Anthony Braxton
Snurdy McGurdy and Her Dancing Shoes
Mitchell, five years older, had the head start. He brought Braxton into the AACM, and his example inspired Braxton’s multi-instrumentalism and forays into spare, low-volume improvisation. They haven’t recorded together so much: just one duo LP from 1976 and occasional guest shots, notably Mitchell’s on Braxton’s march-time double concerto “Composition 58” from his Creative Orchestra Music 1976. Both play numerous large and small saxes, write and perform music that transcends categories like jazz and classical, and record with bands that may or may not contain a conventional rhythm section.
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The new quartet brings back the old one’s wondrous momentum, but with a difference. The 80s unit’s continuous sets strung together or superimposed various pieces from its fat book, to make ever shifting suites whose parts vibrated against one another. The group’s 45-minute recombinations were as multifarious as snowflakes, and they’d end far from where they’d started. In contrast the new band’s 15- or 20-minute realizations of single themes (even allowing for the interpolations) keep returning to their departure points. You can get the feeling, listening to Braxton blow one horn after another, dropping out and then back in, that he’s attacking a problem from many sides without necessarily getting anywhere. That may be an expression of his frustration, after he’d expressed great hopes for the millennium, with the way things were actually shaping up even before the 2000 election.
The compressed “Sing/Song” covers even more ground. Here an unhurried flutey meander breaks into a fast, herky-jerk fanfare (everyone piling on every beat), then moves on to an Ornette-style anthem that launches a chicken-scratch alto solo and a free-jazz blowout, drums boiling over throughout. All of which proves to be a protracted setup for the triumphant, concluding floor-show theme–shades of Steve Lacy’s 70s tune “Prospectus”–which ends one note too high, leaving you waiting for the big tonic chord that never arrives. Snurdy McGurdy is Mitchell at his best, balancing disparate elements like panels of a mobile, giving problematic material a context, while still finding room for catchy melodies that (like some of Lacy’s) blossom from dowdy buds. When it comes to a song that tugs at the heart, even the great Braxton can’t touch him.
