Tarab Cuts evolved from a request by the Paris-based Lebanese electronic musician, Tarek Atoui. In 2011 he invited several composers, including English saxophonist John Butcher, to create short pieces that responded to music in the collection of Kamal Kassar, who owns one of the world’s largest vinyl and shellac collections of Arabic classical music. Butcher, who is much more strongly identified with free improvisation than composition, edited snippets from Kassar’s 78s into a new piece of music, and then finished the piece with real-time saxophone responses to his construction.
This became “Between the Skies,” which is side one of the album under consideration. Butcher went on to expand the work into Tarab Cuts, a set-length piece that includes more reconstructed recordings as well as improvisations by Butcher and drummer Mark Sanders. He performed Tarab Cuts six times in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Spain and the USA. Curiously, while these presentations enjoyed some acclaim, the recorded iteration is barely known. The LP, which has “Between the Skies” on one side and an early performance of the material with Sanders called “Under the Walls” on the other, was pressed up as an audiophile 45 rpm 12”.
Whilst it takes inspiration from early Arabic classical, secular and Sufi music it is not an attempt to copy these musics.
It is an interaction across decades and cultures that throws an intriguing light on the contemporary musical practice of Butcher and Sanders. A meeting of distant voices with their own, in pursuit of both common and unfamiliar ground.
These pieces were later expanded into a 50 min concert presentation also called Tarab Cuts.
LP purchase includes a free download code for a live performance of this.
Photo: Tarek Atoui's Visiting Tarab in Sharjah, UAE.
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Side A Between the Skies - 13:56
John Butcher / saxophones and sound files
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Side B Under the Walls - 14:08
Mark Sanders / drums & percussion
John Butcher / feedback, sound files
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Born in Brighton and living in London, John Butcher is a saxophonist whose work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multi tracked pieces and explorations with feedback, unusual acoustics and non-concert locations. He is well known as a solo performer who attempts to engage with a sense of place. Resonant Spaces, for example, is a collection of performances recorded during a tour of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands.
Butcher originally studied Physics, but after publishing a PH.D (1982) on quantum chromodynamics he left academia and took off with music. He has since collaborated with hundreds of artists, some for many decades, including Derek Bailey, Eddie Prévost, Angharad Davies, John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Okkyung Lee, Andy Moor, Sophie Agnel, Christian Marclay, Pat Thomas, Phil Minton, Rhodri Davies, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, John Russell, Chris Corsano, Steve Beresford, Ståle Liavik Solberg, and Matthew Shipp.
Additionally he values occasional encounters - with large groups ranging from the WDR Sinfonieorchester (as soloist), and the 20+ piece EX Orkest to duos with Akio Suzuki, Liz Allbee, Keiji Haino, Isabelle Duthois, David Toop, Mariam Rezaei, Fred Frith and Joe McPhee.
Recent compositions include “Fluid Fixations” (an hcmf commission), “Penny Wands” for Futurist Intonarumori, “Good Liquor…” for the London Sinfonietta and “Tarab Cuts” (shortlisted for a British Composer’s Award).
"Over 40 years of sustained performance and publishing, English saxophonist, improvisor and composer John Butcher has shaped much of what soprano and tenor saxophone can do, and what their roles and vocabulary in improvised music might be. I’ve always heard Butcher’s playing as a kind of nose-to-tail saxophony, where the whole instrument from reed-tip to brim of bell is available, accessible and articulate. Few other saxophonists slice as sharply back into the physical history, material (and physics) of the instrument, across its near 200 year history. When Hector Berlioz wrote of his friend Adolphe Sax’s then fresh invention, “the varied beauty of its accent, sometimes serious, sometimes calm, sometimes impassioned, dreamy or melancholic, or vague”, he could have been imagining Butcher's distinctively clean but complex, enquiring soundworld." WIRE - October 2024. The Primer by Seymour Wright
