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Briefly, Taylor Ho Bynum and Francois Houle Duo at The Apartment, Vancouver, August 29, 2014

February 20, 2015 1:29 am / Leave a comment

[There are a number of things – poems, travel, concerts, media stuff – from the summer and fall of 2014 I was set to write about, but life and whatever seem to have taken precedence, so I’m going to try to catch up on some of these things in the next few weeks. I have about a dozen or so fragments that need reworking, expanding, editing and polishing before they can make their way into the Frank Styles neighbourhood. Here’s the first of a bunch.]

On the night of Friday, August 29, Taylor Ho Bynum played a duo concert with François Houle at The Apartment, a small gallery on East Pender, just off Main Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown. It’s been a while, but I took down a few notes to jog my memory. Taylor started with a solo piece; the concert was the first semi-official stop on his solo West Coast Bicycle Tour, which would see him pedal a huge number of miles alone down the left coast of North America, through September to early October. He kept an on-line diaryon his website, and has put up excerpts of his musical encounters – some planned, some by happenstance – on a Sound Cloud page. The solo had shards of marches, echoing maybe a little some of Anthony Braxton’s interest in John Philip Sousa and brass marching bands, but with mixed in growls, swoops and other cornet chop suey, concocting a few momentarily avant-Cootie-Williams-like lines.

François Houle joined him for a version of Taylor’s composition “All Roads Lead to Middletown.” Here is a field recording of their performance:

And here is a duo version Taylor Ho Bynum recorded with Anthony Braxton in 2002 at Wesleyan:

A version of Houle’s composition “Seventy-Three” followed, a tune originally recorded on his album In the Vernacular (Songlines, 1998), which is dedicated to the music of John Carter. Carter, Houle said afterward, would have been seventy-three at the time of the recording. Much of the music, besides its in-the-moment spontaneity, was vitally self-aware of its own historicity, its sense of a present deeply enmeshed in lineages and antecedents, but dynamically and restlessly so. Houle also mentioned Carter’s duets with Bobby Bradford: forebears who continue to open up new and challenging possibilities for this music, as part of a living tradition of experimentation and forward motion. The duo played “Shift” from Taylor’s suite Apparent Distance, and then closed with a blistering and challenging reading of Anthony Braxton’s Composition 69c, a sinuous monody combining bluesy flatted fifths with angular sonic geometries. (At the set break that followed, a little out of breath and a bit unsatisfied with his performance, Taylor recalled speaking with Kenny Wheeler about how difficult and even lip-splitting playing Braxton’s compositions in the quartet could be.) For the second set, the duo returned with versions of two Carter pieces (played originally with Bobby Bradford): “Comin’ On” and “Sticks and Stones.”

The concert closed with an extended trio; Houle invited tenor saxophonist Nils Berg to come up, and they offered a ten-or-more minute extemporaneous tone poem, with Berg’s contributions recalling the restrained lyricism of late Lester Young, or perhaps even Warne Marsh in a reflective mood. Beautiful things: bright moments, as Rahsaan might have put it. Here is Taylor’s field recording of the trio, so you can hear it for yourself.

