Piano: Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music w Phillip Greenlief & Orchesperry @ Berkeley Arts (Sun 04 Aug, 9pm) + Uncle Braxton (Myles Boisen + John Shiurba, 8pm)

I’m keenly looking forward to joining Orchesperry to perform one of Anthony Braxton’s important Ghost Trance Music works, Composition 255, at 9pm Sun 04 Aug.

The show will be at the East Bay’s indispensable focal point for creative ferment, Berkeley Arts Festival (2133 University Avenue, Berkeley, CA – map).

We’ll be performing under the leadership of Phillip Greenlief, one of the Bay Area’s greatest explorers of the uniquely Braxtonian mind-meld between the sophisticated, abstract musical structures of post-WW2 classical music and the emotional immediacy and daredevil excitement of the New Jazz, drawing from a full range of improvisatory styles, both “in the tradition” and “non-idiomatic”.

Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music series lays track to interconnect the destinies of two marginalized groups in the struggle for the full decolonization of American culture, while at the same time taking complete advantage of the explosion of musical thinking that started in centers like Darmstadt, Paris and New York after the war.

From the essay Like A Giant Choo-Choo Train System by Jonathan Piper (liner notes to 9 Compositions [Iridium] &  2006 [Firehouse 12 Records]):

“…In 1993 Braxton told Graham Lock he was looking for “a system of tracks, like a giant choo-choo train system that will show the connections, so where a soloist is moving along a track, that will connect to duo logics, trio logics, quartet logics. So, for instance, if you’re traveling from Composition 47, which is a small town, to a city like Composition 96, the model will demonstrate the nature of combinations and connections in between systems.”

Things fell into place in 1995 after Braxton sat in on a Native American music course and studied the Ghost Dance rituals of the late 1800s. For Braxton, the Ghost Dance had great resonance. “The Ghost Dance music, when it was put together, that came about in a time after the American Indian had been decimated, 98 percent of their culture destroyed,” Braxton recalls. “Various tribes came together and compiled whatever information they had left. And the Ghost Dance music was described as a curtain—one side is reality for us, and the other side is the ancestors. And the Ghost Dance music would provide a forum to connect with the ancestors. That had a tremendous impact on me.”  Drawing on the example of all night Ghost Dance ceremonies (and other world trance musics), Braxton looked to construct a “melody that doesn’t end” to serve as the train tracks to cohere his system. The Ghost Trance Music was born.”

From the essay by arwulf arwulf, reviewing Ghost Trance Music Composition 338 as performed on 2006 by Quartet (GTM):

“Beginning in 1995, Braxton expanded his already unusually vast and complex musical universe by initiating what would evolve into a decade-long series of multi-level improvisatory collaborations which he called Ghost Trance Music. The “first species” of this special type of “continuous state music” was patterned after indigenous North American drumming and inspired by the Ghost Dance Rituals of the Plains Tribes as practiced during the late 19th century. It was also informed by the Indonesian shadow puppet theater tradition. Like the rituals for which it was named, Ghost Trance Music materialized initially as an intuitive system for ancestor reverence and collective memory.

Specifically, Braxton sought to honor and invoke a veritable composite Ghost of the Old Masters…. Braxton’s collage technique, which first came to full fruition with his Quartet during the ’80s, coexists in Ghost Trance Music with elemental language music coordinates which date back to his earliest compositions. As the series evolved, Ghost Trance Music became increasingly non-linear, while what Braxton calls the Ritual Function became more important than ever. Contained only by duration, these works (which are more like sets of coordinates than composed entities) really have no beginning and no end.”

Composition 255 is one of the “second species” of Ghost Trance Music, which Braxton launched in 1998, breaking up the rhythmic stream with interruptions and increasingly complex rhythmic subdivisions, and was premiered with Chris Jones in New Mexico in 2003.

Phillip Greenlief and Orchesperry recently performed Composition 255 to high acclaim in the Sacramento In The Flow festival, and I join them in presenting this experience to the Bay Area audience with great pleasure.

