Harold Budd, Marion Brown & The Pavilion of Dreams
Plus Brubeck, keep your CDs, Robert Fripp & Toyah go punk
When people hear of the death of composer and musician Harold Budd, his name will be linked, in the media and in the minds of many readers, with the term 'ambient.' But Budd himself rejected the term. In the mid-1960s he was a minimalist composer, and he composed quite a few pieces for solo piano. This period seems to have crested with a composition for solo gong, after which Budd fell silent for some time. There is no question he was pursuing something different and as early as 1972 he was working on pieces of the music that became The Pavilion of Dreams.
The Pavilion of Dreams, the suite of music that comprised Budd's second recording, was recorded in 1976, but not released until 1978. It arrived on a new music scene that was aesthetically very different from Budd's vision. Budd felt that with Brian Eno and the musicians who worked with him on this recording, that he had found his musical tribe. Eno produced The Pavilion of Dreams while still developing his own work around the idea of ambient music. Two collaborations with Robert Fripp and his own Discreet Music were pointing the way but Eno himself wouldn't release Ambient 1: Music For Airports until 1978. Budd felt a kinship with Eno as well as Richard Bernas and Michael Nyman but didn't think that they comprised a movement. But the term ambient caught on, sometimes lazily used by writers who couldn't bother to differentiate the goal or aesthetic style of various pieces or composers.
The Pavilion of Dreams is completely unlike most of the avant-garde music that was being made at the time, a direction that Budd had thoroughly rejected: "It had taken ten years to reduce my language to zero but I loved the process of seeing it occur and not knowing when the end would come. By then I had opted out of avant-garde music generally; it seemed self-congratulatory and risk-free and my solution as to what to do next was to do nothing, to stop completely.”
While Budd says that The Pavilion of Dreams is meant to say "This is only pretty. Don't look for meaning" it's not quite true that the work is, as he suggested, “existentially pretty, mindless, shallow, and utterly devastating.” The delicacy of Budd's music often suggests that its cathedral-like construction and its sometimes ostentatious beauty are defenses against its frailty and reinforce its ability to keep pangs of sadness and loss at bay. All of which is a way of saying that Budd's music covers a much more complex emotional territory than its placid surface might suggest.
Though The Pavilion of Dreams is produced by Brian Eno, his hand is not so readily apparent on this work as it became on most of the Eno/Budd collaborations that followed. Instead it is the other musician collaborators on The Pavilion of Dreams that help stake its claim in the realm of serious modern compositional music. Not least of these is the American free jazz saxophonist Marion Brown.
Marion Brown was instrumental in helping establish a link between free jazz and African music. He believed that free jazz, distanced from Western European musical ideas of time, harmony, and even instrumental technique, was a closer cousin to African music than swing or bebop, and he advanced these ideas in conversations with writers like Amiri Baraka and musicians that included Pharoah Sanders and Ornette Coleman. Brown was also interested in modern visual art, becoming friends with Mark Rothko and creating his own paintings.
The connections between the music of the minimalist composer and that of the jazz alto saxophonist and ethnomusicologist are several. There is the willful turning away from the prevailing tendency of many of their contemporaries to create music that is frequently manic and harsh and the determination to build a musical universe that belongs to them. Budd utilizes a group that sparkles with the combined sounds of electric piano, celeste, piano, harp, glockenspiel, and marimba to create what feels like a completely different sonic world than we are accustomed to. Brown's alto saxophone is so restrained and concentrated, his tone and technique together create the sound of sheer beauty personified.
By the time The Pavilion of Dreams was recorded Brown had already released several albums that stand out in a very prolific recording career. 1971's Afternoon of a Georgia Faun created music that relied heavily on an assortment of small percussion instruments, an approach that was also being utilized by Art Ensemble of Chicago. The album's second side, "Djinji's Corner" sounds a bit more like typical free jazz. The record features Chick Corea, Anthony Braxton, Andrew Cyrille, Jeanne Lee, and Bennie Maupin. Geechee Recollections an Impulse! recording featuring trumpet player Leo Smith and drummer Steve McCall. It's a really great free blowing session that finds Brown coming into a more relaxed tone that is fully his own. His follow-up album Sweet Earth Flying features Muhal Richard Abrams and Paul Bley playing keyboards on various tracks.