Frankly,
KM

Taylor Ho Bynum on Wreck Beach, 28 August 2014

September 9, 2014 8:21 pm / Leave a comment

Sunset on Thursday, August 28, was supposed to happen, according to my smartphone app, at about 8:00pm – although sunsets are attenuated diminishments, not sudden closures of the light, so the timing was no doubt loose enough. But I was still running a bit late, and cutting it close. It was about 7:45. Taylor Ho Bynum had announced that he was beginning his west coast bicycle tour this evening with a sunset fanfare on Wreck Beach, Vancouver’s famously clothing-optional strand, at the tip of Point Grey on the University of British Columbia campus. I wanted to be there to hear him play. Getting to the beach involves descending a fairly steep set of 400-odd wood-framed earthen stairs. I had rushed past some former students at the top, saying hello but that I was headed for what I thought was to be a solo concert of improvised cornet music on the beach that was about to start so I was sorry but I had to go. At least, that’s what I think I said. I took the stairs two-at-a-time as I started down, but that soon proved to be too dangerous a tactic, so I dialed the urgency back a little and settled into a one-by-one descent. Tanned and mellow, loosely garbed nudists and dreadlocked dudes passed by me on their way up from a day of sunbathing in the heavy, bronze August light. The staircase itself is shadowed and cool, snaking along a gully in the cliff-side amid stands of west-coast cedar, poplar and the odd birch. Clumps of oversized ferns open in the various cusps of hillocks a few metres off the south side of the path. As I made my way down, at speed, I was pelted by what looked in the dimness like scissor-winged dark moths, small meandering swarms of them newly airborne, a sign of the oncoming night. One or two clung to the folds of my t-shirt. I brushed them off, and, passing the green plastic Johnny-on-the-Spot, emerged from the trees onto the beach sand at the foot of the stairs.

I couldn’t see anything that looked like a concert. It took a moment to orient myself. Scattered beach-goers were still perched against logs, facing the Georgia Strait, watching the sunset in the west across the water. A naked, deeply tanned old man nodded and passed me. Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be happening. I thought I might have missed Taylor Ho Bynum.

And then I heard what sounded like a Harmon-muted horn, a little faint, off to the right of the stairs. Perched against one of the many driftwood logs that serve as breaks and that define limited privacies amid this reach of open public space, Taylor – shirt off – was playing to some seagulls who had waddled up to him, curious. I came over and sat on the log next to his. There seemed to be a few other people around the space, at their own chosen logs, who were listening, too. Most of the folks around us were couples, however, out for some kind of romantic postcard moment. The seagulls squawked at Taylor’s playing, and he engaged in a little playful conversation with them, before they wandered off. The couple I took for lovers looked over, once, then went back to themselves. The Harmon mute on the cornet gave his sound an intimacy, a hush that was a little swallowed in the rhythmic wash of ocean on sand, and in the wide-open air. You had to be sitting close by to hear.

Taylor finished what he was playing, set down his horn, and put on his shirt. I came over to him and said hello. He’s a very affable, open person, and chatted for a few minutes, telling me how on the very first leg of his bicycle tour – what would probably amount to 1800 miles over the course of five or six weeks, from Vancouver to Tijuana, playing concerts and ad hoc gigs along the way – he had fallen and cut his leg and arm; he had just been washing his cuts in ocean water, which he told me he hoped would work as a kind of natural antiseptic. (Taylor’s own account of his accident, and of playing on Wreck Beach, can be found in his on-line journal for his Bicycle Tour.)

Another listener, whom I recognized from jazz festival gigs this past June and whose name, if I remember right, is Michael, sat down on the log opposite, and joined in the casual talk.

Taylor noticed that the sun was beginning to set in earnest, and said he ought to play some music, like he’d intended. He was concerned that he might be too loud for the thinning community of beach-goers around us, so he placed a soft hat over the bell of his cornet. He improvised an angled fanfare for a little under ten minutes, eventually removing the hat and letting the horn sing out a bit more fully. Michael and I sat a few feet on either side of him as he played, facing the water. The open ocean seemed more or less to swallow up the sound – I don’t think there was a danger of him being too loud here – while the cedars lining the embankment behind us occasionally bounced a cluster of notes back toward us, gently resonant. He was recording himself on an iPad that he had placed to his right, against the log. He put both performances on Sound Cloud – they’re called “Gulls” and “Wrecked at Sunset” (the latter presumably in honour both of Wreck Beach and his crash) – and you can easily make out the ways in which he shifts from counterpointing his lines with the aural textures of the local biosphere through a form of call and response, leaving space for those ambient sounds to overcome his notes before reasserting his voice in tandem with that soundscape, shifting foreground and background, and finally, to my ear, melding his voice into that variegated chorus. You can hear at the close of “Wrecked at Sunset,” if you listen closely, the trees returning his melodies like ghosts.

