The gifted trumpeter and composer Taylor Ho Bynum joins his mentor, and 10-year collaborator, saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton in a rare duet performance. The culmination of Ho Bynum’s New England bicycle tour (dates in six states via two-wheels), this historic concert in Amherst pairs “one of the most exciting figures in jazz’s new power generation” (Time Out Chicago), with one of the seminal musical figures of our time.
“Taylor Ho Bynum is one of those once-in-a-lifetime talents who can play everything and always sound like himself,” writes Robin D.G. Kelley. “Remarkable technique, inventiveness, energy…he can really ‘talk’ with that horn of his and the tunes he’s written are mad genius.”
Bynum’s resume includes extensive performances and recordings with Braxton, and the large ensembles of Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor. He is also a member of groups led by Myra Melford, Jason Kao Hwang and Joe Morris. Bynum’s most recent releases include a duo with drummer Tomas Fujiwara, Stepwise (NotTwo), Taylor Ho Bynum & SpiderMonkey Strings’ Madeleine Dreams (Firehouse 12), Positive Catastrophe’s Garabatos Volume One (Cuneiform), The 13th Assembly’s (un)sentimental (Important Records), and the Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet’s Asphalt Flowers Forking Paths (Hatology). In addition, he is a curator and vice president of Dave Douglas’ Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT Music), a partner in Firehouse 12 Records, and the president of Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Foundation.
“To judge from his album of duets with Anthony Braxton,” writes Francis Davis, “Bynum has it all, including a devilish sense of humor…one of the savviest trumpeters to come along in recent years, a growling sound-and-space man in the tradition of Lester Bowie.”
Anthony Braxton (born in 1945) has had as great an impact on creative music as anyone in the last 50 years. Since moving from his native Chicago, where he was active with The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Braxton has released well over 100 albums, won a MacArthur Award, is a full professor at Wesleyan University and continues to perform, record, write, and influence the course of arts in America. “Whatever one calls it,” writes Chris Kelsey, “there is no questioning the originality of his vision; Anthony Braxton creates music of enormous sophistication and passion that is unlike anything else that has come before it."
I wouldn’t have missed it. It gave me weeks’ worth of music and things to think about…
Tim Eriksen
Braxton and Bynum were electrifying–so creative and economical and compelling in their playing as to transcend mere metal and bone and breath. This is music at the furthest reaches of the avant-garde, where thrills and excitement live. I was there with two people who had never hear Braxton, and they were simply awed. More, please!
Braxton & Bynum were so totally spontaneously engaging that no sentient being open to experiencing their performance could resist transforming to a state in which every cell in your body is awakened and joyously vibrating in harmonious delight. That’s what happened to me, so I just assuming it might be possible for others.
I’m not a musician and cannot describe the musical qualities of this work but it reaches my heart and my guts in a fabulous way. thanks for the entire series–
it’s always great and inspiring for the creative spirit.
A great performance. I think I enjoyed the mellowness of the second set to the abstractions of the first.
So many thanks to Glenn Siegel for bringing to us music that we may only hear on CDs or for high urban ticket prices if it were not for his series. At these concerts I often feel myself as a student learning a new experience of music that does not hang on the standard framework of composition and patterns, development and effect. High point of the Braxton/Bynum duo were the overtones created individually on their instruments and together between their instruments. At two points I looked around because I was sure I heard another instrument coming from some other part of the room.