Accelerated Ghost Trance

It's not everyday you get 400 people to pack into a theater and listen to a low-energy web of non-repeating sound that makes Boulez or Carter sound like easy-listening music. It's also not everyday that Anthony Braxton brings his music to Philadelphia. Not even every decade. With a demanding continuous piece furrowing any number of inscrutable paths for well over an hour, on November 4th, 2005 Braxton and five of his dedicated interpreters gave the first American exposition (as an isolated form) of the latest development in his grand compositional scheme, surely to the bewilderment of many present who were lured more by the hushed reverence afforded the new sexagenarian than any engagement with his current aesthetic agenda. At the very least, the music offered listeners a layer of accessible individual narrative to latch onto, with Braxton himself taking a handful of characteristically scalding and sublime alto sax solos and Jay Rozen (pictured above), Aaron Siegel, Jessica Pavone, Carl Testa, and Taylor Ho Bynum each stepping into the foreground on occasion to reveal a tremendous level of creative musicality.

After intensively developing an expansive compositional framework called Ghost Trance Music for over a decade in three distinct phases, Braxton has conceded its inadequacy for accomodating his full range of aesthetic desiderata and written a new chapter designated as the Accelerated version. Pushing the envelope of complexity and foregoing the foothold in regular pulse structures of the earlier versions, Accelerated Ghost Trance Music places unusual demands on the musicians. As such, it's ideally suited to a dedicated crack ensemble of musicians well versed in Ghost Trance Music who might be hankering to play at the edge of performative possibility long established as a hallmark of the Braxtonian aesthetic. As Braxton half-seriously quipped after the gig in the wake of Jay Rozen's boggling virtuosity on tuba, with a musician like Rozen to keep busy he had to take the concept one step further. This specific group of musicians (modulo Carl Testa newly replacing doublebassist Chris Dahlgren) have been conducting public researches into Accelerated Ghost Trance Music since their European tour in April this year, veterans of an acclaimed performance at the Victo fest in May and subsequent European appearances this summer. As part of the recent 60th birthday celebrations for Braxton, in September in Connecticut the sextet was expanded to 12 musicians that used both Accelerated and earlier forms of Ghost Trance Music in the same performance, something of a landmark in terms of ensemble size and methodology. So it's worth noting that the Philly performance was an example of a new compositional framework still in an experimental stage of usage, accounting for the sense of thrilling discovery for both performers and experiencers (well, at least a few of us I suppose).

The evolution of Ghost Trance Music through its four phases (or, more accurately, three plus one phases, as Braxton told me he considers it an instance of a more general "3+1 logic" in his systems) strikes me as a gradual erasure of the formative "trance" concept to lay bare the underlying methodology for interpolating materials into a large-scale form in its bewildering aesthetic generality. While temporal extension and continuity alone can account for elements of trance experience, I think that rhythmic regularity is the primary trigger. With its exclusive use of unmetered 8th notes in the primary layer of melodic structure, Ghost Trance Music Species One offered rhythmic regularity in the most explicit form possible, whereas Ghost Trance Music Species Two and Three introduced successively greater degrees of rhythmic subdivision in the form of episodic abruptions, as I believe Braxton refers to them. Now with Accelerated Ghost Trance Music, the 8th notes have disappeared entirely, and with them a hypnotic quality. Referred to as a template, the primary structural material for any Ghost Trance Music omposition is an extremely long sequence of non-vertical sound events notated with Braxton's diamond clef to be neutral with respect to clef and transposition. As such, each instrumentalist in the ensemble is referring to the exact same notational object and unison playing is a common feature of the music. In Ghost Trance Music Species One and Two the sound events were ordinary discrete notes, so the template was essentially a marathon melody, while in Ghost Trance Music Species Three slots for undetermined textures were incorporated into the sequence, a practice continued in Accelerated Ghost Trance Music. An additional development is the use of color coding in the score, but as I understand it this structural dimension is only beginning to be explored and didn't factor into the performance I experienced.

