Paul & Henry | A Musical Encore

Paul Vincent Kuntz / Photo by Henry Kuntz
Paul Vincent Kuntz / Photo by Henry Kuntz

Paul & Henry | A Musical Encore

Paul and I had hoped to record some new music in 2021, this being once again the “Year of the Ox”, that year of the Zodiac in which we made our first duo recordings. While we were unable to realize that project in earthly time, I thought I might intuit and create what we might have fashioned musically in virtual spiritual time. Lapu Lazuli is a new piece that combines a solo piano improvisation of Paul’s (from his album Awakening) with a solo multi-track piece of mine (from the album IIFIINIITY). When I placed this music together, I couldn’t help but marvel. It felt like these pieces had always been waiting for each other… a match made in heaven, you might say!

Lapu Lazuli

Paul Vincent Kuntz: Piano with percussion effects | Henry Kuntz: Nepalese & Balinese bamboo flutes (played together), Bolivian bass flute; rhaita (Morocco); two Guatemalan bamboo flutes (played together). Individual photos of Paul and Henry by Paul. Composite photo by Henry.

Please click here to download the song Lapu Lazuli for FREE. Thanks.

ENVISION ENSEMBLE | Live at Berkeley Arts Festival | HBD O1

ENVISION ENSEMBLE | Live at Berkeley Arts Festival | HBD O1

Free HUMMING BIRD Download Only Release

ENVISION ENSEMBLE Live at Berkeley Arts Festival
HBD 1
Free MP3 Download Available Here… (28:07)

ENVISION ENSEMBLE is: Henry Kuntz: Tenor saxophone, Balinese & Javanese gamelans, Thai & Mali wood xylophones, bamboo flute, Mexican Indian & toy violins, New Year noisemakers | Dan Plonsey: Clarinet, alto saxophone, 3-string violin, alto recorder, bells, shofar | Brian Godchaux: Electric violin | Esten Lindgren: Doublebass, pocket trumpet, guiro, triangle | John Kuntz: Electric mandolin, ukulele, toy percussion, Balinese gamelan

Performance of October 10, 2014 at Berkeley Arts Festival, Berkeley, CA. On-location digital recording and live stereo mix by Karen Stackpole.

Special thanks to Eleanor Lindgren who took original photos and videos of the ensemble; and to Joe Lasqo for inviting us to play and for his encouragement and support along the way.

Sample ENVISION ENSEMBLE Live

For the second-ever performance by the ENVISION ENSEMBLE, the players expanded instrumentation and instrumental range, moving more fully into multi-dimensional “festival form”.

The ENSEMBLE’s formal expansion more or less flips the concept of a usual approach to improvisation, that in which players “listen” to and complementarily match what other players are doing while only occasionally moving into an entirely independent space.

The ENVISION ENSEMBLE begins in independent space. The players hear the whole as well as listen to the parts, creating beyond the strictures of standard complementarity. The intent is to fashion an experiential rather than compositionally logical totality.

The Concept:

The Envision Ensemble moves toward an advanced improvisational archetype, one in which multiple independent events may occur while the musicians simultaneously create an experiential musical whole.

Beyond expanding the independence of musical line – thus increasing the complexity of musical form – the Envision Ensemble expands the formal independence of each player – so that multiple musical forms might be happening at once, moving the music in the direction of what I call “festival form.”

So the players will be creating the total musical space rather than any specific improvised composition.

How will this work?

Each player will simultaneously create an organic complete music.

Each player may relate or not relate to the music and sounds going on around them, the same as when one is playing at home and sounds are occurring in the environment which may or may not affect one’s music.

While the players will not necessarily relate to each other in a compositional sense, they will relate to each other and to their shared environment experientially and together create (or “compose,” if you will) a sympathetically-in-tune experiential musical space – a space defined by the composite layers of sound that make it up, similar to the way the simultaneous layers of sound at a festival define and create the festival.

As Archetype:

The Fullness of Individual Being in
Collaborative and Existential Flow
With the Fullness of All Life.”

The performance will be completely improvised. At my suggestion, the Ensemble has not rehearsed prior to playing. The reason for this is that experience suggests that players’ edge of creativity often comes out more in the initial meeting (i.e. in the rehearsal) than in the performance.

So, along with the musicians, you will be experiencing this music for the very first time.

