It’s taken (respectively) five and three years for these recordings to emerge on CD. The Leo release is, in characteristic Braxton manner, a double-CD set – packaged, incidentally, with irritating sloppiness: both the front and back spines give the leader’s name as “BRQAXTON.” Recorded live in 1998 at Wesleyan University, the set documents Braxton in two different all-horn ensembles. The sound-world will be familiar to anyone who’s followed the Ghost Trance series of compositions. A seemingly endless series of notes is stated at a brisk trot by the horns; these are not exactly harmonized, but simply delivered at fixed intervals which seem largely dictated by the natural differences in transposition between the instruments. (There’s a particularly piquant contrast created at the start of Composition 227 – a major second – because Jonas is on alto saxophone, Braxton on F-alto saxophone.) There are momentary variations in phrasing, speed and dynamics and the odd rapidfire trip-you-up string of notes, but basically these passages are a static musical continuum: they go on, and on, and on – usually for about five minutes, at which point a mysterious switch is triggered, and the jogtrot melody drops away as the musicians strike out for fresh musical territory. The enigmatic quality of these two performances is in large part due to the mismatch between the mood of these interzones (usually spacious and rather tentative, though on occasion they implode in fury) and the implacable automaton-like confidence of the Ghost Trance melodic tracks. It’s as if each piece contains two halves that refuse to add up.

Composition 227 (Braxton, Chris Jonas, David Novak) is rather delightful. Listening to it is like witnessing synchronized pirouettes, sustained to almost incredible length. Then at last they fall apart – into strange near-silent solos, breaths and whistles, a passage of ridiculous kazooing, Braxton’s fevered overblowing, and so forth. The entire piece develops along a wide arc. The pitch range gradually sinks as the midpoint of the piece approaches, where there’s some extraordinary snarfing flatulence from Novak’s contrabassoon and Braxton’s (uncredited) contrabass clarinet. Then the process switches into reverse until, at the end, Braxton and Jonas are playing in fierce unison on alto. Composition 228 (Braxton, Jackson Moore, Seth Misterka) is a tougher go: Braxton sticks throughout to the lowest horns in his arsenal, the other two players favour the baritone sax, and there’s an indulgent amount of grotesquerie. It’s also annoying to hear Moore spit Braxton’s own stuff back at him at length. That said, the piece draws in the patient listener, and there’s some fine moments despite a few too many squalling huff-puff passages. A hilarious tiptoeing episode near the end sticks in the mind especially: Braxton and Misterka skulk around conspiratorially like the white and black spies in Mad Magazine.

Skip ahead two years and 14 composition numbers and we arrive at Four Compositions (GTM) 2000. The most startling thing about the disc is the label that released it: this is, astonishingly enough, the first time Braxton has recorded for Delmark since his epochal 1969 date For Alto. Unlike previous Ghost Trance recordings, this disc features a familiar jazz quartet instrumentation (sax plus rhythm), and listeners weaned on the great Braxton/Crispell/Dresser/Hemingway quartet will find themselves in familiar territory here. Some of the GTM recordings that Braxton has released have been tough going for all but the most devoted Braxtonians, by turns maddeningly perverse, static or austere; the Delmark disc is, by contrast, some of the most entertaining music he has laid down in recent years. The looped melodic tracks in these four pieces are sketched in quite briefly by GTM standards – they are as brief and as openended a springboard to improvisation as a conventional jazz head. Though the GTM melodic tracks are themselves much of a muchness, the performances as a whole each have a distinctive flavour, almost a character: no. 243, for example, is angry and nervous; no. 244, almost distracted. The other three players, all students of Braxton’s, play with a prickliness and nerve that shows no signs of mere deference, and the music’s all the better for it. Kevin Uehlinger stalks Braxton on piano, wielding a plunking, bony minimalist style, all jutting angles and forthright gaps; he also contributes silvery melodica to no. 244. Braxton’s quartet music has always been a feast for inventive bassists and drummers, and Keith Witty and Noam Schatz dive right in to it. Somehow they manage to bring some very unBraxtonian idioms into play (Schatz, for instance, is credited in Steven Loewy’s liner notes with an “unusually diverse background in hip hop, Afro-beat, and rock and roll”) and make it work. For all the complex interweavings of Braxton’s compositional strategies, the overall impression is of a music with an unpredictability and intensity that can border on fury, though the clarity of the four individual voices is never compromised. This is some of Braxton’s most compelling recent work, and certainly the pick of these two releases.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, August 2003