Recorded live at the Ljubljana Music Festival in Slovenia, this CD set documents a 90-minute performance involving four saxophonist/conductors leading the Slovenia Radio Orchestra. The need for multiple conductors in Composition 169 itself isn’t at all apparent, as it comprises a series of highly dissonant, staccato tutti involving all four saxophones and strings. The effect is disconcertingly close to the honking of car horns, and the fiercely nondevelopmental nature of the composition is indeed rather like being trapped in urban gridlock: one inches forward very gradually, sometimes making some apparent progress, only for it to disappear under one’s eyes. However, the three segments in which no. 169 is set forth only occupy 35 minutes of the total performance; the rest is devoted to collages of the three Ghost Trance compositions listed between brackets in the title. These portions are where the disc’s primary musical interest resides. The orchestra is split into four out-of-sync sections which jauntily march along the melodic tracks set out for them, crashing into each other or slowly peeling away. The saxophonists (Braxton, James Fei, Chris Jonas and Jackson Moore) are each featured, and while Braxton gets his best shots in early with an excoriating solo on disc one, the climax is when the orchestra gradually recedes on disc two to leave the spotlight on all four players. The entire performance has a rather raw quality: Braxton, while graciously thanking everyone involved in his liner notes, does say that nonetheless “because of time and budgetary problems I have yet to experience an actual performance of a ‘fully engaged’ example of Composition n. 169,” and the performance’s imperfections are audible. (I should also note that the recording picks up every sneeze and watch alarm the audience could muster – though, curiously, any final applause has been edited out.) I liked sections of this recording and was irritated by others; but in the end it must be said that this is likely only an album for the Braxton completist or the student of his orchestral writing.

Nate Dorward

Coda, May/June 2002