Music / Jazz
Live review Anthony Braxton, The Lantern
Some musicians perform for the crowd, others just seem to let you watch while they make music: you get the sense that even if someone forgot to open the doors and nobody showed they would still play just as well. The enigmatic legend that is Anthony Braxton is very much in the latter category. He’s been wrapped up in his own music for half a century, theorising and evolving to his own internal score, and performance has hardly been a priority for him. Significantly, his Colston Hall appearance was the only UK show in a six country European tour lasting just over a week: not bad going for a 69 year old.
It started with a call and response, James Fey on sopranino sax and Taylor Ho Bynum’s cornet pitching garbled phrases for Braxton’s alto to field with bursts of scrabbling cascades through which scraps of a melody occasionally burst through. It was like Albert Ayler on a broken radio, a frenzy that subsided to a lull(abye) only to be swept aside by a garble from Bynum on bass trumpet and a disturbingly quiet riff from Mary Halvorson’s guitar. It was only the latter – and the gradually more intrusive electronics of the SuperCollider software – that stopped this being mid-20th century classical music like Messaien or early Stockhausen.
As it was, the fractured episodes and dynamic shifts sounded exactly like Anthony Braxton, briefly coherent ideas swallowed up in improvised meltdowns, his three companions coolly familiar with the likely twists of the plot as they turned the pages of what was probably an enigmatic concept of a ‘score’. (Braxton uses arcane symbols of his own devising in place of musical notation – it would be interesting to see them projected onto a screen while they played).
The band experiment with different couplings, with extreme dynamics that made you strain to hear one instrument against the others, with chaotic noise bursts. Towards the end Braxton took off on a masterful post-bop flight of fancy with guitar accompaniment and plangent drones from trumpet and sax, a superb moment that showed what a great player he is and ensured the near-capacity crowd went home happy.
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