Ezz-thetics a column by I place great faith in the reality and potential of improvised music, a process in which musicians might engage a special form of consciousness, a mode of being in which time is experienced differently, intensely or not at all, a continuous surrender to the possible, whether to a pure etching of the conscious or unconscious or, perhaps more likely, a “pas de deux” of the two, written simultaneously in awareness and the myriad impulses arising just below its surface. In collective improvisation, there may be a surrender to the covert texts of the group, its multiple modes, agencies and levels of interaction. There is an attendant kind of growth that occurs in such collective work, a community that will include auditors who are silent as well as those generating sounds, the ideally sensitive and selfless listener positioned as the agent of final assembly, not responsible for any single component but best placed as the composer, a role at once transparent and transitory. Solo improvisation may be a distinct art, insofar as the musician, however entranced, might be considered as composer or medium, mining personal resources that might stretch from impulse to memory to the incidental effects of the environment, the totality of the situation. The signal foundational figures of extended improvisation, insofar as we might surmise from the written remains of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, have been utterly distinct, whether in their characteristic moods, materials or methodologies. The backwards stretch to the origins of the great improvisatory traditions of Africa, the middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and the Orient exist only in the continuum or the improvised musics that are still generative today, but Improvisation of the first order can arise in any period, its spirit driving the piano music of Bartók, its form explicit in the organ improvisations of Messiaen. Just as collective improvisation is both search for and manifestation of a collective awareness, a psychic bond, solo improvisation in its most potent forms marks the assembly of an interior world, a common space that is also a kind of dialogue between address and understanding. The recent solo musics discussed here represent explorations of great depth, sonic journeys of the individual musicians, gifts that should be heard widely, balms against the rampant trivialization, and tragedy of an increasingly mechanized culture. One suggests lab work, an intense assemblage of the possible, the other two arise in the context of solo performance, one a matter of an hour, the other comprised of moments collected over 17 years. Liz Allbee’s Breath Vessels (Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu) is an immediately astonishing work, one in which she foregoes her usual trumpet for “breath vessels, tuning fork, sine waves, and voice.” Like Harry Partch before her, Allbee constructs her own sonic universe out of industrial and household detritus. The breath vessels, as described or illustrated on the LP’s inner gatefold, are assembled from glass vessels and metal tubes: “Most of the instruments used on this recording were made between 2019 and 2023, some with very precise intentionality and tonality and some haphazardly, almost accidentally finding themselves sounding. Many have pieces which are interchangeable, inter-actionable. Little is permanent and even less reliable. Odd behaviour may be due to weather. Almost all parts and objects were sourced from old instruments on eBay (accordion guts, harmonicas), flea markets, metal supply stores, garden centers.” It is Allbee’s gift to make the contemporaneous and the eternal, somehow together, our immediate responsibility. Side One is an epic single track entitled “Elegy for the Lost at Sea,” clocking in at 16:48. It’s a somber telling of the sea at night: warning bells; looming echoes; pedal tones; the edges of scraped steel. They are all shifting and overlapping shapes and drones, an orchestra of mystery, anyone’s Odyssey. By the time it has run its course, it is stretched between time immemorial (historical or fictional) – whether “Some went out on the sea in ships” (Psalms), Homer or Moby Dick – and a present immediacy: all the date-stamped, contemporary refugees, adrift on the Mediterranean or the English Channel, lost, cold, sometimes drowning. The impression is so strong that that sentence was written before I came across the following corporate note: “Conceived as a response to the 2023 Messenia migrant boat disaster, during which more than 500 people lost their lives, and the Titan submersible implosion” (on-line note). The second side of the LP consists of three shorter pieces. “Pigeons” proceeds from a brief poem to a piece of overlapping long tones, evidently taking in sine waves and breathing vessels. The piece feels like a collective meditation, the contrasting sounds taking on personalities, moods, and functions of their own within a collectivized ambient machine music, Allbee again achieving a solo music that suggests group genius, ultimately intensifying and expanding its “collective” of divergent voices to somehow reflect the spatial and shared wisdom of “pigeon-mind” without suggesting the sounds that pigeons make. The very brief “Glottal Stops” is a vigorous storm of overlapping clicks, while the concluding “Solitary Flocks” introduces a different orchestral machine, one that is eventually joined by Allbee describing a single woman walking, her voice suspended between song and talk, a genuinely musical recitation conjoined to her personal orchestra of reverberant pulses and electronic washes. It’s a music defining its own genre, mining pop ambitions of the past 60 years, with lyric grace and a complexity of sonic architecture that defies any conventions of genre, creating an art music so insistently contemporary that it might escape any current attempt at labeling. Hannah Marshall’s Grazing (Relative Pitch) is the cellist’s third CD of solo performances. It consists of two pieces, each running around 24 minutes, recorded five years apart at Café Oto. First up is “Peasantry” from 2024, no hint contained of the title’s significance, but there’s a certain sense here of a wildly successful hunting and gathering expedition in which something of everything falling within the cello’s range of possibilities