Positive events keep unfurling through this blog--this site now has another regular contributor involved! A little while back, Caos contacted me about lending some obscurities from his own collection. A true gentleman and scholar (with fantastic tastes in music to boot), Caos sent along this recording from Brandon Evans. If the name Brandon Evans sounds familiar but you can't quite place it (don't feel bad--it happened to me as well), you might remember him from a Sonny Simmons post over at Church #9 a little while back. Needless to say, I am extremely grateful to Caos not only for this wonderful recording, but for the background information as well.
On to the disc--Evans switches between clarinet and tenor, with great results. He has a very lyrical sound at times, but is obviously capable of stretching his instruments out to fit his creativity as well. I had to keep in mind that this was all coming from a 25 year old musician (at the time of the recording). After listening to this album, I was surprised that Evans wasn't a bigger name on the jazz scene. Fortunately, Caos was there to help explain the situation:
"Indeed Evans is an interesting musician, but he pretty much fell completely out of the scene in 2004 or so. He used to run Parallactic Records, a label that put out over 30 recordings by him, Braxton, Simmons, and others from the Middletown, CT/New York City scene(the Wesleyen school of players surrounding Braxton). An insider of the scene who I spoke to suggested that personal/lifestyle problems caused him to stop doing the music thing (hopefully temporarily but who knows),
which is odd and kind of tragic, considering the artistic heights he was attaining in such a short amount of time. The liner notes he's written in some of his recordings and the innovations he made in notation and approaching improvisation bespeak someone of incredible depth. Braxton himself has also spoken very highly of Brandon, and even gave him a lucrative role in the performance of his major opera Trillium R.
"The core of his output centered on a series of recordings of his Ellipsis/Elliptical Axis compositions, based on two invented notation systems of the same names. In his words, "[these] are systems that define a world of sound as a kaleidoscope of sound alignments, sound cycles, sound configurations; a platform for a 'global improvisational axis point'". Other things in his liner notes are almost impossible to understand, especially the more in-depth discussion on these notation systems and how they are approached.
"The Parallactic records homepage and www.injazz.net, an mp3 store that Evans opened both fell off the face of the earth last year and disappeared without a trace, so clearly some stuff has been going down with him, but who really knows? Damned
horrible shame if he doesn't rejoin the scene eventually."
Caos also found this biographical snippet from the web to lend a little more info about Evans:
"New York-based multi-instrumentalist Brandon Evans was
born in San Francisco in 1972. He began playing music
as a teenager while a student at the San Francisco Art
Institute, and later began studying and performing
with jazz saxophonist Sonny Simmons. Eventually, Evans
relocated to Connecticut to study composition with
Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan University. Even after
moving to New York in 1994, Evans continued to work
closely with Braxton: he has appeared on a number of
Braxton's recordings, and he often performed with
Braxton as a member of his Ghost Trance Ensemble.
After arriving in New York, Evans and Andre Vida also
founded the Creative Trans-Informational Alliance
(CTIA), which organized concerts featuring prominent
avant-garde jazz musicians. Evans' own music, often
issued on his own Parallactic label, explores a
combination of improvisation and composition, for
which he has developed a new system of notation,
called the "'Ellipsis & Elliptical Axis Notation
System." In addition to a number of solo recordings,
Evans has also appeared on disc with Simmons, Seth
Misterka, Jackson Moore, Harris Eisenstadt, Martin
Vanduynhoven, and Kevin Norton. Evans also works as a
filmmaker, and he created a feature-length documentary
about Simmons entitled Multiple Rated-X Truth."
I'd have to wholeheartedly agree with Caos about Evans. This guy is an amazing young talent and it is a tragedy that his recordings are sliding into obscurity (himself as well?). Are there any other Evans fans out there with some material they would like to share? Lord knows his stuff can be hard to dig up. Heck, it might even make our days to hear what he has been up to recently. Even better if it had something to do with a reed...
Brandon Evans - tenor saxophone, clarinet
Solo Musics - Century Theatre Ballroom
1997
(parallactic #2)
(No album artwork available)
192 Rate mp3 files (Equivalent to 128 AAC Files...har, har)
Track information:
(from the liner notes)
1. Structure as it occurs in (the separation of images in)
a. dreams
b. visions
c. mental & physical (sonic) projections
d. groups of vibrations
e. the growth cycle of trees
2. Spirals as they occur in:
a. shells (sea-shells, snail shells, etc. )
b. celestial phenomena
c. fingerprints
d. vertigo syndrome (hallucination of falling)
e. water (whirlpools)
3. Repetition as it occurs in:
a. language (spoken language, ideographic language,
sign language, musical language)
b. historical weather patterns
c. bird song
d. the evolution of societal structures and dynamics
throughout history
e. imaginary symbolic systems (self-referential
coded-information maps that signify sounds)
f. the periodical rise throughout recorded history of
global natural disasters that change the evolution of
a species, favoring those able to adapt to the
resultant climate (e.g. earthquakes)
4. Inversion as it occurs in:
a. the sun setting and rising
b. humans coming up with the concept of the man in the
moon (species reflecting itself in all things)
Enjoy!