The album Vista features bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Ed Blackwell, both fixtures in the jazz avant-garde, as well as keyboard work from Stanley Cowell, Anthony Davis, and Bill Braynon. Brown does a version of Budd's "Bismillahi 'Rahmani 'Rrahim" the same composition that opens The Pavilion of Dreams, and Budd plays celeste and gong on the track. It's a very deep, beautiful vision of the track, and by the album Vista, it's worth noticing that Brown's playing had become more serene. It's a very beautiful album and it's quite likely that Budd and Brown already felt a considerable degree of simpatico, and Brown was invited to record the track on Budd's album.
Brown's focus on free form, abstract music that was nonetheless constructed and deliberately created put a kink in the critical tendency to consider such music created by Black musicians to be a form of primitivism, supporting "the idea that black people, if not in fact incapable of abstraction, tend to shy away from it in the direction of the immediate, the physical, the athletic, the performative.” [Nathaniel Mackey, ‘Interview by Edward Foster’, in ‘Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews’ (Madison; University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p.279]
Brown became more involved with the visual arts during the 1980s, but he still performed for small audiences. Budd moved on to work directly with Brian Eno on manipulating the sounds he created into soundscapes. But the paths of these two visionary musicians crossed with The Pavilion of Dreams, a record that still sounds like nothing else that was being done at the time and not a lot that has been done since.
Bonus Tracks
From Eartrip Magazine comes this very thoughtful look at Marion Brown and his most famous recording in jazz circles, Afternoon of a Georgia Faun. Reading this article made me want to listen to more of Brown's work and it gives a lot of insight into how Brown's Georgia roots influenced his playing and his personality deeply. Despite his neglect, Brown was certainly as good an improviser as the better-known ‘New Thing’ musicians Archie Shepp (an early friend and mentor) and Pharoah Sanders. All along though, and despite overtly free jazz work with Burton Greene and in his own group with Alan Shorter[1], he wasn’t so much ‘New Thing’ as into his own thing – a good dose of classical influence, an interest in ethnic musics (which, admittedly, Sanders and Shepp shared), and, above all, a sparer approach than the other two musicians. Continue Reading
This piece, Budd In May, was written in 2011 for The Independent as Harold Budd appeared at The Brighton Festival in the U.K. The bright, sun-filled music of the Californian composer Harold arrived in London in the immediate aftermath of punk rock. In this era of after-dinner chill out music, it's hard to remember just how incongruous and strange Budd's music sounded in that darker era. The album they were recording was Pavilion of Dreams to be released on Eno's suitably-titled Obscure label. It was an act of nose-thumbingly outrageous beauty... Continue Reading
Jazz fans recently celebrated what would have been Dave Brubeck's 100th birthday...there were many commemorative pieces and a ot of talk about Brubeck's most famous work Time Out. But this piece at Discogs by Morgan Enos discusses things that we often forget about Dave Brubeck, things that may be more important to our understanding of his work than merely difficult time signatures. The pianist-composer, who died in 2012 at 91, was one of the most famous jazz musicians who ever walked the planet — and for that fact alone, he was controversial. His 1959 classic Time Out was the first platinum — and then double-platinum — jazz album. The chances are that “Take Five” pops into your head when you hear the word “jazz.” Later in life, he was an NEA Jazz Master and a Kennedy Center honoree. But while his peers, like Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, and Charles Mingus, lived on the edge, Brubeck was a drug-free, monogamous Christian. Mix that with the fact that he was a white man in a primarily Black art form who commercially sailed past most of his peers, and you’ve got a recipe for resentment. Continue Reading
This week's piece by New York Times classical music Anthony Tomassini, "No, I Am Not Getting Rid of My Thousands of CDs" struck a chord on Twitter and other social media networks. I, like Tomassini, advocate hanging on to recently deceased media formats like vinyl and CD because owning the music you enjoy ensures you will always be able to hear it. Having recently packed seven large boxes full of compact discs as well as a lot of vinyl for a move, I can attest that while it may be difficult to have all that music as a physical presence in your life, it is worth it. Yes, finding room in a Manhattan apartment to store ever-increasing numbers of CDs is a constant challenge. In my front hallway and living room I have five wall-affixed cabinets made for me by a carpenter friend, more than 90 feet of shelf space. In my home office I also have an industrial-looking file cabinet that efficiently holds nearly 2,000 CDs. I probably have, in total, more than 4,000 discs. (And I know people who have twice that many!) Continue Reading
I'm leaving you this week with Robert Fripp and Toyah performing their holiday-tinged Xmas version of The Sex Pistols song "Anarchy In the U.K." All year the husband and wife team have kept us amused with their Sunday afternoon antics, and we say thanks!
Have a great week. See you next week with another New Directions In Music newsletter. As always, please pass this newsletter on to anyone you know who may be interested.