Getting the word out, part 2

The May 2007 issue of Paris Transatlantic has a long review by Nate Dorward on the Braxton Iridium box:

The nine CDs in this collection document everything played during the four nights of performances, and come with a 56-page booklet containing a thoughtful overview by Braxtonologist Jonathan Piper as well as commentaries by many of the musicians (one misses the assiduous bookkeeping of a Graham Lock, though: some guidance as to the subsidiary compositions involved in these dense collages would have been helpful, and not hard to assemble, given that the backstage footage shows the musicians keeping score of composition numbers on a tally-sheet). The cherry on top is the tenth disc, a DVD with a documentary feature mingling clips from the performances and excerpts from a talk by Braxton; it also includes a video of the entire performance of Composition 358. The sum total is, needless to say, a luxury item that will set off waves of covetousness in the heart of any Braxton follower – and perhaps a certain amount of hesitancy as well, since, aside from the price tag, the prospect of listening to and absorbing ten hours' worth of this endlessly demanding music is daunting in the extreme.
***
It's obviously too early to offer anything approaching a definitive judgment on this set. Committed Braxtonites will already have purchased it and been duly delighted. Those less committed but sympathetic – in which camp I'd put myself – will find it by turns fascinating, baffling, exasperating and exciting. As often with Braxton's more ambitious projects, question-marks remain over how well the music's potential is actually realized – despite the evident enthusiasm of the 12+1tet and their immersion in his music and vision, the results are sometimes ragged and out-of-focus. But anyone seriously interested in his music should give it a listen, even if only in the form of individual downloads of a few CDs.

Getting the word out, part 1.5

Forgot to point to this review by Marc Medwin at All About Jazz:

It is the MO of this listener/writer, or, as Anthony Braxton puts it, this “friendly experiencer,” to attempt to bring the reader into individual moments of a performance. The present set does not allow such an approach, or, rather, it renders the approach superfluous. Here, we are presented with almost ten hours of music in which, Braxton explains, one measure can represent an entire composition. It is ironic, given the diversity of material and instrumentation employed over these four evenings, that the results are still so astonishingly unified.
The eight compositions in this ambitious collection close out the Ghost Trance Music (GTM) series. Anyone following developments in GTM’s 11-year history—well documented here in the essay by Jonathan Piper—will hear the continuing and recurring lifeline pulse of first-species GTM alongside the rhythmic enhancements and displacements of latter-day compositions, but the net effect is one of constant layers of submergence and rejuvenation. Each set begins with an area, designated by Braxton but very quickly broadening into other compositional territories charted by subgroups—a flute and bassoon duet, guitar and drums, or a vocalizing trio.
The musicianship is of the highest caliber and it would be unfair to single anyone out; the set deserves essays and volumes, which are doubtless forthcoming, as it marks the end of a Braxton era, the 2006 4 Compositions (Ulrichsberg) 2005 Phonomanie Viii set on Leo a harbinger of things to come.
Meanwhile, for a concise if grittily fanciful but all-encompassing description of the Iridium stand, Margaret Davis’ poem will not be bettered. In fact, the liners were especially helpful in coming to terms with musical complexities—the insider perspectives offered by ensemble members and Henry Grimes’ singularly wise portrait of Braxton the revolutionary being especially noteworthy. The DVD supplements and rehashes the notes with clarity and simplicity, providing a fitting encapsulation of a singularly important event that staunchly defies mere qualifiers and descriptors.

Begone BC

Kath & I will be walking the morning of Sunday, May 13, in support of the Y-ME National Breast Cancer Organization -- please consider making a donation on my fundraising page.

Getting the word out, part 1

some early feedback on the Braxton 12+1tet's 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006, which is now available for purchase directly from the label:

Dan Ouellette in Billboard magazine:

Inarguably this year's most expansive and creative improvisational performance, the "9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006" nine-CD boxed set chronicles iconic alto-saxophonist Braxton on a four-night engagement with his 12+1tet at New York's Iridium. Recorded in March 2006, the collection comprises nine large-scale, world-premiere Braxton compositions (with numerical titles, Nos. 350-358) that complete his 11-year-old "Ghost Trance Music" series of works that he calls "sonic units" and "language music." [JG: well, not quite -- "language music" is a specific set of sound typologies] Braxton's music, characterized by form that elicits and invites free interplay, is a playground of shapes, tempos, layers, weaves and waves. It is journey music replete with comic harmonic excursions, off-balance meandering, quirky curiosity, elliptical eeriness and seesawing dissonance. On the one hand, the music is abstract, but on the other, deeply emotional with different hues of urgency, fear, lightheartedness and timidity.

