The
last time I undertook something like this, the
Composition Notes proved invaluable in helping me to understand the structure and essence of the piece before I wrote about it. So, naturally, when I turned my attention to (the work now known as)
Comp. 70, I went back to the same source - as well as to the very good notes by Bill Shoemaker for
Four Compositions (Washington, D.C.) 1998, the album on which
70 was first - eventually - released. Having only recently noticed that the 1976 Newport Jazz Festival performance had
itself been released - in digital form, thirty-five years after the event - I then decided that I simply
had to get hold of this recording, especially
once I discovered that it had never been in general circulation among collectors. As soon as I
did get hold of it, I started thinking about some sort of comparative analysis of the two versions: the original '76 quintet and the
'98 septet which (as I say) was actually the first official recording of the piece, despite its having taken place more than two decades later.
Last month, then, I found that studying the composer's notes for Comp. 92 enabled me to understand the structure of that piece - as interpreted by an external group, in this case - much more clearly, and to follow its eventual course with such precision that it was pretty simple in the end to pinpoint where each section begins, down to the last second. Spoiler alert: that is not the case at all with Comp. 70. Luckily, with material that is this much longer in duration, it also turned out not to be necessary (or at least to be arguably undesirable).
The confusing aspects of this latter piece began before Composition Notes Book C had even been opened, as I struggled to reconcile the very basic description in the catalogue of works ("eight pages of composition with improvisation for 1 wind, 1 brass, piano, pass, percussion") with the reality of a forty-minute* suite of music. Eight pages, not eighty? - and yet I already knew from Shoemaker's 1998 notes** that the piece is divided into no fewer than sixteen sections...
... most of which, I soon discovered, are subdivided into smaller parts. A typical description from
Book C: "Section A consists of fourteen phrase grouping constructions that are further divided into three groups of inter-component statements (cells) (each of which is activated by separate time point cues)." [It was obvious to me pretty early on in my reading that I was unlikely to be able to follow the progress of this piece as easily as I had done in my previous analysis...] A further layer of confusion is added by the way in which the digital files for the '76 recording
have been presented: there is an (uncredited
***) introduction lasting less than one minute, then the music itself is broken up into eight unequal parts, labelled "(Sections) A-H". This pretty clearly implies that the
music is to be considered as divided into eight parts, although that does not reflect the composer's intentions; possibly, whoever prepared the material for release in 2011 (or at whatever point before then) was aware of the description "eight pages..." as detailed above, and knew no more than that; possibly, they listened to the complete performance and just decided on eight fairly obvious places to index the recording. In any case, there is no direct correlation between the files as presented, and the actual structure of the piece - nor must any be inferred.
- And speaking of inferences... but no, I will come back to that later, at the end of the post ("that" being the whole question of what the 1976 recording is, how it came about, and where it was hiding for all those years... all valid questions, which I found myself asking as soon as I discovered that it never made it into general circulation).
***
The aim here, then, will be to undertake some sort of direct comparison between the two versions, noting any major stylistic divergence, as well as seeking audible evidence of the extent to which the sounds heard are traceable to the actual eight-page score (and I still have trouble believing that the score only comprises eight pages, even allowing for the extensive pockets of improvisation-space which must surely have been encoded into the model). First - notwithstanding the limitations noted above - it's worth referring back to the composer's own notes to see what can be gleaned from them regarding the essential nature of the piece.
By a freakish coincidence (whatever that means#), this is the second time in a row I've had recourse to the official notes for a piece where the dedicatee's name is missing from the published text: just as with Comp. 92, the notes for Comp. 70 - which comprise pp. 553-72 of Composition Notes Book C## - leave a gap following the words "The work is dedicated to" ... which implies that parts of the notes were left unfinished, details to be added prior to publication, and that some details understandably got overlooked. It is not at all normal for the dedication details to be omitted, though: most of the pieces in these books clearly state the names of the dedicatees. In this case, Bill Shoemaker's later notes fill in the missing name as Bill Dixon, and we'll have to take his word for that (even if I have a nagging feeling that some other piece in the canon has also been dedicated to Mr Dixon... we'll let that go). It makes sense: 70 is very far from being a work built around a tune or melody, concerned instead with the organisation of sound, drawing on various strategies by which musicians can be induced to respond to each other. This is a serious and ambitious piece of modern composition, not a "jazz number", and Bill Dixon's is a useful name to invoke in that respect. (How well such an undertaking fit into the confines of a Jazz Festival... is something else I will address later on.)
