Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double album March 4, via Firehouse 12

Drummer/composer Tomas Fujiwara reconvenes his unique sextet Triple Double for a collection of exhilarating new music inspired by dance and protest

March, due out March 4, 2022 via Firehouse 12 Records, features drummers Fujiwara and Gerald Cleaver, guitarists Mary Halvorson and Brandon Seabrook, and trumpet/cornet players Ralph Alessi and Taylor Ho Bynum

"Deliberately seeing double in the cause of exploratory jazz, Fujiwara brings together instrumentalists primed to rub each other in all the right and creatively wrong ways."

– The New Yorker

"[The six musicians’] collective talent and Fujiwara’s innovative leadership make for a tonic of unpredictability… A triple scoop of great music."

– Britt Robson, JazzTimes

Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double celebrates album Friday, March 4 at The Stone, NYC

Tomas Fujiwara, photo by Brian Cohen

Parsing out the various combinations possible within Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double feels something like wandering through a hall of mirrors. Look at it one way and you might see two horn/guitar/drum trios; turn slightly and suddenly it becomes three paired artists taking their shared instruments in radically different directions. Despite the unusual instrumentation of the ensemble, however, Triple Double is at its core a group of six distinctive individuals, each among the most innovative and singular voices in contemporary creative music – drummers Tomas Fujiwara and Gerald Cleaver, guitarists Mary Halvorson and Brandon Seabrook, and trumpeter Ralph Alessi and cornet player Taylor Ho Bynum. 

On the sextet’s second album, March (due out March 4, 2022 via Firehouse 12 Records), Triple Double has also become a band in the most thrilling sense, sharing a scintillating chemistry and a sense of musical mission that remains evident no matter how far apart the various pairings and triplings stretch the music in far-flung directions.

Tomas Fujiwara's Triple Double, photo by Nicki Chavoya

“On the first album [2017’s Triple Double], the band was still relatively new,” Fujiwara explains. “There were a few people in the group that had never played together before. Since then we’ve spent a lot more time touring and playing together, so I feel like those connections and the rapport within the group have really deepened. That influenced my writing for this album because now I had a reference point for different places the band had gone, and I was also conscious of where else I wanted to push us as a group.”

The formation of Triple Double did bring together some new pairings – Alessi and Bynum had never crossed paths, and the drummers had never had the opportunity to share the stage despite Fujiwara’s longheld admiration for Cleaver. At the same time, the grouping also reconvened some well-established hook-ups (to borrow the name of another Fujiwara ensemble). Bynum and Halvorson are both among Fujiwara’s most frequent collaborators, in each other’s ensembles as well as (in Fujiwara and Halvorson’s case) in the collective trio Thumbscrew. Triple Double grew out of a trio that the drummer formed with Alessi and Seabrook.

“When I first put the band together I made a pretty exhaustive list of all the different combinations of the six of us,” Fujiwara says. “On this album I really wanted to hone in on the subtle shifts that can happen with the addition and subtraction of different musicians in the ensemble. It feels like there are endless possibilities, which is really exciting.”

Opener “Pack Up, Coming For You” offers perhaps the most explicit example. The tune begins with the trio of Fujiwara, Bynum and Halvorson. After they trade improvisations their counterparts emerge and the second trio takes over for a time. Finally all six combine and the full scope of the group dynamic is revealed. Like its predecessor, March includes an improvised duet by Fujiwara and Cleaver in tribute to the bandleader’s childhood teacher, Alan Dawson.

The unique combination of instruments is in some ways a challenge, offering little guidance for a composer. At the same time, Fujiwara found the lack of precedent refreshing. “Not having a blueprint can be challenging,” he explains, “but at the same time it can be quite liberating and inspiring. If you’re leading a guitar trio and want to do something personal with it, it can be difficult to get out from under the shadow of all the great guitar trios that came before. With this there isn't that history, so it takes away expectations. That challenge is fun for me.”

Tomas Fujiwara's Triple Double, photo by Nicki Chavoya

Fujiwara took on several disparate challenges in the crafting of March. His vibraphone playing is given a much more prominent role, while the floating, airy “Life Only Gets More” was instigated by the fact that drummers are so rarely asked to solo over ballads. The album was also recorded fairly quickly and spontaneously, despite the challenging material – an approach prompted by Fujiwara’s love of classic Blue Note Records.