Henry Kuntz, for the Envision Ensemble

Photos Before & During October 10 Performance

Esten Lindgren

Brian Godchaux

Henry Kuntz

Dan Plonsey

Photos Copyright Eleanor Lindgren (All Rights Reserved)

Sample ENVISION ENSEMBLE Live

John & Henry Kuntz | Photo by Jacque Braziel

Dan Plonsey, Esten Lindgren & Brian Godchaux | Photo by Jacque Braziel

Brian Godchaux & Esten Lindgren | Photo by Jacque Braziel

John Kuntz | Photo by Jacque Braziel

John Kuntz & Henry Kuntz | Photo by Jacque Braziel

Dan Plonsey | Photo by Jacque Braziel

Sometimes a recording can be clearer than being there — I think Karen’s wonderful, clean recording technique let the layers of gorgeous sound shift in kaleidoscopic clarity even more transparently than they did in the room itself.

It’s great this got documented, nobody else is able to enter this fantastic sonic space. — Joe Lasqo, Producer

ECHO ECHO MIRROR HOUSE | Music Implications for Improvisation

Echo Echo Mirror House (Septet Victoriaville) 2011: Composition 347+ (Victo CD 125)

ECHO ECHO MIRROR HOUSE Music

Implications for Improvisation

I’ve heard a lot of music over a lot of years, so it takes a sonic jolt of sorts to get me writing these days. Two extraordinary new releases from Anthony Braxton provided the jolt:

Echo Echo Mirror House (Septet Victoriaville) 2011: Composition 347+ (Victo CD 125)
Taylor Ho Bynam/ cornet, bugle, trombone, ipod, Mary Halvorson/ guitar, electric guitar, ipod, Jessica Pavone/ alto, violin, ipod, Jay Rozen/ tuba, ipod, Aaron Siegel/ percussion, vibraphone, ipod, Carl Testa/ contrabass, bass clarinet, ipod, Anthony Braxton/ alto, soprano & sopranino saxophones, ipod, direction & composition.
Recorded: May 21, 2011at Festival Musique Actuelle de Vicoriaville, Canada.

Echo Echo Mirror House (NYC) 2011 Composition 367

Echo Echo Mirror House (NYC) 2011 Composition 367 (NBH 035, download from TricentricFoundation.org)
Anthony Braxton, Andrew Raffo Dewar, James Fei, Steve Lehman, Chris Jonas, Sara Sschoenbeck/ reeds, Taylor Ho Bynam, Reut Regev, Jay Rozen/ brass, Renee Baker, Erica Dicker, Jessica Pavone/ strings, Mary Halvorson/ guitar, Carl Testa/ bass, Aaron Siegel/ percussion.
Recorded: October 7, 2011 live at Roulette, New York.

These releases document the first recorded examples of Braxton’s new Echo Echo Mirror House music. Following on the heels of his advanced Ghost Trance Music (see review by clicking here please…), in which players instrumentally access and include in their compositional renderings any of Braxton’s music from whatever period, in this new Echo Echo Mirror House music the players – in addition to their acoustic instruments – wield IPODs loaded with digitized versions of Braxton’s entire recorded output: the players can instantly access any of Braxton’s recorded music from any period and interject that music over an array of loudspeakers into the new EEMH compositions.

The compositions themselves include no written music. The players are provided with copies of maps that might be linked to anything, like say, NY’s subway system, or highways along the northeastern corridor; superimposed on the maps are graphic elements illustrating how the players might interpret their maps; the players are additionally provided with a set of instructions (“turn north, turn south…take longest route possible…turn to left”, and so on) about how to sonically navigate the cartographic pictorials. Each musician is free to make his or her own interpretation of the piece’s abstract parameters and to proceed through the instructions at their own pace.

ECHO ECHO MIRROR HOUSE | Music Implications for Improvisation

ECHO ECHO MIRROR HOUSE | Music Implications for Improvisation

What does the Echo Echo Mirror House music sound like? To begin with, there are no predetermined openings, so each player begins playing or extracting from their IPODs whatever they like. The whole sounds like an auditory version of those riotously outrageous all over the place light shows that used to accompany music in the 60s. You might think of it as an expansive, hydra-headed sonic menagerie inside of a refractive carnival funhouse!

The music’s impact is initially jarring, as it turns on its head any number of assumptions about how music is supposed to work and transpire. Not that Braxton hasn’t already been traveling down this road – he’s been actively putting forth the idea of all of his music being played and heard together since at least the early 1980s, and he’s been pursuing more and more complex versions of that idea ever since. But the Echo Echo Mirror House music pushes the envelope of that concept to a level not previously heard or imagined.

