jazzmatazz | upcoming | recent | reviews | books | links | musicians | labels | sale list | stores | philly jazz
previous review | reviews home | next review
If there was ever a formula for music that I would not have anticipated from Anthony Braxton, it was the performance of his music with African percussion. Braxton’s history is a mathematics/philosophy-inspired music, one that has seemed designed to be anti-emotional, a-temporal, and even non-pointillistic. The last bears explanation. Although Braxton’s music is often a series of points-discrete sounds, staccato bursts, and the ultimate in singularity, the solo voice-it rejected the pointillist (impressionist) motif of using discrete points that, viewed at a distance, seemed to flow together. For Braxton, the individuality of each note was part of the structure.
So the anomaly of incorporating African percussion, with its spirituality, its earthiness, its sensuality, and ultimately its capacity to link the points of sounds by creating a defined structure (even when the rhythm is not cadenced but lends itself to the more abstract) is manifest. But on "Eight Compositions" Braxton does precisely that, and to surprising effect.
The first surprise might be called "fit." However abstract the play of Braxton and fellow multi-reed performer Richard McGhee, it "fits" atop and within the percussion. Whether the two horns are playing a riff-like, chanting chorus, or are speaking with abrupt stops, spaces, cries, or vivid flurries of notes, there is a connectivity to the percussion.
Braxton’s liner notes (almost worth the price of this CD for their intricate philosophizing and display of the curious way he views/hears the world and music) describes these compositions as part of the "fourth species prototype Ghost Trance Musics," music that involves "re-centered pulse construction strategies and the additional use of rhythmic compound cell modules." I cannot tell you which came first, the horn line or the percussion stream, in Braxton’s composing, but he does explain that rhythmic design can be either a set rhythm or "image logic ‘drawing-shape’ notation" in his work.
Braxton’s thoughtful approach to music deserves its own essay or treatise. But simply understanding that Braxton wanted what I will term "overt" rhythm integrated into, and arising from, his compositions, tells the intellectual story of this CD. Don’t expect Mongo Santamaria, as the rhythms are complex, ever shifting, and rarely in conventional cadence, sounding more like a village center conversation of drummers, ever pulsing but without a defined beat. Instead, appreciate Braxton’s sonic brilliance with an added component-percussion that, liking a moving stream, gives a new flow and dimension to a master creator’s sounds.
— Jules Epstein, May 2002
Release Date: November 2001
Anthony Braxton:
Eight Compositions (Quintet) 2001 (CIMP 243)
please send comments to jazzmatazz@att.net
last update 21 June 2002