Anthony Braxton, John McDonough

6 Duos (Wesleyan) 2006 is what happens when a story of admiration, leg‑work and pedagogy crystallises into music. For this intimate recital, Anthony Braxton appears in one of his most exposed formats, a two‑voice setting with trumpeter John McDonough, whose own account of the project reads like a miniature origin myth. Having finally met Braxton at a concert in 2002, McDonough screwed up the courage to offer something wildly specific: he would try to organise a performance of Composition 103 for seven trumpets. The answer was not polite deflection but genuine excitement. Copying out parts, rallying players and, with substantial help from Taylor Ho Bynum, bringing the premiere to life on 16 September 2005, McDonough effectively built a temporary orchestra around one difficult score - and in return, a week later, Braxton made his counter‑offer: “Mr. McDonough, you and I are going to do a duo album together!”

That promise is honoured here in a programme that is modest on paper and expansive in implication. Rather than constructing a conceptually baroque edifice, Braxton and McDonough opt for a compact but revealing mix: compositions by each of them, a fully open improvisation, and, in one of those perfectly pitched Braxtonian swerves, a march by John Philip Sousa. The sequence plays like a set of mirrors. Braxton’s pieces insert the duo directly into his larger compositional universe, with intervallic mazes and structural cues that demand both precision and a taste for risk. McDonough’s writing responds from another angle, informed by his deep study of Braxton yet grounded in trumpet lineage, from band‑room repertoire to small‑group jazz. The free improvisation strips away all scaffolding to ask what remains when shared systems are set aside, while the Sousa march folds “straight” brass‑band tradition into the same frame, treating it neither as kitsch nor as mere quotation but as part of the continuum these instruments inhabit.

Musically, the album is a study in close listening and controlled volatility. Braxton’s lines are restless, capable of leaping registers in an instant or lingering on a single pitch until its overtones bloom; his phrasing can snap into jagged, pointillist bursts or unravel into long, curving trajectories that test the trumpet’s capacity for shadowing and divergence. McDonough answers with a sound that can be bright and declarative or grainy and half‑voiced, matching density with density one moment and choosing, the next, to undercut the line with silence or a sharply placed counter‑motif. The two rarely fall into conventional call‑and‑response; instead, they occupy a shifting field where roles of leader and follower are constantly renegotiated, sometimes from bar to bar.