Briggan Krauss

Writing on Art of ohe Saxophone: The Lethe Lounge Sessions  

The music on this CD was recorded at The Lethe Lounge in New York City in April of 2019.  The Lethe Lounge is an upper West side brownstone converted to a recording studio and performance space owned and operated by musician and composer Mark Ettinger. The space retains the feeling of a warm living room and has excellent acoustics especially suited to chamber music and other acoustic instrument based recording and performing. The tracks on this record are all improvisations that generally feature one of three main characteristic approaches that are noted in their titles; “open”, “towel” or “study”.  

“Studies” are pieces in which I was exploring to the best of my ability at the moment, working in the minutia of quiet long tones and multi-phonics. This was the first time I had ever so narrowed the conceptual focus of improvisations on any of my recordings. This was undertaken as an experimental extension of technical exercises that I practice which is why I call them “studies”.  I was not intending to actually release these experiments but I found that after listening back to them many times, they had grown on me as very personal and vulnerable pieces of music. These studies are to me both impeccable and strong; yet also fragile and blemished in tiny ways as if they are on the verge of shattering. 

“Towel” pieces incorporate the use of what I call the “towel mute”, which is a disk of dense cotton fabric placed in the bell that I invented and began using shortly after I moved to New York City in 1994.  The towel mute drastically changes the sound and operation of the saxophone, turning it into an almost completely different instrument. Over the years since then I have developed a wide vocabulary of techniques involving the use the towel mute which have become a regular and important feature of my playing. My use of the towel mute was initially documented on the first record I made for the Knitting Factory label in 1996 called “Good Kitty” (trio with Chris Speed and Mike Sarin). 

Only recently have I come to realize that what I’ve always been interested in is deconstructing the saxophone. I just never consciously thought about it that way. I have simply strived to approach the saxophone as an instrument for making sounds—making sound in music that is fundamentally grounded in an ontological, first-principles way of creating music. The unique un-saxophone like sounds that I found playing with the towel mute was another way to side-step the history and traditional conventions of the saxophone and to find my own path.  

“Open” pieces are improvisations without any physical alteration to the saxophone with the exception one piece where the word “leg” appended to the title.  This reflects that I used the inside of my left leg as a mute in a manner similar to how a plunger mute is used by a trumpet or trombone player.  

The “open” and “towel” pieces are of a completely different nature from the “study” pieces (which are also “open” or unmuted). The improvisations in the “open” and “towel” pieces tend towards exploring hidden density. I was dealing with creating music that is very fast and intricate when listened to closely, but which is also flowing and gestural, or even conversational when heard from a little farther away. These pieces attempt to feature an overall arc or shape while at the same time individual phrases can be considered as existing as standalone compositions themselves in isolation. 

I was very fortunate to be allowed unlimited access to Lethe Lounge for two days. I borrowed a pair of AKG 414’s from Tony Scherr and arrived with my computer and an audio interface and engineered the record myself and was completely alone in the studio. This was a real gift…being able to relax and really take my time to make this recording. I have always felt that trying to play improvised music in a recording studio is very difficult if not impossible. Recording studios are typically harsh and dry sounding rooms and musicians are often physically separated from each other for the purposes of microphone isolation. In addition to these impediments there is typically no audience except for the recording engineer and perhaps a friend or someone from the label in the control room. I much prefer a “real” performance context such as in the live solo saxophone recordings I have recently released. The unique opportunity to work in the Lethe Lounge in this way allowed me to feel that this was not a recording studio situation. Rather it was a laboratory or a kind of workshop where I could make music in this way.  

Huge thanks to Mark Ettinger for the use of his studio and also to Tony Scherr for the use of his mics. I am also grateful to have had Scott Harding mixing and mastering and finally, big thanks to Iluso Records for releasing this on their label.