs additional air or not.
As this hour recital demonstrates clearly and most emphatically, Braxton had fully developed and mastered a new grammar for the alto saxophone – a grammar that is most capacious in its reach, variety, and logical underpinnings. Its sixteen performances offer a panoramic view of the different elements of his “language studies” in discrete, digestible pieces. In this way, Solo Bern 1984 exemplifies Moten’s characterization of Braxton’s “law-breaking” and “law-giving” method: the study, the inventiveness, and the quest for finding the alto saxophone’s full capacities for expression.
–Chris Robinson
