Not Only Lone, But Forgotten

In a recent Bags thread some comments surfaced about Brian Morton's recent Wire article on solo reed and brass recordings (The Primer: Lone Horns). One of my most beloved topics, I had to pick up a copy of the reliable UK mag and read it for myself. Just fresh from soaking up Morton's controversial overview, I've got some thoughts I'm aching to share. Instead of inserting them into the tangled morass of that Bags thread, I figured everyone's interests would be better served by fashioning a clean and tidy new home for them here. So what I've done is paste all the comments on Morton's piece from that thread into this text object for convenient reference and add a few of my own, with the hopes that this will serve as a perspicuous convocation on the topic of solo music for wind instruments that will offer informal augmentation for Morton's immensely valuable formal survey and a convenient opportunity for everyone to fully vent their gripes about its puzzling omissions.

First, let's have a look at Dan Warburton's brief remarks.

While we're (still) on the subject of solo sax, what did you all make of Brian Morton's Primer on the subject in last month's Wire? The absence of Lol Coxhill has already been commented on, of course. I was bemused by his choice of Butcher's "London & Cologne" (as opposed to "Fixations" or "Invisible Ear"), Gianni Gebbia's "Body Limits" (nice, sure, but hardly indispensable) and especially Bill Dixon's "Solo Works" (the only solo trumpet disc mentioned at all, which is, to my mind, inexcusable - where's Axel Dörner's "Trumpet"? Greg Kelley's "Trumpet"? Maybe it's too early to nominate Nate Wooley's new Creative Sources "Wrong Shape To Be A Storyteller" but I'll do so anyway, cos it's WILD).

It all goes to show, I suppose, that Brian Morton (whose writing I admire enormously, certainly far more than he enjoys my fiddling :-)) is still coming at this from a Jazz direction. Doneda deserved his place, sure, but I would have liked to see Jack Wright's "Places To Go", Scott Rosenberg's "V", Stephane Rives' "Fibres" in there too. Returning to Bill Dixon, I'm still waiting for someone to explain the fanatical devotion the man seems to inspire among his students. No doubt a fine teacher, but I remain singularly unimpressed by his trumpet playing. Where am I going wrong? Show us the way, Clifford :)

Appropriately enough, a timely response came from a man who really deserves to have been in Morton's canon, Tom Djll, though it's really Djll himself to blame for his absence because he's never properly documented his astounding and groundbreaking acoustic solo trumpet work outside of some scarce recordings I'll be discussing at length in the near future on a Bags page near you.

Hey, Dan--
Agreed that Morton is bouncing off the jazz rails both right and left in his WIRE round-up. Ditto his omission of Butcher's Invisible Ear -- one of the most listenable of all the recent 'ground-breaking' solo excursions of recent years. Plus his selection of Roscoe Mitchell material I find faulty; where's Nonaah or S2 Examples?

I had a conversation with one of his students recently, Andrew Raffo Dewar, whose master's thesis is on Bill Dixon and may possibly be accessed through the Wesleyan library system... maybe Mike Parker can contact him and induce him to comment here?

In one of the most uncanny strokes of good timing the interweb can claim, Andrew Raffo Dewar, a grad student and intimate of Braxton and Lucier at Wesleyan who's a promising candidate to deliver some canonical solo clarinet and soprano sax recordings of his own in the future, made his Bagatellen debut at the same time as Tom was invoking him, the two gentlemen pecking away in front of their screens on opposite coasts of the US completely unbeknownst to each other! Indeed, Dewar's meaty contributions were entirely unprompted and coincidental! His thoughts mainly referred to the on-topic exchange about the dilemmas of originality and critical responses raised in connection with David Gross' new solo disc, but I'm excerpting his comments on Dixon for the sake of our present concerns.

re: Bill Dixon. I've spent a good amount of time with Mr. Dixon in the last few years, and though I can't "convert" someone to liking his work, I can say that one of his goals with his playing is to use the horn like an orchestra -- so one thing worth trying while listening to his music is imagining the horn as an orchestra -- see where that gets you. (come on, "Papyrus Vol.2"?!!? that's got to give you something, no?!)

