Alan Braufman recommends four records, and one isn't on Spotify

In May 2024 Bandcamp Daily asked Alan Braufman the simplest question you can put to a musician: what are you listening to.

The occasion was the release of Infinite Love, Infinite Tears on 17 May. The answer came back as six records from the Bandcamp catalogue, each with the reason it belongs there.

Before the picks, though, comes the criterion, and that is the part that matters.

What free means, according to him

What is free jazz? That’s a deep question. I think free music is supposed to be about doing what you want.

Braufman separates free from “free” in quotation marks, which is the idea the public has formed of the music. Too often, he says, free jazz has been associated with just screaming. But if he feels like playing a tune that is not free, shouldn’t free jazz mean he is free to do that?

His credentials on the point are hard to challenge. Born in Brooklyn, he was one of the pillars of the New York loft scene of the seventies.

In 1973 he moved in with saxophonist David S. Ware and pianist Cooper-Moore, then known as Gene Ashton, at 501 Canal Street, in what is now Tribeca. It was there, in 1975, that he recorded his first album, Valley of Search.

He then spent forty years mostly away from New York, touring with the likes of Carla Bley, the Psychedelic Furs and Philip Glass.

David S. Ware, “Prayer”

The first pick is a piece that soundtracks a precise stretch of his life.

At 501 Canal Street, he says, they were all doing the “free” thing, getting together and blowing the roof off. Then Ware started writing, and “Prayer” was one of the first tunes he wrote.

Ware’s band with Cooper-Moore and drummer Marc Edwards, Apogee, was born in that building. Braufman used to hear them playing that tune at all hours.

“David was just a beautiful writer and a beautiful player,” he says.

Listen while you read

Immanuel Wilkins, “Free Blues”

The second pick is the opposite of the first: a piece with no melody in it at all.

“This track shows you just where free playing can go, because there’s no melody in it. It’s just free improv from the beginning and the flow of ideas just doesn’t stop until he decides to stop.”

Braufman adds the part that interests him as a saxophone player: Wilkins has everything, tone, technique, ideas, writing.

Steve Lyman, “Spiral”

The third pick opens with a declaration against his own taste: he is not a big fan of drum solos.

That said, Spiral is almost fifty minutes of drum solo and one of his favourite records in a long time. The reason he gives is variety: every piece on it is completely different from the one before, in such a minimal setting.

Patricia Brennan, “Maquishti”

The fourth belongs in the same bracket: a whole album of solo vibraphone.

What Braufman hears in it is cinematic, he says, visual in the way of a good film score. And he adds something that works as a warning against stopping there: the sextet Brennan leads now sounds nothing like that record.

That is not a small detail, given that Patricia Brennan plays on Braufman’s new album.

What it says about how he listens

The line that holds all six picks together is in none of them. It sits in the middle, where he talks about the saxophonist Rob Brown.

“I’m a tone person,” he says: “if I don’t like somebody’s sound, I don’t want to listen to the notes they play, but if I love somebody’s sound, they can come play a major scale and I’ll listen to it.”

It is the simplest criterion available, and it explains why a piece with no melody, an album of solo drums and one of solo vibraphone end up on the same list.