One online blogger has already likened the impact of the EEMH to that of Coltrane’s 1965 Ascension (Impulse), that beautifully wild and shattering musical outpouring some people are still striving to understand. There’s some truth to that, but an aural antecedent for this music might more readily be found in Marion Brown’s 1970 under-appreciated masterpiece Djinji’s Corner (Side B of Afternoon of a Georgia Fawn, ECM), on which Braxton is one of the players. In that piece, the players engage in what Brown calls “interchangeable discourse”; each musician moves from one “musical station” to another, each station consisting of “primary”, “secondary”, and “miscellaneous” instruments. At each station, the players remain just long enough (a minute or so) to set up a musical phrase on an instrument of choice, then they move on. In the course of the piece, lasting 18 minutes, Brown notes that “there are seven players and seven stations which means there are 49 themes played.”

The effect is not unlike that of the EEMH pieces, though I wouldn’t care to speculate as to how many themes or independent phrases might be heard in the course of these two 60-plus minute compositions.

 Part of Braxton 7tet Victoriaville

There are also significant differences between the two EEMH works. Composition 347+ is, like Djinji’s Corner, played by a septet. There is a good deal of clarity in the recording, and easily identifiable thematic references abound. Live instrumental input can at least at times be heard as separate from recorded interjection.

Composition 376, on the other hand, is played by 15 players (the “12+3 tet”), including 5 reed players, 3 brass players, and 3 string players together with guitar, bass, and percussion. The organized and surprisingly organic cacophony is considerably denser on this piece, and it is more difficult (at least for me) to locate actual thematic material. At times I hear what I think are passing thematic allusions, but the IPOD interjections seem much more abstract in their references than on Composition 347+; either that, or much of the interjected material may be taken from other recent works of Braxton’s not based on thematic material at all (like his Diamond Curtain Wall Music or his Falling River Music, each of which uses graphic scores to orient the players). The whole is like a sonic shape-shifting textural mass within which any number of live and/or recorded instrumental voices darts about in high relief. As a reference, NY Eye and Ear Control (ESP) kept coming to mind as I listened to this piece; or maybe it just sounds at times like an unkempt and rowdy free jazz blowout! And, speaking of Ascension, around the 48th minute, someone plays a vague Ascension-like theme that a number of players pick up on and one part of the music moves into a liquid mix of long lines and colors pushing into and out of each other.

Due to its increased level of abstraction, Composition 376 allows one to more easily hear the form of this music as pure form; i.e. beyond simply a form bearing the overpowering stamp of Braxton’s music. So suppose we were to extend this form to include recorded interjections of some other music (say, Charlie Parker’s music, or Coltrane’s music, or whoever’s music) or any music or all music or maybe even all sounds! Copyright considerations aside, there’s no end of possibilities. But it would seem that, whatever the inclusions, there’s going to be an overriding point of diminishing returns. What happens, say, when these pieces and pieces like them – which to a large extent are built on the sampling of previously recorded pieces – are themselves the main source for new sampling? Eventually it seems like a sound threshold will be reached, and we will have before us some kind of new Noise Music; or there will be something like a reverse “Big Bang” and everything will simply revert to Silence. But, of course, these two possibilities – Noise, and Silence (or at least a “Not-Music” tending toward Silence, based on Japanese onkyo) – are already full-blown musical movements, co-existing in time and space with the Echo Echo Mirror House music.

All this got me thinking about form in general and how formal change or evolution takes place in purely improvised music. That is, how form changes without a composer to give direct impetus to the change.

Many an unspoken assumption is at work regarding how players “listen” to each other in group improvisation situations and what levels of abstraction or complexity, or of noise or silence, they are going to pursue. Players carry with them quite similar imprints about how they are going to relate to each other and about what good relating is. To varying degrees, the players attempt to mimic, match, re-frame, re-phrase, oppose (as an opposite manner of “matching”) and interweave with the creations of their fellows.

A wide range of players has become quite good at this manner of improvising. There’s nothing wrong with this, but the truth is – as we are all aware – much improvised music has lost its edge and become overly predictable in its manner of working.

With its ongoing, changing and simultaneous multiple levels of activity, the EEMH music shifts the foundation upon which those imprinted assumptions about how players ought to relate is based. In a Downbeat interview from March 2012, quoted in the notes to Composition 347+, Braxton explains: “With the ‘Echo Echo Mirror House’ musics, we’re redefining the concept of elaboration. It’s not a linear elaboration. The new models are multi-hierarchical formal states that allow for many different things to happen at the same time…’” Perhaps, then, the EEMH music can provide a nudge in the direction of new ways of improvisational thinking.