Brian Marley added his own two cents on the perenially polarizing topic of Dixon:

Oh, and can I say that some of the earlier comments on Bill Dixon by Tom Djll and Andrew Raffo Dewar are illuminating – many thanks, guys. For years I've enjoyed Dixon's music without understanding a damn thing about how he approaches and makes his music, and now I'm just that little bit clearer.

Let's hope the intimidating Dixon solo oeuvre is further aired out in the Commentellen below, but for now I'll timidly throw in my two cents, noting that unlike Dan, Tom, and Andrew, I'm not a musician, and unlike the lot of above commentators, certainly including Morton, I'm not a well-versed expert by any stretch, but rather a young and enthusiastic fan of solo improvised music with a special fixation on reeds and a newly acquired and rapidly growing affinity for trumpets. My intention here is simply to light a fire under the keyboards of more knowledgeable commentators, not provide any sort of definitive statement on either solo horn music or Morton's piece.

Morton's article reflects incredible depth of listenership in the post-jazz avant-garde and it's a no-brainer to recommend reading it to anyone remotely interested in the topic. His take on many of the players is synthetic, concise, and penetrating, truly serving the purpose of a primer for curious listeners. Surely it was written with a broad intent to serve the needs of a wide audience, not to satisfy the esoteric concerns of the sorts of specialized troglodytes bound to foam with indignation at its shortcomings.

Before tackling my BIG GRIPE about the primer, I'll stroll through some minor reactions. I was surprised that Steve Lacy's first solo recordings from 1972, found on the Emanem disc Weal and Woe, weren't cited. They're pretty astonishing and worthy in my view, besides their tremendous historical significance to the solo reed topic.

If forced to pick the most important Michel Doneda solo disc, I'd affirm Morton's focus on Anatomie des Clefs, but if other players like Evan Parker are recognized for multiple crucial recordings and evaluated in terms of their personal evolution, why wasn't Doneda given a similar treatment? The developments separating 1991's monumental L'élémentaire Sonore and 1998's only moderately more monumental Anatomie are well worth considering, and 2000's Sopradino is so outrageously important to not only Doneda's solo music, but solo reed music as a whole, that it should've been incorporated into Doneda's entry, its placement in the "soprano" category notwithstanding. Doneda has a new solo disc I haven't heard yet, by the way, but having seen him perform quite a few times in the past few years, I wouldn't be surprised if it sets a new reference standard for something or another.

I'll leave the topic of Braxton's solo music to the hardcore experts like Brian Olewnick, but I'll cite two grievances against the following sentence: "For Alto remains the key text, though, and one of the half-dozen genuinely innovative new jazz records of its period, still fresh and unassimilated after 35 years". Half-dozen? That's a ludicrously harsh take on innovation. Why call For Alto "jazz", regardless of whether "new" is attached? I mean, it's really an inappropriate term in this case and a disservice to the scope and restructuralist intentions of the record.

In the case of Gianni Gebbia, whose work I've become increasingly enamored of in recent years to the point he'd easily make my saxophone top ten, I believe the developments in his alto sax vocabulary revealed in 1997's H Portraits and most vividly on 2000/2001's Arcana Major/Sonic Tarots Session are somewhat more germane than the mid-90s recording Body Limits that Morton selected.

In terms of the radicalism of his aesthetic innovations, I'd only cite Evan Parker and Michel Doneda as peers to Mats Gustafsson in the history of the saxophone. His new baritone solo disc Catapult, should've been cited, considering the profound and underdocumented developments in the years intervening between this 2005 recording and the 1996 recording Impropositions that Morton left to represent such an actively expanding player all by itself. Catapult is one the best solo saxophone records I've ever heard. Period. Also, Morton's blurb on Impropositions beats around the bush, nay, forest, of Gustafsson's radical expansion of possibilities for saxophone. It entirely fails to give even a faint hint of the content of the disc; I mean "fiery intensity"? Come on, there's a bucketload of saxophonists better slighted with that phrase and there's a lot more happening in Gustafsson's solo music, that disc and otherwise, than fiery intensity! The exact opposite of fiery intensity, for starters. By the way, Gustafsson has a new solo disc on slide saxophone, surely a first of its kind, and while I haven't scored a copy yet, I did see him do an earth-shattering extended solo on the extremely rare instrument a few months during a Brötzmann Tentet gig.

