Short Reviews [Thumbscrew - 2020 - "The Anthony Braxton Project"]

Over the course of more than six decades NEA Jazz Master Anthony Braxton has created a vast body of music as a composer and recording artist. To celebrate his 75th birthday, musicians have been reapproaching his work, and Thumbscrew were one of these. Invited to explore the Tri-Centric Foundation’s voluminous Braxton archives, drummer/percussionist Tomas Fujiwara, guitarist Mary Halvorson and bassist Michael Formanek looked for rarely played pieces that could fit their instrumental palette. “The idea was for us to choose compositions of Anthony’s, mostly early compositions, which hadn’t been previously recorded (or, in a couple cases, recorded only once or twice),” says Halvorson. “We chose pieces that captured our imagination and that we thought would work well for the instrumentation of guitar, bass, and drums or vibraphone. Our choices included graphic scores, complex notated pieces, and everything in between.” They worked on the music during an extended, four-week residency at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, developing arrangements of varying detail based on the scores and the corresponding catalogue notes for each composition. Some of the pieces were solidly scored, while others took musicians in a direction and left them to their own devices before bringing them back again. The result is an album which is permanently challenging, both to listeners and the musicians, as threads are brought together, discarded, or sometimes tied so tightly that it takes a knife to move to the next stage. This is free jazz that is a combination of improvisation and notation, always on the edge as musicians look to themselves and the others in the group to fully understand what is to happen next. There is a great deal of space within the music, allowing each to fully express themselves and explore, yet they are also incredibly tight, with complex patterns followed with ease. One never knows what I going to happen, yet secure in the knowledge that one is to expect the unexpected and that it will take a great deal of concentration to follow. This is not music which could ever be relegated to the background, as it has to be centre stage, and will definitely not be for everyone, but for those of us who enjoy music from left field then this is something special indeed.