The wider remit of the work is set out thus, in the notes: "Section A opens the music as a vast sound space environment that is unique and unfeeling. When the music begins to happen we are allowed to enter a world of slow and changing unison statements that give insight into the purpose of time and thought."### (Maybe just pause a minute right there, to take all that in.) In more accessible terms, it is explained that the work "is not a head structure or single dialogue sound forum that emphasizes only one principal intention and/or attitude^ - rather Composition No. 70 is an expansive terrain of structured moments that unfolds into many different personalities and motives." (These "structured moments" are what I will be noting below, among other things.) All the main sections of the work contain their own notated material; but the piece was written "without any preconceived overstructure dictates - in the traditional sense of pre-set harmonic and/or rhythmic systems".
Besides the above, what I really took from the notes can be condensed down to two main conclusions. First, there is a major emphasis on musical elements being introduced early on, then recontextualised - Shoemaker also uses the term "repositioned", borrowed from B's own notes - later: recontextualised, not simply repeated. The most obvious example of this is the use of trills - the trill being itself one of B's key language types (although I am not sure if that term was in use by 1976) - which are present at the very beginning then recur throughout the piece in different sonic contexts, usually played on piano (at least in the original performance)^^. Second, one of the principal characteristics of the work is the way in which it forces the musicians to consider very carefully their own roles and interactions with the rest of the group (or "sound forum", as B. would have it), fostering a "state of involvement" even while "participation... necessitates that each individual be responsible for his or her own statement". The effort of interpreting this last point might reasonably lead one to conclude that it is a fundamental truth about all musics born from or adjacent to "jazz", and indeed (very possibly) of all musics generally; nevertheless, this focus on underlining the role of the individual within the group, and on asking each player to make a careful study of it, feels very Braxtonian somehow, especially in the light of the way B's influence has been - continues to be - felt by the musicians who have studied with him, played with him, or simply been influenced and inspired by him.
***
To recap the two performances: the premiere, from 1976, was written for quintet and featured the working group with
Lewis,
Holland and
Altschul augmented by frequent collaborator
Muhal Richard Abrams. This gives us three key AACM figures onstage at once, together with the bassist and drummer who could (at that stage) have been expected to have the best understanding of B's music, and the system of thought which underpins it. The later version was rearranged somewhat for septet, with two extra reeds: the brass, bass and drums are played by
THB,
Jonathan Zorn and
Kevin Norton, whilst the keyboard role is filled by accordionist
Pete Cafarella;
James Fei adds more saxes and clarinets, and
David Novak bassoon and contrabassoon. Norton was already the regular first-choice percussionist, having made his first appearance
in (I think) 1994; Bynum and Fei, both of whom would become critically important to B's music in the years and decades to come, were still relatively new to it and were, I believe, playing in the same group for the first time
^^^. (The other names will be less familiar to most readers, although Zorn and Novak did play with B. on other occasions; I'm not sure I have come across Cafarella anywhere else.) Adding more reed players, both of whom double or triple on their instruments, was a natural development: B. may have written the piece originally for quintet, but he repeatedly expresses the desire in his notes for the horn players to use as wide a variety of instruments as possible. Augmenting the group with extra players was the simplest way of moving towards that.
Shoemaker describes the '76 Newport Jazz Festival as a "politically charged occasion", declining to elaborate (as if it would be obvious to all readers why this was the case~); B., he says, used this to present a work which "consolidated strategies pursued in his recent quartet music, demonstrated the diversity of innovations in creative music during the 1960s and 1970s, and empowered the performers to shape the performance". This seems to be a pretty fair summary.
The two recordings were made under completely different circumstances and, naturally, they also sound completely different. The 1998 septet was - like the
other three pieces on that album - recorded at the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, and although it says in the notes that this was "live", I take that to mean that the band played all together and was recorded that way, not that the recording was made in front of an actual audience (since there is no evidence of the latter) - in any case the recording is very much of professional quality, and it
sounds to all intents and purposes as if it was recorded in the studio. The 1976 quintet sounds as if it was captured onstage on a tape recorder, probably a decent enough one by the standards of the time, although there is a little tape deterioration near the start and not all players are equally audible at all times. The main difference, besides the obvious gulf in audio fidelity, is in the ambience: the '76 tape gives a full impression not just of the relative positions of the players onstage, but of the space between them, the size of the auditorium, the air in the room, and (most crucially) the
energy and buzz surrounding the performance. The '98 recording does not lack fizz or excitement at all; indeed, given that the band tear through the score considerably faster than their counterparts did twenty-two years earlier, the later version is generally denser and more intense than their earlier one. However, there is an ineffable
crackle to the earlier recording which is not present in the later one, very probably just the product of the performance being given in front of a (very appreciative) live audience.