Morton's entry on Brötzmann is not only fabulously on-the-money, but rather witty as well!

Only one entry apiece for trumpet and clarinet? Absurd, of course, but more on the trumpet thing below when I get to my BIG GRIPE.

In terms of format for the primer, I find it odd that Morton lists three Roscoe Mitchell solo albums, at least one of which he doesn't seem to be even recommending at all, while offering entries for other musicians that omit masterpieces well worthy of a vigorous recommendation to curious listeners, as in the cases of John Butcher, Michel Doneda, Gianni Gebbia, and Ned Rothenberg. It's a frustrating inconsistency of treatment.

That wraps up my casual stroll through Morton's piece. Now my face is red with indignation as I realize three of the most obvious and monumental solo saxophone records are absent. These are so massive, so unquestionably canonical, groundbreaking, revelatory, and mind-blowing, that I'll have to give Morton the benefit of the doubt and assume their absence was a purely accidental oversight, and not an intentional gambit of historical distortion. In any case, these are the omissions I consider completely inexcusable.

John Zorn A Classic Guide to Strategy
Sure, Morton didn't have a "duck calls" category in the primer, but these two albums from the 80s are untouchable landmarks as revolutionary and musically successful as any solo horn albums ever, period. For my tastes, heavily slanted towards the new concepts of lurching rhythms and jarring juxtapositions that constitute a primary aesthetic breakthrough of the 20th century, these timeless recordings by Zorn are the holy grail.

Joe McPhee Tenor
I can't believe I'm even typing this. I have to pick up that magazine again to double and triple check I didn't just accidentally skip a page of the article where Morton pays tribute to this legendary recording. Nope, it's really not there. There's a section called "Tenor Saxophone" that cites Ellery Eskelin (great choice! incredible album!), Charles Gayle, Evan Parker, and Frank Lowe. Joe McPhee is not mentioned. Tenor is not mentioned. Other solo albums by McPhee are not mentioned. I'm pinching myself. Yes, this is not just some kind of weird, ugly dream. Recorded in 1976, Tenor long predates the synthesis of non-idiomatic free improv and pitch-based songcraft that is finally starting to emerge as a palpable, though still elusive aesthetic now that the storms of earlier improv paradigm battles have largely receded. It has also indirectly but profoundly shaped the course of post-jazz in the past decade via its role in Ken Vandermark's personal developments. Bags' own Derek Taylor wrote a nice piece about McPhee's solo discs on hat Art.

Bhob Rainey The Withered Grasses
Recorded in 1999 at the beginning of Rainey's transition into lowercase improv, this is the closest thing we have to a definitive early document of the radical new solo saxophone language he developed that made him a household name in the improv world and an icon of quiet, sparse acoustic improv based on extended techniques. In fact, this might very well count as the seminal document of the "acoustic saxophone as electronics" aesthetic that has become fruitfully ubiquitous in recent years. It's not Rainey's first solo album, though; the 1997 recordings on Ink, while equally brilliant, represent his earlier style based on the direct influence of Joe Maneri, a style he essentially abandoned shortly thereafter. That said, Withered Grasses is a varied album that really reflects the transition he was making more than the place he arrived at. Sadly, Rainey hasn't followed up on Withered Grasses beyond the tremendous piece comprising his disc on the triple 3" CD release from Crouton, Folktales No. 2. The dearth of solo recordings is hardly an issue, though, considering the abundance of releases from Nmperign that take care of the same business for the most part. By the way, the most powerful experiences I've ever had hearing a live solo performance on any instrument, not just saxophone, have been the two solo gigs by Bhob Rainey I've caught, dating back several years, which contained much more silence than any of his public solo recordings.

