Paul Abbott & Seymour Wright: Drums and Saxophone Assumed, Manifested, and Fabricated

By Lee Rice Epstein

lll人 (Daichi Yoshikawa, Paul Abbott, Seymour Wright) - VICTOR (Infant Tree, 2024)

Kavain Wayne Space & XT - YESYESPEAKERSYES (Feedback Moves, 2024)

yPLO - ob TRU (Feedback Moves, 2024)

@xcrswx & Lolina - 10” (Feedback Moves, 2023)

Anne Gillis + XT - Our/s Bouture(s) (Art Into Life, 2023)

Paul Abbott - Growl, Rubs, Drops, Claps (Live Growth) (s/r, 2023)

Seymour Wright - RITES (Alto Saxophone Solos 2003–2023) (s/r, 2023)

Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright have broken so much ground in improvised and electro-acoustic music that, improbable as it seems, these seven albums represent only a portion of their recently released and to-be-released output (for example, Wright is also the saxophonist for [Ahmed], which released both an album and boxed set this year). That seems true for any musician, when a rush of albums they’ve been working towards are released into the world at once. But Abbott and Wright have been producing at this rate for several years, showing no signs of slowing. And what’s most remarkable, listening to all this music together, is the astonishingly high bar these releases set, within the space each one album inhabits (solo free jazz, electro-acoustic, trio improvisation, experimental avant-garde, whatever one settles on for descriptor). 

For openers, the solo albums: Growl, Rubs, Drops, Claps (Live Growth) , a 2022 set recorded at Ateliers Claus in Brussels, and RITES (alto saxophone solos 2003–2023), a four-volume set collecting recordings made in Brussels and London, spanning 20 years and diving headlong into a dozen delightful rite/right/Wright puns.

There are maybe, truly, only a handful of drummers occupying similar spaces as Abbott. His ingenuity and improvisational acumen are first rate, and that's still only about half the story. Growl, Rubs, Drops, Claps (Live Growth) is a fantastic introduction to Abbott's sound world; like a modernist novelist, he shows you how to listen as the solo progresses. Early taps and clicks lead into rolls and clangs, with echoes of reverb and feedback deepening the performance. Aspects of Abbott's solo music are sometimes reminiscent of Mira Martin-Gray's Stick Control for the Air Drummer , while at other times he seems positively Tom Rainey-esque with his seemingly loose-limbed, everywhere-at-once approach. 

RITES is a monster of a solo alto sax set, truly four sets or maybe 15, depending on how one defines a set. And maybe one could even say, depending on how one defines solo alto sax. Keys, mouthpieces, inhaling as well as exhaling, fluttering and spattering, popping, clattering, it's as physical as it is musical; the exhaustion one might feel listening to the whole of it could be due to attempting to keep pace with Wright, whose performance is some otherworldly confluence of Ornette Coleman's playfulness, Evan Parker's experimentalism, Steve Lacy's innovation, and Roscoe Mitchell's all-of-the-above. Wright's alto playing has a kind of spiky assonance Mitchell practically invented, more often than not, however, there's a kind of extreme commitment to what I'd call a search for sound that's the most compelling aspect of all these (and previous) solo recordings.

 

And so then, if Abbott and Wright each represent degrees of iconoclasm—and… do they? Actually, I'm only using the term for the sake of attempting something, but I feel it's too artificially imposed here. After all, as Abbott and Michael Speers note on yPLO's ob TRU, "Perhaps a drum is a space wrapped in material," and who am I to argue that point? It's not an opinion that upsets the balance of what's un/known and/or un/discovered about music and improvisation, it's simply another way at looking at an object. It's a thing, or a container, or possibly both or neither; it is a fixed (or not) amount of space manipulated to produce sound. And isn't that also a horn? Wright, in a recent interview said, "There’s a tradition of alto saxophone solo music. There’s a Chicagoan tradition, a UK tradition, a global tradition. And it’s like, why not? It’s absurd for me to connect with that, in a way, but why not?" There's something we can't ignore that makes their music quite personal, the connections drawn between the candid, exposed edges on the solo performances, or the mutually dependent construction of any of their duo or trio collaborations—move one piece and the fragility is coldly exposed.

Wright's duo with drummer Crystabel Riley is fascinatingly near and far from his music with Abbott (which, more below). Riley, unsurprisingly, has a markedly different approach to drums and noise, at times more like Oren Ambarchi in her use of cracking snare and pulsing tones. As @xcrswx they've released two singles and a live session for Café OTO's Takuroku pandemic series. The 10" released last year on Feedback Moves is a split with Lolina, like everything @xcrswx has released so far, there's a vertiginous thrill in the music—straightforward beats take a left turn like an early DJ /Rupture mix, sax hovers on a single real/fake note far longer than a listener might be willing to endure; my advice, wait it out, let the music take you.