Aside from these significant changes in the templates, the essential spirit of Ghost Trance Music remains unaltered. While containing its own modular system to enable spontaneous deviations from the template, it also interfaces with Braxton's pre-existing master scheme for organizing material into modules that can plug into all his work. In a sense, Ghost Trance Music could be taken as an overarching system that encompasses Braxton's entire career in a format accessible to any of the musicians that might pass through his ever-shifting pool of willing interpreters. It's this inclusiveness that struck me during the performance. I could hear little episodes of so many different aesthetic directions Braxton has pursued over the years, whether it was different sound parameters taken as loci of variation, different methods of group interaction, different idiomatic references, or simply different degrees of improvisation. In a manner typical of many varieties of improvised music and definitive of non-idiomatic free improvisation, individual instrumental personalities were allowed to function as source material to some extent, offering that familiar and potentially appealing experience of music as a theater of performer psychology. In a manner typical of many varieties of notationalism, the musicians were also reproducing predetermined material of a character unlikely to appear in improvised music, offering an expression of Braxton's private imagination. While this sort of complex interplay between improvisation and notationalism is not especially rare and has seen comparably ambitious and successful realizations in works by folks like Simon Fell and Scott Fields (the performance roughly reminded me of Fields' epic and wonderful 96 Gestures but the music was vastly more subtle), I'd like to suggest there is something yet more inclusive about Braxton's music in the way it embraces a full human experience. While he pursues esoteric aspects of sound organization alongside the best experimentalists, Braxton embraces very traditional music experiences and leaves a space for them in most of his work. Taken as a whole, I think Braxton has created a complete music, a music that synthesizes a full range of aesthetics across the gamut of deep traditionalism and deep experimentalism instead of being restricted to isolated aesthetic concerns. This is such a rare achievement that the only other artist I can think of who's created a complete music in the same sense is John Zorn. As vague as these remarks may be, it's my concrete feeling that Ghost Trance Music is an aesthetic ecosystem more than just a compositional framework.

I'm not foolhardy enough to attempt any exegesis of Ghost Trance Music mechanics, were I even privy to them in full, but certain aspects are transparent and worth mentioning to convey a methodological gist. The use of parallel independent subgroupings was well represented by a memorable passage in which Taylor Ho Bynum issued an extended freebop narrative over a barnstorming pulse movement by Chris Dahlgen's burning doublebass and Aaron Siegel's percussion, which temporarily assumed the flavor of a conventional drumkit even though his setup was totally unlike a drumkit. It's worth noting that this was one of very few passages in which jazz occurred. For a large part of this trio segment the other musicians didn't play, but then Jay Rozen (tuba) and Jessica Pavone (viola) exchanged some hand signals and cryptic glances in order to launch into a tightly connected duo passage without any interactive relationship to the trio passage, which continued unperturbed. It was sublime to hear each subgroup retain its internal logic and resist merging logics with each other. My take on the rough structure of a case like this is pretty straightforward. First, I assume that individual-level relationships (relationships between single musicians) tend to have perceptual primacy over group-level relationships (relationships between groups of musicians) when both are in an overlapping range of informational density. Second, it's not that the subgroups have no relationship to each other, but rather that all individual-level relationships are encapsulated in the two modules so that group-level relationships between the modules aren't masked by individual-level relationships. In other words, it opens a higher order relational space by subtracting a lower order relational space. It strikes me as yet another nice way to avoid those good old pitch relationships that have worn out their welcome in human culture.

Taylor Ho Bynum, a ten-year guinea pig of Braxton's musical laboratory, was the dominant soloist this evening, with an especially uninhibited take on Ghost Trance Music's flexible parameters. I lost track of how many times he whipped out a different instrument and played it with polished vim, but I believe his main tools were cornet, trumpet, trombone, conch, finger cymbals, kickable objects, and flugelhorn. He took a flugelhorn solo that completely blew my mind, easily one of the five best solos of the evening alongside a few Braxton alto excursions and Rozen's insane tuba workout to be recounted in an upcoming paragraph. Bynum also has an animated and invigorating stage presence, an asset he deploys to special effect in the free jazz contexts that have earned him a healthy reputation in the avant-garde jazz world. I have to admit I've had a favorable bias ever since first hearing him alongside Eric Rosenthal and Jack Wright on Bhob Rainey's pre-lowercase classic Universal Noir some five years ago.