“On many of the sessions they would just call in a group of musicians, they’d show up, the bandleader would have some charts on the music stand, they’d run through them and just record them. And yet they're now eternal classics that we love. I wanted to capture some of that magic.”

Like the name of the ensemble, the new album’s title also folds multiple meanings into a deceptively simple word. At its most basic, March is the month of the album release – but of course it’s a loaded date, falling exactly two years after much of the world went into pandemic lockdown and ensembles like Triple Double were suddenly indefinitely separated. The gulf has proved a long one for this band in particular, having recorded the album in late 2019.

But March also implies movement, as suggested by the felt assemblages that grace the album’s colorful artwork. The multi-hued group embracing on the cover could be dancers stepping in rhythm or protesters parading for a cause. All of those meanings danced in Fujiwara’s head as he penned the music for March, especially as he titled the tunes in the midst of the tense protests that erupted throughout 2020.

“There's something about marching that is very evocative to me,” the drummer explains. “It's a coordinated activity that always has a group intent behind it – which could be peaceful, violent, revolutionary, stifling or joyful. Marching can take on so many different forms, but it's always a group activity for a group cause that represents those intentions or feelings by a show of numbers together in one direction. Oftentimes it's not about getting from point A to point B, it's simply the act of marching and of being together that expresses the point.”

Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double – March

Firehouse 12 Records – FH12-04-01-035 – Recorded Dec. 10-11, 2019

Release date March 4, 2022

Tomas Fujiwara, photo by Brian Cohen

Tomas Fujiwara

Described as “a ubiquitous presence in the New York scene…an artist whose urbane writing is equal to his impressively nuanced drumming,” Brooklyn-based Tomas Fujiwara is an active player in some of the most exciting music of the current generation. He leads the bands Triple Double (with Gerald Cleaver, Mary Halvorson, Brandon Seabrook, Ralph Alessi, and Taylor Ho Bynum), 7 Poets Trio (with Patricia Brennan and Tomeka Reid), and Tomas Fujiwara & The Hook Up (with Jonathan Finlayson, Brian Settles, Halvorson, and Michael Formanek); has a collaborative duo with Bynum; is a member of the collective trio Thumbscrew (with Halvorson and Formanek); and engages in a diversity of creative work with Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Halvorson, Matana Roberts, Joe Morris, Bynum, Nicole Mitchell, Ben Goldberg, Reid, Amir ElSaffar, Benoit Delbecq, and many others. In 2021, he won the DownBeat Critics Poll for Rising Star Drummer, and premiered two suites of new music as part of his Roulette Residency: “You Don’t Have to Try” (with Meshell Ndegeocello) and “Shizuko” (with Bynum, Reid, Rafiq Bhatia, and Davi Vieira). “Drummer Tomas Fujiwara works with rhythm as a pliable substance, solid but ever shifting. His style is forward-driving but rarely blunt or aggressive, and never random. He has a way of spreading out the center of a pulse while setting up a rigorous scaffolding of restraint…A conception of the drum set as a full-canvas instrument, almost orchestral in its scope.” 

tomasfujiwara.com

John Hébert - Sounds of Love (January 14, 2022 Sunnyside Records)

Composer and bassist Charles Mingus’s legendary status is undeniable. Tributes to his genius tend to come up short because there isn’t a way to improve what he has already wrought. One element of Mingus’s vision that tends to get overlooked was his ability to create singular ensembles of strong, individual performers to play his music, ensembles that have gone down in history as some of the greatest of all time.

Bassist John Hébert has long been influenced by Mingus’s music. It was Mingus’s 1975 Atlantic recording, Changes One, that etched the clarity of the legend’s vision and tone into Hébert’s mind. Using the music and ensemble fluidity of the album as a direct inspiration, Hébert assembled an incredible band to play with the spirit of Mingus as a beacon for a number of performances from 2011 to 2013. The recording, Sounds of Love, presents the ensemble in their element, in a thrillingly dynamic live performance.