So how, in the best of worlds, does a vital free-improvised music work and how does form evolve?

It so happens that at the same time I was listening to Braxton’s new EEMH music, I received a copy of Evan Parker’s newly released solo performance Vaincu.Va!, recorded live at Vancouver’s Western Front on November 8, 1978. This performance came only six days after Parker’s stunning solo presentation at Woody Woodman’s Finger Palace in Berkeley, California (Evan Parker at the Finger Palace, The Beak Doctor 3), a performance I attended and reviewed in my newsletter BELLS).

Vaincu.Va! Evan Parker/ soprano saxophone Recorded: November 8, 1978 at Western Front, Vancouver BC

Vaincu.Va!
Evan Parker/ soprano saxophone
Recorded: November 8, 1978 at Western Front, Vancouver BC

What’s interesting is that while Parker’s saxophone language at the Western Front is not unlike that used at the Finger Palace, the performance itself along with its sense and feeling is completely different.

At the Finger Palace, Parker’s playing moves at a measured pace throughout. It begins by mimicking electronic sound sources, then sets up and swings off a series of shifting rhythmic fulcrums until Parker stands like a Native American shaman at the center of an extremely high-pitched electrical sound field. Then there’s a re-grouping, re-shifting, and an extended exploration of quick rhythmic sound clusters that by the end of the performance is simultaneously firing out crackling electrical currents. The performance lasts some 45 minutes, Parker’s longest single solo presentation.

At the Western Front, the music begins at an extraordinary level of intensity and complexity. While operating from a similar rhythmical base as at the Finger Palace, Parker’s lines in the first few minutes herald the more compact multi-linear expression of his later solo work. (Hear Lines Burnt in Light, Psi, October 2001, for example.) The intensity level continues for nearly half the performance before there begins a kind of deconstruction and reconstruction of the music’s component parts. The performance, every bit as compelling as that at the Finger Palace, lasts around 34 minutes.

Evan Parker 1978 @ Western Front - Image by Kate Craig

Evan Parker 1978 @ Western Front – Image by Kate Craig

Of course, we can now see these as something like transitional recordings of Parker’s solo music, but the performances are complete in themselves. They are based on Parker’s thoroughgoing reinvention of saxophone language, a language that did not exist prior to his creating it.

What is interesting formally about these performances is Parker’s willingness to allow his playing to adapt to its immediate surroundings and to allow it to feint and flow inter-dimensionally, i.e. to play from known dynamically-evolving source rather than from habituation.

But how does improvised music evolve as group music? In the first instance, it evolves – like Parker’s solo music – out of expanded instrumental language which itself comes about from players’ willingness to risk unknown dimensional leaps – i.e. to stay fully in the process of the music while trusting in its outcome. I think back to Topography of the Lungs (Incus), 1970, and why that was such a ground-breaking recording. The formal bounds of improvisation were shattered by three players (Parker, Bailey, Bennink) who had completely reinvented the languages of their instruments. So how could the players have responded to each other in ordinary ways? It would not have been possible.

Along with new ways of playing instruments, the introduction of new instruments – like electronics or electronic processing – out-of-culture instruments, or newly invented instruments can move improvisers’ formal relations in new directions; also, added complexity within what are known processes (for example, Parker-Guy Lytton Zafiro, Maya, 2006); or players’ collaborations with musicians with whom they might not ordinarily play (I think of Derek Bailey’s later work, like his recording Mirakle, Tzadik, with longtime harmelodic masters Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Calvin Westin; or his amazing live recording with Pat Metheny, Gregg Bendian, and Paul Wertigo: disc 1 of The Sign of 4, Knitting Factory Works, 1996).

Yet while each of these ways of formal evolution can work to change the content and shape of improvisers’ playing, none necessarily changes the way in which improvisers actually relate to each other. That takes more of an evolution of consciousness and of a conscious awareness of felt reality, what players find of emotional weight and interest at any given moment and the state of the players’ own nervous system (as both a reflector and artistic imaginer of the societal nervous system).

So credit is due Anthony Braxton for having rescued a good deal of contemporary music from the doldrums and for having pointed some new directions forward. His much-acclaimed quartet music of the 1980s and 90s came along just when the jazz quartet was in need of an infusion of energy and direction. His advanced GTM music and now his new Echo Echo Mirror House is rethinking and reinventing the ways in which players relate to music itself. As for the future… well, you might have a look at his Sonic Genome project on his tricentricfoundation.org website.
There’s obviously more to come!

