Play That: Amiri Baraka & Henry Grimes - Live at ISSUE, 3/2009

The new album 'Love Of Too Much Living' from The Magic Lantern, release date 29th September 2014 on Smugglers Records. 

Watch the video for 'No One's Fault' here: youtu.be/JuEmbXpY1ik

No One's Fault

Widely recognised as one of the most uncompromising reed players on the International jazz/improvised music scene. Whether in small groups or big bands, his musical sensitivity and imagination combined with a powerful sound make him one of the most distinctive improvisers playing today.  This will be a solo set of bagpipes and trombone at The Nave's side church.

URL: http://www.pauldunmall.com/

Paul Dunmall (GB) - "Part One" - Solo Soprano Saxophone

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Bemsha Swing

Trevor Watts - soprano sax
Olie Brice - double bass

Recorded in Hastings, 23/11/18

Trevor Watts & Olie Brice 02

On a popular understanding, Schoenberg devised the twelve-tone system to enforce a kind of democracy among pitch-classes.  For example, here is Milan Kundera's unsympathetic riff on this theme in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: "One day a great man determined that after a thousand years the language of music had worn itself out and could do no more than rehash the same message. Abolishing the hierarchy of tones by revolutionary decree, he made them all equal and subjected them to a strict discipline: none was allowed to occur more often than any other in a piece, and therefore none could lay claim to its former feudal privileges. All courts were permanently abolished, and in their place arose a single empire, founded on equality and called the twelve-tone system."

One can approach Schoenberg's purported goal by means not involving rows.   One can understand this piece as twelve compositions played simultaneously, each involving a single pitch-class.  Each layer (or channel if you think of the pitch classes as akin the primary colors that make a digital picture) unfolds in a uniform rhythm, but each in a tempo different from the others.  The durations of twelve-pitch classes divide the total duration of the piece into parts as follows: 
12*79, 19*80, 14*81, 21*82, 16*83, 23*84, 
18*85, 13*86, 20*87, 15*88, 22*89, 17*90.
One can view the 12*79 notes for the first pitch-class as 12 cycles of 79 or 79 cycles of 12.  Dynamics and doubling bring out both ways to parse the whole span.  Structure emerges from the interaction of the dynamics and doubling in all twelve "channels."  The shorter cycles interact to project chromatic scales (with octave displacements) and the longer cycles to project cycles-of-fifths.   Pitch classes move from octave to octave only gradually, so the polyrhythmic structure induces little melodies that seem to repeat but actually morph constantly.

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Josh Ison

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