Having set roots in New York in the mid-1990s, Hébert became one of the most in demand bassists of his generation, upholding duties in bands led by Andrew Hill, Paul Bley, Mary Halvorson, and Uri Caine. Hébert continues to participate in a longstanding musical relationship with piano great Fred Hersch and has found himself in academia as a professor at Western Michigan University.

Assembling cohesive lineups of musicians is an art form that Mingus mastered. For this band, Hébert wanted to put together a shocking combination of musicians that would make the music come to life. Fred Hersch was a natural selection for the piano chair, as he had even studied with Mingus’s longtime pianist, Jaki Byard. The singular saxophonist and composer Tim Berne is a key fixture on New York’s Downtown scene where Hébert immersed himself and Berne makes a rare appearance as a sideman on Sounds of Love. Trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum proves a fitting foil to Berne and Hébert’s Halvorson rhythm section partner, drummer Ches Smith, proves once again that he can handle any musical challenge.

The musicians hadn’t played with each other before the first rehearsal. Their contrasting sounds were what Hébert wanted to make the music come together and still stand apart. It was a true balance of personalities and styles that would have made Mingus proud.

Hébert did not intend for the group to be a repertory band. They did develop arrangements of a handful of Mingus pieces, mostly from the Changes recording. Other pieces were written by the leader as vehicles for improvisation, with more than slight nods to the Mingus’s style, as he was obviously on Hebert’s mind.

The first performance of the group was in 2011 and, based on the strength of the ensemble, Hébert was able to take them on a short tour of Europe in 2013. The Sounds of Love recording comes from a live performance at Jazz in Bess in Lugano, Switzerland on March 27, 2013.

The recording begins with Ho Bynum’s vehement trumpet and Hersch’s pointillistic piano leading into Hébert’s “Constrictor,” an ominous waltz that sets the mood of noirish mystery as it builds to dynamic heights with Berne’s solo. Smith’s drums introduce the leader’s “Blank Faced Man,” a loose, subtle piece that shows the ensemble’s interplay. A fantastic solo bass feature from Hébert leads into Mingus’s “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love,” the ensemble keeping their intensity at simmer, allowing Mingus’s melody to sing.

Hébert’s “Love What?” was written in response to Mingus’s “What Love?” The piece pushes and pulls, the ensemble staying dramatically malleable before ramping up the energy in an off-kilter groove. The rhythmic structure of Mingus’s bluesy “Remember Rockefeller at Attica” makes the piece incredibly exciting to solo over and the ensemble takes full advantage, as the band members sing and shout. The recording concludes with the leader’s “Frivolocity,” a piece that contorts and twists over a bassline that was loosely based on Mingus’s “Sue’s Changes.”

Perhaps the best method to honor Charles Mingus’s work isn’t through imitation. John Hébert looked to the legend’s ability to match musical personalities in service to the music as inspiration for his band on Sounds of Love, though with plenty of Mingus DNA in their output. 

1. Constrictor

2. The Blank-Faced Man

3. Duke Ellington's Sound of Love

4. Love What?

5. Remember Rockefeller at Attica

6. Frivolocity

John Hébert - bass

Taylor Ho Bynum - cornet

Tim Berne - alto saxophone

Fred Hersch - piano

Ches Smith - drums & percussion

PRE ORDER

Jason Kao Hwang - Blood (October 22, 2018)

Blood by Jason Kao Hwang and his Burning Bridge ensemble represents the latest masterwork to date in the oeuvre of one of the jazz avant-garde’s most original compositional voices: an uncompromising artistic vision as captivating as it is challenging. Hwang succeeds here at incorporating improvisational statements into unified compositional schemes with what strikes me as a cinematic, directorial style, an engaging conception of sonic cinéma vérité. His mastery of musical mise-en-scène allows him to place his outstanding cast of artists within well-structured soundscapes, across which he pans with lyrical lines and propulsive rhythms that his soloists continue seamlessly, as he zooms in to foreground their candid improvised responses to the challenging situations in which they find themselves. 

