#two seasons

While Butcher is open to working with people in a multitude of ways, he has an affinity for non-exclusive, long-term relationships that yield a dynamic interplay between familiarity, evolution, and surprise. He and Davies have played together many times over the past couple decades, particularly in the ensemble Common Objects. But up to the point when the autumn portion of this CD was recorded at KM28 in Berlin, they had played just four duo concerts. So, while the two musicians knew one another’s ways as instrumentalists and improvisers, they didn’t know exactly what they’d accomplish together in the studio (the spring section of this CD was recorded at Nottingham University Studio) or in concert.

In the studio, the duo improvised a series of brief pieces; five of the seven last under three minutes, only one exceeds five. Each piece is a focused investigation of a particular set of variables — soprano or tenor saxophone, density of attack, rapidity of change, and parallel vs. sequential co-creation. Given their shared commitment to instant music-making, it’s unlikely that the players discussed these elements in advance. Rather, each can hear in the other’s opening gambit some implication that leads to a shared zone of inquiry bounded by each musician’s ideas about what sort of sounds and reactions make sense together. Their shared language is ordered by values that prize a readiness to use most any sound they can get from their respective instruments (Seymour Wright nailed it when he described Butcher’s “nose to tail saxophony, where the whole instrument from reed-tip to brim of bell is available, accessible and articulate” in a piece for The Wire; Davies is similar willing to deal with the violin’s expanded possibilities, working with notes between notes and sounds obtained without directly acting upon the strings) and the skill to summon a sound in one fraction of a second and switch to another, technically distant one in the next without making such actions into overt displays of virtuosity.

Of the two pieces recorded in concert, one lasts over 24 minutes and the other is short and focused enough to fit into the studio session. In those shorter pieces, improvisation generate examples of the duo’s shared compositional aesthetic, but on the longer one, one can perceive how shifts in approach build and resolve tension. Davies’ initial see-sawing exploration of an ancient-sounding span of sound looms absorbs a series of proposals from Butcher — a long burred tone, testing interrupted one — until they arrive at a moment of shared hissing in which friction harmonizes with exhalation. Then they explore inversions of a soft vs. lacerating dynamic, arriving at a moment of profound deliberation.

The release of this album has instigated an acceleration in the duo’s encounters. In March the duo will play back-to-back concerts in two Norwegian cities, followed in April by a gig at Ad-Lib in London in which they will play as half of a quartet with John Edwards and Sharon Gal. One wonders how this moment of increased frequency will influence how Davies and Butcher will relate.