John Butcher - Away, I Was

"Over 40 years of sustained performance and publishing, English saxophonist, improvisor and composer John Butcher has shaped much of what the soprano and tenor saxophone can do, and what their roles and vocabulary in improvised music might be. There’s a situated purposefulness to Butcher’s music. It is always concerned with its context, flexibility, space and company: how group playing works and flows; how aspects of improvisation fit into a living musical world; how and what the saxophone can be for.

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 through jazz, particularly Lester Young’s infinite permutations, to its speculative, hybrid origins. 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”, he could have been imagining Butcher's distinctively clean but complex, enquiring soundworld".
WIRE Primer by Seymour Wright

"Away, I was" is a collection of solo pieces created in, and for, some quite different situations. The two longest pieces are tenor and soprano improvisations recorded in concert at Dragon Club, Poznan (2024) and the famous Blow Out series, Oslo (2025). The shorter tracks range through saxophone-controlled feedback and multitracked works, a tenor sax version of Chris Burn's transcription of a Derek Bailey solo, studio improvisations and compositions and an audience recording of Butcher's opening amplified soprano burst at a Keiji Haino "Fushitsusha" concert.