Superior improvised music from John Butcher on a couple of vinyl LPs which arrived together…
On Lower Marsh (Duos) (NI VU NI CONNU nvnc-lp046), he’s doing it on tenor and soprano saxophone in duo pairings with Pat Thomas, John Edwards, Angharad Davies and Mark Sanders. These are all English players, excepting the Welsh Angharad. I mention this as there’s a strong London link to the whole set, which was recorded at the Iklectik venue in 2022, a location not far from Waterloo station which was one of the few places in this city where experimental music of all hues stood a chance of thriving. (I think it’s since moved to Peckham, forced out from Waterloo by developers, if I’ve understood correctly.)
Astonishing music on here. John Butcher has been steadily evolving his own voice, his own sound, for many years; nothing less than fully realised personal music has emerged from his bell, but today he sounds supremely confident. Nary a wasted utterance nor a commonplace phrase ‘scapes his lips. No doubt these gifted players bring out his best qualities. While it’s all great music, my personal fave is the segment featuring Angharad Davies on her violin; ‘This Vivid Strain’ sees her embroidering the very air around her with intricate, delicate beads of glass, while Butcher respectfully drones and sighs with the taut breath control of a lizard.
Second fave is Pat Thomas on ‘Breakthrough Serenade’. This joint assault of electronics and soprano sax moves at twice the speed of thought. If translated into human words, it would confound all our enemies in just 8:21 mins. We need to start using improvised music (all art, in fact) as tools to shape our thoughts, guide our prayers, articulate deepest sentiments with accuracy in a productive dynamic. John Butcher, who has always seemed to me capable of realising emotions and abstractions in precise, repeatable, comprehensible form, should be reckoned a hero on this account.
I’ll also single out here the simpatico notes written by Clive Bell (one of the nicest fellows in this branch of showbiz), as they articulate more about the music than I can, and he also has a surprising sideline in unexpected dimensional observations, including blinking twice at the metadata on his PC when he spun the sound files he was sent. These fine essay-form notes are printed on the cover in the letterpress mode, as they deserve.
In picking his dream teams, Butcher reports: “choosing is probably 75 % about the player and 25 % about the instrument”, once again indicating the exactitude of his mind, but also highlighting the very human side of free improvisation, a factor which might be in danger of being overlooked – it’s played by real people, not generated some vague amorphous entity called “art” – and we don’t want its players to become an endangered species. (15/10/2024).