Bynum's readiness to step outside the brass family casts him as a classic example of Derek Bailey's conceptualization of a type of improvisor who regards their instrument as a means to an end and not an end in itself, certainly a minority in the post-jazz demographic. I recall a performance from a few years ago in Boston during the James Coleman -curated Autumn Uprising festival that perfectly captured this aspect of Bynum's musicality. Forgive me for some haziness on the specifics here—it would be great if someone graced the Commentellen below with a more accurate version of the story—but the occasion was a short tribute to an eccentric inspirational figure of the local avant-garde scene (perhaps a trumpeter/composer who had passed away?) in which several trumpeters gave a one-minute interpretation of a graphic score by this fellow. I think there was four players (who also did a trumpet quartet in the same set), and I think one of them may have been Tom Halter (but if not, he's a fine player!), but I'm pretty sure the other three were Bynum, Mark Harvey, and Greg Kelley. Needless to say these are advanced players who could be expected to offer radically different responses to the squiggles or blobs or whatever were on that piece of paper, but Bynum's reading epitomized the poetry of surprise. As I remember it, he engaged in a mini-epic struggle to tie and untie his shoelace around the bottom of the music stand's pole with the full-body vigor of someone fending off a swarm of bees. It was a beautiful piece with a frantic tempo and a true sense of naked humanity. (I also remember Kelley's reading being a single heart-stopping virtuosic blast of static and extreme circularly-breathed trumpet sound.)

I offer that anecdote as a pleasant contextualization for the most poignant moment in the concert, which for me is an even better symbolic rendering of the wondrous and ineffable human spirit of Anthony Braxton than his widely reported (with amusing telephone-game variations unique to each reporter!) recent onstage communication of a Wolf Eyes song title (which, granted, I didn't witness first-hand). In what I'm assuming to be a reading of a texture space from the template (or perhaps a module of one of Braxton's language types, a common interface with Ghost Trance Music), Bynum suddenly began capriciously kicking the mutes and other objects on the floor near him. Bynum plays soccer. Bynum keeps playing soccer. Bynum's soccer takes him many feet away from his allotted spot on stage. Bynum's bouts of soccer attain spectacle-hood. Jay Rozen nonchalantly crinkles a tin foil pie plate in textural sympathy. Sir Braxton intently peers at the score, listening. Sir Braxton keeps intently peering at the score, listening. Sir Braxton smiles so hard and long his whole body is moving, still peering at the score. Sir Braxton is rocking from side to side and shaking his head with pleasure, still peering at the score. Sir Braxton exudes more joy than a kid stepping into a candy shop or a conductor reaching the climax of his favorite symphony in its best reading, still peering at the score. Jessica Pavone is standing closest to Braxton a few feet away, holding her viola in the "off" position, head down, concentrating, listening, expressionless. Sir Braxton is radiating enough joy to burn the back row of the theater. Jessica Pavone looks up at Sir Braxton and smiles with the understated warmth of a person just reminded of why they love this complex man in a cardigan.

What can top that? How about a contrabass saxophone? Can't say I'd ever seen one of those before. Probably the biggest wind instruments I'd previously encountered were whatever kind of massive clarinets (probably contrabass) Wolfgang Fuchs, Peter van Bergen, and Hans Koch were using when I saw Holz Für Europa some years back and I've seen Robert Dick play contrabass flute too. This was a special occasion and our main man in the cardigan didn't just stop at bass saxophone, which was itself a rare treat requiring a special wheeled stand; he treated Philly to the big one. Have a gander at the photo above for a gist of the dimensions. Braxton wheeled the behemoth over in front of his music stand on a precious few occasions and put some astounding elephantine roars into the mix. An especially sublime passage blended the contrabass sax with Bynum's conch, Rozen's quiet shakers, and Pavone's slicing viola harmonics.

Probably the best way to understand why there was a musical justification for these exotic sounds is by considering the crucial role that an expanded timbral palette plays in Braxton's music. In fact, I was entirely surprised by the extensive use of extended techniques during the concert. While of course he is a pioneer of extended techniques in his role as a reed instrumentalist, Braxton's conception of notated ensemble music is as exploratory as Iancu Dumitrescu or Helmut Lachenmann in this way. In fact, the theoretical apparatus he developed in tandem with his reed research lends itself to applications independent of instrumental identity, like his language types and Cobalt System Structures.