The compositional stage-sets he conceives showcase an activist aesthetic of polycultural hybridity, in which uniquely orchestrated sounds combine to evoke overtones of his own Asian American history and location. Building upon Burning Bridge’s acclaimed debut recording (2012, Innova), he brings experimental jazz styles into mutually enriching dialogue with traditional Chinese music in order to confront, contemplate, and counteract the unspeakable violence whose disturbing, unrelenting echoes engendered this piece. 

He explores this harrowing theme across some 28 painstakingly staged scenes, comprising a continuous play of sound divided into five acts. The first act begins and ends with the reverberations of distant bass explosions with flying treble debris, in between which ensemble lines guide brass soloists through unfolding ritual contexts, and freeze-frame sustained tones launch duos or trios into intense dialogue; collective improvisations flow seamlessly into individual statements, which in turn give way to lyrical contrapuntal melodies before returning again to ensemble extemporization.

The second act opens with a mournful ceremonial procession that suddenly transforms into a bluesy strut over a sinewy rhythm-section groove that carries violin and cornet solos into juxtaposition with subsequent erhu and pipa solos, which lead into a climactic syncopated ensemble passage. The third act returns to the ritualized austerity of the first, with a tuba solo over processional strings, followed by freeze-frame pipa-percussion and trombone-erhu-bass dialogues, flowing into aggressively rhythmic ensemble figures that set off an explosive drum solo, over which a concluding free-rhythm coda ultimately marches off.

The fourth act brings the beat back, with an angular ensemble passage launching a series of bluesy solos over a muscular shuffle groove, which further propels violin-led call-and-response exchanges into collective improvisation that resolves into to a world-weary ensemble reprise; even the funky violin solo and light-hearted string passage that follow cannot prevent the return of repressed, collectively improvised, traumatic memories. The final act expands the first’s reverberating booms and flying debris into bass and tuba solo salvos underscored by string shrapnel, introduced, bridged, and concluded by poignant ensemble prayers for peace. 

The impassioned realization of this ambitious script owes much to the empathetic artistry of the virtuoso ensemble Hwang has assembled and sustained since 2009, with support from Chamber Music America, the Doris Duke Foundation, and U.S. Artists International, as well as performances at Edgefest, the Vision Festival, the Victoriaville Festival de Musique Actuelle, the Chicago World Music Festival, the University of Massachusetts, Flushing Town Hall, Roulette, and the Bop Shop. 

- Scott Currie 

Driving down on an unlit highway, my headlights flashed upon a bleeding deer carcass. My heart rate thundered and lungs exploded as I swerved away, narrowly avoiding a collision. This shock made me reflect upon my mother’s harrowing experiences in China during World War II. While in a Changsha pharmacy she was knocked unconscious by a Japanese bomb. She awoke as the lone survivor surrounded by the dead. I also thought about Butch Morris and Billy Bang, musicians I’ve worked with who fought in Viet Nam. The magnitude of sorrow that they endured is unimaginable. 

Blood meditates upon the emotional traumas of war retained within the body as unspoken vibrations that reverberate throughout communities and across generations. Through Blood the violence of deeply held memories are not relived but transposed into our sound. Blood in our sound rises within our song. 

Extreme danger triggers powerful forces of “fight or flight”. This conflict can produce an immobility response, which penetrates and remains within the body as emotional trauma. Similarly, when a bomb explodes, there is blast wave outward that leaves a near vacuum in its wake. This is filled by an equally deadly blast wind in the opposite direction. Within an explosion, Blood was created.

– Jason Kao Hwan

Jason Kao Hwang (composer, violin)

Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet, flugelhorn)

Joseph Daley (tuba)

Andrew Drury (drum set, concert bass drum and percussion)

Ken Filiano (string bass)

Sun Li (pipa)

Steve Swell (trombone)

Wang Guowei (erhu)

1. Breath Within the Bomb 12:31

2. Surge, Part 1 07:11

3. Surge, Part 2 07:16

4. Evolution 11:12

5. Declarations 09:38

Tomas Fujiwara - Triple Double (FIREHOUSE 12 RECORDS 2017)

Bandleader, composer, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara possesses a musical dexterity that could go unnoticed if not for its ripple effect. He has brought his rhythmic and compositional imprint to a wide variety of settings – as a member of the collective trio Thumbscrew (with Mary Halvorson and Michael Formanek), in a long-standing duo with Taylor Ho Bynum, and as a supporting member in groups led by Bynum, Halvorson, Matana Roberts, Tomeka Reid, Amir ElSaffar, and Nicole Mitchell. While these collaborative efforts could define and sustain him, a more ambitious musical intelligence emerges on closer inspection.