Henry Kuntz – August 2013
All Rights Reserved

Featured release: One One & One

ONE ONE & ONE

Humming Bird CDs 2 & 3

ONE: CIRCLE-CYCLE (CD 2) | Henry Kuntz / solo tenor saxophone | Recorded January 27 1998 & June 9, 1997

listen to Henry Kuntz | C. Dimension 9. Moon Stripe Tiger | from the CD One Circle-Cycle

ONE & ONE: 12 PATHS TO KNOWLEDGE (CD 3) | Don Marvel / time machine, prophet sampler, old turntable, live signal processing and mixing; Henry Kuntz / tenor saxophone, Chinese musette and Nepalese bamboo flute. | Recorded April 18, 1998

listen to Henry Kuntz and Don Marvel | Who Knows What Is Known? | from the CD One & One 12 Paths To Knowledge

Buy One One & One – Henry Kuntz – HB CDs 2 & 3 (CD or MP3) here…

mp3logoClick here to Download the complete album as MP3. This download contains the complete tracklist in 192kbps MP3 format along with high resolution cover art and leaflet pages in JPG format.

The solo saxophone music on One One & One (1997-98) is the dimensional opposite of that which appears on Wayang Saxophony Shadow Saxophone (2006). To use a shadow play analogy, the solo music on One One & One is like the movement of the brightly painted puppets (brightly lit by flickering flame) on the puppet master’s side of the screen while the solo music on Wayang Saxophony Shadow Saxophone is like the etheric trails of those movements as they appear in “negative” space.

The music with the amazing Don Marvel straddles multiple dimensions.

The following “Notes” for One One & One were originally sent only to reviewers.

ONE (HB CD 2)

In September 1996 at Beanbender’s in Berkeley, I gave the first performance of solo tenor saxophone I had given in some 15 years. The response was overwhelmingly positive, encouraging me to continue working in this format.

Henry Kuntz | Photo by Martha Winneker

From 1979 to 1981, I did a number of solo saxophone performances. The musical areas I was working in at that time are documented on the first two Humming Bird LPs, Cross-Eyed Priest (HB 1001) and Ancient of Days, Light of Glory (HB 1002), and by a single piece on the Humming Bird cassette, Atitlan/Luna Negra (HBT 004).

Key to my playing in this period were harmonic, sonic, and textural explorations and the dimensional use of space both for formal definition and as an implicit propulsive component in its own right. This playing was mainly rooted in the extreme upper range of the saxophone. From this position, I also attempted to put forth what I called a “new melodicism” which was based on the concept of working in this range for its own sake rather than simply using it as a place to land through emotional catharsis.

While I was happy with the results of these explorations, the physical demands of continuing to play in this way coupled with, to some extent, running out of room to maneuver at the horn’s high end forced me to put the saxophone aside for awhile. I was also finding many other possible instruments to play and explore, on each one of which a different “voice” of mine seemed to emerge. (The expressive results of playing many of these instruments, in various formats and to various ends, are documented on the different Humming Bird cassette releases and on Moss’Comes Silk, Humming Bird CD 1.)

Although I have never actually stopped playing the saxophone, I have only recently (since 1994) begun practicing it regularly again. This time, aesthetically speaking, I decided to make a fresh start with the instrument, drawing on all the different ways I had once played and explored, and remembering the influences of many different players who had inspired me to want to play in the first place.

At the same time, I have been drawing on the influences of electronic music and the particular ways it is possible to approach, create, and manipulate sound electronically. These are ways of playing which, while growing out of electronics, need not be restricted to that domain alone but may also be applied to playing traditional instruments. I include in my reference to electronics turntable artists, samplers, “noise” artists, signal processors, and those in still indefinable “categories” of sound in addition to persons engaged in so-called “pure” electronic music.

Technically speaking, I have sought to bring both a sense of “tradition” (or at least of my own tradition) along with a sense of exploration (of the unknown and barely-known edges of sound) to my current playing.

All of my playing, however, is based in improvisation. So the technical aspects of music-making are still only the groundwork for what is to follow — and that, of course, is always unknown.

Spiritually speaking, improvisation is to me — as I have alluded to elsewhere — akin to a form of shamanic art. Clarity of mind, psychic freshness, pleasure in playing: these are the core of true creation. These are the qualities I have sought to keep constant in all of my music.

ONE & ONE (HB CD 3)

With my expanded interest in electronics, the collaboration between Don Marvel and myself was a natural.