I would find it extraordinarily difficult to describe the music played in either version, and if I attempted it, I don't think it would help the reader much. (Anyone interested is, in any case, directed towards the actual recordings.) Nonetheless, the '76 reading in particular more than once had me thinking of words sung by Robert Plant in "Kashmir":
not a word I've heard could I relate... (but the) story was quite clear. Listening to this recording did feel overwhelmingly like being immersed in an exotic, utterly absorbing narrative, coherent and whole (notwithstanding its avowedly multipartite nature) - it's just that afterwards I was quite unable to articulate what I had heard. This doesn't really seem to matter very much, if at all: it's a really powerful and convincing performance, and a salutory reminder (to me!) that however much the working quartet would
start to feel lopsided by year's end, at this point in the music's development, all players were equally capable of grappling with brand new, challenging and demanding music, and doing so with complete success. Nobody sounds anything less than fully focussed in this remarkable recording. If I didn't experience the same "storytelling" quality in the '98 reading, on this last occasion, that is at least partly because by that stage I was primarily listening out for familiar landmarks, trying to match these up with those in the earlier version. It's still the case that my response to the WDC album has always been extremely positive, any time I have just played it and listened to it (as opposed to making notes on it).
As one would expect from readings involving passages of improvisation, the two recordings are far from identical - and they could hardly be that, given that almost fifteen minutes is lopped off the running time in the later rendition. But there are many points of contact, and it's quite clearly the same score which is being used (even if I still don't understand how that score is supposed to comprise a mere eight pages!). The beginning, in both cases, is pretty much exactly the same: high trills over cymbal washes, the only difference being that the
very beginning of the '98 version consists of two dramatic chords, leading directly to the opening passage as noted (these chords not present in '76, when the music sort of begins as if it has always been playing, just maybe not previously audible). In the quintet, the trills are played on piano only; in the septet, they are voiced on accordion and small brass. In both cases, what happens next is the same: a slow, ominous theme in very low voicings is eked out, building a considerable degree of tension with the trills and cymbals which continue underneath; the effect is not dissimilar to certain other pieces we have already heard, such as
the opening section of
Comp. 23e. (In the quintet, these very low voices are trombone, arco bass and - of course - contrabass clarinet, which must have excited a few audience members right there.) To quote again from the
Composition Notes, "the basic feeling that is communicated here is... 'expectation!' (and then 'having to wait')." Within a couple of minutes, the tension is allowed to dissolve gradually instead of exploding, and the long journey is properly underway.
I have no more intention of walking the reader through the piece minute-by-minute than I do of attempting to write about the music descriptively; from the third minute, in the case of the quintet, and halfway through the second minute of the septet, the theme subsides and details naturally enough begin to diverge. All I really plan to do from this point is map out the points of convergence, regular as they are. We are kept waiting a little while for the next of these as, following the opening, the '76 version becomes rather spacious and contemplative in tone - in keeping with B's note about the audience "having to wait", the early tension not at once being released - whilst the '98 septet is much more busy and dense, a crowded (not cluttered) soundscape reminding me almost of a barnyard; at 1.10 in file B ('76) a slight pause precedes a declarative written phrase, culminating in a unison trill, very reminiscent of Comp. 69j's opening theme. (The trill, remember, is the most salient example of a motif to be deployed and redeployed - repositioned - at points throughout.) This same phrase is repeated with slight variations, and the exact same passage appears in the '98 reading at 5.55; my best guess is that in both cases we have reached the beginning of Section E in the score. (But... don't quote me on that.) Meanwhile the C file for '76 begins with a similar (but trill-free) written phrase which does not seem to have a direct counterpart in the '98 version. In between the "signposts", the two versions explore the improvised sections entirely differently, as one (again) would expect.
The next marker occurs around 10.00 in '98, and around three minutes into the D file in '76, where a furiously-intense passage has subsided into brief silence, out of which emerge long, sustained notes interspered with short, staccato written phrases which are precisely mirrored in the later version. (By now though I had completely given up on trying to locate these events within the section-map representing the infrastructure of the score~~.) The next few minutes from '76 (files E into F) are some of the most vibrant and captivating in the entire performance, but their main events - an intense Abrams piano solo, some outrageous contrabass sax (following which, some much-needed cathartic applause provides a safety valve for the audience) and a dramatic unaccompanied drum solo - are presumably not written out in the score in any way, since they have no direct matches in '98. But the passage immediately following the '76 drum solo - from roughly 1.32 in file F - is exactly reproduced from around 11.40 in the '98 reading, and to emphasise the match, in both cases we are very quickly back with those trills, repositioned in fresh contexts again. Out of this, at 3.38 (F) in '76 and 12.17 in '98, the same plucked bass figure plunges the music forwards. In the septet, this is followed by quite a lot more unison written material which seems to have been skipped out in the quintet, and in fact the later version appears to loop back on itself in due course, with the passage from around 15.55 sounding almost (though not quite) identical to one we have already heard, further trillage leading up to a reprise (16.31) of the plucked bass figure we encountered four minutes previously. I couldn't begin to tell you which parts of the territory are being traversed by our '98 explorers, but it's all fascinating stuff.
