John Butcher has been among the most creative figures in improvised music for several decades, during that time both maintained long-established partnerships and sought new possibilities, whether it’s a fresh ensemble or a different sonic environment. These two recent recordings present longstanding associations that continue to grow creatively.
John Butcher & Angharad Davies - Two Seasons (Weight of Wax, 2025)
John Butcher and Angharad Davies have been playing in duet and other situations for many years, and there’s an essential chemistry at work in their music. This recent duo combines two extended works recorded in live performance in Berlin and a series of short pieces,”Granwyns”, recorded in a studio in Nottingham.
The opening work, “Hydref i”, might be the whole package, an intense 25-minute duo improvisation in which two high-pitched instruments – soprano saxophone and violin – are individually explored and countered, creating a tenuous universe of intense depth and mystery in which solo and duo passages strangely merge. With sufficiently close listening, one enters a microcosm of sounds overlapping and interacting. It is a world in which the concept of A440 is largely suspended, in which most tones deviate from the norm, with Davies frequently mining intervals that differ sufficiently in timbre to suggest two different instruments. The music is always active, always sustained, whether one or both musicians are playing. String and reed have never been closer. There are times when the lines exchange identities, often at very low volume, the grit of string, the vibrating air of the saxophone, twinning and separating. The saxophone can function as strained obbligato, the violin its eerie double. A careening passage, consuming the last few minutes, is so complex, intense and interwoven that it could never be composed or imagined – the essence of great collective improvisation.
The second piece from the Berlin concert, “Hydref ii”, is a brief work in close resonance, long tones abounding, Butcher’s hyper-resonant soprano activating the air, Davies’ high-pitched, bowed tones moving towards the silence of sonic eclipse. When its four-minute playing time is up, it feels like it is continuing, whether lending character to the air or merely anointing its continued presence.
“Granwyn i”, remarkably bright sounding, has a relatively provisional feel, attention riveted on the combination of room ambience and the interaction of overtones. “Granwyn ii” has the feel of a hurdy-gurdy, that ancient, resonant wail suggesting the character of a trance. “Granwyn iii” is air-drenched squall; “Granwyn iv” is densely compacted, each instrument occasionally coming to the fore; “Granwyn v” is the soul of somber sound, an interaction of reed harmonics and violin glissandi; “Granwyn vi” has an uncanny suggestion of oblique calypso; “Gwanwyn vii”, the last and most developed of the Nottingham pieces, is as astonishing as anything else here, an improvisers’ mind-meld in which the two musicians are constantly modulating their sounds, adjusting their volumes, pitches, air column or bow, harmonic spectra – creating a six-minute piece that manages to suggest the scale of the opening “Hydref i”.
Last Dream of the Morning - Sharp Illusion (FSR, 2025)
Last Dream of the Morning is a collective trio that includes two other essential figures in contemporary improvised music, bassist John Edwards and percussionist Mark Stevens. The group’s first CD appeared in 2017 with their current name as title; it became a band name with 2020’s Crucial Anatomy . Sharp Illusion continues a series that is required listening for anyone interested in the current state of free jazz or free music. I’d like to begin with a certain confession. I was struck a few times by the presence of extended clicking passages, certainly not the first I’d heard from Butcher but by Stevens as well. I knew I’d heard the techniques before, but here the affinity with certain South African click languages seemed particularly striking. I googled “John Butcher click languages” and was struck by the first result, a review of the trio’s first recording from 2017, then paired with another Butcher trio CD, The Open Secret with Gino Robair and Dieb 13, the latter including a track entitled “Last Morning of the Dream”. The review appeared in this journal on April 21, 2018, and, embarrassingly, was written by one Stuart Broomer. Why some respectable linguist/musicologist hasn’t pursued this line of inquiry is beyond me, but it’s both a busy and increasingly preoccupied world, however much all this might reflect on a positive and inter-penetrating – not to mention utopian – human future.
That instrumentation – “sax and rhythm” – will signal a certain tradition, a format employed by numerous musicians and one that has resulted in some of the masterpieces of jazz and/or improvised music (a problematical distinction in some quarters that doesn’t have to arise in the utopian space enjoyed here). This music will stand solidly on its own, but it might also stand comparison with a certain hierarchy. The foundational masterpieces for consideration include Sonny Rollins with Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones (at the Village Vanguard), Lee Konitz with Sonny Dallas and Jones (Motion), Albert Ayler with Peacock and Murray ( Spiritual Unity or Prophecy ) or anything by Evan Parker with Barry Guy and Paul Lytton (say Imaginary Values ).
Like them, Sharp Illusion, a July 2024 performance recorded at the Cultural Centre in Lublin, Poland, is about the specific potential of its specific time, or perhaps already an anytime when anything might be possible. If Butcher can be celebrated for numerous innovative voices, more recently he frequently sounds declarative/authoritative in a traditional tenor saxophone voice. Meanwhile his partners here participate freely, often beyond traditional functions. The effect is a trio that occupies an exalted space, at once intimately entwined with free jazz and improvised music, at once alive to the tradition of the former and still expanding potential of the latter, a dialectic organized around both utopian form and a potential for a shared state of auditory grace.
The opening “Roof Rattle” is a continual, 13-minute, reshaping of auditory space, beginning in a trio passage of equal parts bending individual instrumental sounds into an eerie and supportive collective voice. Eventually distinctions come to the foreground, loosely linking arco bass and a miscellany of percussion that can suggest any number of non-musical implements. As it rolls along Butcher becomes more conventionally central to the collective narrative, sometimes assuming a “boss tenor” voice that might recall musicians like Yusef Lateef or Booker Ervin, all the time supported by arco bass grunts, swivels and high harmonics, and a percussive storm that willingly ventures well beyond the conventional, the whole giving way to an extended click dialogue that involves the entire trio to varying degrees..
Each of the other tracks represents comparatively subtle evolutions, reshapings and transformations, always redefining the roles and relationships of three musicians’ constantly evolving views of the individual potential of the collective music, whether it’s the 12-minute “Turning the Soil”, hive interior or rich earth; the rich play of the longest track, the 28-minute “Movable Bridge”, which shifts positions in the manner of the preceding pieces but with even further development; or the very brief “Afterglow”, which Butcher begins with a strange transformation to a convincing simulation of a trumpet voice before turning to an openly tenor saxophone voice as his partners join in, eventually ending with more forceful clicks.
