Two more uploads, having found my discs of Braxton/Parker and of Time will Tell.

Braxton's music is often an interesting mix of composition and improvisation. The collaborations with Parker, perhaps in deference to Parker's own preferences and strengths, contain no actual notated composition, which is an unusual thing for the Braxton that I know. This happens to be one of the first Braxton discs I ever heard, so realizing that it was unusual for him came relatively late for me.

I can't get past the impression that the two of them don't always 'find each other' terribly well -- Braxton may simply be much more at home with a pre-determined structure, however loose. Here is imho the most successful by far of the five tracks on the disc (they don't have titles besides ParkBrax 1 or BraxPark 2, etc)

Duo London 1993, second track

Finally, here is a track from Time will Tell. Paul Bley is astonishing here, and even the lumbering contrabass, in the hands of Barrph Illips, becomes an imble complement to Parker's formidable twittering.

A track called 'Sprung'

This is Chafing Dish. I'm going quiet now, for a while, as promised in my footnote...

Well, Richard, I am immensely indebted to you for this vital and valuable information, since I have to confess that I was, until reading it, just one more of those "not many people" whom you mention. I realise now that I must, with the due deference of the comparative commoner that I am, address you as Visconte Scabroso in future and I hope that the now Lady Thatcher privately rewarded you with ample ongoing supplies of the finest Imperial English gin (not to mention tonic from the one-time Raj) for your troubles. Of course I also now understand that your title Vanity referred to likes of Messrs Arthur Scargill and Michael McGahey and that Another Heavenly Day was written in appropriate celebration of the victorious actions of mounted police officers at such God-forsaken places as Kellingly Colliery. I think that you should be further applauded for not taking any kind of nepotistic advantage of the honours bestowed upon you in order to further your career; this very fact alone demonstrates that you are yet more honourable even than that hereditary peerage itself - but, that said, may I urge you not to be shy to admit that, whilst the title you mention may well be the one by which you have been known during those past 22 years, your official title is in fact "Lord No of Abertawe"?

I cannot, however, quite resist asking you (if I may have the temerity to do so) how it felt when Her Majesty (who, by Her own Majestic admission, doesn't actually like music and who apparently had the most difficult moment of her life when knighting Sir Harrison Birtwistle through clenched teeth) tapped you on the shoulder with whatever it is that She uses for such occasions with the words "arise, Sir Richard"; I have to admit that, if ever such an honour is bestowed upon me, Her Majesty at least does me the courtesy of tapping me on the shoulder at that crucial moment with a contrabass clarinet (assuming that She still has the Majestic muscle power to wield such a wondrous instrument)...

Yours, etc.

Alistair Redwood-Mosley

Absolutely. I was just looking at the music from a Parkerological point of view. I do find the music as a whole highly impressive, but, as I say, it comes across principally as a Bley project in terms of its general stylistic range.

No I don't, but I can imagine that it's very fine. Actually I first met Evan Parker at that very same Parisian venue, where both he and I (and Ryan and Akchoté and Thierry Madiot and Joëlle Léandre) were invited by George E. Lewis (thanks again George) for several days of rehearsals and a concert in the "Banlieues Bleues" festival.  The day before the concert was also the last time I saw Iannis Xenakis. 

That's quite enough gratuitous namedropping for today.

As it happens I am a stranger to oenology, limiting as I do my alcoholic intake to beer and spirits. I'm particularly fond, after a day of sedate joshing with my noble friends in the House, of a little Old Speckled Hen.