In both versions, there follows a furiously-intense passage with some white-hot (but tightly-controlled) sax playing from the maestro (which lasts longer in the later reading), and in both versions this is brought to a close with a series of group staccato attacks on a single note: around 20.05 in '98, 5.35 (F) in '76. In both versions this is immediately followed by a much more reflective passage, again featuring long, sustained unison notes over busy cymbals. The two recordings quickly diverge again into improvisation after this, though, and next come back into alignment around 1.05 (G) and 21.13, both of which feature written lines where bass, clarinet and brass are the strongest voices; the contemplative next passage is again a match in both versions. (Bynum's extended display of "laughing" attacks with the mute, however, are an innovation unique to the later recording, and highly effective they are too.) 23.50 in '98 has the same written figure, leading to another sustained tone, that we hear from around 5.57 (G) in '76, though the passages leading up to this point have been very different (much more intense in the quintet, this time). And from here on out, the two readings move very differently towards their endings, with the quintet going spacious-free-playful then building to a brief, tumultuous climax - Abrams pulverising the bottom octave of the piano before lapsing away into tinkling fragments in the top end - in a way that the later version never attempts to replicate. Instead, the last few minutes of the later reading provide a marvellous sequence of bent, creaking, detail-rich attacks and techniques from all players, dwindling quietly away into two last sustained notes, THB's cornet fidgeting away into silence at the very end. But even in the last minute or so, there are fleeting reminders that we are hearing two readings of the same piece.
The quintet's close is marked simply with a "thank you" from B., greeted with the kind of rapturous and unfettered applause which some might have you believe was simply not a possibility for this kind of music at that time. The audience gives the impression of having been held spellbound throughout, and if some of them came expecting to hear a "jazz concert", free or otherwise, they do not seem to have been disappointed by the actual performance in the slightest. And yet, in 1977, B. was interviewed by Steve Lake~~~, and remembered of the Carnegie Hall concert that "everybody was really surprised by what we did... George Coleman was playing be-bop, Ted Curson... too; so I decided, well, I could do that but I might as well do something completely different. And then I read this review by Ira Gitler which says "Well, Braxton has proved that he can't swing." The critics just missed the point. Everybody is locked by very limited definitions of what creative music should be." If by "everybody" B. means the critical establishment, he would know, and I'm sure he was right - nor did it end there, as conservatives like Wynton Marsalis would later attempt to write all this "other stuff" out of history altogether. But there were people who got it, whatever "it" might be, and we can hear that at the end of this vital recording. Of course, those people were listening with open ears, trusting the musicians to play something worth hearing. Gitler, who will have been there on some magazine editor's time and money, can be assumed to have spent the whole performance with one eyebrow cocked high enough to give him a headache for a week, and apparently blamed the latter on the music (to which he doubtless stopped paying attention within a few minutes anyway, already writing his damning "review" in his head). Fuck that noise: this was the sound of something new, and there were always some people who recognised that.
***
Finally: I did say I would come back to the question of what this recording might be, and how it got here, and why it disappeared for all those years... the Wolfgang's website lists the files as copyright Bill Graham Archives and affiliates. B's notes, on the other hand, end by stating "the work has yet to be documented on record". That single word "yet" does just about allow for the possibility of an agreement, at the time of performance, for a recording to be made with a view to eventual release - at some point. Coincidentally, Bill Graham's Fillmore Records
ceased operation in 1976; perhaps there was an original intention to publish which just evaporated, along with the label. It does sound as if the recording was made onstage, or very close to it, and it seems we would have to conclude that it was made with
some sort of official permission. In any case, by 1998, Graham himself had been dead for a number of years (killed in a helicopter crash; even if I won the lottery, you would never get me in one of those things) and B. had clearly decided that the only way the piece would ever get recorded was if he did it himself. Who knows what the status of the '76 tape was, by that late stage..? Graham's estate must have owned it, along with hundreds or thousands of other unreleased recordings, and B. would presumably have been in no position to wangle it back, even if he remembered it by then. (- And one would think he would have done; but then, did he even know..? hmmm.)