For those few minutes, it felt like Taylor had begun to initiate a musical ecology: situated and embodied, even a little wounded, this wasn’t a “concert” but a shared auditory space, or better: a temporary entry into the layered networks of place, a kind of sonic reciprocity. The inescapably linear monody produced by the cornet gains depth and polymorphous heft by combining expressive assertion with attentive deference, by concocting instances of responsive, correspondent exchange. A conversing. Not playing for so much as playing along, playing with.

Actual sunset with which Taylor Ho Bynum was playing on Wreck Beach– including a couple in the right foreground.

After Taylor finished, and we chatted a little more, one of the RCMP officers who patrol the shore strolled past, and politely suggested that the beach would be closing at dark, and it was time to go. Taylor picked up his horn, and played the Miles Davis outro tag-line from “The Theme,” a light-hearted nod to the historical spectres of improvisers who inevitably haunt our musical memories and an acknowledgement, by quirkily twisting jazz convention, of the ways in which this was no concert, no outdoor club date. He packed up his horn, and picked up his bike, which he had carried down to the beach and which he would have to carry back up the stairs with him. And that was that.

Possibility Abstracts: Taylor Ho Bynum, Nathaniel Mackey and Discrepancy (Audio)

July 31, 2014 9:58 pm / Leave a comment

Here is an audio capture of “Possibility Abstracts: Taylor Ho Bynum, Nathaniel Mackeyand Discrepancy,” a paper I delivered in Prague, in the Czech Republic, on 18 July 2014 as part of the vs. Interpretation symposium, sponsored by the Agosto Foundation. The text riffs on the epistolary form of Nathaniel Mackey’s serial novel, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, particularly the fourth volume, Bass Cathedral, on which Taylor Ho Bynum draws for his modular composition Navigation, versions of which he recorded with his sextet for release on Firehouse 12 records late last year. (See firehouse12records.com/album/navigat…12-recordings.) For me, this music is a contemporary masterpiece, negotiating the liminal zone – the discrepancies – between the improvised and the composed, and doing so in such as way as to creatively undo that rather careless binary. There is an excellent review of Navigation by Stuart Broomer in Point of Departure.

Possibility Abstracts: Taylor Ho Bynum, Nathaniel Mackey and Discrepancy (Abstract)

May 27, 2014 4:57 pm / Leave a comment

This is the abstract/proposal for a paper I am set to give at the Vs. Interpretation colloquium and festival on the improvisational arts, which is taking place in Prague in the Czech Republic on July 17-20, 2014. The colloquium is supported by the Agosto Foundation, and keynote speakers include George Lewis and Pauline Oliveros. The original theme for the colloquium had to do with “improvising across borders.” I am aiming to extend my own thinking about the intersections of improvisational practices and the poetics of listening by addressing the work of Taylor Ho Bynum and Nathaniel Mackey. So here it is:

