By Stuart Broomer
John Butcher has been among the most creative figures in improvised music
for several decades, during that time both maintained long-established
partnerships and sought new possibilities, whether it’s a fresh ensemble or
a different sonic environment. These two recent recordings present
longstanding associations that continue to grow creatively.
John Butcher & Angharad Davies – Two Seasons (Weight of Wax, 2025)
John Butcher and Angharad Davies have been playing in duet and other
situations for many years, and there’s an essential chemistry at work in
their music. This recent duo combines two extended works recorded in live
performance in Berlin and a series of short pieces,”Granwyns”, recorded in a
studio in Nottingham.
The opening work, “Hydref i”, might be the whole package, an intense
25-minute duo improvisation in which two high-pitched instruments – soprano
saxophone and violin – are individually explored and countered, creating a
tenuous universe of intense depth and mystery in which solo and duo passages
strangely merge. With sufficiently close listening, one enters a microcosm
of sounds overlapping and interacting. It is a world in which the concept of
A440 is largely suspended, in which most tones deviate from the norm, with
Davies frequently mining intervals that differ sufficiently in timbre to
suggest two different instruments. The music is always active, always
sustained, whether one or both musicians are playing. String and reed have
never been closer. There are times when the lines exchange identities, often
at very low volume, the grit of string, the vibrating air of the saxophone,
twinning and separating. The saxophone can function as strained obbligato,
the violin its eerie double. A careening passage, consuming the last few
minutes, is so complex, intense and interwoven that it could never be
composed or imagined – the essence of great collective improvisation.
The second piece from the Berlin concert, “Hydref ii”, is a brief work in
close resonance, long tones abounding, Butcher’s hyper-resonant soprano
activating the air, Davies’ high-pitched, bowed tones moving towards the
silence of sonic eclipse. When its four-minute playing time is up, it feels
like it is continuing, whether lending character to the air or merely
anointing its continued presence.
“Granwyn i”, remarkably bright sounding, has a relatively provisional feel,
attention riveted on the combination of room ambience and the interaction of
overtones. “Granwyn ii” has the feel of a hurdy-gurdy, that ancient,
resonant wail suggesting the character of a trance. “Granwyn iii” is
air-drenched squall; “Granwyn iv” is densely compacted, each instrument
occasionally coming to the fore; “Granwyn v” is the soul of somber sound, an
interaction of reed harmonics and violin glissandi; “Granwyn vi” has an
uncanny suggestion of oblique calypso; “Gwanwyn vii”, the last and most
developed of the Nottingham pieces, is as astonishing as anything else here,
an improvisers’ mind-meld in which the two musicians are constantly
modulating their sounds, adjusting their volumes, pitches, air column or
bow, harmonic spectra – creating a six-minute piece that manages to suggest
the scale of the opening “Hydref i”.
Last Dream of the Morning – Sharp Illusion (FSR, 2025)
Last Dream of the Morning is a collective trio that includes two other
essential figures in contemporary improvised music, bassist John Edwards and
percussionist Mark Stevens. The group’s first CD appeared in 2017 with their
current name as title; it became a band name with 2020’s
Crucial Anatomy
. Sharp Illusion continues a series that is required listening for
anyone interested in the current state of free jazz or free music. I’d like
to begin with a certain confession. I was struck a few times by the presence
of extended clicking passages, certainly not the first I’d heard from
Butcher but by Stevens as well. I knew I’d heard the techniques before, but
here the affinity with certain South African click languages seemed
particularly striking. I googled “John Butcher click languages” and was
struck by the first result, a review of the trio’s first recording from
2017, then paired with another Butcher trio CD, The Open Secret
with Gino Robair and Dieb 13, the latter including a track entitled “Last
Morning of the Dream”. The review appeared in this journal on April 21,
2018, and, embarrassingly, was written by one Stuart Broomer. Why some
respectable linguist/musicologist hasn’t pursued this line of inquiry is
beyond me, but it’s both a busy and increasingly preoccupied world, however
much all this might reflect on a positive and inter-penetrating – not to
mention utopian – human future.
That instrumentation – “sax and rhythm” – will signal a certain tradition, a
format employed by numerous musicians and one that has resulted in some of
the masterpieces of jazz and/or improvised music (a problematical
distinction in some quarters that doesn’t have to arise in the utopian space
enjoyed here). This music will stand solidly on its own, but it might also
stand comparison with a certain hierarchy. The foundational masterpieces for
consideration include Sonny Rollins with Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones (at
the Village Vanguard), Lee Konitz with Sonny Dallas and Jones (Motion),
Albert Ayler with Peacock and Murray ( Spiritual Unity or
Prophecy
) or anything by Evan Parker with Barry Guy and Paul Lytton (say
Imaginary Values
).
Like them, Sharp Illusion, a July 2024 performance recorded at the
Cultural Centre in Lublin, Poland, is about the specific potential of its
specific time, or perhaps already an anytime when anything might be
possible. If Butcher can be celebrated for numerous innovative voices, more
recently he frequently sounds declarative/authoritative in a traditional
tenor saxophone voice. Meanwhile his partners here participate freely, often
beyond traditional functions. The effect is a trio that occupies an exalted
space, at once intimately entwined with free jazz and improvised music, at
once alive to the tradition of the former and still expanding potential of
the latter, a dialectic organized around both utopian form and a potential
for a shared state of auditory grace.
The opening “Roof Rattle” is a continual, 13-minute, reshaping of auditory
space, beginning in a trio passage of equal parts bending individual
instrumental sounds into an eerie and supportive collective voice.
Eventually distinctions come to the foreground, loosely linking
arco
bass and a miscellany of percussion that can suggest any number of
non-musical implements. As it rolls along Butcher becomes more
conventionally central to the collective narrative, sometimes assuming a
“boss tenor” voice that might recall musicians like Yusef Lateef or Booker
Ervin, all the time supported by arco bass grunts, swivels and high
harmonics, and a percussive storm that willingly ventures well beyond the
conventional, the whole giving way to an extended click dialogue that
involves the entire trio to varying degrees..
Each of the other tracks represents comparatively subtle evolutions,
reshapings and transformations, always redefining the roles and
relationships of three musicians’ constantly evolving views of the
individual potential of the collective music, whether it’s the 12-minute
“Turning the Soil”, hive interior or rich earth; the rich play of the
longest track, the 28-minute “Movable Bridge”, which shifts positions in the
manner of the preceding pieces but with even further development; or the
very brief “Afterglow”, which Butcher begins with a strange transformation
to a convincing simulation of a trumpet voice before turning to an openly
tenor saxophone voice as his partners join in, eventually ending with more
forceful clicks.