It's not professional quality, and for full effect, I definitely recommend listening through headphones (in the dark would be even better). Important document though it is, it seems to me a real cheek that after all these years of sitting on it, anyone would expect to be paid for it - instead of simply sending it on its way with a blessing. Had it been made available (much) earlier, it would have found greater recognition and been valued by collectors worldwide, I'm sure. As it is, finally stealth-released thirty-five years after the fact, only a few fanatics like me will even really be aware of it, and this seems a crying shame. I know it's not exactly "for sale" - the site has got thousands of live concerts in its archives, and they want people to sign up for monthly access to them, this being just one of the many delights one could uncover in the process - but I can't encourage anyone to part with money for this. Let's hope it gradually seeps out into the blogosphere, where it naturally belongs...
* The 1976 version lasts just over forty minutes; the 1998 version clocks in at 27.39. (Even so - eight pages?!)
** These are presumably the original liner notes from BH009, which I don't (yet) have in physical form; but in any case they are now easily available on the album's Bandcamp page.
*** That is, the archival entry on the Restructures discography lists only the eight musical files. For reasons partly explained in the main post, I'm not thoroughly persuaded of the claim to exclusivity implied by the site where these files were eventually made available for sale, and I have deliberately not linked back to it here; but anyone who wants to find the recordings in their "official home" can find the url in my earlier post. (Strictly speaking, the eight music files are simply labelled "A", "B", "C" etc on the other site, and the precise way of naming them on Restructures would seem to have been an innovation of Jason G. Then again, given that the original url is dead and that the location for the concert has moved within that other site, it may be that they files were labelled rather more fully when they were first "released" in 2011.)
# The prevalent viewpoint among western intellectuals these days attaches no significance to coincidence at all, but many other cultures have had a different line on the subject. Personally, I always take note of it.
## Copyright 1988 by Synthesis Music. Published - as always - by Frog Peak of Lebanon, New Hampshire. (First printing.)
### Of course, the fact that the composer himself conceived the work in these terms - and was thus able to delineate the events of the music within that (much) wider context - does not mean that listeners would experience it in the same way. It can be presumed that the performance was not preceded by a lecture on the nature of the work to be performed; even if one had been delivered, how many present would have understood it? (Whether or not this really matters - and to what extent the composer-philosopher might say that the nature of the work communicates itself, regardless of the audience's conscious comprehension of that - is a whole separate question, not to be examined here.)
^ In other words, a direct contrast is being drawn between Comp. 70 and the seventeen component parts of the 69 series.
^^ Shoemaker regards this as the aspect of the composition most clearly forward-facing, "whereas much of (70) recapitulated earlier investigations": for him, "repositioning foreshadows the advent of pulse track structures in the quartet music of the 1980s and early 1990s", but I'm not at all sure that I agree with him there. (Pulse tracks are more about rhythmic displacement, or counterpoint; in that regard they are more relevant to 92 than they are to 70... and besides, the foundations for them had already been laid in the mid-'70s, with Comp. 23g.)
^^^ As far as I can tell, THB made his debut as part of the "Wesleyan Creative Orchestra" which performed (the musical components of) Comp. 102 - this took place in March 1996. (The young brass player was credited on that occasion as just Taylor Bynum.) Fei first shows up the following year, as one of six saxophone players in the "Yoshi's ninetet" which enjoyed a four-night residency in Oakland. They both played on Comp. 46 as well as on 70, on May 1st 1998 in WDC; Fei was also one of nine saxophonists heard on Comp. 223. I can't find any earlier performances where they were both present (but of course, this does not necessarily mean that there weren't any).
~ At the time of this performance, I was two weeks shy of my sixth birthday, and living in Birmingham, England: I am certainly in no great position to comment on why this occasion was "politically charged", and would have valued some explanation. (The only mention I can remember my parents making of global politics around this time concerned Idi Amin's activities in Uganda; as for the climate in the U.S., the Vietnam War was over - although the fallout from it arguably never would be - and the only major event I can find from that year was Carter unexpectedly beating Ford in the presidential election. If anyone cares to fill in the blanks here, I am all ears.)
~~ Any attempt to pick out likely-looking signposts in the notes is thwarted by the latter's reference to very precise prior locations, e.g. Section J repositions material "from grouping B5". But since I couldn't tell you where B5 can be found in either recording, well, you get the idea. Even a nutcase like me has to draw the line somewhere.
~~~ This took place on May 28 in Evan Parker's garden, at Twickenham: the year is not given, but we are told that it was the penultimate day of Company Week, and B. refers to the Newport event as having been "last year". It is (of course) presented as an appendix to Book C, pp. 615-643.