Reviewing the In The Flow performance, Craig Matsumoto said: “If you’re not familiar with Ghost Trance Music, it’s based on a maddening, non-steady pulse that, on the surface, can seem like the musical equivalent of a guy reciting π. But… when you’ve got a large group of friends performing, it almost develops a party atmosphere.”

Orchesperry is part of the continuing impact of the late, great bassist Matthew Sperry on Bay Area musical culture and beyond.

The line up for our 13tet performance of Composition 255 is:

Joel Bremson – bass

Keith Cary – cello

Luis Albert Clifford Childers (Facebook link) – trombone, euphonium, chromatic harmonica

Dax Compise – percussion

Tara Flandreau – violin

Michael Frost – viola

Phillip Greenlief – conduction, alto saxophone

Joe Lasqo – piano

Christina Maradik-Symkowick – viola

Tim Onorato – electric bass

Tony Passarell – tenor saxophone

Amy Reed – electric guitar

special guest: Suzanne Thorpe, flute, processing, laptop

Phillip Greenlief performs at the Vexations [Re-vex’d] 22-hour improv marathon at Berkeley Arts on 24 Mar 2013 (photo: Joel Deuter)

Orchesperry’s leader in the performance is saxophonist and composer Phillip Greenlief, the founder of Evander Music; an independent record label presenting original composition, improvised music and jazz. Since 1986, his recordings and performances have received critical acclaim in Down Beat, All About Jazz, Jazz Times, Cadence, Modern Saxophone, InfraTunes (France), Altrisuoni (Italy), The Wire (London), Colossus (Finland), St. Petersburg Times (Russia), Cuademos de Jazz (Spain), New Jazz Improv (Portugal), Los Angeles Times, etc. His duo recordings of improvised music with bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Scott Amendola received 5 stars in the Music Hound Jazz Essential Album Guide. Recordings with The Lost Trio and his compositions on Russian Notebooks were listed on the Critics’ Top 10 Lists of the SF Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, East Bay Express, & Downtown Music Guide (NYC). Phillip is a recipient of the San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award and has recently completed a 2013 composer residency at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts.

Phillip began playing guitar and trumpet in elementary school and explored various instruments before discovering the sax in the mid-1970’s. His ever-evolving relationship with the sax continues to unfold with an expansive sound vocabulary, extreme dynamic range, a deep regard for melody and form, and a humor and wit that echoes the Native American Coyote tales. As a composer, he has created nearly 300 works for almost every conceivable ensemble, including numerous pieces for solo sax, sax + string quartets, jazz ensembles, chamber groups, electro-acoustic improvisers, film projects, live theater, works for large ensemble & orchestra + choir. As an organizer, he has produced concerts for local musicians and internationally touring artists under the auspices of Evander Music Presents since 1997, and is currently serving as curator at Berkeley Arts Festival.

Phillip has performed internationally in a variety of settings since 1982. In addition to club dates and concert tours across North America & Europe, he’s performed at the John Coltrane Festival in Los Angeles, Seattle Improvised Music Festival; Freiburg Zelt Muzik Festival; Big Sur Sound Shift; Olympia Experimental Music Festival; Du Maurier Jazz Festival; the WIM in Zurich; the Ulrichsburg Festival and the Konfrontation Festival in Nickelsdorf, Austria; the Isole Che Parlano Festival in Sardinia and the Venice Biennale; and the International Festival of Arts in Sao Paulo. In 1998 he lived in St. Petersburg (Russia) where in addition to playing solo he performed and recorded with several jazz groups, singer-songwriter Yelena Kolokolnikova (Елена Колокольникова), and the Russian folk ensemble Dubinushka (Дубинушка).