Don Marvel (1998)

Don is a deeply aesthetically-sensitive player who not only took the raw sonic material I provided him and uniquely re-shaped it but used it to create entirely new formal dimensions, sounds, textures, and structures that were likewise firmly rooted in the extended contours of my own playing.

Additionally, as part of the raw material of his turntable, he took the LPs I had made years ago and gave them new life, using them as formal, clipped, and distorted counterpoint to the “actual” new music — to the extent that even I am not always aware of what is the “current” playing of mine and what is not. This is not to mention the way in which he processed and mixed all of the music in the moment, creating layers of textural soundings, loops, and inter-loops, seamlessly inseparable from the original material from which they sprang.

I hope this record will serve to introduce Don’s genius to the many who I know will want to hear how he works.

I am grateful to him for helping to bring all of my music full-circle and into complete contemporaneity. Henry Kuntz, July 1998

REVIEWS:

JAZZ JOURNAL INTERNATIONAL | Kuntz … has never shunned the challenge of solo performance on tenor. ONE …shows that it remains one of his strengths. It contains 10 well-balanced improvisations, shuns lengthy, technical displays and rewards newcomers who might sample Song Bat and Thatched Circuits. Kuntz uses technique as a means to a creative end. He is well in control of multi-phonics but his one man counterpoint is used more as “parent line and decoration” than as a series of parallel melodic statements. Barry McRae (March 1999)

CADENCE | Kuntz pulls no punches when it comes to the direction that his music takes. There is only one road for him, and it leads to universes unknown…

His approach is to explore all the sound elements possible from the tenor, ranging across the frequency bandwidth from the lowest earthy tones to the highest banshee screeches. Your spectrum analyzer will touch all the bases. Kuntz takes a thread of an idea, toys with its possibilities at various degrees of the tonal register, and then launches into a massive attack of the sound form. His blowing technique consists of lightening fast alteration of the hertz level within the note clusters. Both his tenor and your ears get a full workout. Frank Rubolino (January 1999)

SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN |  Few other musicians so completely defy description. Kuntz not only colors outside the lines, he erases them and starts from scratch every time out.

And “out” this music is. The solo saxophone disc, subtitled “Circle-Cycle,” is a tour de force of sonic alchemy, produced by working breath and tongue against reed, fingers against valves. Then, with the North Carolina-based Marvel (a.k.a. Flappy), the results sound like radio static smooches and make startling dynamic leaps, from crackling whispers to white noise explosions. Derk Richardson (October 28, 1998)

OUTSIDE # 7 | This is a 2-CD package issued on Kuntz’ label – Humming Bird Records. The sixty-one and one-half minute ONE (the gold disc) is solo tenor saxophone by Henry recorded in 1997 and early ’98. It is entitled Circle-Cycle. It consists of 10 pieces in 3 separate sections, and explores sonic territory in which few, if any, have dared to venture …at least not alone, and for such an extended period.

From 1979 to 1981 Henry’s solo saxophone performances concentrated on the upper register of the instrument. He then went on to other instruments, only returning to performance on the tenor with a September 1996 solo concert at Beanbenders in Berkeley. In this concert, Henry states, “This time, aesthetically speaking, I decided to make a fresh start with the instrument, drawing on all the different ways I had once played and explored, and remembering the influences of many different players who had inspired me to want to play in the first place.”

The result is a highly original and masterful approach to the tenor saxophone. This is not familiar territory. It is like a lonely walk on a distant planet. Not those comfy close-to-home planets like Mars, Jupiter, Saturn or Venus but rather ONE man walking out there digging and turning the solidified materials with a carefully polished axe. Yes, a mineral world, full of sharp edges, deep vibrations, and short cries and exclamations of discovery. That ONE man taking this lonely creative trip may interest only a few but like most truly creative work it’s not for everybody, just those who want it. For those, a wonderful music has been made available.

The second disc ONE & ONE is Henry in duo with the electronics of Don Marvel who lives secluded in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Henry plays tenor, Chinese musette, and Nepalese bamboo flute. Don plays time machine, prophet sampler, old turntable, signal processors and does the mixing. The 73 minute CD (the blue disc) is an intense package of further searches into the unknown.

In a universe where everyone is forced to consume “product” from completely known and mapped sources; where taking a trip means looking out the window of standard conveyance, eating in distant Macs, and sleeping in musical Hiltons & Holiday Inns, it’s good that one can get off the beaten track. It can be difficult too. Jimzeen & Wizard (February 1999)