Then your knowledge of the work of Robert Parker (not to mention his omnipresent influence in the wine world) is all the more remarkable! Your love and appreciation of the finest of real ales that Britain has to offer is something that, my admiration for such things notwithstanding, I simply cannot share, since the very thought of anything remotely resembling even a shandy within a hundred paces is more than enough to warrant my retirement to the little lords room to perform an involuntary but necessary act of oral evacuation. Spirits are, of course, where you and I find ourselves on more common ground (though not, I hasten to add, the ground of the commoner!) and I have little doubt that (a) the greatest cognacs and armagnacs manage to retain their distinctive appeal to you despite originating from that neighbouring country whose northern part is no longer a colony, (b) the splendours of Imperial English gin (such as Tanqueray 10, Hendricks and even Plymouth [God bless Drake]) are greatly appreciated by us both and (c) those peaks of spiritous achievement that we both know as the finest malt whiskies are, as their very name defines, the "water of life" (and I'm sorry to say this to you but you Welsh just can't make decent whisky and it puzzles me why any of your countryfolk even try!).

Of course, I am, as I said before, a mere commoner, so it has never fallen to me to opportunities to josh (sounds suspiciously Jewish to me, but if that's what it takes...) with any of your cronies in the House (Heiss, surely?), so I do accept that my tastes in such things are not informed by such elevated experience as are yours...

Speaking of the "water of life" by the way, you may be amused by a conversation that I once had with Sir Ronald James-Stevenson, a distinguished connaisseur of the malt, in which I referred to his having mentioned Carl Nielsen's profound statement that "music is the sound of life" before having the temerity to ask whether, if that is indeed the case and as whisky is the water of life, his own music represented the sound of whisky. I cannot replicate his answer here, since I do not wish to be banned from this forum and I cannot pull rank as you can...

Best,

Alistair Humble-Pie

I'd like to have some thoughts on this, but am hampered by knowing nothing of Kapustin's music or his methods. Could you possibly help us with a source of information for the latter, increpatio?

We might move on to consider actually what's meant by the term "improvisation", whether one sees it as a compositional method or anything else. It obviously meant something different to Derek Bailey when he wrote his book from what it meant to Pierre Boulez when he wrote his Improvisations sur Mallarmé.

I can find some articles online, namely:
http://home.wanadoo.nl/ovar/sovrev/kapustin/anderson.htm
http://home.wanadoo.nl/ovar/sovrev/kapustin/ath.htm
http://home.wanadoo.nl/ovar/sovrev/kapustin/smith.htm

A lot of bio, but you should be able to pick out the odd salient bit you should be able to pick out. He's a paragraph that characterized him a little (though in naive terms):




Yes, quite.  Most of his works are rather intricate (such as, for one example, his set of 24 preludes and fugues which I regard to be technically something quite astounding, his dealing with syncopated themes is something is more advanced than, in particular, Henry Martin's (nonetheless successful!) jazzy venture into the same genre), but he still seems to wish to capture something of the "sound" of improvisation.  Clearly there's a lot in the jazz improv style that can be extracted from it and applied to much more concretely "planned" works.  This seems to be most apparent in his faster paced works.

(see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYbGooihn2U for such an (audio) example of his second sonata.)

A free mp3 track of his (superb) set of theme and variations on the opening bit form the right of spring is available to download form Hyperion's website:

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/MP3Audio/67433-01.mp3

It seems, not having thought this point through to far, that a lot of his works involve combing jazz-style works which are structurally classical('classical' to me has recently to connote 'form' more than anything else; this is probably a passing phase though); this, for one point, is made clear by his titles, many of which are indicative of form (preludes, fugues, sonatas, tocattas, etude, sarabande, theme & variations &c.).

I would like to state for my part, just talking about his music as opposed to something composed-improvised, that other than the odd immediately gripping piece(there are several!), it often takes me several listenings to really get my head into a any single work.  In this way it's rather different from improvisation in that it can reasonably include 'more' material and expect listeners will eventually work out what's going on.

Possibly more interesting for me at the moment, and relevant in a different way to this thread, is his chamber music which...I will have to think more about before I say much, except to say that I think it interacts with the chamber music aesthetic (and the jazz ensemble aesthetic, I would imagine) in a very different way to the way his piano solo works interact with solo classical or jazz.

Video of a proper performance of his cello burlesque here:
http://www.celloproject.de/movplay2.swf?m=m3&s=2&l=200

(I don't particularly like as much as I do his other works).