I was really pleased to hear some substantial overlap in the music with recent experimental free improvisation of a sort Braxton has never gone on record performing that I'm aware of, both in the use of certain sound vocabularies and extremely low dynamic levels. Aaron Siegel's percussion was critical in this regard. One of the highlights of the evening for me was a sustained passage of faint scraping across the surface of his giant floor tom, recalling some of my favorite percussionists like Lê Quan Ninh, Paul Neidhardt, and Burkhard Beins. This "concert drum" afforded some deeply resonant tones, especially when Siegel dowelled on it; I'd never heard anyone dowel on such a large drum before, so it was a bit of a revelation. Siegel's virtuosity and timbral diversity was put to good use throughout. He ripped through tricky abruptions on vibraphone and alternated rolls on his small drums with such finesse they became textures.

Easily the most extraordinary example of extended techniques in the concert, as well as of one of the most musically compelling moments, came from Jay Rozen's tuba. At some point I began hearing a miraculously beautiful line that I could only imagine coming from a tenor or baritone sax, but which was yet unlike anything I'd ever heard. I was puzzled because it clearly wasn't coming from Braxton's corner and while Rozen was the only explanation I was at a loss to understand the relationship between what my ears and eyes were processing. Rozen was playing his tuba with a tin foil pie plate in the bell, which simply couldn't account for the sound I was hearing. What I found out afterwards from Rozen was that he was actually producing four distinct layers of sound at the time: an ordinary tuba tone, a sound derived from a small object (a whistle?) he had wedged inside the mouthpiece, a vocalization amplified by the tuba, and the buzzing from the tin foil. Go figure. Turns out he was as surprised as I was by this confluence of techniques; it was a real-time improvisational discovery for him and he nursed it for a good long stretch to serve several musical functions. Another astounding passage from Rozen (there was quite a few!) came when he used a saxophone mouthpiece on his tuba, which creates a gloriously complex and aggressive sound that must be heard to be believed. The first time I heard someone play a tuba with a reed mouthpiece was just a few months ago and it wasn't until many weeks later that someone explained it to me. It was Per-Åke Holmlander during a Brötzmann Tentet gig, and at the time I was totally freaked out by the sound and could only imagine that some serious electronic processing was being used.

Braxton is a really famous guy. Part of that has to do with his singular body of theoretical and conceptual material wrapped around his music, but the simple fact is that people wouldn't've taken him seriously in the first place if he wasn't one of the most brilliant jazz and post-jazz saxophonists in history who quickly created a body of work based around his reed work, especially alto sax, that's both accessible and mind-blowing to the typical avant-jazz fan. I have no doubt that there are people who go to a Braxton gig because they've heard records like For Alto, New York Fall 1974, his jazz tribute projects, the Hemingway/Crispell/Dresser quartet records, etc, and wind up totally mystified by the sort of radically unconventional non-jazz experimental ensemble music he's developing with Ghost Trance Music. And as much as I enjoy the manifold challenges this music presents me and even manage to overcome enough of them to tremendously enjoy the music itself, I still have as much hankering as the next person to experience Braxton, Alto Sax God, so I couldn't help notice the nature of my listening experience completely shift into a more immediate and visceral sort of pleasure on the handful of occasions when Braxton put the trusty little horn to his lips and filled the air with invisible liquid gold. In fact, the only passage in the concert I'd call truly transcendental for me was Braxton's sole unaccompanied alto sax solo towards the end. It was an extended bout of raw physical engagement with the instrument that set his whole body into poetic gyrations and it was a flashback for me of the only other time I'd seen this man perform in the flesh, his monumental two sets of solo alto sax at The New York Ethical Culture Society on May 24, 2002, one of the milestones in my modest journey through a human life. All of Braxton's alto solos killed me during the Philly gig though, and they covered quite a range of aesthetics from harsh bluster to winsome melody, surely giving everyone in the audience at least one Braxton alto sax moment to take home in their basket of precious memories. There was even one that distinctly reminded me of Jack Wright (my favorite saxophonist and in my honest and considered opinion the greatest free improvisor in the world) in its implosive, bottled intensity and tortured quietness with sparse loud notes conjured with dramatic effort from the fiercest silent boogie. At the same time, Carl Testa was quietly rubbing the body of his doublebass and it was a heavenly episode of the quiet and dramatic improv I tend to favor these days.

