Stuart Broomer knows Anthony Braxton. He has listened to the American composer and multi-instrumentalist’s music from the beginning, attended concerts by him since the early 1970s, written about the musician many times, and over the years interviewed Braxton on many occasions. Because of this familiarity, Broomer sets himself a more difficult-than-usual task here. Unlike historicContinue reading “Stuart Broomer. Time and Anthony Braxton.”
Genre Archives
Big Ears Festival. Knoxville, Tennessee. March 26–28, 2010.
Clean, tidy, and walkable, downtown Knoxville feels more like Europe than America. Unlike the Next Big Thing-chasing club crawl of that other Southern-U.S. fest, South by Southwest, in Austin, the Big Ears Festival is a carefully curated festival driven by an artistic mandate to showcase cutting-edge artists from a wide variety of practices. This moreContinue reading “Big Ears Festival. Knoxville, Tennessee. March 26–28, 2010.”
Densités Festival. Fresnes-en-Woëvre, France. October 23-25, 2009.
A rural French hamlet in the Lorraine countryside isn’t the setting you would imagine for a world-class festival of unadulterated Electronic and Free Jazz music. Yet the Densités Festival in Fresnes-en-Woëvre—population five hundred—about eighty kilometres from Nancy, is just that. During three days in late October, the sixteenth edition presented a sonic banquet of unstoppableContinue reading “Densités Festival. Fresnes-en-Woëvre, France. October 23-25, 2009.”
ROVA Saxophone Quartet & Nels Cline Singers. The Celestial Septet.
The Celestial Septet combines two institutions of California’s experimental and improvised music, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet and guitarist Nels Cline’s instrumental trio with bass and drums, ironically named the Nels Cline Singers. This music is rooted in the free-jazz revolution of the mid-1960s, the ROVA saxophones liberated by the driving presence of the Cline rhythmContinue reading “ROVA Saxophone Quartet & Nels Cline Singers. The Celestial Septet.”
Grutronic. Essex Foam Party.
Essex Foam Party sees Grutronic, a free improvising collective, join forces with guests vibraphonist Orphy Robinson and sampler Paul Obermayer. Mixed among the moist pulses and triggered cross textures that characterize much of the music are interludes of keyboard comping and runs from Stephen Grew, and of hollow thumps and percussive power from David Ross.Continue reading “Grutronic. Essex Foam Party.”
Lori Freedman. Bridge.
Bridge largely emulates the pattern of one of Freedman’s solo clarinet concerts, exploring the relationships between composition, interpretation, and improvisation. If composition and improvisation were once separated by a gulf, here they’re constructed as a continuously variegated field. Pascal Dusapin’s through-composed piece Itou, has the feel of improvisation, driven along by its rhythmic momentum andContinue reading “Lori Freedman. Bridge.”
The Element Choir. At Rosedale United.
Christine Duncan leads the most unlikely ensemble devoted to collective improvisation, Toronto’s fifty-one-voice Element Choir. The choir’s improvisation is strongly shaped by Duncan’s ongoing “conduction.” In performance, members respond to a series of signals and gestures with everything from sustained tones and evolving drones through unintelligible massed conversation to sudden dramatic “whooshes” of sound. TheseContinue reading “The Element Choir. At Rosedale United.”
Kyle Brenders. WAYS.
Saxophonist-composer Kyle Brenders has assembled a sextet from among Toronto’s community of improvising musicians to perform an extended composition called Ways. Five segments of the work are heard here (Sections 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8) so the recording explicitly resists the notion of definitive performance, as does the music itself. While each segment, accordingContinue reading “Kyle Brenders. WAYS.”
Diane C. Fujino, Editor. Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader.
Composer, bandleader and baritone saxophonist; theorist; revolutionary socialist, and Black-Asian-American, Fred Ho writes essays that are as uncompromising and defiant as his compositions. This wide-ranging collection elucidates the evolution of his philosophy from 1984 to 2006, while tracing his development “From Banana to Third World Marxist”—as he terms it. Although his essays on the twistsContinue reading “Diane C. Fujino, Editor. Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader.”
Robert Adlington, editor. Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties.
“If you remember the ’60s, it means you weren’t there” is a cliché with a kernel of truth in it—especially the insistence that rock sounds then subsumed other music. Yet the ’60s also saw mass acceptance of new and electronic music, while jazz’s most radical sounds divorced it from its role as entertainment. Sound CommitmentsContinue reading “Robert Adlington, editor. Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties.”