turns up, all in fortuitous relationship with the nearest matter at hand. It’s a playful exploration, whether the instrument is bowed or plucked, drummed upon or subject to a host of simultaneities, harmonics and open strings, a certain raw percussive punctuation created at the frog of the bow; contrasting rhythmic patterns and techniques arise contrapuntally, whether with intensity of purpose or seemingly by chance. It’s a flight of the imagination in which every possible interaction with the instrument seems to arise, whether willfully or with a dream-like sense of chance or a narrative inevitability. At times there arises a hive of bowing and incidental tapping that can suggest a range of small creatures encountering each other for the first time. The second piece, “Arboreal”, from 2019, is more mysterious still, beginning with an extended passage of whistling high frequencies more suggestive of nesting alien birds than a string instrument, then gradually assuming the character of a high-pitched human cry that eventually expands with rapid rhythmic bowing in the lower register, perhaps realized with two bows if one might speculate about the techniques employed to create this transitory maelstrom. The piece might suggest a tree’s varied possibilities, whether as organism or industrial product, from a home to myriad creatures to an incidental factory, with one of the strongest identities arising midway in the work as an insistent cello, with multiple strings bowed continuously in an exploration of shifting microtonal combinations, with one later sequence that can suggest something of the gauzy, foghorn-like world of Liz Allbee’s breath vessels, before lowering in volume and pitch into another creature’s strange reflections, then a series of isolated plucked tones, isolated aleatoric notes gradually assuming a traditional character with the application of vibrato, single tones eventually augmented by dissonant neighboring tones in continuous lines that simultaneously combine and explore multiple pitch ranges, all of it disappearing into brief, isolated and contrasting sonic events before a final eruption. John Butcher’s Away, I was (Relative Pitch) is a collection of solo pieces that range in date from 2008 and 2025, in length between 15:32 and 1:18. The pieces vary similarly in instruments and techniques: sometimes tenor, sometimes soprano, sometimes both; sometimes amplified, sometimes not; usually improvised, sometimes read. Even in this variety theatre, Butcher’s focus and creativity remain singular. The most extended pieces (also the most recent) are near the beginning: “Brinks,” the longest track, is an astonishing tenor saxophone Odyssey, beginning with a tone of intensive metallic harshness followed by a significant pause; Butcher will repeatedly create isolated passages of tremendous intensity, rough, burred multiphonics contrasting with muffled asides, short phrases mutate rapidly, sudden timbral shifts occur unexpectedly in the midst of a short phrase, all executed with startling precision. The work expands with a kind of precisely articulated, abstracted narrative, complete with shifts of mood and, point of view; sudden transformations of sound, line and register add to the drama. It’s almost a kind of musical theatre, but one that might suggest a sonic abstraction of a Samuel Beckett work for the stage. The other long track, “Fujin’,” employs very different tones, but with a similarly evolving complexity. Played on soprano saxophone, it consists largely of quiet sounds, flute-like tones alternating with human and bird-like whistles, eventually becoming almost speech-like. Slightly muted melodic figures interact with bird-like murmurs and mumbles, only to give way eventually to cascading lines, a human music itself in full flight that in turn will revert to strange metallic murmurs, isolated tones. These highly developed recent performances are separated by “Mirror Foil,” a brief and mysterious interlude of bubbling, resonant electronica created by “feedbacking tenor and soprano” from 2014. Following “Fujin’,” there’s a highly eclectic assortment of shorter works, highlights drawn and saved from far-flung performances. “Listening to DB listening to JR (after Derek Bailey),” played on tenor at Bernie's Boudoir in London in 2008, is a Chris Burn transcription of Derek Bailey’s improvised “Listening to JR” from the Scatter CD, Drop Me Off At 96th. Sight reading and a shift in instrument, of course, change everything, and it’s likely that the source might never occur to even the most devoted listeners, unless they, too, had transcribed the Bailey performance (I can’t substantiate this but suggest the late John Russell as Bailey’s model here: the original recording seems uncharacteristically spacious for Bailey). Other curios and mementos from Butcher’s tape collection appear as well, each with something distinctive to recommend it. “Shaken Stains (for Keiji Haino)” consists of amplified and acoustic soprano from a 2012 Café Oto appearance playing opposite Keiji’s band Fushitsisha. “Fragile Thread (for Éliane Radigue & Lester Young),” from 2020, is a warbling, evanescent tenor saxophone piece composed for “Tāda mūzika,” a program broadcast by Latvian National Radio. The initial multiphonics seem to invoke Radigue, while the more linear later development suggests Young before an ultimate return to multiphonics. The very brief “Pricklings” for two tenors and two sopranos give a minute and 18 second suggestion of Butcher’s possibilities as a saxophone quartet. The final track, “After Chihuahuan (for Joe McPhee),” described simply as “Recording as 2,” without date or further explanation, is a three-minute tenor exposition, always masterful, ranging from hard-edged, Rollins-like clarity to a contrasting multiphonic voice that possesses and transforms (even doubles) the same kind of precise authority. Though no date or circumstance is given, it likely reflects Butcher’s 2010 trip to Texas where he and McPhee performed at a highly distinct artwork, James Magee’s epic “The Hill” in the Chihuahuan Desert, resulting in the 2019 release, At the Hill of James Magee (Trost). It was April, in the month of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, stranding travellers from Texas to Santiago de Compostela.
© 2026 Stuart Broomer
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