An excerpt from an Amazon.com customer review:

4 ½ Stars.
***
Having had the set for a week, I have absorbed all nine discs and the DVD over the course of six-nights. Needless to say that after just one-time through, I have just skimmed the surface- and still I am sated, yet eager to tackle the set in its entirety again starting in a few days. One could (and should) easily spend weeks and months digesting and experiencing this music. Themes, sub-themes, small instrumental dialogues, inspired solos, interesting compositional techniques, passages of jarring juxtapositions, moments of sheer cerebral beauty- all of these are to be had in abundance with a capital A.
The DVD runs about two-hours and provides context and visuals to accentuate those which Braxton's music invariably generates. The documentary finds him discussing the origin, dynamics and execution of Ghost Trance Music at Columbia University and is interspersed with performance footage from the Iridium shows. Also presented is Composition 358 in its entirety.
***
One criticism leveled at Braxton is that he is too prolific. Those interested in exploring his music don't know where to start, while those who follow him find it hard to keep up. Certainly a ten-disc set will do little to quell this quibble, but ultimately the question is: To buy or not? For fans of Braxton's work the answer is a resounding yes. Scrimp and save if you must, but this is an indispensable document which represents the culmination of four-decades of work.
To the curious and uninitiated the answer is also yes. Approach the set with open minds and ears and you will be both rewarded and enriched for your time and listening attention. These are the works of a master at the top of his game.

Some kind words on the Braxton discussion group from Kevin Frenette (a guitarist with a new release of his own, which he was kind enough to send me):

I received my 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006 box set yesterday morning (autographed too!!!) --- Listened to about 4 discs so far and the music is incredible...but I spent the evening watching Jason's DVD...WOW!!!! It is worth the price of the boxed set alone. Great footage of the group performances and we finally get to see/hear what was discussed at Columbia University. It's an incredible look deep inside the GTM and it's priceless to see Braxton himself discussing what it's all about and see the ensemble putting it into practice.
Thanks Jason --- superb work.

Listen to this interview of Braxton by John Schaefer, Soundcheck, WNYC, 20-Apr-2007. (If you've never heard Schaefer's program, check out some other archived shows for interviews with everyone from Courtney Love to Cecil Taylor.)

Pick up the May 2007 issue of JazzTimes for an excellent article by David Adler. UPDATE: this article is available here (pdf format)

And there's much more on the way: look for upcoming articles and reviews in Down Beat, Signal to Noise, Paris Transatlantic, Jazzman (France), and The Wire (UK).

Kudos to Scott at Improvised Communications for doing an absolutely terrific job getting the word out!

9+1 on 12+1 in 26

As Mr. Bynum says, the excitement is building.
The trailer is now up on YouTube.

who: Anthony Braxton 12+1tet
what: 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006 [9-CD + DVD]
when: April 3, 2007
where: Firehouse 12 Records and other retail outlets
why: because music is the healing force of the triverse

Hear the people's voices here and here.

UPDATES:

Liner-note contributor Steve Smith mentions an upcoming signing in NY.

Read another set of notes contributed by Dave Douglas.

For Malachi Ritscher (1954-2006)

Kenneth Patchen
"No One Ever Works Alone"
from Panels for the Walls of Heaven (1946)

No one ever works alone.

Put the good things here. There is so much, so very much!
O trees flowers birds the face of my darling! hurry hurry the great
tongues of truth! O speak out!
Against the dead trash of their "reality."
Against "the world as we see it."
Against "what it is reasonable to believe."
Out with the rascals
And all their bloody works!

There is a beautiful sun today.
Have you change for one hundred and ninety odd dullards, sir?

Look you have a life--use it! No one ever works alone! Hate and
fear O blast them to hell for love everyway and every old how
you can! There is so much, so very very much!