Okay, now that I've covered the unforgiveable omissions, I can move on to the more relaxing matter of a few forgiveable omissions, some records I would've included, but I can hardly blame Morton for neglecting given space limitations and other factors. I suppose I should start off with what probably counts as my all-time favorite solo saxophone disc, Jack Wright's Places to Go, which I've already praised at length in these pages. However, the new Wright solo album Up For Grabs might very well wind up earning that distinction once I come to grips with it. A handful of listens so far have revealed musical concepts I'd never previously imagined. It's a groundbreaking record synthesizing the various threads in his tumultuous aesthetic developments in the past decade. So why is the omission of Wright forgiveable if his solo work is this monumental? I suppose he's the perennial underdog, a permanent outsider who resists the kind of easily grasped aesthetic identity critics and canonizers require in their deliberations. Or maybe the simple fact is that his recordings remain poorly exposed and distributed, and so I can't blame anyone for missing them. Heck, it's almost a sure thing Morton hasn't heard Places to Go because otherwise it would've been listed.

Kang Tae Hwan's 1994 solo recordings on the self-titled release from Chap Chap Records are extraordinary enough to warrant inclusion in a solo reed survey. While the bulk of the disc is given over to duo and trio collaborations with Ned Rothenberg and Yoshihide Otomo, most interesting to me are the two solo tracks that add up 28 minutes of extremely original alto sax improvisation cultivated in the relative isolation of Korea, where Hwan is one of the few improvisors to have ever registered on the global radar. While comparable in its focus on circular breathing to work by Evan Parker, John Butcher, Gianni Gebbia, and Ned Rothenberg, not to mention virtuosity, Hwan has his own rhythmic fixations and timbral quirks I find utterly bewitching. His music is rather obscure as far as I can tell, but aside from this killer disc, his equally scarce duo disc with Sainkho Namtchylak is an incredibly unique and devastating masterpiece that could make an improv top 100. He has a two-disc release of 1999 duos with Kazuhisa Uchihashi and Yoshimitsu Ichiraku that are somewhat more pedestrian, though still representative of his alto sax genius. I'd also recommend acquiring a copy of the compilation Deluxe Improvisation Series, Vol. 2 just to hear the amazing 2001 quartet piece with Ichiraku, Otomo, and Sachiko M.

Something of a novelty, though an entirely worthy and riveting one, Masayoshi Urabe's 1996 solo alto sax disc on PSF simply entitled Solo is worth citing as example of something that can be done with solo wind instruments I've never heard anyone else do. It's pretty scary.

I wouldn't think twice about canonizing Paul Dunmall's solo bagpipe albums. I haven't gotten a copy of volume III in the series yet, but volumes I and II are treasures I play often, and often at loud volumes. Few solo albums can match their visceral power, and Dunmall's adaptation of the majestic traditional instrument to an avant-garde improv context is an innovation worth celebrating. In the regrettably absent "Bagpipes" category of Morton's primer, I also lament the absence of Matthew Welch's stunning disc of solo bagpipe arrangements of Braxton compositions, though I suppose they don't count as improvised music in the same sense as the others.

