Battle Trance: You Must See Them Live

(As always, you are humbly implored to listen as you read.)

Back in 2017, when I was gaining certainty in pursuing some sort of graduate composition degree, I made a point to reach out to a composer who I thought might be able to help. Eric Wubbels—who was floating around Columbia University in Manhattan—and I met for coffee to discuss some of his work that I found really interesting, and to look at some of my own. While talking about new artists doing interesting things that seemed up my alley, he wrote on a napkin a list of composers and albums I was to make a priority to discover. At the bottom of the list, in all capital letters, was “BATTLE TRANCE - YOU MUST SEE THEM LIVE”

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But, they weren’t performing live, and hadn’t for at least a year or two. The tenor saxophone quartet had dropped two albums, but it seemed now that all of its members had been more invested in other projects by the time I’d found them. Even so, their two previous albums, Blade of Love (2016) and Palace of Wind (2014) became favorite recordings of mine. I usually don’t take much time to discuss the music itself in these entries, but I’ll at least offer this:

Battle Trance, more than anything else I’ve heard, convinces me that there are complete elements of musical perception we still don’t understand, if only because no one has yet articulated anything close to how it feels listening to this music. It is hyper-narrational, but without any program. It is genre-defying in a way that makes you roll your eyes at any other usage of the word. It is powerful and raw and has convinced me—deep down—that music without a score, by a group of people who just design sounds for themselves, can achieve something otherwise impossible, that no concert work can ever hold a candle to. It is also—for what it’s worth—a virtuosic display of four saxophones using their horns in the strangest, most beautiful ways. We sometimes encounter art that we can’t help but think was inside us before we ever heard or saw it. Make no mistake, it is not that it was simple or that we could have made it ourselves, but more that it strikes at something so true but underneath the surface that the beauty wasn’t in the idea, but the ability to articulate it, which we were never able to do ourselves. Good art, I think, is like a fish writing about water, and all the others reading it and thinking, “Hey yeah.” Hopefully this rambling evidences why I usually steer clear of discussing the music, itself.

In any case, in March of 2019, my opportunity came.

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After random visits to different websites, I found that Battle Trance was to perform live at UMass Amherst, seemingly out of the blue. There were no other concert dates, there were no other recent recordings; it was a one off. But I got tickets and made the drive there—which, from New Jersey, was about four-and-a-half hours—and back that night to see the group (plus another, Tigue, whose album Peaks is mentioned in one of my earliest—and humblest—entries). And, to no surprise: Eric Wubbels was right.

Hearing the group live was like an entirely different experience altogether. They played Blade of Love in full, from memory, for a crowd of maybe fifteen of us. The women beside me laughed at one part, when the extended techniques the group was using caused clouds of saliva mist to spray across all four of the performers’ faces. The noises, the visuals, the spectacle, I think opens up the dialogue for vulnerable art, but that’s not even what I’m looking to speak to. The night was incredible, I thanked the performers afterward, and drove home with four hours of listening to the very same album on repeat with a big smile on my face. But, after the first few listens, I began to realize just how true Wubbels’s words were. The digital recording—just like the one you’re hopefully listening to now—is remarkable, but nothing like the real thing. In fact, right now you may be approaching some particularly loud mouthpiece-fanning in Green of Winter I, but I can promise you no extravagant set of headphones or surround-sound speaker system can recreate the impact of the sound live, feeling a primal fear as if you are in the eye of a hurricane, enveloped in a coming stampede whose sheer volume overrides your basic instinct that insists you are not actually in danger. And, similarly, I found myself arriving back in New Jersey, back to home, just as I realized the recordings of this music I had come to practically worship were almost completely inadequate, at least when compared to the real thing.

And so, on one hand, the eight or nine hours spent in the car that day were undeniably worth it. You read in music history texts or biographies how these composers traveled Europe to attend a concert, to meet a composer, to experience something whose sum total is hopelessly small compared to the time it took them to get there. And, if you’re anything like me, you hopefully imagine that they, too, felt it was worth it. That in a time when a symphony orchestra was not something you could simply hear on a moment’s notice, that the music they produced was infinitely more valuable. That to travel to hear someone like Liszt or the Wunderkind Mozart perform live was not just getting to “go hear them live” but getting to “go hear them” period. And for some, maybe that was one of a handful of musical experiences you’d have at all that year, assuming you weren’t a musician or especially wealthy person yourself. It depends a lot on the when and where, yes, but hopefully at least you’re behind the idea that music was previously much less accessible as a blanket statement.

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We all have childhood memories whose clarity gives us pause. I remember my art teacher telling fifth-grade me once, as my class waited in line outside her room, that I always smiled, no matter what, even if something bad happened. Why did that stick? Why, of every teacher at that school, do I remember her most vividly, despite probably liking her least? Some things simply stick.

I have lots of these memories with music: dancing to Christmas songs in my living room as my whole family had come over for Christmas Eve; riding in the back of my grandparents’ car as my grandfather sang old Spike Jones tunes out loud; sitting in an empty house listening to Claudio Arrau play the slow movement from Beethoven’s Pathétique a day before my childhood home was sold. The break up letter I received that starts with the line, “I’m listening to Brahms’ Waltz in A-flat as I write this.” The Italian madrigals playing from a listening test practice playlist during the best first kiss of my life. The music a street musician played as we walked through a city in my first time out of the USA. And what do any of these memories have in common?