A man with many musical friends, Phillip’s list of collaborators takes up 25 single-spaced lines, and rather than list them here, I’ll instead urge you to get his brilliant recent solo album, Lines Combined, a series of intense pieces inspired by the art works of Eva Hesse and Robert Rauschenberg that perfectly illustrates the Braxtonian mind/body fusion and reads like the sax version of Dubliners.

Beginning the show at 8pm in Set 1 will be Uncle Braxton, a duo project of guitarists Myles Boisen and John Shiurba that has grown over nearly 20 years.

Myles Boisen’s vibrant stream of explorations in music, audio engineering and photography have made him a pillar of the Bay Area cultural scene.

Often sensed before he is seen — by the telltale scent of 13♯9 chords, earth after rainfall, and Martian wisteria — Myles is a recording and mastering engineer, album producer, film and television composer, journalist, guitarist and bassist.

His résumé includes hundreds of studio and live recordings for independent groups and labels, as well as for MTV/Comedy Central, CBS, Warner Bros., Polydor, PBS, et. al.

Myles was the engineer on The Gorey End CD by The Tiger Lillies and Kronos Quartet (EMI Classics), nominated for a Grammy award in 2004. His production and restoration work on Clarence “Guitar” Sims’ Born To Sing The Blues CD (Mt. Top Records) garnered two awards from Real Blues Magazine in 1999: “Best West Coast blues reissue” and “Best studio sound technique”.

In addition to musical performances with Tom Waits, John Zorn, the Rova Saxophone Quartet, Fred Frith, Eugene Chadbourne, Splatter Trio, and The Club Foot Orchestra, Myles has contributed to a number of independent film soundtracks, plus director David Lynch‘s films Twin Peaks and Wild At Heart.

Throughout the 1990′s Myles was a composer and bassist in The Club Foot Orchestra, which is generally acknowledged as the first national touring ensemble to revive the art of original music performance with classic silent films and cartoons. During this period the CFO collective appeared at Lincoln Center (New York City) and Disney World (Orlando, FL) performing their scores for such vintage classics as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Pandora’s Box, and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr.

The softer side of Myles Boisen (Photo: Joel Deuter)

As a composer, Myles has scored original work for the award-winning Onsite Dance Co (ODC; San Francisco/New York), Rova Saxophone Quartet, and numerous Bay Area new music ensembles. He’s currently the music director of Orchestra Nostalgico, a CFO spinoff dedicated to the live performance of film music (Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, John Barry). Myles pursues his musical interests in Oakland, where he’s the chief engineer at Guerrilla Recording, a full service recording studio.

John Shiurba is a composer and guitarist whose musical pursuits include improvisation, art-rock, modern composition and noise. John has recorded and toured the U.S. and Europe as a member of the bands Eskimo, The Molecules and Spezza Rotto, as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the sfSound ensemble, and in various improv settings. John has composed works for his own Triplicate and 5×5 ensembles, for the sfSound Ensemble, and for various soloists. As a guitarist John has developed a unique and personalized approach to the guitar. Through the use of extended techniques and unusual preparations, he expands the traditional sound range of the instrument, producing stunning, often unrecognizable results.

Cadence Magazine calls John Shiurba a “wildly creative guitarist… anti-jazz, anti everything else, yet utterly compelling.” John was invited to play at the Seattle Improvised Music Festival, the High Zero Festival in Baltimore, and the Olympia Experimental Music Festival, as well as being featured at New Langton Arts in 2002, premiering his work Triplicate. He’s played with internationally acclaimed musicians such as Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, Eugene Chadbourne and Jack Wright, as well as many of the finest West Coast improvisers — Gino Robair, Dan Plonsey, Scott Rosenberg, Myles Boisen, Matt Ingalls, Tim Perkis, and Matthew Sperry to name a few.

In 1998 John formed the improvised music label lIMItEd SEdItION, which has released 28 CDs documenting the diverse and lively Bay Area improvised music scene.

Braxton, Orchesperry, Greenlief, Boisen, Shiurba — your ears can’t afford to miss this unique evening…

See you there!

Joe