It's clear why Abbott and Wright are drawn to each other, their shared interest in imagined, speculative, or what they sometimes call potential sounds has led to some of the most exciting new music of the last decade. For example, Abbott's previously mentioned duo with Speers, yPLO, takes this concept and zooms way in on the drum set. Their first album now plays like a proof of concept, with the latest, ob Tru, first recorded live using "amplified mylar, floor tom, bass drum, mixers, audio recordings and microphones" then processed and mixed down. The result is drums that are not drums, drums that are spaces and surfaces, wrappings on sounds made to be chopped and spliced.

Abbott and Wright's most well-known groups, XT and lll人, sound like a maximalist performance of all their ideas, concepts, and experiments at once. Following their trio album with Pat Thomas (which we Collectively named album of the year in 2022), Our/s Bouture(s)is an hour-long recording made with sound artist Anne Gillis. The title implies cutting and slicing, but the material is a deep exploration of resonance, silence, repetition, and extremes. The music might fleetingly evoke John Zorn's Hemophiliac group with Ikue Mori and Mike Patton, but more often Gillis, Abbott, and Wright allow in more space and breath than on some of their previous albums. And this is what makes XT such a fascinating group, they sound exactly like themselves even when they sound what we might call totally different from themselves. Familiar timbres, tones, and rhythmic variations remain like echoes of other performances, whether from past Gillis, Abbott, or Wright albums. That's not to imply there is any kind of revisiting or retreading here; what I mean is, there are glimpses, here and there, of a past gesture, threaded through constant pulses through to future ideas, at times so fleeting they recede just as they begin to emerge. One can imagine Abbott and Wright feel like this no matter who they're playing with, looking to anchor some thoughts while letting others float away, dissipating like high lonesome clouds.

All that was meant to evoke the feeling of listening to Our/s Bouture(s) , the rhythm and imagery, even wordplay where I've managed to shoehorn it in, because plain description will sound utterly boring. This gets even more challenging on the latest XT album, recorded with Kavain Wayne Space, a.k.a. RP Boo, the groundbreaking footwork DJ. YESYESPEAKERSYES is the second recording with this trio, the first was a Café OTO download-only release under XT & RP Boo. If that one was a delight, then YESYESPEAKERSYES is a demand, as in demands your attention. We run out of ways here to say something is breaking new ground or blowing our minds or playing on repeat nonstop on our stereos/headphones/wireless devices/smartphones/car radios. And yes, the complete hour-long set from 2021 that the vinyl pulls from is available for download if you purchase through Bandcamp. But it's really those vinyl sides that make the difference. For one thing, these sets showcase other obsessions of Abbott and Wright, namely the club, disco, and soul music that's much of the core of Space's music. Samples, beats, and skronks playfully push and pull at each other, electronic whirrs bounce off Wright's trills. Space has a brilliant sense of humor, there's a playground-like vibe at times, I would love to be at one of these shows. The notes reference mutual interest in the music of Chicago, and YESYESPEAKERSYES sounds most like (if it sounds like anything else at all) an Art Ensemble for the future (there's Mitchell again hovering over our shoulder).

And this leads us to lll人 (pronounced "el"), Abbott and Wright's trio with sound artist Daichi Yoshikawa, a fellow alum of Eddie Prévost's workshops. Of the three, Wright has written the most about AMM, including a PhD dissertation, and although (once again, here we are) the music bears little resemblance on the surface, if you can allow yourself to relax into it, there's a harmony between the two groups. It's not a perfect symmetrical equation, like Gare=Wright, Rowe=Yoshikawa, Prévost=Abbott; it's more like a symmetry of shared values, the sublimation of ego and pursuit of an ensemble sound that emerges in the moment. That's a high bar to be sure, AMM is one a high-water mark for any free improvising group, but as they've written about themselves, "the tools are familiar, the listening is not." Similarly, the players are familiar, the music is not.

Dedicated to the late Victor Schonfield, VICTOR presents two unbroken performances from August and December 2016. It's the first album in nearly 10 years from lll人, and of course just hearing them again one immediately hopes it won't be nearly as long before there's another album (unlike some of you, I can't just pop down to Café OTO of an evening, unfortunately). The shows display some of the clearest, rawest playing from Abbott and Wright since the solo recordings, mentioned above. Wright had me howling at the stereo, his playing is maniacally daring. The energy generated by Yoshikawa is off the charts—he mentions in his note to Schonfield that he stopped playing for a few years, and while these recordings capture the group before that break, there is nevertheless a specter (the approaching COVID pandemic and the May/Johnson or more broadly May/Johnson/Trump years that followed) lingering around the edges of "Ah," the December recording. By then, we were well into the knowledge of what was to come: the Western ascendance of extreme conservatism, economic hardship, and xenophobia. The piercing and wailing moans from Yoshikawa and Wright open the set, then quickly yield to Abbott who resets the pace before launching them right back to breakneck. VICTOR is astonishing, unrelenting, and emotionally purifying, an incredible achievement that's sure to be a classic of free improvisation.