1. Diving For Quarters 11:00

2. Blueberry Eyes 05:58

3. Hurry Home B/G 03:32

4. Pocket Pass 02:46

5. For Alan 08:00

6. Love And Protest 07:43

7. Decisive Shadow 05:52

8. Hurry Home M/T 03:21

9. Toasting The Mart 04:02

10. To Hours 06:20

Tomas Fujiwara – drums

Gerald Cleaver - drums

Mary Halvorson – guitar

Brandon Seabrook - guitar

Taylor Ho Bynum – cornet

Ralph Alessi - trumpet

Illegal Crowns - Illegal Crowns (ROGUEART 2016)

We treasure the long-time collaborators who share the same commitment to the creative journey, and we thrill at meeting new partners who converse with the same hybridized and willfully corrupted musical vocabulary. A cooperative project like Illegal Crowns celebrates all of the above.

Illegal Crowns: a group both old and new, music accessible and experimental, a name revolutionary and royal. Four individuals and one ensemble, in the kind of harmony that needs no resolution. Taylor Ho Bynum, excerpt from the liner notes

01. Colle & Acrylique 6:21

02. Thoby’s Sister 6:29

03. Illegal Crown 9:03

04. Holograms 4:09

05. Solar Mail 7:18

06. Wry Tulips 14:44

Mary Halvorson: guitar

Tomas Fujiwara: drums

Benoît Delbecq: piano, prepared piano

Taylor Ho Bynum: cornet, flugelhorn

Anthony Braxton - 3 Compositions (EEMHM) 2011 (2016)

The legendary modern jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton has released more than one hundred albums in his career. For those looking for an entry point, he recently released several box sets highlighting his charming, insightful approach to the avant-garde.

Source: pitchfork

Anthony Braxton contains multitudes—perhaps to a greater extent than any other composer alive today. The saxophonist hasn’t demonstrated this merely by playing with a diverse range of icons that includes Dave Brubeck, Max Roach, and Cecil Taylor. Nor has he done so solely by serving as a teacher and mentor to younger talents like Mary Halvorson and Steve Lehman. Instead,Braxton’s hybrid-sound identity is due to the staggering variety of projects he has undertaken as a bandleader.

In the 1970s, while recording for the major label-funded Arista imprint, Braxton signaled an intention to play in multiple creative arenas, sequencing his madly accelerated bebop compositions alongside electronic-music explorations. He composed music for multiple piano virtuosos. He produced one of the great post-Ellington big band albums, with Creative Orchestra Music 1976. Toward the end of his Arista contract, Braxton submitted a triple-LP recording of a modern classical piece "for four orchestras." (His major label deal was not renewed.)

When Braxton lost corporate support, he reacted by expanding his ambition. He began composing a twelve-opera cycle, titled Trillium. Though each one sounds like nothing else in the classical catalog, works in this series do bear traces of European modernists like Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen. At other points, Braxton has interpreted early-jazz standards (sometimes furrowing the brows of period specialists). And he’s fielded a succession of smaller ensembles focused on his original music and growing catalog of "systems"—which often bear mystic monikers like "Ghost Trance Music" or "Diamond Curtain Wall Music." Some of his most recent concepts require collaborators to handle the intercession of electronics, or to navigate scores that look like paintings.

For those who are interested, this all begs the question: Where to start? Picking up the box set that collects all the famous Arista projects remains a solid bet. Those looking for a less-expensive opening gambit can opt to sample the winning run of albums Braxton recorded for the Black Saint label, in the 1980s. The Complete Braxton 1971 is another comparatively bite-sized, double-album look at the madcap idea factory. Though there is also now a new contender on the scene for the curious-but-uninitiated. (Or, as Braxton prefers to call such listeners, "friendly experiencers.") And this record hails from a much more recent concept.

