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Gino Robair'There was everything: graphic scores, scores with noteheads but no rhythms, scores with complex dense rhythmic stuff. Every day something different: a new piece every day. 9am. It would kick your ass. He'd [Braxton] come in with these scores, there'd be like three saxophones, a woman on steel pan and me on snare drum, and he'd say, Gino you play the flute part. So I played the flute part on snare drum. That's how you play his scores. At first you think it's insane, but then you realise that for him it's not about purity of orchestration, it's about density and movement. If he gives a piccolo part to a bass player it's because he doesn't want those pitches, he wants something in that time frame that's rhythmically similar, with the same kinds of shapes. The whole thing about layering, the collage aspect turned me on.'
Gino Robair: Interview with Paristransatlantic.com
'I`ve always respected the science in the music, though I haven`t respected some of the related value systems: for instance, the concept of notation - I don`t think notation is the problem, it`s the concepts that surround notation. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, all of the master Europeans who solidified Western art music were instrumentalists and improvisers as well as composers. Notation wasn`t used then as a choking device to stop the blood, the dynamic, of the culture; it was later, when the technocrats made the process more important than the results, that we got the so-called crisis of Western art music, which is still with us. In fact, we can see the same mind-set entering the bebop continuum: now they`re making bebop so "correct", it will be bopbe or something - it won`t be the same music that Charlie Parker and John Coltrane played'.
Anthony Braxton: An interview with Graham Lock (from 'Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music', originally from 'Forces in Motion' by Lock)
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