Gategeese the windopeninghosts of air. My invitation--O come
if you like: I won't forget your kindness. Live gently. Now is the
I wouldn't kid you time to stand up and count them.
My conclusion is:
There is only one thing that matters and that is life.
No one ever works alone.

Life needn't be ugly. I don't protest great good God I demand!
All this ratty lying murderous swindle of theirs be damned!
There's a beautiful sun today! When are we going to throw the
bastards off our backs. Art has no place for lies.

Jesus the earth is real and it warms like a hand in the sun.
Three green white horses. Look you have a life--put your soul
into it! When you buy a suit don't just get something that will
look good on your boss. If you won't mind I'm going to say get
with it! Live your own life for a change, eh?

The leaves fall. The chances don't lessen.
Nothing of flesh should be treated shabbily.
I at any rate cannot resist trying a little one-step even on the brink.
What are you in terror of?
The baby fox goes to sleep under the thousand-ton tree.
Life needn't step to their dirty tune.
Each pays for his own piper
When you get right down to it.

Media Cleans House - Will Americans?

Taibbi:

We are in the last week before midterm elections in George Bush's second term, five years after 9/11, three and a half since the beginning of the Iraq war. By now we can say without much hesitation that the media establishment has turned not only on George Bush, but on the public attack-dogs of his right flank who dominated the national political media for so long. There's no more free lunch for the likes of O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, the latter of whom also took an unusually savage fragging in the national media last week for his attack on Michael J. Fox.
* * *
What's happening is that these talk-radio pit-vipers who for a decade or so had us all wondering, "How the fuck do these guys get away with this stuff?" are now no longer getting away with it....
* * *
What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.

It doesn't take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside. It doesn't take much courage for MSNBC's Countdown to do a segment ripping the "Swift-Boating of Al Gore" in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media "regret" the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it's politically expedient. We needed TV news to reject "swift-boating" during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later; we needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as "thousands" or "at least 30,000," as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O'Reilly might actually have cost him real market share.
* * *
This assault on the Republicans that's taking place in the national media right now is partially a reflection of national attitudes, but mostly a matter of internal housecleaning. The members of the Bush administration have proven to be incompetent managers of the American system, and so they are being removed. It's that simple. They screwed up a war that all of these people wanted, turned public opinion against the dumbed-down militarist politics that until recently was good business for everybody. And so they have to go. Mistake any of this for ideology or principle at your peril.

Now it's the people's turn to clean House -- though we may never really know what the people want.

Do You Know Where Your Country Is?

Poetry as I need it

Thanks to Peter K for pointing me to the Nietzsche Family Circus - keep refreshing for some indeterminate fun.

Some favorites so far:
here - here - here - here - here

Cats Be Jammin'

Call it pussyfootin'.

Misha's Pief did it 40 years ago.

And of course there was...

for Leandro Barbieri

Flowers and Sweets

It's much, much worse than we thought:

An estimated 655,000 Iraqis have died since 2003 who might still be alive but for the US-led invasion, according to a survey by a US university. *** While critics point to the discrepancy between this and other independent surveys (such as Iraq Body Count's figure of 44-49,000 civilian deaths, based on media reports), the Bloomberg School team says its method may actually underestimate the true figure.

read the report (pdf)
more; more

Who's the terrorist?

Bush & Foley

"Foley, let's compromise. If they're smaller than this, I'll call the police."

Tower Records, R.I.P.

A fond farewell to an institution that helped me and millions(?) others discover a lot of great music you'll never find in Wal-Mart or Best Buy - and where, flipping through the bins, I occasionally found something I wasn't specifically looking for.

Brazilian Bad-Ass

I haven't listened to the album yet, but damn!

Reminds me of...

At long last

An odd aside

From a NYT article on the new Bob Woodward book:

The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House....

Seems someone's pissed they didn't get a freebie.

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?