There's a whole slew of other omissions, some downright unforgiveable, I haven't hinted at yet. In other words, it's time to address my BIG GRIPE. If someone told me "Hey, I'm writing a primer on solo improv recordings performed on wind instruments", I'd say "Golly, that's a swell idea! What could be more timely and useful in 2005 when we're finding ourselves right in the midst of the golden era of solo improv for wind instruments, with thrilling innovations and idiomatizations coming at a breakneck pace from every direction in a flurry of sympathetic activity around the globe that truly defines the current aesthetic zeitgeist in improvised music. I would love to see a balanced, historically comprehensive roundup of this vital art form, citing the relationships between the most recent work and the pioneers, and sorting out the signficance of various approaches, noting the widespread detachment of wind improv from jazz, and so on. It's just what I need to catch up on the essential recordings I've missed so far and gain a panoramic view on the burgeoning topic to counterbalance my narrowly focused interests in certain players like Wright, Doneda, Rainey, Kelley, etc. Just splendid, I can't wait to read it!". Well, that's really what I expected from Morton's primer, but I quickly realized it should've been called "The Primer: Lone Horns, Part One" because the most recent disc cited is from 1998! That is, with the exception of a Roscoe Mitchell release completely irrelevant to recent developments. In other words, the entire current era of solo wind improv has been omitted! And it's the very era in which this form has flourished more than any other! It's frankly absurd and without a "part one" or "jazz-related" qualification it's tantamount to historical fraud. I suppose that Dan and Tom had similar thoughts when they mildly noted the jazz-bias of the primer above.

I'm not especially knowledgeable about the flood of releases documenting new techniques and aesthetic concepts for reeds and brass, so I won't attempt to make some kind of list here. I'll leave that to someone like Dan Warburton who knows the stuff in and out and would be a good candidate to pen "Part Two" for the Wire. But we're talking about a few dozen solid candidates for inclusion in a balanced primer, among which at least a handful are essential. I will, however, address a very salient issue, the omission of Greg Kelley's utterly earth-shattering solo trumpet albums, 2000's influential Trumpet on Meniscus, and 2002's less-discussed but vastly more devastating If I Never Meet You in This Life, Let Me Feel the Lack on Rossbin, which represent drastically different approaches to reinventing the trumpet, the latter being unquestionably my favorite solo trumpet album and the high-water mark in my view for the entire burgeoning genre of extended-technique-based acoustic free improv, at least in its first half before the static soundfield kicks in. Kelley has a third solo trumpet album co-released just a few months ago by Gameboy and Little Enjoyer, entitled I Don't Want to Live Forever, but just as Lack was a quantum leap away from the palpable trumpet-ness of Trumpet, his third solo statement continues the trend of abstracton, to the point where it's hard to even consider it a trumpet album in any meaningful sense. Listing Bill Dixon all alone in the trumpet category is just an insult to the profound achievements of Kelley and his peers, and perhaps the one objection to the primer that would be unanimous.

Aside from bagpipes, other second-class citizens of the contemporary wind instrument landscape were unjustly ignored, like flutes and oboes, despite worthy ambassadors of both instruments in the improv world. For oboe, Kyle Bruckmann's Entymology is an obvious choice that fits in with the "new thing" movement entirely ignored by Morton. When it comes to flute, history's foremost master of the instrument, Robert Dick, has a slew of groundbreaking solo recordings heavily rooted in avant-garde improvisation, though often foregoing improvisation in favor of notational approaches. Dick represents a pinnacle of achievement in the development of his instrument in the solo format for which no other instrument can claim a figure of analogous stature. It would take ten saxophonists to amass the artistic significance of Dick's contributions to solo flute music, improvised and otherwise. Jérôme Bourdellon's Trajet Solo would be a no-brainer if it weren't diluted by the multi-tracked pieces instead of focusing on true solo music, as Bourdellon is a master improvisor familiar to many listeners through his two killer duo discs with Joe McPhee. As far as flute improv with aesthetic concerns similar to Kelley, Bosetti, et al, Sabine Vogel's 2004 solo recording Aus dem Fotoalbum eines Pinguins is stunning reinvention of the instrument I've had in heavy rotation since belatedly playing it for the first time a few months ago. If anybody writes "Part Two", please don't overlook Vogel's masterpiece because of its regrettable status as a limited, demo-style CDR issue.