They all only happened once.

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So can I convince you that, compared to the times in undergrad when I was attending four or five concerts a week, that this concert well into my time as a public school teacher felt like a sacred oasis? That, when music felt like it was so saturated in my day-to-day activities that I’d become all but numb to it, that the time to travel somewhere and discover this, what you’re hearing now, is as burned into my memory as any of those other special moments? No one tells you that sometime around age 20, that those moments almost never happen anymore. The only things that elicit that deep-down, individual sacredness are things like getting married or holding a child, or really, really, really good pieces of art.

But, even then, there’s something about recorded music that’s just not the same as hearing it live. I think of my uncle, who watched all of Breaking Bad on his cell phone during bouts of air travel for work, and how he might feel seeing it on a big screen in a theater for comparison. It is literally a different experience, viscerally. And perhaps we forget too easily, sometimes, that MP3s are the same thing; a hopelessly inept translation of reality, at least when you start to value the things that only live music can do. The kind of gratitude and attention and presence only a pilgrimage to some special place to hear it can provoke. The act of putting a record on, for me, is the next closest thing because of its intentionality, but it still falls desperately short.

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A few years ago, back during my time as a public school teacher, I attended a professional development conference where John Feierabend spoke. He’s an inspiring individual, with no shortage of witticisms and practiced anecdotes to convince you that his methodologies are sound, necessary, and—by the way—for sale just after the presentation. But his vignettes are often true and contain important realizations. I remember distinctly that he spoke about his visits to Hungary, giving presentations about music that caused the audience to look at him with great puzzlement. Afterward, his translator explained the conundrum: he had pointed to pages of songs from his book and called them music. His translator explained that, in Hungary (and elsewhere), calling the pages music was very uncommon; it was notation. Music was reserved for the real thing, the sound in the air. Everything else was just representation. What is notation anyway but a compromise? Undeniably valuable, but ultimately a symbol for something much more important.

Well, aren’t recordings the same? Aren’t the digital ones and zeros that make our speakers shake in someway an approximation, albeit quite a good one, of the real thing? What’s the danger of forgetting that it isn’t the real thing? For me, the difference between recordings and live music feels a whole lot like the difference between a handful of cash and a block of gold.

And so what about this pilgrimage idea? If you’re with me at least as far as valuing live music more: can I convince you, too, that the sweetest water lies deep in the center of the desert? That we, as humans, have a nasty habit of forgetting to appreciate things that come easy? That the musical lessons I’ve taken that were drastically far away, like meeting David Pope in Virginia, or the faculty here at MSU during my “prospective visit” were more memorable than all the others combined? That driving to Ann Arbor from central Jersey—11 hours if you’re lucky—JUST to see the Donald Sinta Quartet play my 5 minute piece before turning around was still the memory of a lifetime? Can I measure how much I valued sitting there in the front row, starry eyed and bewildered by the first piece of mine played by a professional ensemble, in how many hours behind the wheel it would take before I’d have just watched the livestream instead? There is no number.

Wrapping up…

I saw Barbara Kruger's exhibit at the MoMA sometime this July, and it changed me. If you don’t feel like clicking the link, just know that it’s a massive room with human-sized text on every conceivable inch of its walls, with things written like:

YOU.

YOU ARE HERE, LOOKING THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, DARKLY

SEEING THE UNSEEN, THE INVISIBLE, THE BARELY THERE. YOU.

WHOEVER YOU ARE. WHEREVER YOU ARE. ETCHED IN

MEMORY. UNTIL YOU, THE LOOKER, IS GONE.

UNSEEN. NO MORE. YOU TOO.

To say it stuck with me is an understatement. I enjoyed it at the time for it’s powerful statements, but found myself taking a late night train from the city that night feeling empty. “You too.”

Since then, I’ve done a lot of processing on this sort of existential crisis. If most of those kind of thoughts linger for a week, though, the four months—and counting—this time around weigh a bit more heavily.

But here’s what I know:

I sat in a little café one night in Detroit, surrounded by close friends, listening to the sounds you are listening to now, and I felt okay. More than okay. Because Battle Trance doesn’t perform live often. And, from what I’ve gathered speaking to the group, this is their last album. And after this strand of tours promoting Green of Winter, their live presence may come to a permanent halt. What I lived that night was marked by the unignorable idea that I’d never see it again. That it wasn’t just beautiful and one-time-only, but beautiful in part because of that truth. Because this was my one chance. There aren’t many times in life you live a moment you know you’ll relive forever after, but that was one. And, when I think about all the music I discover on bandcamp or youtube or wherever, it doesn’t matter how much I like it, or how cool it sounds, or how much it costs. It will never be like those sacred times when art was hard to come by, and promised never to come back.

I’m lucky to have had a few experiences like that in my life already. Battle Trance is definitely the big one. But, if you haven’t already, I hope I’ve convinced you of the totally mandatory type of experience finding your own really is. Because, like me, you’ll one day too be gone, and these moments will be what you cherish. What define how you understand your time here. How you learn to find beauty in rarity, in intentional effort to experience art, in whatever the 21st-century equivalent of traveling across Europe for a concert is.

Find those now, while you can.

Whoever you are.

Wherever you are.

Etched in memory.

Until you, the listener, is gone.

Unseen.

No more.

You too.