The ol' Lysistrata strategy:

Colombian gangsters face sex ban
Wives and girlfriends of gang members in one of Colombia's most violent cities have called a sex ban in a bid to get their men to give up the gun.
more

Žižek's Impossible Realism

Slavoj Žižek on Israel's wars on its neighbors:

Let's try a mental experiment and imagine that, instead of Lebanese women and children, the human shields used by Hezbollah were Israeli women and children. Would the IDF still consider the price affordable and continue the bombing? If the answer is "no," then the IDF is effectively practicing racism, determining that Jewish life has more value than Arab life.
***
The problem courted by Israel in its continuous display of power is that this display will be soon perceived as a sign of its opposite, of impotence. This paradox of power is known to anyone who has had to play the role of paternal authority: In order to retain its force, power has to remain virtual, a threat of power.
***
It is those who evoke the Holocaust who effectively manipulate it, making it an instrument for today's political uses. The very need to evoke the Holocaust in defense of Israel's actions implies that its crimes are so horrible that only the absolute trump-card of the Holocaust can redeem them.

Art is a Cat

Jerry Saltz takes on the neo-Cartesians:

In the days just after September 11, painter Gaylen Gerber reported the "small victories" he felt going to the Art Institute of Chicago and simply "looking at shiny plastic furniture from the '60s and '70s that in some way, maybe because of its superficial and ultra-clean look, made me feel a little better."

Gerber was experiencing the ways in which art tells you things you don't know you need to know until you know them. He was in touch with how art can be "a vacation from the self," in critic Peter Schjeldahl's words, or a journey to it; how it's a system for mapping, reflecting, prospecting, and creating consciousness. Art is a region where protocols are invented or suspended and things one doesn't understand change one's life. That's why those shiny chairs cut through the gloom, a ceramic pot can vie for greatness with the Sistine Ceiling, and the Vietnam Memorial channels a nation's remorse even though it is based on the one thing that most Americans purport to loathe: abstraction.

Art is often political when it doesn't seem political and not political when that's all it seems to be. Neither Andy Warhol nor Donald Judd made overtly political art. Yet both changed the way the world looks and the way we look at the world. That's because art creates new thought structures. Imagine all the thought structures that either would have never existed or gone undiscovered had all of Shakespeare been lost. Art does far more than only meet the eye. It is part of the biota of the world. It exists within a holistic system.

Crazy from the Coffin

Building on a piece from the soundtrack to the film Preparati la bara! (Ferdinando Baldi, 1968) [aka Django, Prepare a Coffin!], Gnarls Barkley has the hit of Summer '06... though it also has similarities to an old tune by Harvey Scales.

Hear for yourself in these mp3s:

• Gianfranco Reverbi, "Nel cimitero di tucson" (Preparati la bara!, 1968)
• Harvey Scales & the 7 Sounds, "Love-itis" (from the Shakin' Fit! compilation)

To the Gallows

New Taibbi:

The Democratic Party has been operating for two decades without the active participation of its voters. ***

It's been an essentially oligarchic system of government, where all the important decision-makers have been institutions, with any attempts by ordinary people to circumvent the system coldly repressed. Remember 2000, when Ralph Nader was not only not allowed to debate with Al Gore and George Bush, but wasn't allowed in the building -- not even allowed in a second, adjoining hall in the building, not even when he had a ticket? Well, we have a replay of that proud moment in our history going on now, with Hillary's Senate primary opponent [Jonathan] Tasini being shut out of debates by New York's NY1 TV channel (owned by TimeWarner) which is insisting that qualified candidates not only reach 5 percent support in the polls (Tasini is at 13 percent and rising) but raise or spend $500,000. Said NY1 Vice President Steve Paulus: "All Tasini would need is for each [New York state registered voter] to send him a dollar. Right now, with the money he's raised, he does not represent the party he claims to represent."

So a war chest is now the standard for representation? In order to get on television, you need a dollar from every voter? (Are we electing a Senator or holding a Girl Scout raffle? What the fuck?) And this is decided by . . . an executive for a corporate television station? One that recently sent a reporter [Adam Balkin] to Japan to do features on high-tech toilets? In other words, NY1 will pay to put an exotic Japanese toilet on a few million or so New York television screens -- but insists on seeing a half-million dollar deposit before it will put a Democratic candidate with 13 percent support in a televised debate? Am I missing something?

more here on Jonathan Tasini

more here and here on the Clinton-Tasini non-debate