It was also representative of the low dynamic levels of most of the evening, a matter that was rather badly matched to the music's environmental conditions. For starters, I'll have to get a little rant off my chest here. There was a horribly insensitive woman wearing hard-surfaced high-heeled shoes of some sort, evidently an employee of the venue (a ritzy large theater reflecting the ample resources of benefactors of the University of Pennsylvania and typically used for film events) who felt it was her job to inspect the audience and determine whether any seats were available as people trickled in after the venue was packed to capacity. She repeatedly walked on the wooden floor of the long hallway along the side of the seating array. So for each of several informational excursions she undertook during the first half-hour or so of the concert, that's dozens of footsteps that were louder than the music. Sir Braxton did not require the services of an inept and loud percussionist for his presentation that evening. Besides the utter horror of this act and the yet worse specter of its repetition, the venue took an abominably cold and irrational approach to the seating situation, actually refusing admittance to a good many people (including some friends of mine who had journeyed all the way up from Baltimore for the concert—I suspect a lot of people travelled from distant places for this rare and special event) until someone left the concert and vacated a seat! As it were, the hallway on either side of the seating array was by itself larger than a typical improv venue and could've easily held fifty people standing within comfortable earshot of the music while still maintaining a wide walkway. There was a ton of space available! The place was huge. Sheer bullshit.

It reminds me of the time I went to see Hariprasad Chaurasia perform with a carful of college friends. Our long journey to some opposite region of the greater Chicago area found us arriving a bit late. The performance hadn't begun yet and every seat in the moderately large but cozy theater was filled, no surprise considering that Chaurasia is one of the greatest master musicians alive today and a cultural icon. The first few rows were surely filled with prominent local benefactors of the concert series. People began to settle on the aisle floor. Yet the sensible and culturally-sensitive folks running the event graciously escorted our motley crew to the comfortable carpeted and raised platform between the stage and the first row (at eye-level with the muscians no less!) and we happily took to the floor and took in some truly transcendental ragas that evening in the profoundly intimate vicinity of the performers.

For better or worse, folks presumably unimpressed with Accelerated Ghost Trance Music did vacate their seats in due time. There was a distracting trickle of people leaving the concert that steadily increased from midway onwards. I'd estimate that upwards of a hundred people decided they had more valuable uses for their time than sticking out a full presentation by an international cultural treasure and arguably one of the five greatest musical figures of the past century. It was bad enough that a few dozen people gratuitously applauded twice in the middle of the piece after solos (one by Bynum and another by Braxton)! Hello? This isn't bebop. Would you applaud in the middle of a Scelsi performance? Did you not catch on to the fact that a delicate weave of ensemble interaction was happening during and immediately after the solo? Damn philistines.

Such are the compromises of an event of this scale and uniqueness, and all told it was a smashing success and mind-boggling achievement for the impresario, Mark Christman. In fact, this is precisely the ideal occasion to celebrate Mark's profound contributions to Philadelphia culture. The concert was in fact just one of an entire series Mark is curating to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the AACM under the aegis of his avant-jazz promotional organization Ars Nova Workshop. The series began last month with an historic pairing of Roscoe Mitchell and Muhal Richard Abrams in quartet with Jaribu Shahid and Tani Tabbal, and it continues next month with Wadade Leo Smith's Golden Quartet (Smith with Vijay Iyer, John Lindberg, and Ronald Shannon Jackson) and extends to the early months of 2006 with the current version of Kahil El'Zabar's Ethnic Heritage Ensemble featuring Joseph Bowie and Ernest Dawkins, a Leroy Jenkins and Myra Melford duo, and a giant in my post-jazz pantheon, Henry Threadgill, with his Zooid ensemble. The series is just too good to be true, but Mark somehow corralled various resources to make this historic and bold statement to the Philadelphia region. The significance of the AACM in American cultural history cannot be overstated.