3 Compositions (EEMHM) 2011 is a triple-CD/download release that includes the first studio realization of Braxton’s "Echo Echo Mirror House Music." Here, Braxton and six bandmates play their usual instruments, while also "wielding" iPods that contain the bulk of Braxton’s discography. Each musician uses their hardware to pipe selections of old recordings into the live-performance mix. Over time, the resulting blend of improvisation, score-reading and fragmentary drops from past albums has a compelling, hypnotic effect. Prior live-concert recordings of the "Echo Echo" concept have sounded comparatively tinny. But the studio where this was recorded, which also doubles as an intimate venue, affords Braxton a well-separated stereo mix that rewards listener exploration. (There’s also a "pure audio" Blu-ray version of the album available.)

The hour-long performances on each disc often suggest installation art soundscapes more than they recall past composed-and-improvised landmarks like the Free Jazz LP led by Ornette Coleman—a saxophone mentor who gave Braxton housing, early on, in New York. And unlike the environment-heavy sound works you’ll find in some contemporary museum exhibits, Braxton’s miasma is built from a rich variety of source materials that can make misty experimentalism feel fully active and alive. Chalk it up as a side benefit of 50 years spent in the avant-trenches, working to discover new sounds.

On an initial listen to the first disc—aka "Composition No. 372"— I started out by trying to keep track of all the old-school inserts. I noticed a piquant ensemble march that sounded like recent "Ghost Trance Music,"as well as the more clearly identifiable, hard-riffing lines of "Composition No. 40M" (as played on the album Five Pieces 1975).This endeavor soon started to seem like a point-missing exercise, and after letting go of the effort to distinguish past from present, the overall wash of the experience quickly seemed like the best possible way to experience this setting.

Braxton suggests as much in the section of his liner notes that bears the heading "How To Listen to This Music," where he writes: "Don’t worry about it - have a fun listening experience in a music that more and more is like life itself. Suddenly something will emerge that was composed 40 years ago, and that something will be placed next to something composed last year. It’s OK, just let it happen. This is a ‘dream state’ sonic environment that is constantly changing. I find myself thinking of the movie Prometheus where the cyber hero has discovered an image projection hologram that he can walk inside of and manipulate, or play with." (Braxton’s liner notes, like his music, can turn sharply from academic phraseology to colloquial joking and vernacular references.) So, with the composer’s blessing, you’re invited to tune in and out at will. Put on 10 minutes from a set while getting ready to leave the house. Let a different section score a subway ride. Or clear an evening and sink into the aggregate experience.

Throughout, tricky chorus-writing from Braxton operas like Trillium E dances with classic solo-saxophone explorations as well as live-guitar work by Braxton bandmates like Mary Halvorson. Sometimes you get a group of vintage Braxtons, wailing on different saxophones at once, that is interrupted by the in-studio vibraphone playing of Aaron Siegel. By braiding together the artist’s music dramas, large-ensemble jazz opuses, and freer group-improvisations, 3 Compositions (EEMHM) 2011 ultimately achieves something that no "Braxton Sampler" album has ever quite managed to pull off. By giving us an aerial survey of a large and varied sonic landscape, it cuts down on the cognitive stress that can result from trying to "process" such a defiantly diverse career. It’s such an elegant solution to the contemporary anxiety about information overload that it might have made John Cage crack a Zen smile.

And if you find yourself wanting more, you can definitely get more. With some artists, 16 CDs and two Blu-ray discs would be sufficient for capturing a career—though that’s merely the physical-media tally required to hold Braxton’s early-2016 releases. Two other box sets, released simultaneously with (EEMHM) 2011, appear on the composer’s own New Braxton House label. The more noteworthy effort is Trillium J, the composer’s most recently performed four-act music drama. The librettos of Braxton’s operas blend his philosophical analysis of culture-at-large with absurdist comedic setups that often refuse to resolve. That postmodern dramaturgy fits with the orchestral language, which can lean heavily on thick, atonal cadences, before sliding into a square dance without warning. (Seriously, that happens in Act I.)

