#remote resonator

Paris-based Pierre-Antoine Badaroux’s musical interests run from deconstructed Bebop as part of the group Peeping Tom (along with inveterate musical explorers Axel Dörner, Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal), deconstructions of Swing music with the Umlaut Big Band, caterwauling free improvisation with the trio R. Mutt and the intersections of compositional structures and improvisation with Ensemble Hodos. Add to that a super-quirky solo synthesizer take on Ornette Coleman’s “Songbook.” Badaroux’s solo begins with an extended tone which swells in waves colored by burred overtones. One can hear the reed player probing the way that his horn resonates within the space. Held notes quaver and build into surging blasts, dark honks and burnished brays which Badaroux then lets slowly decay into silent breaks. The piece builds over its 18 and a half minute duration with measured patience, adjusting attack and timbre from ragged harmonics and rasping overtones from the alto’s dark, low registers to modulating, tonal intervals which resound against the live space.  

Seymour Wright’s piece is a more strident affair. Wright’s self-released solo debut, Seymour Wright of Derby, introduced him as a singular reed practitioner, deconstructing his horn into reed pops, breath amplified through conical bore, keypad clicks, rasping microtones and tattered vocalizations. While the alto saxophone is intrinsic to his playing as a sound source, the results are completely abstracted from his horn. A single-minded focus imbues his solo here, starting out with acerbic, reverberating, sparely placed high-register notes. He gradually builds from there with insistent, stabbing phrasing of harsh, skirling intensity. Balancing attack and decay, Wright’s solo unfolds as an immersive sonic investigation. By midway through, notes start to pile up with piercing potency, shaded with breaths, overtones and vocalizations, breaking apart into slabs of sound and silence as he navigates his way toward the end of the piece. In the final section, soft hissing breaths are introduced, shading the ambient sound of the space only to be ruptured in the final moments with a stabbing, shrill cry.  

Amazingly, though he’s recorded extensively in various group contexts and solo organ programs, this looks to be Jean-Luc Guionnet’s debut solo saxophone recording. Of the three, Guionnet’s attack and phrasing alludes the most to free jazz though that is fully abstracted over the course of his 21 minutes solo. Guionnet digs in with a rasping tone and strapping inflections starting things out with slabs of notes that are blasted out, bent and cut off with frayed, overblown harmonics. Phrases are teased out, repeated, inverted and metamorphosed with sterling focus. His control of breath is astonishing, allowing him to extend tones and phrases in unbroken, commanding waves that mount with taught, bracing consideration. All of this is tempered with a measured sense of structure and pace. Like the others, he eschews the use of arc, instead spontaneously constructing the form of the piece with contemplative resolve. His piece is constructed with impeccable balance of blocks of sound broken by pools of silence, like the others exploiting the unique resonance and decay of the room with a keen ear. Anthony Braxton may have charted strategies for solo alto saxophone improvisation just over fifty years ago. But this release displays that there’s plenty left to explore by three able successors, each of whom are continuing to conduct vital extensions to that tradition.  

The piece, written for ONCEIM, is built from a list of 180 events consisting of vocal whispers, slow scales for solo instruments, improvisations, use of objects (rustling bags, cans in a cardboard box), instrumental colors and duos of noise. In the score, Ablinger notes that “theoretically the montage of the score is a version or a suggestion or a starting point. theoretically everything could be re-arranged, shortened, extended, while the general idea - density, horizontal and vertical collage - remains similar.” The 30-minute piece is scored for 28 performers with instrumentation for clarinets, saxophones, trumpet and euphonium, accordion, piano, electric guitar, string players, electronics and percussionists, providing basic structures coordinated through a central clock. Ablinger specifically stipulates the piece should not be directed by a central conductor, leaving open options for the ensemble during performance within specified parameters. Detailed notes are available on Ablinger’s site here.  

Starting with quiet murmurs, drum rolls, and fractured reed lines, the ensemble traverses the 30 minutes with aplomb. Sonic events appear, snippets of melodies and fragments of scales float in and out, all woven in to the score’s  “horizontal and vertical collage.” A key element that emerges is the lack of differentiation between non-tonal texture which Ablinger refers to in the score notes specifically as noise, tonal color, and melodic line. Little flurries of solo voices emerge for a moment and then are quickly subsumed into the encompassing whole. But even in short duration, these statements are striking breaks in the overall ensemble textures.  

The members of ONCEIM balance the score-based instructions and improvisation with steadfast assuredness allowing the piece to hold together so well, never devolving into episodic shambles. Their keen balance of density and volume is also critical to the success of the piece. Sections may burst forth with forceful energy while others are introduced at an almost subliminal level, only to emerge as other events subside. This is particularly evident in short canons that occur throughout the piece, where the low strings play off of each other in countervailing rising glissandos. The chatter and hum of voices, always with words or meaning veiled to create what Ablinger notes as “a continuous fabric,” provides an undercurrent that supplies a persistent thread. The ending of the piece occurs as various subgroupings complete their events, decisively unwinding density as progressive layers subside until insistent percussive patterns and the chatter of voices bring the piece to a riveting close.