Concluding my remarks here, I'd like to offer a point of view that turns the tables on conventional thinking about solo albums. Back when For Alto came out, there was a smothering bias against solo improv. It was seen as arrogance and egotism. Even after solo improv albums became relatively common, residues of that bias persisted in the tendency of muscians to put solo work on a lofty pedestal as if it were a form of creation they weren't qualified to address without years of paying their dues in group contexts. Clearly this is an artifact of earlier aesthetic and sociological models, and I feel we not only need to reject it, but embrace its inversion. In my view, improvisors should begin their creative journey with solo work. After all, they have to learn a private instrumental language before they can play music in any context, solo or group, and the very content of non-idiomatic free improvisation seems predicated on such individual instrumental languages. More and more, I've noticed that I rarely find improvised music satisfying unless I find each participant's individual language satisfying. Essentially, the primary methodology of free improv is choosing and mastering a certain set of sounds to draw from during performances. Dominic Duval once remarked to me that "You can't play something you don't know". Me and Dominic come to the philosophy of improv from very different aesthetic and ideological vantage points, but I think he really captured the essence of the situation for even improvisors rejecting the conventions of melody and rhythm he (very fruitfully!) operates within. I'm not denying the validity of improv in which uncertainty of technique is cultivated, but I view that as a secondary and relatively unproductive approach compared to the paradigm of mastering a private sound world before setting foot on stage, and this is the paradigm subscribed to by virtually all the improvisors who enjoy a measure of public accolade. I believe an improv debut release should usually be a solo album, because if a musician's solo music isn't interesting enough, I don't see how their group music will be either unless they pick great partners and just tinker in the background

A typical active improvisor is constantly reshaping their private language, often abandoning extremely fruitful concepts that go undocumented in the process. Because of the radical subjectivity of free improvisation in its independence from established aesthetic criteria, a musician themself will frequently assess their work in conflict with their audience. Whereas a musician has to live with their sounds day in and day out, becoming susceptible to aesthetic disenchantment owing to nothing other than overexposure, a listener only makes occasional contact with their sounds, and only a limited subset of them at that. All of this is simply intrinsic to the culture of improvised music, but one of the unfortunate side-effects is that a lot of vital music goes undocumented or at least not publicly documented in a way that listeners can readily access and enjoy. Improvisors have an unfortunate tendency to withhold their creative work for the sake of chasing an illusory carrot of refinement or optimal realization. Many feel they need to delay the release of solo music until they self-assess a certain level of sophistication in their playing. They don't hesitate to play this gig or that gig with other musicians or appear on albums of collective improv, but when it comes to the very core of their musicality they balk at projecting it into the world to move cilia as it may. The problem I see with this mentality is that is presumes a liner progression of musical value, whereas in practice most improvisors reach sufficient musical spaces early in the game and then simply zigzag around to others of no intrinsically greater value, while privately deluded into believing their path has an evolutionary logic. Oftentimes improvisors abandon rich musical spaces under the influence of aesthetic trends in their larger community.

As an antidote, I propose that any improvisor actively developing their private instrumental language should release at least one solo album per year to document the essence of their music at that moment in time. We suffer under a culture of overly selective and sparing policies about publicly releasing music, the masterpiece mentality that is fundamentally incompatible with the primary aesthetic foundations of experimental improv. Hopefully that situation will continue to self-correct with the technological advances of CDRs, hard-drives, and web-based distribution. More and more the arbitrary sociological and technological gap separating public performances and public recordings is thankfully eroding. For the most part, if someone is willing to get on stage and perform for arbitrary listeners, they ought to be willing to let other folks listen to it who may have been geographically inhibited from attending the performance. As it is, a ton of improv gets released to all manner of acclaim, ridicule, intrigue, and apathy, rendering the issue of quality control largely moot; great music will always fall on the wrong ears, but it shouldn't be inaccessible to the right ears.

So this is my message to improvisors: Please, don't hold back; the world needs more solo albums; let a million instrumental languages bloom; release your solo music or it may get lost forever. Oh, one more thing, if you make squeaky, harsh acoustic sounds, please let me know about it! That's what I like!

~Michael Anton Parker

The image quality of the album artwork at the top is not so great, so for reference, the left one is Joe McPhee's Tenor, the center one is John Zorn's A Classic Guide to Strategy (the CD reissue of volumes I and II), and the right one is Bhob Rainey's The Withered Grasses.