Braxton’s ability to independently field an orchestra that can produce compelling performances of complex, multi-hour works for the stage is a testament to his impresario’s pluck. Fittingly, Braxton cites a range of dramatic influences that includes Wagner, Stockhausen and Walt Disney. (So Kanye West has company, on that last one.) This recording of Trillium J benefits from a Blu-ray supplement that presents a full live-performance version from the Brooklyn venue Roulette, as well. In general, the CDs in the box offer crisper performances—with the orchestra in particular savoring details in the studio that were missed in the live moment. But since opera is also a visual medium, and because it has so occupied this composer for decades, the Blu-ray version offers a rare chance to fully appreciate the seriously oddball aesthetic of his ongoing Trillium project.

Switching lanes again, it’s the legacy of swing—specifically, the music composed by midcentury pianist Lennie Tristano and his associates—that anchors another 7xCD box, titled Quintet (Tristano) 2014. This is the release that is most explicitly for the Braxton-diehards who have kept track of his prior "jazz standards" projects. Though for those listeners, there is idiosyncratic value here, too. In contrast with an earlier investigation of this composer’s work (the much easier-to-digest Eight (+3) Tristano Compositions 1989), here Braxton plays not a lick of saxophone, instead holding down the piano chair in the group. In conversation, he’s straightforward about his limitations on the instrument. (“I don’t kid myself!" he recently told The New York Times. "I’m a self-taught piano player who tries to continue learning more.") But he is capable of bringing a blocky, Sun Ra-derived touch to Tristano compositions like "Lennie’s Pennies."

If you’re wondering whether Braxton still reserves any time for shredding on his main axe—the answer is yes. It’s just that he’s not currently using his own distribution channels to feature an aspect of his art that’s already been documented on the hundreds of recordings that fill his Echo Echo Mirror House Music iPods. So it’s up to a small Brazilian label, Selo SESC, to bring us a notable recent live performance from São Paulo.

Generically titled Ao Vivo Jazz Na Fábrica (Google Translate renders this "Live Jazz at Work") the album features Braxton on multiple saxophones—alto, soprano, and sopranino—as well as his regular guitarist Halvorson, trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum, and another saxophonist, Ingrid Laubrock (who often focuses on tenor playing). This group navigates the painting-scores and electronics of Braxton’s "Diamond Curtain Wall" music with the assurance of seasoned collaborators. (A consistent highlight of the first set is Braxton’s interaction with Halvorson’s rock-ish guitar progressions.) While his solos can careen with rapid groupings of notes and harsh rhythmic patterns, the tone of Braxton’s playing sometimes feels feather-soft. The disparity between the aggression of the melodic line and the lilt of its execution makes for a frequently thrilling experience.

Even more impressive than this protean output is the way these aesthetically diverged aspects of Braxton’s art all seem to converge on a central, spiritual impulse—one that he outlined in the liner notes of his 1968 debut, 3 Compositions of New Jazz: "You are your music. … If you try to vibrate toward the good, that’s where your music will come from." It's a simple sounding idea. Though because the world is more complex than inspirational koans commonly allow, realizing the objective can require multiple modes of effort. Contemplative sound-installations, humorously experimental operas, reinterpretations of classic swing, and serene, small-group free-jazz with electronics: the common thread here is Braxton’s curious and warm-hearted openness, perceptible even when his music verges on extreme cacophony. It’s a charming, insightful approach for an avant-garde sound artist to pursue. And it can prove addictive for "friendly experiencers," too.

Released April 1, 2016

1. Composition No. 372 57:54

2. Composition No. 373 59:26

3. Composition No. 377 58:14

Anthony Braxton: composer, sopranino, soprano and alto saxophones, iPod

Taylor Ho Bynum: cornet, flugelhorn, trumpbone, iPod

Mary Halvorson: guitar, iPod

Jessica Pavone: violin, viola, iPod

Jay Rozen: tuba, iPod

Aaron Siegel: percussion, vibraphone, iPod

Carl Testa: bass, bass clarinet, iPod 

Recorded May 20th, 2011 at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, CT 

Recorded, Mixed, and Mastered by Nick Lloyd 

Recording Assisted by Greg DiCrosta 

Layout & Design by Yesim Tosuner 

Produced by Anthony Braxton 

Co-produced by Nick Lloyd

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