Anthony Braxton - 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022

Avant Music News

The Free Jazz Collective 0

Gary Chapin, Don Phipps and Lee Rice Epstein will be looking at Anthony Braxton’s 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022 over the next few days.

By Gary Chapin

I saw a birthday message to Anthony Braxton in his Facebook group, recently, and someone wished him a “creative” year. That’s a wish that I think will be granted. I’m all for celebrations and wishes of good fortune, but if there’s anyone who reliably has creative and productive years, especially in his late career, that person has been Anthony Braxton.

Witness the current release, 10 discs focused on the Lorraine compositions. Ten discs. Ten compositions. Ten performances. Ten concerts. Released as if this is just a normal thing a person does. It is not. It is a normal thing a Prometheus does, and Braxton has been bringing us fire since 3 Compositions of New Jazz in 1968 (with Muhal Richard Abrams, Leroy Jenkins, and Wadada Leo Smith).

The first six tracks of Lorraine feature Braxton on saxes and electronics, Adam Matlock on accordion and voice, and Susana Santos Silva. It’s an interesting chamber group, with the accordion and electronics supplying the miasma everyone swims in, while the sax, accordion, and trumpet do the swimming. It would be too much to call it synchronized swimming, but the are swimming in conversation. A lot of kinetic call and response going on.

Track one, 'Comp 423,' begins as Braxton means to go on. The structures are languid and move at a regular pace, while the melodic voices dart all over the place. The textures leave a lot of space and no one rushes in to fill a vacuum. Trying to think of how to understand this music, how to grok it, my first thought was that it was somewhat rhetorical—there are sections where it feels like the three voices are having an argument and making points. The second thought was that it was theater or dance. My mind generates a choreography for this without even being asked to, a plot expressed with bodies and not words. After about ten minutes, Matlock comes in with wordless utterance, which only makes all the rest of it sound more organic or biological. It immediately brought to mind Roscoe Mitchell’s work with vocalist Thomas Buckner.

Track two, 'Comp 424,' opens in a more playful space—although each track is a disc or around 45 minutes, and each traverses a number of “spaces”—and makes it a good time to mention that Braxton’s constant solo/obbligato is a wonderous unfolding of melodic ideas and inspirations. None of the musicians here explore the screeching edge of their timbres. They all play within the advertised parameters. But they play with a lightness and, much of the time, dry humor that is a trademark of Braxton’s recent chamber work.

Track three, 'Comp 425,' continues in the same multi-variant vein. I would be lying if I told you I entirely understood the shared qualities that make something a Lorraine composition. There is a space and a set of rules around “how to be in the world and how to be in relation with each other” that unifies the set and encourages each voice. There’s a sense of ease, also, which is very welcome. It’s a quieter kind of love. No one gets whipped into a frenzy. There’s enough of that going on in the world.

This review will continue tomorrow and the next day.

The Free Jazz Collective 0

Review of Compositions 426, 427, and 428. See part 1.

By Don Phipps

There is nothing about Compositions 426, 427 and 428 that speak the language of jazz. As Anthony Braxton argues, his music is not jazz. He strives to go beyond idioms. This is not modern classical either. Why? There is too much free playing and improvisation, that while structured, is not so structured as to create dogmatic expression. Braxton’s compositions instead fuse these two pillars (modern jazz and classical) into something new – a language that can best be described as Braxtonian. In these unique and wildly different compositions, the key driving force is not the musicians themselves, as amazingly precise and technical as they are. Instead, it’s the electronics, which filters through in every measure (phase, period – call it what you will). Like light in a dark theater, to which one’s eye is immediately drawn, electronics consistently provoke and stimulate.

How this is accomplished is a mystery. Braxton is elusive on the subject. While the liner notes do a good job of detailing the complex building process of Braxton’s historical achievements and demonstrate how these building blocks form the foundation for 10 Comp (Lorraine), they do not detail just how the electronics (developed using a program called SuperCollider) and the music are able to co-exist. From what is known, Braxton pre(?)programs the electronics and then one might presume that the score is provided to the musicians who then improvise around electronic “structures” as they exist. It’s difficult to imagine that since the electronics must be programmed, that it interacts with the musicians (as the future might allow with artificial intelligence – the electronics becoming, in this case, a fourth improviser). Instead, it is the musicians that must interact with the electronics. Electronics as a given – composed/developed by Braxton.

To this, the three artists, Susana Santos Silva on trumpet, Adam Matlock on accordion and vocals, and the maestro himself, Anthony Braxton, on an array of saxophones, layer sounds and improvisations that mirror the music’s atmospherics and at times follow a series of notes and at other times wander on their own path. All three, though, do so with great expertise.

Silva’s trumpet is piercing at time. At others, she flutters about like a hummingbird. But even as her playing runs to the extremes possible for the horn, her technique and control never falters or hesitates. She seems to approach her lines three dimensionally – progressing up and down while weaving back and forth. Suffice it to say, stunning is befitting.

Matlock, too, plays the accordion in a manner that I imagine a French street musician would respond to with mouth open- and wide-eyed stares. What’s fascinating about his technique is the dynamics he brings to the instrument, which can elevate from dissonant chords to squeezed out bursts in a moment’s notice. His vocals are both odd and interesting – at times, a guttural response to the music’s dynamics, and, at other times, a full-throated part of the composition.

Braxton rolls through the three compositions using what he describes in the notes as “slap tongue logics,” “double tongue techniques,” and hyper-runs up and down the necks of his various saxophones that feel like the old slapstick slipping on a banana peel – meaning that the experience is a continuum and not a series of notes. As Braxton himself says, the music is “a system for positive experiences and fun.” True dat. There is much fun in hearing him carve out sounds and tones while filling spaces or leaving it wide open.

What is realized here is a new language – a new systemic language – and this is where it deviates from free improvisation. There is clearly a system at work in these three compositions, one that is captivating and challenging, cerebral and yet connected, one that like a sunbeam, which at first look appears to be randomly floating yet is simply responding to the air currents around it, is both responsive and detailed. Anthony says it best – mutable logics, stable logics, and transpositional logics.

The most enticing aspect to this listener is the music’s eerie quality – a feeling like one has entered The Twilight Zone. Braxton speaks of “dream time and/or dream space.” He further writes that the music is about “stream compositional alignment.” One should keep these concepts in mind as one navigates Braxton’s odd and surreal world of sound and space. For those wishing to experience the frontier (not the final one – as Braxton’s sound/music seems as boundless as the universe), this set of diverse and commanding compositions, like an unknown world or one’s own subconscious, begs to be explored. Enjoy.

Anthony Braxton: saxophones, electronics
Adam Matlock: accordion, voice
Susana Santos Silva: trumpet