Released in November 2013, the multi-format set of recordings of Taylor Ho Bynum’s innovative composition for improvising sextet, Navigation, both culminates and continues his fascination with the interfaces between the extemporaneous and the written, the scripted and the performative. Separate LP and compact disc versions of the work are paired with different fragments of text from poet Nathaniel Mackey’s experimental epistolary novel Bass Cathedral, a book that Ho Bynum has recently said, for him, is probably the best writing about music he has encountered. Earlier compositions by Bynum, such as his suite Madeleine Dreams, have not only used prose fiction as libretto, but more tellingly have striven to address sonically and structurally the complex and often fraught relationships between the musical and the diegetic, between sound and sense. Navigationtakes up Mackey’s own address to this interface, sounding what Mackey understands as creative discrepancy, an expressive troubling of formal and cultural boundaries. Name-checking both Sun Ra and Louis Armstrong, Mackey has noted what he calls a “play of parallel estrangements” in improvised music and in poetry, arguing that music “is prod and precedent for a recognition that the linguistic realm is also the realm of the orphan,” that is, of the limits of sense, a liminal zone of both orchestration and letting go. Ho Bynum’s recordings pick up not only on Mackey’s thorough enmeshment in jazz history, but also on his intention to pursue the expressive potential of language and of music at their textural boundaries, at moments of troubling contact between divergent worldviews, or between dissimilar social and cultural genetics. Composing using what Mackey calls m’apping – a portmanteau splice of mapping and mishap, pursuing what Mackey calls the “demiurgic rumble” of discrepancy, improvising across the gaps between careful craft and unruly noise – Ho Bynum conjures a hybrid and collaborative music that blends the complex Afrological heritages of jazz performance style (audible in Navigation’s network of gestures to Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington, to name only two key forebears) with graphic scoring techniques derived from Sylvano Bussotti or Wadada Leo Smith, among others. If improvised music, for Mackey, represents – and represents precisely – what defies descriptive capture in language, what eludes ekphrasis, then the music of Taylor Ho Bynum’s sextet aspires to invert that representational effort, to take up the discrepant aesthetic tactics of Mackey’s writing and to assess how the written (as graphē, as graphic score) can approach and test the expressive limits of making music happen. Taylor Ho Bynum’s compositions for improvisers offer exemplary instances of how to negotiate creatively the boundaries between text and sounding, and suggest a means of addressing, too, the graphic work of other composer-improvisers, including the work of Nicole Mitchell, Anthony Braxton and Barry Guy

Mary Halvorson, "Songs that Get Stuck in My Head"

June 30, 2013 2:31 am / Leave a comment

Just come back from an hour-long afternoon public workshop with guitarist Mary Halvorson at the Roundhouse Community Centre in Yaletown, part of the last weekend of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. It was a real privilege to hear her talk and play. She was personable and articulate, taking questions and playing a handful of brief solo improvisations.

She confessed that she was in the midst of “working on solo guitar music,” and that she hasn’t really performed solo up until this point in her career as an improviser. She said that she had decided to base her nascent solo work on “songs that get stuck in my head,” which at this point were principally jazz standards, although she was also looking to various “compositions by other people” as source material. She admitted that she tends to focus on melodies and has a harder time “remembering the chords.” But there was nothing diffident or self-effacing in her aesthetic or in her performing; her spotty memory seems to offer creative opportunity rather than impediment. Or, as she put it, “I’m going to make up my own chord changes to these existing melodies.” She offered a foreshortened but compelling version of “Beautiful Love,” laced with pitch-bent burbles, halting twangs and lyrical turn-on-a-dime redirections. She likes, as she said, “weird left turns and falling off cliffs” in music–her version of the “sound of surprise”– but her playing also drew out a gently fraught lyricism in each of her lines. If this really was a hint of what’s to come, her solo work is going to be beautifully unsettling and eclectically brilliant. She talked at some length about some of the challenges she feels she is facing combining her own idiosyncratic approach to the instrument with a more idiomatically “jazz” approach to playing and to musical form. (In fact, before she began talking, she played us a track from her iPod, Johnny Smith doing “Moonlight in Vermont,” and admitted her love of Smith’s sound. Smith had passed away a little over a week ago.) She also played a track from her yet-to-be-released septet album, roiling layers of horn and guitar.

When asked about connections between her styles of band leading and composition, she said she tries to enable and to support the members of her group, and is keen “not to be too controlling.” She pointed to her experiences with Taylor Ho Bynum‘s sextet–the example was suggested by someone in the audience–as a possible model for relinquishing control and instead creating democratic interactions among the players. At the same time, referring to her studies with Anthony Braxton (whose music she said helped her decide to drop her courses in biology and pursue music) and with Joe Morris, she said she felt that “the teachers you have really shape who you become,” noting that both of these mentors encouraged her to follow their example in seeking out her own idiom, her own ways of making music. A brief improvisation built from cascading pulses closed out the workshop.