Anthony Braxton - Charlie Parker Project 1993

Hatology 2-612

Braxton’s single-composer tribute albums began in the late 1980s with the Monk album for Black Saint and the Marsh/Tristano album for Hat Art. After a few years’ gap came this double-album, which remains something of a lightning-rod for discussions of Braxton’s abilities as a player of standards. It takes a different tack from most of his other standards projects, which have typically featured relatively conventional rhythm-section accompaniment; instead, he’s surrounded here by a crew of sly-devil avant-gardists who aren’t shy about messing around with – or just plain messing up – these tunes. Trumpeter Paul Smoker (who used to work with the reclusive bebopper Dodo Marmarosa, by the way) and saxophonist Ari Brown fill out the front line, and there’s a jolting-jalopy rhythm section: Misha Mengelberg on piano, Joe Fonda on bass, and Han Bennink (disc one) or Pheeroan AkLaff (disc two) on drums.

The original sessions took place over three days – a Zürich concert and then two days in the studio in Köln. Several tracks were discarded because of recording flaws, which might explain the not-quite-the-whole-story feel to the album: Brown, for instance, is sidelined for long stretches, and AkLaff plays on only four tracks (most of disc two is drummerless). The music on this reissue remains the same as on first release but is given a welcome facelift by Peter Pfister’s remastering. The original cover (a close-up of Braxton’s pensive head) has unfortunately fallen foul of Hatology’s current design programme, which favours drab, unpopulated urban landscapes. Essays by Peter Niklas Wilson and Alex Dutilh have been dropped from the liner notes, but at least Graham Lock’s informative interview with Braxton is still included, and this time around the composer credits are actually accurate. Pia Uehlinger’s original role as co-producer is, as usual with Hatology reissues, quietly excised from the credits.

So what’s this album about? The core problem is that any response to it is going to be seriously overdetermined. There are “free” tracks on here, but many of the tracks are faithful enough to bebop convention that you can’t help comparing them to “competent” bebop performances – from which perspective the playing here is often perfectly frightful. But, aha!, there’s the readymade argument: of course Braxton isn’t interested in producing copybook bebop – he’s interrogating the bebop legacy (Dan Warburton even uses the dread word “deconstruct”...). From this perspective Braxton is faithful to the spirit of Charlie Parker, not the dead letter. This is the point at which the Braxtonophile inevitably mentions Wynton Marsalis, and the argument proceeds down a more or less predictable path.

What makes playing wrong sound right? It’s eventually up to the listener to make that judgment call. But I get the impression that many Braxton fans are unwilling to acknowledge how much is wrong. Which is just a sign of not paying attention, or not wanting to – because there’s a lot wrong on this album by any usual standard. First of all, Braxton loses his place a lot. On “Hot House” he goes astray a mere 7 bars into the tune, fudges the second A section, and the band finally has to drop a bar to sort things out in time for the B section. On “Passport” he forgets where the B section is and adds an extra 16 bars. On “Dewey Square” Braxton returns to the head at the wrong spot, and he and Fonda are forced to fudge the ending. And it’s not just Braxton who’s messing up, it’s the whole band. The heads at the start of pieces are messy, and the restatements at the end are worse: the players rarely manage to scramble back to the head without lots of turned-around beats and extra bars. “Koko,” the album’s last track, turns into a real melee, unravelling after Misha plunks down the opening chord of the B section (rather than the A section he’s supposed to be playing) and the others become increasingly befuddled.

It’s not that seasoned mainstream jazz musicians don’t make mistakes too – they do, all the time – but that they also have highly developed damage-control skills that permit rapid and sometimes unnoticeable recoveries. Whereas problems here often go unresolved for long stretches: virtually all these tracks feature extended ships-in-the-night passages from the rhythm section. (A particularly awkward passage comes at the end of the live “Klactoveesedstene”: Fonda and Bennink lose each other and never do hook up again.) To be sure, a lot of this chaos is deliberately cultivated – Bennink and AkLaff are each in his own way equally unhelpful and Mengelberg is positively treacherous – but this is making a virtue of necessity. This band couldn’t play it straight even if they wanted to.

Does any of this matter, except to bookkeepers and the jazz police? In a certain sense it doesn’t – Braxton’s playing doesn’t depend on exact harmonic navigation anyway, so if he misses a few bars, so what. He tends to alternate between two strategies: 1) leisurely which-way-am-I-going slithers up and down the chromatic scale or the home scale of the piece, with a thinned-out, erratic tone; and 2) fast-as-possible scurrying around, his tone now thick and hoarse; every so often he lands on a note with a triumphant cock-crow and proceeds to jiggle it violently back & forth. One never gets the impression of a player at ease with manipulating materials – for instance, the kinds of fluent transposition and variation with which orthodox jazz musicians develop solos. He’s on the hunt for happy accidents – which come frequently, but once they’re elicited stay stubbornly in place, however excitedly he fusses over them.

What I’ve said so far concerns his “straight” jazz playing. Listen to his free playing here, on the other hand, and it’s contrastingly pithy, elegant – in fact downright exquisite. This delicacy is especially evident in a series of short tracks on disc two, which feature chamberish instrumentation (drummerless trios and quartets), languorous tempos, and the more delicate instruments in Braxton’s arsenal: sopranino, flute, contrabass clarinet. (Yes, in his hands the contrabass clarinet is delicate, not a monster – when he pulls it out on “Scrapple from the Apple” and “Sippin’ at Bells” it casts a hush over the music.) Braxton’s standards albums have often suggested an itch not only to play fast but to speed things up – sometimes ruinously so, such as the reading of “April” once memorably savaged by Lee Konitz in a Wire Invisible Jukebox. But much of the best music here comes when Braxton defamiliarizes bebop by slowing it down, making it more lustrous and more tentative.

But, though it’s tempting to just say that the free tracks are good, the straight tracks chronically awkward, it’s impossible to be as clear-cut as that. It would be easy to mount both the case against and the case for this album, yet I’m not sure I want to do either, even though I can’t dispose of my irritation with its pervasive sloppiness (not just jam-session sloppiness: it’s something more deep-rooted). As I reread the foregoing paragraphs they seem (to my eye anyway) less and less judgmental, more and more just plain description. This is what you get. Do you like it? If you don’t shudder from time to time, or shrug in despair, you’re either a true believer or just not listening very carefully. If you don’t like it at all – well, you probably just don’t like Braxton.