As impressive as this special series is, the totality of Ars Nova over the past five years is vastly more impressive. My personal tribute to Mark here comes after enjoying more great avant-jazz concerts he's curated than I could possibly recount. My gratitude is incalculable. It's been a critical and formative aspect of my experience as a fan of creative improvised music, almost to the levels of Baltimore's miraculous Red Room. Just off the top of my head I can think of three Ars Nova gigs that would likely find a slot in a list of the ten most profound concert experiences I've had so far in life (Gregg Bendian's Interzone, Tim Berne's Hard Cell, Joe Maneri Quartet) and Mark's connoisseurship of avant-jazz is so impressive that virtually everything he's put on is worth attending, no filler. He has curated a truly accurate representation of the true current state of jazz as a creative art form without any compromises. Just check out the archival list of performances on the Ars Nova website. In terms of making Philadelphia a vital center for creative musical culture and saving people the trouble of trips to NYC or Baltimore, only Jack Wright and his miraculous No Net events are comparable in significance to Mark's curation of the Ars Nova Workshop.

Mark's professionalism and dedication is astonishing. His promotion of events is thorough and effective, routinely drawing larger crowds than typical for avant-jazz. And to set up this Braxton gig he actually drove all the way to Connecticut to approach the secluded Wesleyan professor in person after a gig! In fact, he went home empty-handed after his first trip up there for this purpose, due to some weather situation or gig cancellation or something, so he actually made a second trip and began the dialogue that eventuated in the unforgettable concert I've recounted above. There's nothing hyperbolic in my tribute to Mark here, and I'm not just saying all this because he's a fine person whose favorite musicians (e.g. Tim Berne, Nels Cline) conveniently happen to be the same as mine!

While some may balk at the potentially contrived nature of this connection, right before zipping over to the gig that evening I attended a gallery opening of a show that genuinely struck me with Braxtonian resonances. Combined with my reverie in Braxton's Composition n. 247 (one of my top five Braxton discs for sure) while driving to the gallery and the gig, Paul Santoleri's Linear Interference offered a sense of immersion and scale that put me in a real Ghost Trance Music zone. Spread over two floors and covering entire walls instead just ordinary modular hanging rectangles, it was full of so much intricately woven detail that I'd guess it took many years to complete if I didn't know any better, but as it is Paul is a remarkably prolific visual artist with several large shows in just the past few years. A close-up shot appears next.

I think the concept of scale is essential to Ghost Trance Music. Braxton's pieces routinely last upwards of two hours. The Philly gig was probably in the neighborhood of an hour and a half, but that's just a guess. His scheme is partly modelled after the epic ritual music of various traditional cultures. Ghost Trance Music similarly demands a willingness to enter a non-ordinary state of mind. One of Paul's primary media is public murals; his conception of art is epic and inclusive. After over an hour cycling through the different regions in Paul's work, I felt I'd been transported to a self-contained parallel world with its own ecological niches and untraceable geneology of pattern. Like Ghost Trance Music, Linear Interference redefines the parameters of continuity. Material seems to derive from an ever-present template, but it coalesces in diversionary modules and sometimes feels imported from a distant land.

In the segment shown above, you can see how Paul superimposed independently created modules while retaining an overarching contextual logic. I couldn't help but noting the analogy with Ghost Trance Music. For almost the entire time I was there the visual experience was aligned with a duo performance by cellist Helena Espvall-Santoleri (Paul's partner and a glowing presence in Philly improv culture) and percussionist Shawn Hennessey (tabla player Lenny Seidman had interlocked with Helena earlier in the evening before I arrived). They generated a burning and powerful continuous groove that revealed the core human implementation of trance music in stark contrast to what I heard mere minutes later in a different part of town. It was a most serendipitous evening in Philadelphia.

~Michael Anton Parker

Special thanks to Taylor Ho Bynum and Anthony Braxton for graciously explaining certain aspects of Ghost Trance Music to me. James Fei's fabulous liner notes to Composition n. 247 also proved very useful, and please get that disc if you haven't already; it's mind-blowing and totally unique!

Posted by maparker on November 19, 2005 2:45 PM