[There are a number of
things – poems, travel, concerts, media stuff – from the summer and fall of
2014 I was set to write about, but life and whatever seem to have taken
precedence, so I’m going to try to catch up on some of these things in the next few weeks. I
have about a dozen or so fragments that need reworking, expanding, editing and
polishing before they can make their way into the Frank Styles neighbourhood.
Here’s the first of a bunch.]
On the night of
Friday, August 29, Taylor Ho Bynum played a duo concert with François Houle at
The Apartment, a small gallery on East Pender, just off Main Street in
Vancouver’s Chinatown. It’s been a
while, but I took down a few notes to jog my memory. Taylor started with a solo
piece; the concert was the first semi-official stop on his solo West Coast
Bicycle Tour, which would see him pedal a huge number of miles alone down the
left coast of North America, through September to early October. He kept an on-line diary
on his website, and has put up excerpts of his musical encounters – some planned,
some by happenstance – on a
Sound Cloud page. The solo had shards of marches, echoing maybe a little
some of Anthony Braxton’s
interest in John Philip Sousa and brass marching bands, but with mixed in
growls, swoops and other cornet chop suey, concocting a few momentarily avant-Cootie-Williams-like
lines.
François Houle joined him for a version of Taylor’s composition “All
Roads Lead to Middletown.” Here is a field recording of their performance:
And here is a duo version Taylor Ho Bynum recorded with Anthony Braxton in 2002 at Wesleyan:
And here is a duo version Taylor Ho Bynum recorded with Anthony Braxton in 2002 at Wesleyan:
A version of Houle’s composition “Seventy-Three” followed, a tune originally
recorded on his album In the Vernacular (Songlines,
1998), which is dedicated to the
music of John Carter. Carter, Houle said afterward, would have been
seventy-three at the time of the recording. Much of the music, besides its
in-the-moment spontaneity, was vitally self-aware of its own historicity, its
sense of a present deeply enmeshed in lineages and antecedents, but dynamically
and restlessly so. Houle also mentioned Carter’s
duets with Bobby Bradford: forebears who continue to open up new and
challenging possibilities for this music, as part of a living tradition of
experimentation and forward motion. The duo played “Shift” from Taylor’s suite Apparent Distance, and then closed
with a blistering and challenging reading of Anthony Braxton’s Composition 69c,
a sinuous monody combining bluesy flatted fifths with angular sonic geometries.
(At the set break that followed, a little out of breath and a bit unsatisfied
with his performance, Taylor recalled speaking with Kenny
Wheeler about how difficult and even lip-splitting playing Braxton’s
compositions in the quartet could be.) For the second set, the duo returned
with versions of two Carter pieces (played originally with Bobby
Bradford): “Comin’ On” and “Sticks and Stones.”
The concert closed with an
extended trio; Houle invited tenor saxophonist Nils Berg to come up, and they
offered a ten-or-more minute extemporaneous tone poem, with Berg’s
contributions recalling the restrained lyricism of late Lester Young, or
perhaps even Warne Marsh in a reflective mood. Beautiful things: bright moments,
as Rahsaan might have put it. Here is Taylor’s field recording of the trio, so
you can hear it for yourself.
Frankly,
KM
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